Sermon given by Avital Woods, January 26, 2024.
I wrote my sermon a week ago and it was ‘pretty good.’ I had my wife read it over. I can always tell when I’ve hit it out of the park, she gets this cute look in her eyes like she knows she picked the right one to spend her life with.
She didn’t have that look after she read my sermon.
She told me it was good. That she got teary eyed. That I made some good points. And she told me I didn’t share enough of my own story. That I’d kept what was most compelling - the personal- to a minimum.
In the days following, I thought a lot about why that might be. The stakes feel so high and the times feel so urgent and I feel so small amidst it all as an antizionist Jew. I feel small and othered, outside my own community, carrying the burden of exile and truth. I feel desperate to share the right anecdotes so I can perfectly illustrate the value of life inherent within Judaism . In short, I want to do this justice sermon justice.
So naturally at 6.54pm last night, like a caricature of a tortured writer, I decided it was a perfect time to start over and rewrite my entire sermon.
I was flipping through one of my notebooks for inspiration. I have a whole notebook dedicated to justice because justice, or tzedek as we call it, is a central tenet of the torah. And the quote I kept returning to is an edict I have carried with me since childhood – Deuteronomy 16. – “Tzedek, Tzedek Tirdof,” or, justice, justice, shall you pursue.
What is the pursuit of justice? What is it to become a society that values integrity rather than politeness? How do we remove the blindfold of wild exceptionalism and instead come into deeper practice of our values? In other words, how do we become a transformative force ushering in liberation?
In a community meeting I recently attended, a man voices his frustration with what he perceives as a lack of explicit instruction. He wants to be told what to do. In my years of organizing, I have seen this time and again. People want a set of instructions – call this number, do this task, write this email.
It’s the way our days have been ordered. We have to balance work duties with domestic duties with social and communal obligations and so on.
When can justice be pencilled in?
But what if justice is brought not only through a series of actions but through an internal commitment. What if justice is a verb and we have to ‘do justice’ all the time?
What if we order our lives around justice?
Just this morning then, I want us to step inside our imaginations. Do it with me. Take a deep breath, in through the nose, and out through the mouth, and let’s imagine stepping into our imagination. Let’s try to understand our imagination not only as a space to play and think and wonder, but let’s imagine it as a space of expansion, a place where all things are possible. What if we let ourselves for a moment, consider not only who we are, but who we could be.
We might even ask: how do we want to be?
Octavia E. Butler said: ‘there is no single answer that will solve all our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers – at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.’
Some of this work is practical – making calls, boycotting, petitioning. Alongside this work, however, is crucial internal work and that’s the work I want to talk about today. This internal work helps us shift our mindsets and shed autopilot ways of being and doing.
JoJo Diggs said: ‘until someone can listen FOR your humanity, they’ll listen FROM protecting their identity.’ We all have a responsibility to confront internalized narratives.
I see a lot of well intentioned people resist this work. I think it’s because they feel shame. And shame is the great stagnation, it doesn’t let anything good grow.
We can feel embarrassed when we don’t know something or don’t immediately understand what someone is talking about. We can feel defensive or reluctant to confront an unjust framework.
We’re almost made to feel like it’s a moral failing to change our minds. Somehow, we become more afraid of admitting a wrong than taking the invitation to learn from it so we can come into what's right. And sometimes it can be painful to uncover the truth not because you’ve been wrong but because you’ve been fooled.
I know something of this pain.
I know something of this pain because I grew up as a Jew indoctrinated into Zionism. Zionism is an ideology of supremacy and ethnonationalism. My childhood didn’t look anything like that definition. It was not a hateful community, not focused on domination, supremacy, or conquest, at least not in overt ways I could understand. It was a gentle childhood with emphasis on community, belonging, prophecy, G/d.
We lit a braided candle every Saturday night in gratitude of the Sabbath bride, dancing in circles with tambourines to honour Miriam, we kissed the right side of every door frame so when we entered a room we recommitted to the law of G/d and we preached the ethics of the fathers which states you are not obligated to complete the work of liberation but neither are you free to abandon it.’
We also sang the national anthem for an occupied territory we had no claim to. I always wondered what Palestinians thought of our anthem entailing how we loved the land as we bombed it. I think of how we felt an entitlement to the holy soil, sam sax wrote: settlers think land can be possessed. How wrong we are in this thinking. How small.
