The New Year tends to give us a glimpse of utopia, a time to imagine that this next year will be a good one; whatever the trials and tribulations of the past, this next round will bring redemption. That seems to ring especially true as we transition from 2020 to 2021 – from a year where the whole world was afflicted by a pandemic to one that has a light at the end of the tunnel: a vaccine, a new U.S. president, and – hopefully – a real commitment to address the injustices and challenges that were ignored or exacerbated over the last few years.
For me personally, 2021 is poised to be special. I hope to get married, maybe buy a home; my career is in transition in a way that encompasses my greatest ambitions; I have some writing projects in the works…
For now, however, I want to set aside my relatively small hopes for 2021 – perhaps big for me personally, yet blips on the screen projected onto community, let alone Earth.
Instead of being focused on the practical moves forward in 2021, of which there are sure to be plenty, I want to really run with the metaphor of New Year as Utopia. Perhaps, in 2021, everything is possible.
Nothing says this better than the poem “The First Week” by Laura Eberly. I’ll return to this poem shortly. But first, I want to zoom in and out a little bit more. I remember first discovering this poem in the first weeks of the pandemic, at a time when – despite the tremendous uncertainty and fear of the impending coronavirus – people took advantage of the municipal stay-at-home orders and spent multiple days in their pajamas, baking, and reading, and hopefully cuddling.
Now, of course this image of those early weeks of the pandemic glosses over the real experience of essential workers, those living check-to-check, and those whose home lives are filled with contention. It assumes the ability to keep money in the bank, perhaps the ability to take off work for weeks at a time or at least to work from home; the potential to care for one’s children full-time and maintain all of the other responsibilities of adulthood; that home life can be peaceful and vibrant.
Many never got to enjoy this temporary and extended “snow day” – and it is essential (pun intended) to keep all these folks in mind. Others got to enjoy it for a time, but then had to get back to their hustle somehow, despite the restrictions of the pandemic, in order to maintain their livelihoods. There are also those who potentially could have continued to experience an extended period of hibernation, but became bored and ill-at-ease and have decided to prematurely return to “business as usual”, cavalierly associating with others and causing infection rates and deaths to skyrocket.
I have been blessed during quarantine and truly grateful for my blessings. I was able to work from home and then pretty seamlessly transitioned to a new, better opportunity in the middle of 2020. I have had an exceptionally lovely time with my partner of 12 years, with whom I’ve thoroughly enjoyed being in quarantine. We got engaged during the pandemic and are patiently waiting the green light from public health officials after which we’ll plan a gathering to celebrate marriage.
For years, Kimeiko and I have noticed that the winter months are meant for hibernation – if one follows the seasons and their natural rhythms – and have been all but appalled to see the extent to which our Western society puts our materialism on hyperdrive at the time we ought to be most withdrawn. We have therefore mostly related to these last 9 months as a year-long (and maybe a little more) period of hibernation, after which we will once again socialize regularly and carry on with our lives.
Of special interest to me over the last few months, a topic about which I wrote more extensively in my article Juneteenth and a New Jubilee, has been the Jewish concept of Shmita – a year-long period every seven years in which people abstain from business-as-usual, and, in particular, let the land rest. The pandemic has intimated the potential of Shmita – particularly the early months where more people observed the stay-at-home orders, businesses mostly stopped, and our greenhouse emissions were drastically reduced (although still not nearly enough).
As some of us have gotten a taste of what Shmita might be like, my interest in the concept as a sociopolitical intervention is energized. Rabbi Michael Lerner suggested we “imagine the human race taking off one year out of every seven”, with the “15 percent who had to run essential services” getting a “rotating sabbatical” the other six years. One implication is the possibility that if we followed this law (albeit in an updated manner appropriate to the 20th century), we could avoid the universe forcing us to follow it due to the effects of natural disasters and pandemics.
I believe that all cultures and wisdom traditions have something to offer the collective. One of the key gifts of Judaism to the world is Shabbat and Shmita. The biblically-determined Shmita year begins in about 9 months and some in the Jewish world are asking what it will take for us to collectively observe this ritual in a way that truly protects the natural world and allows us to deepen into the retreat from materialism that we dipped our toes into this past March. For example, the Jewish environmental organization Hazon has developed a campaign around it called the Shmita Project. Its core message is to “Reimagine society”.
In this spirit of utopianism and the dream of a true collective hibernation – not because a pandemic has forced it but because it is what we truly need – I offer this poem to start off 2021.
It is both a wink toward what 2021 could look like and, even more so, a nod toward what the first day of Shmita could be – not as an exclusive Jewish practice but as a multicultural collective adoption in the spirit of mutual aid, spiritual sacrifice, and tending to the soul of the natural world – so that we may rest and restore balance.
I have taken some creative license in adapting this poem to begin on Friday, January 1. I hope that if Ms. Eberly happens across this blog that she will appreciate my small changes and consider them a blessing on her original, which is truly perfect already. Ultimately, this poem invites us to imagine snapping our fingers and waking up to days we could only dream of…
“The First Week” by Laura Eberly
(edits by Pesach Chananiah)
On the first day of this New Year,
we will be too busy
healing, tending, and child-rearing
for waging war,
so the soldiers will have no orders.
The police will have quiet radios and no calls,
so we will tear apart the prisons
and send the guards to rehab,
where first-graders and nursery workers will teach them slowly
to trust humanity again,
beginning with their own.
We will use the bricks and fences
to build community centers with wide porches
where the grannies can knit and keep watch instead.
Saturday would be for rest:
hammocks,
creeks,
and lemonade.
We would listen to the earth
and the spirits
and our ancestors
and our lovers
and our beloveds
and the bullfrogs
and the songbirds
and the tall grass
and the redwoods
and the oak trees
breathing
for one day
every week.
Breathing.
On Sunday
we should assemble all the healers –
all the yogis, chiropractors, sangomas, and sage smudgers –
and ask them to have coffee with the matriarchs,
and the refugees,
and the trans sex workers,
and the small town queers,
and anybody who has yelled at a marble building through a bullhorn,
or raised a child in times of war,
and by lunchtime all of us would learn
to locate, heal, and fortify our spines.
If we all agreed to,
on Monday
we could plant a pollinator garden on every corner
and turn over one parking spot per block
to vegetables and fruit.
That evening,
the musicians would find our diaphragms
and teach us new songs
to sing while planting.
On Tuesday
after the gardens,
we would repair every roof,
install rain barrels and solar panels,
retrieve the lost balls and frisbees and kites,
and remember we are tiny beneath the sky.
On Wednesday,
we’d fix the heaters
so the gas could never be cut off,
and install a tiny lead filter in every faucet.
By Thursday,
we would know each others’ names
and begin to tell our stories.
Then
the farmers and the roofers and the plumbers
would be honored by the lawyers and the doctors,
who had spent their first week ever listening.
Next, venerations and reparations
by the bankers and professors,
who will learn that education isn’t learning
and money isn’t value
and nothing is the feel of soil in your hands
or throwing back your head to sing.
We will ache for love and owning nothing
and for the first time
that will make us unafraid.
As we reach Friday once again, we heal and tend and prepare for rest once again.
And by next Sunday,
we would know who else we need.
Community Alchemist 