I’m thrilled to be visiting Pittsburgh this coming week—albeit way too briefly—after way too long. Besides hopefully seeing lots of good folks and sweet friends (and somehow catching up on my paid copyediting work), you can find me chatting about #RitualAsResistance on Wednesday, August 23 in PGH, thanks to the hospitality and good organizing of @ratzonpgh and @bagelfemme (who also homemade the graphic). So without further ado, here’s the info:

Ritual as Resistance
with Cindy Barukh Milstein

Wednesday, August 23 | 6 PM ET
@ Friendship Park (Friendship & Millvale) // Rain location TBD

Masks welcome but optional outside.
If we move indoors because of rain, masks will be required.

Jewish anarchism is being remade in feminist/queer/trans practices, building bridges from grief to rebellion and joy, and drawing from millennia of diasporic rituals and communities (without states). Cindy Barukh Milstein will look at Jewish anarchism as a weapon against colonialism, capitalism, fascism, and ecocide, and how to use it to form communal solidarities that sustain and mend us in cultivating forms of liberation that help us live “the world to come” here and now. Specifically, the heart of this talk and conversation will revolve around rituals, from why they matter to present-day examples of how people are embodying them for resistance and transformation.

Accessibility Info: Friendship Park is mostly grassy with some uneven ground. There is a paved area in the center that’s wheelchair accessible and has benches. We’ll have blankets on the ground for sitting, but feel free to bring a folding chair if that’s better for you. We’ll position ourselves based on the needs of the group.

Rain: If the forecast calls for rain, we'll move to a TBD indoor rain location. Keep an eye on our Instagram (@ratzonpgh) or e-mail us for updates.

If you have any questions or access needs, feel free to e-mail ratzonpgh@gmail.com.

On this sixth yahrzeit of Charlottesville, I’m borrowing this photo posted by my dear, tender-hearted, brave, and loving friend @scottdanielwilliams as my small #RitualAsResistance.

May Heather’s memory be a blessing and continue to spark blessed transformations that mend this world.

May friends and any of accomplices who were in Charlottesville that day, whether forever scarred physically and/or emotionally by the fascists, or in any way forever changed, find blessing and comfort and communities of grieving.

May all of us who felt the impact from afar also find blessing and comfort and communities of grieving.

May we all continue to spark blessed transformations to mend this world, as direct actions of the grieving rebelliously and deeply, and caring and loving rebelliously and deeply.

#MourningOurLosses
#FightingForTheDead
#FightingForTheLiving
#MendingTheWorld
#ArtOfRembrance
#WeMustOutliveFascism

Give the gift of solidarity to forest defenders on the upcoming birthday, or new year, of the trees, Tu Bishvat!

Twenty people are now facing charges of “domestic terrorism” for the “crime” of loving trees—a result of state repression against beautifully powerful and ecological efforts by many thousands of people for well over a year now to Defend the Atlanta Forest and #StopCopCity from being built in Weelaunee forest in so-called Atlanta. As part of the state’s attempts to crush this movement and set a chilling example for similar struggles, the injustice system set exorbitantly high bonds, including $350,000 each for two of the defendants.

The do-it-ourselves jail, court, and legal support via Atlanta Solidarity Fund—much of it voluntary—is powerfully beautiful too, yet hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars will be needed to resist this wave of statist brutality, get all the charges dropped, and set defendants fully free.

On Tu Bishvat, we Jews (often with our non-Jewish friends) commune with trees as we move ritualistically through four worlds (or seasons or directions), which can be seen as moving through our relationships with land and place, community, the world, and spirituality. We remember on Tu Bishvat that though this world can seem cold and deadening, the sap of warmth, resilience, and life is still moving within us.

What better time to raise much-needed funds for forest defenders?!

You can do a Tu Bishvat solidarity seder and collect donations, or an intimate Tu Bishvat gathering in your home with friends and pitch in some dollars. Or hold self-generated rituals in a forest and pass the hat. Or set up a small or large separate fundraising event during Tu Bishvat, such as tabling with zines and a putting out a donation jar, or doing an art raffle or dance party, including tree themed ones, and raise money. It doesn’t even need to be the main focus of your Tu Bishvat, but you can still donate.

Please direct all donations to the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, atlsolidarity.org, for a big Tu Bishvat gift and show of solidarity!