A Jewish homeland would never come at the expense of another people, for this would violate one of Judaism’s most absolute laws: pikuach nefesh which states the preservation of life overrides any other law. So as a child when I was told there was a promised land, I simply assumed there were no people there.
Imagine my confusion when I began to ask my people questions, in a community that had always prioritized learning, I was called Shanda. The Yiddish word for shame. Shame. The thing itself. For simply calling on the values that had been taught to me.
In college, I began to unearth other shame as I uncovered just how sheltered I had been from the reality of Palestinian resistance. I didn’t even know Palestine was a word.
But through activism, I began connecting with Arab and Muslim students. Pursuing justice together, I became a smarter, more informed, expansive, and principled activist.
Because to hear someone’s story is to turn toward them, you open your palms, take their truth in closer to your heart, expand. This is how we grow. This is how we become heart open and values aligned. This is how we get closer to G/d.
I’m not sure if it’s because I’m gay and thus know what it’s like to walk through the world and be on the receiving end of other people's projections but I have always valued the practice of affording others as much complexity as I afford myself, of being curious, of listening.
I think of Ocean Vuong saying: “Being queer saved my life. Often we see queerness as deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes; it made me curious, it made me ask, is this enough for me?”
It is because I love humanity that I’m anti-zionist.
I am heartbroken that my gentle Judaism has been stolen in order to justify a genocide. As if all our liberation isn’t interconnected. As if Jewish safety would ever come at the expense of another people. As if genocide could ever be justified.
It is beyond language painful. AND it gave me the gifts of strength and nuance because my whole life has been processing the confusing sorrow that people I trusted embedded within me an ideology antithetical to my values and to Judaism itself.
This experience helped me understand the sinister underbelly of ideology that lurks within talk of peace, how it can hide in plain sight, and seem otherwise.
It illuminated that dominant narratives are sneaky in ways we don’t always recognise.
That's really what’s important about this anecdote I share.
Rather than think of ourselves as ‘good’ and thus outside the need for interrogation, we must ask HOW do these dominant ideas – ideas rooted in colonialism, capitalism, carceral thinking– how do these ideas show up in my perspective, actions, and biases?
Sometimes these types of questions can produce overwhelming revelations. We are untangling from colonial and carceral mindsets. These are not small shifts. We can move at our own pace, but we must ask the questions. And we must confront the responses they produce.
Integrating these revelations allow us to set down defense and defeat and instead embrace creativity, hope, and sacrifice. For revolution demands sacrifice. And only from a place of openness, can we cultivate the necessary solutions.
We have so many creative thinkers, community organizers, spiritual leaders, youth activists and something they all have in common is dreaming. The first step to creating the world you want to see, is imagining the world you want to see. Step one, what could it look like? Step two, what is a small way I can bring about that world now, today.
And often that work isn’t popular.
On Martin Luther King Day, I reflect on the words of his daughter, Bernice:
“Please don’t act like everyone loved my father. He was assassinated. A 1967 poll reflected that he was one of the most hated men in America. Most hated.’
Just as I was telling the kids earlier, there’s often resistance met when a hard truth is told, truth is hard to hear when it forces us to confront our own complicity and learned helplessness.
We must learn to sit in this discomfort.
Because truth tellers are important; they keep us awake.
Being an antizionist Jew has made my life harder and more frightening, AND I will never abandon my wild love for humanity, my belief in dignity, resources, and joy for all people. The invitation is this: what do we all need to do to keep our wild love for humanity alive? What do you need to keep your love for humanity alive?
In his wild love for humanity, Jesus made crowds mad at the opening of his ministry (Luke 4), called religious leaders the walking dead (Matthew 23), publicly called out family members (Matthew 12), and ultimately was killed as a Jewish political radical. (Matthew 27).
These are the stories theologian JW Buck reflects on about Jesus as radical activist – he writes –
“While Jesus taught his disciples to be peaceful and non-violent, it was clear he was starting a movement that disrupted the norms of society. I learned about a prophet who did not conform to the social, political, or moral expectations of the day. To be the son of man was to bring to remembrance how Jesus would disrupt the governments of the world through his own agenda, to be the messiah was to inhabit a Jewish political position that was not welcomed by Rome. The gospels showed me that Jesus looked more like a radical activist than a docile skinny white guy with flowing blond hair who picked up lambs for fun. Studying the four gospels gave me a clear picture of Jesus as disruptive, radical, and actively bringing heaven to earth. I saw Jesus teaching us to worship G/d with a spirit of deliberate activism.’
