Resources

As the Jewish Studies Professor for my department, I teach an undergraduate course in the Holocaust (Sho’ah) every other school year. The remote format of the course now consists of weekly assigned readings and the edited version of class lectures gleaned from earlier years of in-class instruction. Students submit short weekly responses to the readings, including personal viewpoints and questions requiring additional information. The enrollees are a good Louisiana gumbo of Black, Brown, and White, male, female, and “other.” Two weeks ago, I received responses to essays on “The Medieval Treatment of the Jews” (book burnings, forced baptism, conversion sermons, blood libel, host desecration). Their responses largely expressed surprise that they had never been taught about these specific modes of mistreatment meted out to Jews in Europe. But there was one component that surprised and touched me personally. Although we had never discussed it, they seemed to sense how emotional Yom ha-Sho’ah (Holocaust Memorial Day, Jan 27) would be for me, and many expressed words of kindness and consolation. Their gesture moved me to respond with the following email of thanks. The national motto of Israel is lo’ ‘od, Hebrew for “Never again.” As Jews, we read and study a version of history that is not the same as the version other school children in America study. We don’t sing, “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” For us, the events of 1492 are singled out as a cause for mourning, a year during which we learned that not even conversion to the dominant Christianity of our world was enough to transform us into persons whose value is equal to that of our fellow citizens. It is understandable that the typical history curriculum in most of our schools does not focus on these matters of life and death to a tiny portion of the population. They are matters of no serious consequence to anyone other than the minority group of Jews. But if we watch in horror the slow and agonizing death of George Floyd or the senseless murder of Alton Sterling in our own beloved Baton Rouge, our responses can be either-or. Either we turn away and try not to think of what happens, or we vow to join the effort to create a world in which such evil can no longer be tolerated. In this struggle, the human capacity to empathize is essential. If the only persons who understand the pain of a class of people are those who themselves are in that category, hatred and pain never cease. Only the victims care, and their cries go unheard. Small, insignificant acts of meanness somehow morph into large and debilitating experiences. Over time, the world becomes darker and more frightening, for we have learned that we must fear each other. What is the answer? I cannot be other than who I am. But if I can only sense and react to treatment that is harmful to Jews, or old professors, then bad stuff done to “Others” floats by me right in front of my face—and I do nothing to combat it. This must not happen! Even at this later stage of my own life, I must daily renew my determination to expand my vision ever wider, to open my heart to the conditions of life that all people face, not just folks like me—old, white, male, Jews – all people. “To see” must also become “to perceive.” “To hear” must be “to understand.” I must be responsible not just for myself alone, but for everyone who is part of my human family.  Here is a major part of my reason for entering into dialogue with people like you who are young, probably majority Christian, and cool. In other words, nothing at all like me. Yes, I need you to be “woke” about Judaism and our unfathomable experience during a truly awful period of history. But I also believe that it is incumbent on me to learn about all of you, to care about you as if you were my own family, because that is exactly what you are. Indeed, if Judaism teaches only one lesson, it is that we are all from the same father and mother and thus  a single family destined either to live and care for each other or, God forbid, to hate and destroy each other. I choose life and caring, and I ask all of you to join me. Ken yehi ratzon. “May it be God’s will.”