And to that end, i’m hoping to shoutout your Tu Bishvats in a public post! So DM or email me your fundraiser by Feb. 3! 🖤💖🌿

#ForestNotFascism
#RitualAsResistance
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

(Photo: green-colored infographic with a drawing of a tree in black, with the words “Forest Defender Tu Bishvat. Call for New Year of the Trees’ Fundraisers for Atlanta Solidarity Fund. This is a call to celebrate Tu Bishvat 5783/2023 as a ritual of resistance, honoring the trees and those fighting to #StopCopCity in Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, and to raise money for the Atlanta Solidarity Fund to aid the 20 forest defendants,” and encouraging folks to send their events to cbmilstein [at] yahoo [dot] com to include in a public “solidarity shoutout” post)

Grief rituals, one could argue, are part of the essential grounding for millennia-old cultures that orient toward far more ecological relations with the whole of this earth, including each other. For loss is part of the seasons of life, which ancient—and yet still here—cultures recognize needs to be honored through ceremony so as to remember what is loved and cherished, and continually reaffirm a duty to love and defend life.

It is little wonder that as colonialism and capitalism, heteropatriarchy and white Christian supremacy, grew into hegemonic death machines over the centuries, they tried to kill off innumerable life-giving rituals and ceremonies that humans passed along over generations to hold each other through transitions. They tried to make people forget that minds and bodies crave—and need—those rituals and ceremonies in order to sustain hearts and spirit. And without heart and spirit, humans become shells of themselves.

It is little wonder, then, that so many humans today, but especially human-made institutions like states and their police, are so hollowed out of heart—of empathy and sociability, solidarity and communal care—they all too easily acquiesce to or participate in killing off life.

It has been a week since Tortuguita was murdered in cold blood by cops within Weelaunee forest, where Tort gave full heart and loving spirit to defending life-giving ecosystems. May their memory be a blessing.

In that week, so many people have, in essence, “sat shiva,” a ritual within Jewishness that is about taking seven days to be with community (whether people or trees) to begin to honor and process loss of a beloved and grief at their murder. Shiva doesn’t mean doing nothing. It is a time to sustain our hearts and spirits.

So it’s remarkable—a testament to Tort as well as the big, amorphous, autonomous, yet interwoven circles of rebels—that this past week has witnessed an outpouring of remembrance that we do indeed need and can revive ancient grief rituals, as precisely the ground that allows us to keep fighting, not merely to #StopCopCity, but to stop all systemic theft of lands and life.

#RebelliousMourning
#MourningOurDead
#FightingLikeHellForTheLiving
#RitualAsResistance
#MendingTheWorld

(photo: sign with words “Weelaunee People’s Park” seen among the trees in October 2022 at @defendATLforest)

There are no safe spaces. But there are sacred spaces.

At this moment in history, like other particularly brutal epochs, there is no separating that sacredness from the unsafeness.

That’s what this sacrilegious world order has forged over more than five hundred years of conquest, plunder, displacement, genocide, and ecological destruction. Its theft of land and lives, lifeways and ecosystems, has desecrated every corner of the globe.

Yet time and again, those who would defend land and freedom create brave spaces. Meaning despite the risks, often impossibly heavy ones, they find strength in the sacred, aiding them in fighting the good fight and holding them when they must mourn and honor their dead.

Perhaps that braveness, even when we’re afraid, is part of what compels our sacred duty all that much more.

We know what’s at stake, for one: the further loss of sacred places and sacred life. Yet equally, while we defend sacred spaces such as a forest, we know what it feels like to inhabit dignified lives worth living, in common with all living beings, because there is a magic to the sacred. The sacred animates life against their death machines.

Moreover, we understand that in our brave spaces, it is up to us, and only us, to love, care for, and protect each other, to make our spaces ever safer for us all. We know that any sense of safety comes though our love and solidarity, and when we’re lucky, glimpses of the spirit of far better social relations—in right relation with earth.

Brave spaces are most crucial, though, when bad things happen, including our worst nightmares, and our efforts at those “safer spaces” are momentarily shattered. We feel a sacred obligation to grieve the sacredness of what’s been stolen from us, including by making more brave and sacred spaces, like do-it-ourselves vigils, altars, and other tender spaces of remembrance on the dangerous landscape of this violent social system.

May all that is sacred embrace us now, because the big @defendATLforest community is hurting.

May Tortuguita’s memory be a blessing—and spark the blessedly ecological world they fought for.

