WHAT WE DO NOW by Dennis Johnson

Author:Dennis Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2017-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

What are we here at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah going to do, in addition to helping to protect the most vulnerable members of society? The first thing we’re going to do is educate ourselves.

I want to really understand fascism. I want to understand the history; I want to understand the politics. And guess what—we happen to have members of our community who know this stuff. We’re going to start bringing in people and programs to better educate ourselves about what fascism looks like and how it has been resisted, successfully, at other moments in history. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We’ve been at the precipice before.

Second, we’re going to make sure that our prayers and our religious lives give us strength. We need to sing. We need to pray. We need to be joyous. We need to celebrate Shabbat. We need to bake rainbow challahs down in the kitchen together. We need to make sure that we continue building a full and meaningful and joyous life. That is an important form of resistance.

We are going to continue thinking of ways that we can interrupt the narrative of hatred.

Third, we have to figure out what kinds of political activism make sense for us to engage in. Just because we don’t have the answers right now does not mean the answers don’t exist. But it does mean we have to engage with the political process and think about ways that we can be effective politically. It’s not just about making noise. Though I love making noise. I love being a street activist. But we also have to think about what works politically. We’re going to do it as a community here at CBST and we’re going to do it in all the other communities we’re part of.

The fourth thing we’re going to do is make connections. Today, our clergy visited a mosque to express solidarity. We’re going to continue to reach out to our Muslim brothers and sisters and say, “We are together.” We don’t need anybody’s permission to do that. We don’t need a big political infrastructure to do what we did today: show up at a mosque with a little sign that says, “WE JEWS SUPPORT OUR MUSLIM NEIGHBORS.”

And yet to show that support, we may have to do more than just hold signs. The president-elect has said he intends to register every Muslim in this country. Well, let him try. Because if he tries to register Muslims, there are going to be a lot more Muslims to register than he ever imagined. Millions of us Muslims!

We as Jews love to say, “Never again.” We love to say, “Where were the gentiles in Europe and in the United States when we were being rounded up for the concentration camps?” We love to point the finger and say that no one hid my family. We love to say that no one stood up when our families were ripped out of homes and forced onto trains—not necessarily by German Nazis but by Ukrainians, by Lithuanians, by Poles who had been our neighbors.

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