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Hello everyone,

The tulips and dandelions and grasses are singing. The return of such vibrant color to my immediate landscape fills me with awe and delight. I hope everyone is taking good care and feeling into whatever shifts feel meaningful.

Back in February I traveled to New Mexico for an initiation retreat into Shomeret Shalom, an emerging cohort for practitioners of Jewish revolutionary nonviolence. During this Passover portal, many of us shared stories about the difficulty and tension we experienced at our seder tables. In general, the dissonance between what the holiday represents and where we are as a people feels jarring, overwhelming, and heartbreaking.

On the one hand, many of us are searching for the ways in which our Jewish tradition has teachings for us rooted in nonviolence. We have a deeper knowing that for as long as there’s been violence, there’s been people opposed to it, practicing other ways of relating. So what are these matriarchal blessings, loving ways, healing paths, revolutionary stories, creative solutions, courageous ancestors, and subversive acts Judaism has to offer? Thanks to people like Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb and Taya Ma and Hadar Cohen and projects like Dwell in Revolution: Ancestors for a Judaism Beyond Zionism (to name a few), we are uncovering these stories together.

On the other hand, we are reckoning with the ways Jewish tradition has let us down. We’re facing a lineage full of patriarchal violence and harm — a way of thinking that sadly our loved ones are still able to justify at the seder table in the name of “this is how it’s always been done” and more recently, zionism. For those of us who are reckoning and not uplifting this part of our lineage, we are tasked with unlearning, rewiring, revisioning, and recreating what Jewish tradition means to us. A Judaism grounded in nonviolence that meets us within our current context and serves as a loving offering to future generations. This emerging Judaism is so juicy and so visionary and so dreamy, especially when it can be informed and shaped by other liberatory frameworks of our time. In particular, my personal favorite, abolition.

Teacher, Kohenet, and artist Elana June said it so beautifully during our retreat: We are being called to become both death and birth doulas for this work.

*shomeret shalom / guardian of peace*
a mosaic I made this winter: glass & terracotta clay mosaic on wood panel

People ask: Why revolutionary nonviolence? My response? Prolonged violence as an ongoing strategy is a surface, band aid, patriarchal solution. The patriarchal logic and defense expressed in mainstream discourse and echoed at our dinner tables is unsurprising. And at this point, boring. Clinging to a justification of violence in this way adheres to a belief system that lacks integrity and imagination. And this can be particularly painful when it comes from those we love and respect. I understand the big cultural work of our times to be shifting this narrative. Brute force leads us to believe we have squashed the thing for now, tricking us into feeling successful, but we know wounding only brings deeper wounding. What's actually needed is deeper healing and repair, which violence can never provide.

That’s why I love abolition as a framework because it centers healing and addresses harm at the root vs. band aid solutions. Abolition understands disappearing people doesn’t disappear problems. Abolition, birthed by Black women and feminists and gender expansive folks, is a politic that provides a complete shift in ideology and culture, transforming our way of being and relating.

<3 my little ode to abolition… <3

Abolition involves radical honesty about harm, the repair needed, and the transformed relationships and conditions that follow. Not so different from Judaism’s relationship to Teshuva.

Abolition requires truth telling as opposed to denial and avoidance. Being with the “clean” pain as opposed to suffering in the “dirty” pain as Resmaa Menakem says.

Abolition is the antithesis of a capitalistic, linear, quick fix. It requires slowing down, patience, and endurance. It requires grieving. It requires understanding the nature of spiraling time toward healing.

Abolition is about releasing all forms of domination and control from the psyche and material realms. Again, these are band aid “solutions.” Abolition diminishes the fallacy that nationstates, militaries, prisons, police, and surveillance could ever offer us safety or protection because they rely on these unsuccessful strategies.

Abolition centers human dignity and care as opposed to disposability and exploitation. It’s about departure from superiority, punishment and degradation of human life. It reinforces our interconnectivity no matter how much the myth of separation tries to tell us otherwise. It claims all of us and pulls us into circle together.

Abolition is the healing balm we need for all forms of oppression -- racism, sexism, ableism, classism, ageism, zionism, nationalism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia. Abolition, grounded in nonviolence, has strategies to offer us, both interpersonally and collectively.

Abolition nurtures our relationships and world building in the dream space, a space this current reality we’re all living in lacks. Many abolitionists and artists refer to these times as the crisis of imagination. Abolition invites us to create, to weave, to birth, and to experience joy and pleasure while doing it.

<3 my little ode to abolition… <3

People negate this kind of thinking by calling it naive, which is nothing but a deflection stemming from patriarchy and white supremacy. It is a way to dismiss the other so that they don’t have to face the hard truth of their own limited capacity. People who have been severed from their ability to feel, grieve, dream, imagine, or create are often the first and the quickest to call those who can naive.

From where I stand, many of our loved ones appear still caught in a narrow place with old, fear and trauma-based, self-serving narratives. zionism thrives here. So does racism and misogyny and the others. Fortunately, many of us are blossoming into the expanse, searching for alternative love and healing-based narratives in complete devotion to the collective. What a courageous and beautiful place to be. And I'm grateful to be alongside you.

With love for all of us,

Maya

PS. Because my love language is books & resource sharing, here are some of my top picks.

On abolition, a starter pack:

What Is Abolition, And Why Do We Need It? (Vogue Article)
Are Prisons Obsolete? By Angela Davis (free PDF, 51 pages)
We Do This ‘Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba (for purchase, 197 pages)
We Will Not Cancel Us by adrienne maree brown (free PDF, 64 pages)

For educators & youth workers:

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom by bell hooks
Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators
We Want to do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love
Teaching for Black Lives edited by Dyan Watson, Jesse Hagopian, and Wayne Au

passover musings: why I love abolition so much as the people’s pedagogy for getting free