#RitualAsResistance
#SacredSpaces #BraveSpaces
#MourningOurDead #MendingTheWorld

(photo: resanctified entry—after a cop incursion—into the Weelaunee forest, featuring red-and-black anarchist hearts painted on a pink-painted concrete slab and a #StopCopCity yard sign, as seen in October 2022)

The last eight evenings, so long, so dark, were a practice in attempting to trick my despairing mind into seeing some light by writing 8 Hanukkah stories as I lit my candles. Fire as muse, words as fire.

(For those who’d like to read or share them as a whole, the 8 posts are “Hanukkah 5783: Ritual as Resistance” at https://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2022/12/26/hanukkah-5783-ritual-as-resistance/.)

In the end, as the last of my 44 candles went out, I came away with illumination but not light. Or to borrow words posted by Kathy R. Bunny on FB, “I don’t actually believe that light will return, but I’m acting as if it could.”

I tried acting “as if it could” because usually that works, and I almost felt a bit of the promise yesterday. It’s hard not to be warmed by the brilliance of a full menorah! Sometimes, though, the reality interrupts our acting, and what gets illuminated is exactly the darkness, the danger, we fear and abhor.

On the one hand, there was the light of the many kind responses to my Hanukkah posts here. So unexpectedly many—enough that it should have overshadowed the small number of fascist responses. But on that other hand—the hand that does a Nazi salute so publicly now—someone called me a “kike” in the comments (an antisemitic insult, which I deleted and blocked). And two fascists started “following” me, with one proudly listing a neo-Nazi code number in his profile; I blocked them too.

It’s not that I fear three cyberspace fascists. It’s that they, more than we, define and shape the present, and I despair for what that means, now and ahead.

My friend Ami Weintraub’s words (in my “There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart” anthology) keep returning to me:

“Our practice teaches us to fill our cemeteries with rocks.

“I want to take the pebbles that we set on graves and join the children who throw stones at the men who murder in my name. I want to throw them at the men who want to murder me too.
We arm our dead with weapons of resistance.

“I imagine running into Jewish graveyards, fleeing from the hatred that haunts me. And even when death surrounds me, I find the tools I need to stay alive.”

We must resist, but there’s no light in the reasons why.

(photo: Jewish grave, Pittsburgh, 2020)

#WeMustOutliveThem
#FascismKills #SmashFascism
#RitualAsResistance

On this last, eighth night of Chanuka, I read a blessing written eight years ago by Rabbi Brant Rosen as I lit my candles, seemingly so whole, blazing in strength and solidarity.

“We light these lights
for the instigators and the refusers
the obstinate and unyielding
for the ones who kept marching
the ones who tended the fires
the ones who would not bow down. ...

“These lights we light tonight
will never be used for
any other purpose but to proclaim
the miracle of this truth:
it is not by might nor by cruelty
but by a love that burns relentlessly
that this broken world
will be redeemed.”

Love, of course, won’t stop fascism. The murder of three Kurds in Paris this past Friday, inseparable from the fascism of the Erdogan regime in Turkey, is but the latest cruel example.

Yet smashing fascism demands that we love each other, expansively, whether across their borders, or our beloved identities and cultures.

We need such relentlessly burning love in order to sustain our fight for a world without fascism. We need it to protect and defend each other in ways that reflect the best parts of ourselves and our humanity. And we especially need that love when all seems lost and bleak—feelings that have marked this Hanukkah 5783 for me.

Our rebellious love—which I saw in the blessed flames of my candles this eve—is why we mourn our dead and fight for the living so fiercely, with such heart and chutzpah, even when we’re hurting or weary. And it’s why—when and if that day comes, and only because of our relentless, loving rituals of resistance—we’ll dance joyously together on the grave of fascism. May it be so!

I mouthed Rosen’s blessing tonight as a love letter to my chosen, beloved rebel ancestors, and for all of you beloved rebels, who might need it too, but also to try to make myself feel—or rather trust in—some of the wholeness of my candles, full of fire for the hard, maybe even harder, days ahead.

