CW: this essay contains mention of suicide and child loss.
Prior to 2018, when my synagogue was launched, I dwelled in a kind of limited emotional space with respect to other people: we did things for one another, we showed up for one another, we gardened together, we taught each other skills. In my family and broader neighborhood and community in Baltimore, there were expressions of love and solidarity, exchanges of gifts, camaraderie. Life felt pretty rich.
I had comrades with whom I could do the practical work of decolonizing my thinking, of learning to look with “the eyes of the native” as opposed to “the eyes of the settler” as Winona LaDuke so succinctly and beautifully frames it in her book, All Our Relations. (This book became important to me as I began pivoting in my professional life from the intellectual and critical pursuit of journalism to the external-facing, praxis-based work of community organizing and organizational leadership. I recommend reading it, along with From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, if you are contemplating making a similar shift into doing front-line community based work. I find it important to study when one is changing, or about to change, one’s positionality with respect to how one relates to groups of people who are involved in community work or activism.)
But in terms of my interpersonal relationships, I found that I was repeating a pattern that I’d been raised with, which was simply to express either condolences or worry when people died or were in crisis. When my then-boyfriend’s father died unexpectedly following surgery for cancer in 2003, I expressed to his grieving and traumatized widow that I was glad I could be present for the funeral -but I did so in a way that conveyed that I was anxious and worried for her. This, I now understand, was totally inappropriate of me. Surgeries were the same - I used to worry and process about them with others, or send a card or do nothing.
In fact, I had no idea how to actually show up for grieving people or people who were undergoing a major change of any sort. I missed funerals, or in the case of my beloved childhood piano teacher’s passing, I attended the memorial service but said nothing to the person’ loved ones. I missed weddings, too, including the weddings of three friends who I considered to be close friends. Only one of these friends is still close with me today. I received news about peoples surgeries, illnesses, deaths with a sense that this was a bad thing that was happening, that something was wrong in the world if these bad things were happening to good people.
Then, three things happened, two of which were losses in my sphere of loved ones.
My young cousin who lived many states away died by suicide just a few days prior to her fifteenth birthday, which overwhelmed all of my existing circuits and neural pathways about how to respond to crises in people’s lives. My cousins who were her immediate family members were thrown deep into grief, and I and my siblings and parents flew to be with them for the memorial service. After that, I felt compelled beyond even my own understanding of grief (which was super limited, as I now understand it) to do something for the people that this young person had left behind. I turned to my crocheting hobby as a means of physically expressing what I felt, and I made a large prayer shawl with a butterfly pattern for my cousin’s grieving mother, which I mailed as soon as I finished making it.
Yet this too felt inadequate to the thing that I wanted to be able to do, which was to provide real care. Making the shawl had been, primarily, a means of working through my shock and sadness, of consoling myself. I worried for my cousins, but that feeling of worry also felt deeply inadequate to the gravity and reality of the change that had occurred. I knew I could cause harm if I were to express worry, to make them pay attention to me and what I was feeling. I wanted to provide the grievers with something that would not be also an expression of my own grief, but a recognition of what they were going through as they grieved and did the awful but necessary work of assimilating this loss into their lives moving forward.
I still wasn’t aware yet, though, of the reality of death and loss, of their universality and necessity within the ecosystems of our lives. (I plan to revisit this idea in a separate essay.)
After some reflection, I arrived at a silly solution: I began simply sending them wordless texts that consisted of colored heart emojis, at first several times a week, whenever I thought about them. I committed inside my brain that, any time they crossed my mind, I would send a heart. After some time had passed, I decreased the frequency of the heart-sending, but did not stop. I dedicated myself to continuing this practice, which seemed at first sort of like a dumb thing to do, but gradually came to feel like exactly the thing to do, for at least one year. One or the other of them would occasionally respond with words of thanks, or letting me know how they were doing. But I required nothing in response, nor did I particularly care if they did respond. This was about providing a form of basic, nonverbal witness for the fact that they were mourning their child. (I think that in fact I did it for about two years, and had phone calls with them on Mother’s Day for five.) They reported later that my sending the hearts with such consistency had in fact been meaningful to them. For this I am profoundly thankful.
Another friend who lived closer to me also experienced a sudden and unexpected loss of a child around that time, and I was also able to show up to bear witness and support her in more material ways over the years. I learned from these two experiences that bearing witness to someone’s grief can be a form of care, whereas worrying about someone merely serves to occupy my own thoughts in an unproductive way, and can even cause the griever or suffering person to think that they ought to be taking care of me. So, I learned two things through these two losses in my sphere of friendship:
Worry does not equal care. Worry is not a form of care.
Bearing witness to, or accompanying, someone in their time of grief can be a valuable form of care.
