Do Not Cry Alone
It seems strange to say about the saddest day of the Jewish calendar, but I’m actually excited for Tisha B’Av tonight.
This year we have thrown ourselves headfirst into the exploration of everything in this world that doesn’t work quite like we say it does. We have explored the history that has expanded the difference between the haves and the have-nots. We have run up against blatant examples of guilty-until-proven-innocent, and it’s-illegal-for-you-but-not-for-you, so many times that it has stopped seeming like an exception and started to look like the way justice actually works in this country. I have tried to help people navigate policies and programs that treat adults like children, or worse, vagrants, because they do not have a job or health insurance or stable housing or merely because they are a person of color. We have heard the stories of masses of people organized and protesting, only to be given 5 minutes to speak in City Hall while backroom deals overrule the civic engagement we’re so proud of in this country. I have been furious, absolutely furious, at what I was not taught in US History in high school, what is not on the AP test, what is not considered worthy of basic knowledge for a voting American citizen. I have been terrified to share my thoughts, my turmoil, my perspective, in a venue as public as a blog, because it seemed like everything I thought I knew was changing weekly. I didn’t want to be associated with last week’s Gillian.
And yet, throughout the whole year, I have managed to find unending inspiration and hope in the people around me; in my housemates and fellow AVODAHnikot, who came home each day and shared their stories, their frustrations, their fears, and their successes; in Ed and Vera and Jamilah and Ron, who all together have over a century of organizing experience and bring a wisdom to their work that always settled my fierce impatience and reminded me to look at things from different sides; in Rachel and Davida who finally gave me the history that contextualized what I was seeing.
Over the last few weeks, though, I’ve felt like Atlas finally collapsed. I’ve composed my own version of lamentations.
Every day the newspaper was filled with stories of the oil spill: how another attempt at stopping it had failed, how many fishermen out of work still hadn’t been hired to help in the cleanup, how we didn’t know what the dispersants would do, didn’t know how far the oil would spread, didn’t know how the blue fin tuna or pelicans or oysters would fare, didn’t know hardly anything. It was as though an entire region was holding its breath, the way a little kid counts the seconds between a lightning flash and the ensuing roll of thunder.
Soon other news started rolling in. A friend in Haiti informed me that, more than half a year after the earthquake in Haiti, forced evictions of squatter’s camps by guns and bulldozers are only intensifying. One of New Orleans’s Rabbis sent us a plea to protest Israel’s Rotem bill, which would make the only conversions recognized in Israel Orthodox conversions—holding your rights as a “Jew” to a conservative standard of observance that most of us with Jewish mothers do not choose to keep and have the freedom not to. Rumors circulated –the development of a copper mine upstream from the town where I lived and worked in Panama had been sold to a Chinese company, with no guarantees that labor and environmental standards would be upheld. I received news that a friend in Panama had left our water sanitation project to work on the construction of a hydroelectric damn which he had opposed, because he needed the money. News that a partner agency here in New Orleans had lost a grant and had to lay off 2/3 of its staff. News that another friend here had been “surplused.” News that the Avondale shipyards, one of the bigger and better-paying employers on the Gulf Coast, are planning on closing.
And then came the meetings. Meetings and meetings and more meetings preparing for the switch in my clinic to sliding-scale. As post-Katrina funding dries up, the network of community health clinics that sprung up in this city is transitioning to a sliding-scale fee system. It is a painful change, from an ethos of never turning anyone away to insisting that people pay a small part of the care they receive, even when they are more susceptible to bad health because their neighborhoods are not safe, are not green, are not clean, are not stocked with affordable, healthy foods. It is a painful change, deciding for people what they can afford to pay, according to a standard set far away from the patients in the white halls of D.C. Again, I feel at the mercy of something beyond my power; my idealism has gotten caught in the cogs of our giant, and perhaps flawed, economic machine.
I run through the stories, the injustices, the problems again and again in my personal lamentation. Sadness fills me, unbearable sadness at what has happened and what is happening. Helplessness overwhelms me. We seem like so few, arrayed against the mighty Roman armies, or defeated and crying by the waters of Babylon. I have felt so small.
Rabbi Moshe Aharon argues in “The Shabbat of Prophetic Wisdom” that the collapse of one paradigm (in this case, the destruction of the Temple), while incredibly painful, can teach us deep lessons and open up the chance for us to envision something new. This has certainly been the case with healthcare in New Orleans, where the complete destruction of the hospital system and Emergency Rooms that had served as poor people’s primary care created a space for a new vision, a network of clinics where people could have a doctor they knew and trusted, a place to call theirs. Right now, though, in the moment of change, in the moment when old systems are collapsing around you, on the eve of Tisha B’Av there is nothing you can do but wait until the dust settles. The growth comes later.
So tonight, I’m excited to be sad with other people. I have heard people say that payer in Judaism is a roomful of people praying alone, together. I want to be with my community while I struggle with my fears. I want to attach my twenty-something self to a longer history, to remind myself that senseless, terrible things, things that crush the work of many hands into dust, have happened before, will happen again, and that good will still survive in this world. I want to step forward with other people through our pain into the period of comfort and rebuilding, so that I can move forward from this year into new, frustrating challenges. I hope we can all do the same.
Some seeds of hope:
Prayer written by Rabbi David Seidenberg:
Elohei haruchot (God of all Spirit), you gave all living creatures a rainbow covenant, to not destroy the Earth because of human sins, and now we are drowning the seas of the Gulf of Mexico with oil that we have unleashed. Please give us wisdom and strength to heal the seas; please protect the lives touched by that oil. May the holy sparks that our hands have scattered be restored to the Tree of Life. And may the whole of creation return to its original strength, so that we may see the rainbow, rejoicing and beautified with its colors. Yashuv hakol l’eitano harishon, v’niratah hakeshet, sas umitpa’er b’govanin. Barukh chei ha’olamim.
Other Worlds, Beverly Bell:
You have to imagine something different to work towards it. This website is a reminder that there is another way.
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