#WeMustOutliveThem
#RitualAsResistance
#HateFascismLoveYourFriends
#AllChanukkahsAreBeautiful
#Mazeldon
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

(photos: my brightly colored, night 8 candles with a red-and-black flag on an “antifascist action” sticker; despite our brokenness and all the messiness around us, “love more,” as this tag in white ink on a black utility box suggests, as seen on the streets of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal in June 2022)

For the full Brant Rosen prayer:

https://connectere.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/we-light-these-lights-a-new-hanerot-hallelu-prayer-for-hanukkah-by-rabbi-brant-rosen/

I haven’t seen the moon in ages. Gray days blur into overcast night skies. Instead, I relied on written pages to tell me what I want to trust is out there this Hanukkah eve: the new moon, and thus a new month, Tevet 5783.

That, in turn, meant turning the page on my @radicaljewishcalendar to find the art of my friend @alias_alice, who’s across oceans, but lighting candles under the same moon that’s hard to see and so from the looks of this drawing is relying on books too.

That makes sense. Jews are “people of the book,” and some believe that the book preceded the creation of the world and was written in fire. Books can shape, reimagine, and transform the world, and make new ones. Books can save lives in this one.

Many, many new moons ago, when the pandemic was new, I felt beyond lifeless. Each morning, I woke startled anew, wondering why I was still here, and only wanting to sleep again. And walk, obsessively, for hours. For some reason, one day I tucked a big book of speculative fiction under my arm and set off on foot. I’d never read the genre, and as it was, my broken heart had no ability to read at all. Yet I sat by a lake and somehow got through one chapter. Then another chapter the next day, and so on, until I had something to look forward to, even if I still couldn’t clearly see it. I got lost in trusting the written fire of the other worlds and other moons created in this book.

Perhaps we Jews light candles with such ritual persistence because colonialism, christianization, and capitalism have stolen the moon—our illumination—ripping apart our lunisolar calendar, bloating out the skies with climate catastrophe, letting trillionaires like Musk make it their playground. Perhaps we write and read books as our weapon against them, and fiery promise of other worlds to and for each other.

So while we have to trust, hopeless as that feels these fascist-gray days, that the moon will reappear, new and maybe even whole, let’s always carry a book of our rebel wisdom and use its fire to the fullest.

Come, watch the moon with me, even if we can only imagine its guiding light, now obscured by all that pains us.

(photos: my night 7 candles in front of a drawing of a book, set against a pink floral background, with a 1940 Walter Benjamin quote, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” and the words #AlwaysCarryABook, or #ACAB; red spray-painted outline of a heart on a gray wall with the tagged words inside it, “If you want, we can watch the moon?!,” spotted in an alley in Montreal, May 2022)

#WeMustOutliveThem
#RitualAsResistance
#AllChanukkahsAreBeautiful
#TryAnarchismForLife

“When the world is sick / can’t no one be well / but I dreamt we was all beautiful and strong.”
—lyrics by Silver Mt Zion

I spent the whole of this “feels like” minus-17-degrees day resisting, including when I lit my candles on this sixth night of Xannukah+Shabbes.

Yet it wasn’t the kind of resistance that feels generative.

In the same song that contains the lyrics above, Silver Mt Zion observed that “the world’s a mess and so are we.”

I’m often able to resist the latter part of that claim by holding to the belief that we are “messy beautiful,” in profound contrast and contestation to a social order that’s “messy ugly,” “messy brutal,” “messy deadly.” And that belief in turns sparks a resistance in me to want to transform this world, side by side with others.

But this day, this Xannukah, the third under a palpably sicker world from the tridemics of COVID, ecocide, and fascism, it’s hard not to feel that “everything has gone crazy,” and we are simply a mess. Or at least I am.

So today, it was all I could do to resist on the most micro of levels.

I had to resist with all of my might the impulse to not go for a walk, and instead somehow force myself outdoors, if only for 30 frigid minutes of a heavily bundled-up trudge. I had to resist the impulse to eat badly, to sink deep(er) into depression, to see today’s bleakness and “going crazy” as how I always feel, or always will feel. I had to resist a feeling I’ve never had before: that I didn’t want to light my Xanukkah candles.

That resistance—to all of that and more—took everything to so-so accomplish. Especially to resist being hard on myself.

I know that none of us can be well in this sick world, and that makes days like today a struggle. For I know that resistance can and has to be much larger than me “resisting” the impulse to eat a cookie or feel stuck if we’re going to mend this world. Still, what makes us “messy beautiful,” to my mind, is that we try to resist on every level, down to the cellular level, in service of life, ours and everyone else’s.

