The World That Is Coming: A Do'ikayt Teach-In - upcoming workshops!
NEW DATES FOR IN-PERSON LEARNING AND CONNECTION!
Saturday January 13th, 3-6 PM, Blackbird Infoshop & Cafe, 587 Abeel Street, Kingston NY (doors close at 4 for a protected circle practice, masks required and provided)
Wednesday January 31st, 6-9 PM, Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, The LGBT Community Center, 208 W 13th St, Room 210, New York, NY 10011 (doors close at 7 for a protected circle practice, attendance capped at 35, masks required and provided)
Neither conversation will be recorded or shared publicly, to allow people to share freely, to be courageous, to integrate the new.
Do'ikayt is the yiddish word for "here-ness." It describes a movement that came into being at the same time as, and in conversation with, the nascent zionist political project in the late 1800s, and it is based on the idea that wherever we are, that is our homeland; that our task as Jews is to build solidarity and fight for liberation in the places where we already live and work.
Itโs difficult for many diasporic Jews to imagine a praxis that integrates all of the ancestral trauma that we carry with the drive for peace and justice for all peoples to which we are commanded. Doโikayt offers as a possibility that tikkun olam will come when ALL borders fall and ALL states dissolve.
We are in a climate of unbearable propaganda; we are being thrown bodily into the memories of generations of screaming ancestors who yearn for sanctuary. This is being crafted intentionally by agents of states who need us to be too dissociated, too triggered, and too terrified to connect across difference so that they can get on with their work of exploitation and domination. Our only job right now is to resist that, to push through the dissociation and the fear and the trauma to reach out for each other, to dismantle the borders and walls and protections that the fear and trauma spring up around us, to remember that we are not each otherโs enemy.
When we tear down the walls around our hearts, we are making ourselves into channels through which olam habaโa can be born, and when we tear down the walls in the world, letting the sacred peace of Shabbat rush in like undammed water, letting the artificial mechanisms of the state be washed away by a river of solidarity, we are bringing it to pass.
If you want to open yourself to the possibility of do'ikayt as medicine, and want to do it in community, please join us to explore the history, tradition, and possibility of a way of being Jewish that does not accept the violence that we are being asked to tolerate in the name of our own safety.