I want to repeat Buck’s line – “I saw Jesus teaching us to worship G/d with a spirit of deliberate activism.’ And we can easily take this beyond a Christian context, right? The message is that our spiritual work on this timeline should be in service of the earth, and each other.
Malcolm X said: “I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against.” This suggests that when we have a clear set of values, then everything becomes simple, clear.
This was my painful experience with zionism. I had to confront an ideology that I hadn’t noticed had been spoon fed to me disguised as something prophetic and divine. I have to live in the shameful tension of that messy aftermath. That people I love embedded within me a violent ideology. That none of us are above propaganda. That well intentioned people cause harm. What do you do with all that? That’s what I find myself asking so often: what do I do with all this?
What I did, what I do, is live in the decision to be a disruptor – is that not divine invitation? To stand up and say, this is not in alignment with my values so even though it’s painful, and I lose my community, and am called a traitor, and am not welcome at temple anymore, and I’m labeled self-hating and antisemitic and too radical and too much, I won’t betray what is right, because what is right is actually very simple when you have a clear set of values, and lucky for me I had a beautiful set of Jewish values instilled in me at childhood –
Values like Tikun olam - repair the world, pikuach nefesh, all life is sacred, or how Judaism has a strict stance of non-violence, then, the answer has very simply already been provided for me.
I wrote this whole sermon trying to answer the question: “But what do we do?” I feel desperate to answer this question. I want to say: do X at Y location for 3 hours a week and then the world will be solved. Or, call this person at this number and they magically will have an active organization, sufficient funding, and a safe space to gather. Doesn’t it sound funny when I say it like that? In fact, when someone is asking me who they can call, or what they can do, I think it’s you! As the Hopi prophecy reads: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
We have to dream the world we want into existence by being the ones who do it, the ones who open their door, offer their home, cook the meal, organize the space, facilitate the difficult conversation, mediate, offer the funds, teach the class, make the call, and so on.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
And as I reflect on this movement, this decentralized leaderless movement that demands we practice consensus and unlearn carceral mindsets, I recognize it is harder, it demands more from us, it’s harder to embody liberatory approaches that negate the way of living we’re accustomed to, it’s harder to unpack the internalized narratives and ideologies… AND it is right, it feels better, because we actually crave to be in right relationship with ourselves, the earth, source, and each other.
If I could impart a simple ‘how to,’ of justice, it would be to think of justice as a verb, think of justice as something you do all the time. If you see a need in your community, fill it, by yourself, with others, call someone you know who has a skill you think would be helpful, get your church involved. Let community do what they’re good at, show up and contribute in the ways we can, everyone has something to offer, and this work, justice work, is a beautiful stage where that plays out. Become the activist you wish you could call. Do the things you can and for the things you can’t, find someone who can, or find someone who might know someone. A friend of mine who is a brilliant activist says: “Community organizing is just finding other people to help you make your big ideas happen.”
So let’s make our big ideas happen.
I want to end with an excerpt from a poem I wrote that feels like a prayer every time I perform it –
Picture this. We live side by side without blockades and divides, picture this, no one floats to some untouchable top, we all stop when the earth weeps and weep with her, picture this, we defer to the wisdom of our ancestor’s traditions return to decolonial ways of living, picture this, the military industrial complex fades into the mist, picture this, every corner is filled with music, poetry, and art and our time is spent thinking of how we can be tender with each other’s hearts, picture this, we hold out a hand and a hand holds us back, picture this, there is enough for all of us, we give what we can, take what we need, picture this, we actively seek consensus, take everyone into account because everyone counts, picture this we make way for all ways of being, picture this, we add another cup of water to the soup, picture this, we are a community of curiosity and care, walking each other home, picture this, all the children are home, picture them, all the children in the world, home, home, picture it, a free Palestine, a free Sudan, a Free Congo, a free Ukraine, a Free Hawaii, a free earth… picture it, picture it.
Amen.