#WeMustOutliveThem
#RitualAsResistance

(photos: my night six, brightly colored and lit Xanukkah candles and a @breadandpuppet postcard that says “resist” alongside a drawing of red poppies; tag in black spray paint saying “everything has gone crazy” on a gray concrete-block wall, seen in April 2021 on stolen Anishinabeeg lands)

Tonight, as the last of my Hanukkah candles burned down, it kept flickering out, and then multiple times, burst back into flames.

It offered, quite literally, ritual as resistance, refusing to give up, despite the odds of tonight’s configuration of a sacred time-space lasting.

But ritual as resistance has many other radical, life-giving roles. Among them, our rituals let us deactivate from the stress of what they (e.g., cops, courts, and the state) do to us; instead of reacting to them, we pause. We coregulate. We reignite the sacred fires inside us, and from there, self-determine how to proactively direct our actions and practices.

Indeed, the small act of knowing that we can always light a candle, that we can gaze into its glow and find warmth, find effervescence, is huge in terms of rekindling our spirits, especially when we’re up against the worst.

For instance, that our Hanukkah candles increase day by day isn’t a mere numbers game. What’s illuminated is the growing solidarity between the candies, burning in concert, supplying a felt sense of interconnection and collective possibilities.

This Hanukkah has brought some of the worst to @defendATLforest and @stopcopcity. Six people were arrested, are now being held without bond, and face charges of “domestic terrorism” for caring about a forest. A years’ worth of infrastructure related to mutual aid and forest defense was destroyed by cops and capitalists, as was a paved walkway and many trees in this public park.

But last night, about 100 people “gathered in the rubble of our beloved park to celebrate the solstice, … to build altars in the debris,” as @kezleyseeslife put it. “A crater in the ground was turned into a fire pit. A menorah was lit to celebrate Hanukkah,” added @atlpresscollective. Everything we build, and will keep building, “is born from our already broken hearts. … The forest will heal. We will heal,” Kezley asserted.

(photos: my brightly colored night 5 candles next to @desrevol’s brilliant painting of a possum, mouthing “Abolish the police,” surrounded by brightly colored flowers; picture of the rubble turned into an altar, including the tagged words from some anonymous forest defender, “You won’t win,” in the Weelaunee forest from @atlpresscollective; brightly colored hand-painted sign reading “Let us love and be loved by the forest,” which I photographed pre-rubble in October 2022)

#AllChanukkahsAreBeautiful
#RitualAsResistance
#CandlesNotCops
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

Tonight, as the last of my Hanukkah candles burned down, it kept flickering out, and then multiple times, burst back into flames.

It offered, quite literally, ritual as resistance, refusing to give up, despite the odds of this evening’s configuration of a sacred time-space lasting.

But ritual as resistance has many other radical, life-giving roles. Among them, our rituals let us deactivate from the stress of what they (e.g., cops, courts, and the state) do to us; instead of reacting to them, we pause. We coregulate. We reignite the sacred fires inside us, and from there, self-determine how to proactively direct our actions and practices.

Indeed, the small act of knowing that we can always light a candle, that we can gaze into its glow and find warmth, find effervescence, is huge in terms of rekindling our spirits, especially when we’re up against the worst.

For instance, that our Hanukkah candles increase day by day isn’t a mere numbers game. What’s illuminated is the growing solidarity between the candies, burning in concert, supplying a felt sense of interconnection and collective possibilities.

This Hanukkah has brought some of the worst to @defendATLforest and @stopcopcity. Six people were arrested, are now being held without bond, and face charges of “domestic terrorism” for caring about a forest. A years’ worth of infrastructure related to mutual aid and forest defense was destroyed by cops and capitalists, as was a paved walkway and many trees in this public park.

But last night, about 100 people “gathered in the rubble of our beloved park to celebrate the solstice, … to build altars in the debris,” as @kezleyseeslife put it. “A crater in the ground was turned into a fire pit. A menorah was lit to celebrate Hanukkah,” added @atlpresscollective. Everything we build, and will keep building, “is born from our already broken hearts. … The forest will heal. We will heal,” Kezley asserted.

