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