These principles have guided my actions toward those in my life who are grieving their own losses ever since. I am grateful to my cousins and my friend for their amazing, generous, expansive attitudes about sharing their grief, because it afforded me the chance to show up for them in multiple ways, and to finally get something right in all of that difficult murky time.
The other thing that happened in 2018 was that my synagogue, Hinenu, was formed, first with people sitting in each other’s living rooms to conduct Jewish rituals and sing and eat together, and then with a (phenomenal) rabbi being hired and providing pastoral care, and then with her knitting together a real congregation through real re-constituting of the Jewish traditions and ritual life. The prayers never spoke to me much; but the death and mourning rituals did, and the holiday celebrations did; but the one thing that hooked my interest the most was: Community care.
One of the core tenets of this congregation is the practice of chesed, or community care for those who are experiencing illness, injury, hardship, need, or welcoming a new baby. This usually looks like cooking a home-cooked meal, or bringing a meal from a favorite take-out place, to a family and delivering it at their doorstep. Or it can be walking someone’s dog as they recover from surgery. Or it can be paying them a visit to shoot the shit and chat as they convalesce from a head injury. Or it can be showing up to help box up their belongings as they prepare to move without the support of relatives or many other friends or partners.
Of course, I had sometimes cooked meals and shown up for friends who had needs; but I hadn’t ever participated in structured community care in this way before. The contrast between my old way of behaving toward people in my sphere who were experiencing major things such as surgeries, or death and loss, and this new way of showing up for them *as a community*, felt both stark and right. This new way of circulating the act of providing care around within a community feels to me like a new iteration of the previous “back-and-forth” care relationships in which I was accustomed to participating.
Or, rather, it is transformative. Because the internally supportive structure among a broader group — in this case, the 300 or so members of my synagogue — constitutes a gift economy unto itself, a system that is self-sustaining, responsive in a quick way to the needs expressed, and enriching to the whole group without generating any monetizable product or service.
The way it works is this. There is a committee known as the Chesed Committee, made up of a half dozen or so committed individuals. These folks have created an intake form which any member of the congregation may access through visiting our website. When a congregant makes a request, the form goes to a general inbox which is checked daily by whichever member of the committee is “on duty” that month, a responsibility that rotates so that nobody gets exhausted.
Depending on the nature of the request — is it for meals? for dog walks? for rides to the grocery store? — the responsible committee member (care traffic controller, my term thank you thank you, I’ll be here all week) evaluates what sort of labor is needed to fill it, and sets about the task of organizing this labor. If the need is to have meals delivered, the care traffic controller alerts our paid staff administrator, who sets up a meal train. Or, congregants are invited to a cooking session in the kitchen of the building where we rent space, and the meals are packed up and delivered from that experience. If the need is for three strong-backed people to help someone box up their belongings to prepare to move, the care traffic controller reaches out to the congregation via the email listserve to find volunteers. And so forth.
It is important here that everyone who participates is a member of the community, but whether the ones showing up to provide care know the person in need is completely unimportant. The gift of care continues in a virtuous cycle around and around the group of 300 regardless of the person’s popularity, status, or longevity in the community.
From this, I’ve learned another thing about care, which is similar to what Kurt Vonnegut gleaned from his learnings about how villagers in tribal societies care for children: The greater the number of adults who are committed to providing care, the greater the benefit to the overall group. Even someone who nobody gets along with can cook a meal or walk a dog.
I think that, as fascism tries to make its grab for attention and power, as artificial intelligence and climate change conspire to accelerate the breaking of the promises of capitalism, it is worth examining in detail the role of care as a renewable resource, and how it can operate within communities. It is worth looking at the ways that we choose who to care for, and where to put in effort, and to ask ourselves tough questions such as: Are we providing something that is of value to the person to whom we are providing it? Or could our offering cause them unintended harm, as when an expression of worry adds to the stress of the person going through the crisis or loss? What have we been asked or invited to do? Where are we already situated, and how can we make an impact there instead of going someplace else? Who will benefit materially from our actions? Can we console ourselves and take care of our own feelings as a process that is separate from the providing of care?
The month of Elul is the month that contains both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, holy days of renewal and atonement. This is a time when we Jews tend to self-reflect the most, and see the places where we have tried to do good things, and have come up short. It is a time for making repair, and mending the relations that make up the fabric of our days. I don’t subscribe to the G-d parts of that formulation, but as I reflect on how grief and loss have touched my life, I want to do better. I want to participate in, and be part of, something larger than just myself.
What are the ways that you, dear reader, have been able to access community care? What are the ways in which you have provided it? Comments are open.
Sending hugs and solidarity,
Mariya