During the past year, two of my favorite Brazilian writers and educators, Luiz Antonio Simas and Luiz Rufino collaborated on yet another book: Encantamento: Sobre a Política da Vida (Incantation: On the Politics of Life).  One of the central affirmations of their work (which follows their previous co-authored publications: A Pedagogy of the Crossroads, An Arrow Through Time, and The Enchanted Science of Macumbas) is that the opposite of life isn’t death—it is desencantamento, or an inability to surrender to a process of incantation. As a verb, incantare evokes our capacity to fuse song and word in an effort to raise our spirits, to spark magic in our imaginations, to invite divine presence. Our capacity to incantate spaces of learning does precisely what theologian Rubem Alves invites us to do:  name and invoke the not-yet worlds, so as to break the spells of right-here worlds that continue to abandon, oppress, exclude, and sever from ourselves and our communities of belonging. Incantation as a poetic of resistance allows us to escape, disobey, and ambush the traps set through the colonial matrix of power so that bodies can dare to see, create, invent, and integrate new possibilities freedom, belonging, and liberation through creativity and imagination. Incantation, Simas and Rufino affirm, nests our capacity to move through time, to experience a passage between forms and worlds, to change our points of reference through a politic of life that is rooted in an imprinting of the everyday as rites of reading and writing different poetic routes capable of setting traps to our collective loss of hope and vivacity.[i]  In this sense, incantation is an exercise in emergence and survivance that lives and breathes beyond the terrorizing effects of coloniality. It’s the commitment to movement, occupation, visibility, insertion, and participation. It’s the creative force that travels through crossroads of knowledge-making, confronting hierarchizations produced by ontological, epistemological, and semiotic violences. Art, as I understand it, has a tremendous power to forge incantatory pathways of resistance because of its capacity to dis-educate us from disciplinary molding. It reverberates and discloses to us that which is hidden in our interior recesses in embodied, striking, and visceral ways. It can help us re-educate our affections, as Paulo Freire puts it, or work a kind of magic in our souls, as bell hooks states.  It also inspires us to name the world as we see it, and to find a poetic tongue when the language we know fails us. It helps us resist, heal, connect, conjure, and tend to all our relations. As generative clearings, the arts are sites for world-making, for dreaming, rehearsing, and choreographing new possibilities of being and intervening in the world. When we immerse ourselves in acts of artmaking, we have the opportunity to access the visceral, the somatic life of the body, its reflexes, limits, intuition, responses, desires, needs, and its alchemies.  When we encourage and invite students to in-corporate artmaking processes as they engage readings, discussions, and bodies of knowledge, we participate in this politic of incantation. A student’s performance and ritual entitled “Disposable Beauty” still stands as one of the most profound and generative projects to which I have been witness.   As a final integrative assignment, the performance consisted of placing delicate flower arrangements throughout locations in her neighborhood that were marked by abuse, violence, and abandonment. Such poetic gestures in vulnerable spaces in the city sought to raise awareness of our transience, interdependence, and negligence in the face of injustice. The flower assemblages were made out of blossoms and foliage that flower shops would throw away at the end of the day. This poetic gesture both incantated and resisted the (i)logic of degradation, disposability, oppression, and inequity by orienting herself and participants in acts of creative wonder. Through her invocation of not-yet worlds, she extended a gesture of care, of regard, of re-worlding, refusing to be desencantada with the world around her. At the end of these performances, she invited folks to partake in tea ceremonies that were rooted in offering the gift of reciprocity, spiritual care, regard, and a warm cup of tea. As a poetic of incantation, her artistic gestures imbued spaces of desolation, disposability, and abandonment with love, presence, and beauty through a practice that integrated the semester’s resources, readings, discussions and questions with her own wisdom, creativity, and spiritual sensibilities. I return to this experience often to remind myself to continuously ask how many of the assignments outlined in my syllabi impede or foster poetic and incantatory experimentations. Notes [i] See Luiz Antonio Simas and Luiz Rufino, Encantamento: Sobre Política de Vida (Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Morula Editorial, 2020). Photo Credit: Miguel Garcia Saaved - stock.Adobe.com

I am familiar with what liminality means, but I have never put the Israelite’s journey in the wilderness and liminality together until recently. Liminality was first used in the discipline of anthropology and then applied to ritual and other areas of research. It is a term to describe being in between, being in the threshold, where a person is in transitional stage, not belonging to the past or future. I have used the term to describe the biblical Job during his suffering. Liminality is a time of confusion, vulnerability, uncertainty, and even danger. But then it also reflects a time of possibility, potential, and becoming. For example, when a person passes from singlehood to a married status, that person can no longer return to the old single self, but has been transformed into a new sense of self with someone else to live and care for. Similarly, when one is between jobs, that person is also in the liminal stage. In a way, all schools are going through this liminality during the COVID-19 crisis. Being in a pandemic is being in liminality, with all the confusion, vulnerability, and uncertainty that go along with it, not to mention danger. Being in transition is not comfortable. Belonging nowhere is painful. Having a confused status is never fun. Yet, being in COVID-19 is also a time of profound possibility, potential, and becoming. The world will not be the same after COVID-19. Many professions and fields will forever be changed in the post-COVID-19 world, and education is among them. In the future, online education and programs will be a necessity rather than an option or a suggestion. Remote learning will be the norm. The idea of expecting people to come to one’s campus physically for education will soon be in the distant past, if  that is not a reality already. During the podcast conversation I had with Dr. Lynne Westfield in early February 2021, she asked me about the future of my school: “Is it bright?”  I responded: “The future is online but everything else is uncertain.” Indeed, with COVID-19, all schools are not just in the same boat, but in the same storm, as Westfield rightly remarked. Living in liminality can be frustrating, but we can choose to see the transforming potential it has for all of us if we discern attentively what God is doing at this moment of history as administrators, faculty, and students in our particular contexts of formation. If we try to see beyond the chaotic present into the future, perhaps we can see ourselves living in a prophetic time, a critical time for reflection on things that matter. After leaving Sinai for the Promised Land, the Israelites were stranded in the wilderness for forty years. It was during that crucial time through trials, suffering, rebelliousness, and dependence, that the Israelites became the people of God. It was also during that difficult time, that the presence of God was with them (Ex 40:38). Being in liminality can be meaningful and hopeful.