Recovering Community
Spirituality Is Resistance
by Mimi Tohill
In times of fear and violence such as these and those we fear ahead, some use “thoughts and prayers” as a scapegoat, others as an escape from worldly obligations. Yet spirituality, grounded in religious practice, holds the promise and power to ground us in visioning, trusting in, and acting towards new possibilities. Through prayer, through traditional temporal practice, and through faith, spirituality is resistance.
Quiet Possibilities
Photo: Anne Worner, C.c. 2.0 sa
As the Jewish high holidays came, some of us immersed ourselves in the prayerful hunt for the soft, quiet voice inside and alongside us. Daily “truths” too often limit our days and lives, insisting that our possibilities are quite narrowly defined – when in fact, we live on a planet with a wild, untamable history. On this same Earth, scientists see proof in ancient trees of a near-reversal of the magnetic field. On this same Earth, humanity once survived a flood so great it left peoples worldwide with shared myths, even today.
When we tell these stories to each other, accompanied with phrases of affirmation and commitment to the infinite nature of possibilities, we access the quieter and deeper truths beneath our daily regimen, rumors, and structures.To paraphrase author and activist Arundhati Roy, another world is possible. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing. Prayer calls us into that quiet. When we hear the sweet, shimmering world just alongside us, we access comfort greater than the temporary scramblings for safety, dictatorships, and messages of separateness invoke in us. We access a truer vision which we find joy in working towards.
Leaning into Tradition
Many spiritual traditions subvert contemporary life through obligations to alternate holidays and calendars. The Jewish tradition, as many others, runs both on a lunar/solar calendar and on a weekly Sun-Sat calendar, in which the final 24 hours are sacred. In upholding this practice, we are obligated to prioritize faith, or spiritual practice, over production-oriented societal values.
In 1970 W. Gunther Plaut wrote Shabbat as Protest, in which he offered the following:
I view Shabbat as … an enormous relief from and protest against the basic causes of unrest. Once a week it provides us with an opportunity to address ourselves to the meaning of human existence rather than the struggle for survival; to persons rather than things; to Creation and our part in it; to society and its needs; to ourselves as individuals and yet as social beings.
In 2019, I challenge us to take this argument a step further. Shabbat acts as a strike, per se, on capitalism, on the 24-hour media cycle, and on the relentless narrative that power is one-directional. To practice quiet and vulnerability weekly, in shared space with others, builds a deep-rooted knowledge that stands in conflict to the violence of our strict, production-oriented infrastructures.
Traditional practice may equally include other resources for resistance. Holidays which require celebration, with song and dance, bring communities together in joy. Holidays that center traditional stories of loss and grief allow us to grieve communally, a deeply human need in a world with such extensive public violence. Calendars that answer to seasonal shifts, encourage us to move with our environment, not against it. I am thankful for the wisdom of these many ancient structures.
The Spirit of Resistance
Faith in a greater power, or greater powers, allow us to survive and thrive beyond destructive human impulses, to resist the temptations of human-built hierarchies, with their borders and power-structures.
Look, again, to the American Jewish community: after a banner year of anti-Semitic violence in the United States, leaving 13 dead in its synagogues, one might ask why we American Jews still show up to pray.
Photo: Michal David
Yet the same anti-Semitism offers the answer: when Trump charged American Jews who vote Democrat as “disloyal to Jewish people and disloyal to Israel,” the American Jewish response was twofold. One, a clear denial of this anti-Semitic trope that being Jewish entails a question of one’s loyalty to a nation-state. And two, a clear embrace of the truth behind this trope! “We will never be loyal,” sang Jewish youth along with a re-appropriated pop song by Lorde. “Our loyalty is to HaShem” (“The Name,” aka “God), proclaimed one Jewish activist.
In this era, the violence of white nationalism has compelled many in the United States and across Europe to put their loyalty in violent and litigious red lines defining imagined communities of nation-states. Yet faith in a greater power grounds spiritual-seekers in a higher truth: our loyalty is to this higher power and the interconnected, beautiful ecosystems in which we are housed and in which we participate. If a fear of powerlessness and vulnerability causes violent nationalism, the faith offered by spirituality engenders healing and community.
Why, a new friend asked me recently, have I become more observant in recent years? Might as well ask, Why is Marianne Williamson a presidential candidate? Why the return to astrology, especially in communities of queer and trans-people, and to plant medicine, especially in communities of black, indigenous, and other people of color? Why lean in, deeply, to the human need for thoughts and prayers in times of fear and grief?
Because spirituality is resistance.
Header Photo: brillianthues, C.c. 2.0