(photos: my brightly colored night 5 candles next to @desrevol’s brilliant painting of a possum, mouthing “Abolish the police,” surrounded by brightly colored flowers; picture of the rubble turned into an altar, including the tagged words from some anonymous forest defender, “You won’t win,” in the Weelaunee forest yesterday from @atlpresscollective; brightly colored hand-painted sign reading “Let us love and be loved by the forest,” which I photographed pre-rubble in October 2022)

#AllChanukkahsAreBeautiful
#RitualAsResistance
#CandlesNotCops
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife

On this fourth night of Chanukah, auspiciously falling on solstice, I thought that by now, the increasing candlelight and promise of increasing daylight would have worked their somatic magic. That I would feel as if I’m on the other side of the darkness of these times, even if only a bit.

Yet I’ve noticed that my body isn’t responding, like it always has before, to the candles. I feel frozen, stuck, not able to offer or take in light.

It’s not just the accumulated trauma of loss and isolation, from and during the pandemic, though it is that too. It’s the shift that seems to have happened from a protofascist USA into, increasingly, everyday fascism. The fascistic horrors didn’t—and still don’t—come at once, but get added one at a time, strategically, like the methodical addition of a Chanukah candle daily, acclimatizing people little by little—until it’s too late to turn back from the conflagration.

So instead of journeying toward the growing light, I can’t stop thinking of anarchistic author Daniel Guérin (1904-88) traveling into what he called “the brown plague”—Nazism—in 1932 and 1933. For those two years, as a young closeted gay man, he wandered around Germany—just prior to and, a year later, just after the seizure of National Socialist power. What he noticed was not geopolitics but rather the minutiae of cultural politics, the stuff of everyday life. He wrote of the little things that added up to the “tragedy unfolding” and people’s “inability to recognize danger,” including because of the “seductive rituals” Nazis employed to win over the populace.

One year he’s staying at youth hostels, likely acting on his sexual desires in a place, Weimar Germany, that was the hub of gay life. The next, many of the same youths he might have comingled with are burning books by the tens of thousands across thirty-four cities, including trashing, looting, and burning the extensive library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s (in)famous, and (in)famously gay, Institute of Sexology.

Those books, once lit, grew quickly into flames that consumed people.

I want to see light this Chanukah. But all I see are ashes.

(photos: my night four candles in my menorah; a sign and me reflected in it at the Tucson Jewish Museum, 2019)

#RitualAsResistance
#MourningOurDead #FightingLikeHellForTheLiving #FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife
#AllChanukahsAreBeautiful

There’s nary a Jewish holiday or ritual that isn’t about sorrow as well as joy. They are as inseparable as the braids in a challah loaf or havdallah candle, or during Hanukkah, the shredded potatoes in latkes.

It is this interwoven quality that makes Jewish rituals so life-giving, because to live a whole life means embracing the sorrows and joys that are part of the human condition, yet in ways that aid us in journeying side by side with others through the darkness and light.

In this third pandemic Chanuka, 5783, in the deepening fascism, Christian supremacy 2022, it is difficult to see that balance, to see blessed light. Tonight’s menorah is so far from even “a cup half full” of lightness in this world, in these bleak times. There is more emptiness, more darkness, than feels possible to hold.

There are the small, blessed darknesses still—like seasonal cycles, which even if they steal away the daylight now, are essential for life, or this menorah, which my parents used from my earliest memories, and was the only object, as material remembrance, that I wanted when they died, yet when the candles flicker out each night, I miss my folks all over again.

Those are easy, even comforting to bear.

It is the big, cursed darknesses that are making it feel, well, dark—as if the gray skies blotting out sun and moon daily this winter are mirroring all the fascistic, wholly unnecessary sorrows—violences—swirling around us.

It feels impossible that the light of promise, much less hope, will return. We must sit with that uncertainty.

And while we do, Hanukkah will somatically exercise our capacity to notice—and maybe reweave—blessed dark and blessed light, to rededicate our fighting spirit for them, by easing our bodies over the next eight nights into “fuller cups” of sparks, of flames. Literally, with our hands, we will bring more light to life each evening—light that’s only visible because of the darkness; an inseparable illumination of what, by the eighth day, gestures at the worlds we dream of, the worlds we conjure via rituals of resistance so as to inhabit them now, if only for the length of candles burning brightly over this Kanika.

(photos: one purple and one orange lit candles set in a metal menorah, with the other seven candleholders empty, against a tan-colored wall; black-and-white art by @wendyelisheva featuring two crows, each holding one candle in its beak, toward a branch/treelike menorah with the words “bless dark” and “bless light.)

#Mazeldon
#RitualAsResistance
#FreilachHanukkahNotFascism
#TryJewishAnarchismForLife