Recoding the Conflict: What Chanukah Has to Teach Us About How We Speak
When I was young, my dad used to tell us stories. The stories always involved two young children, a girl and a boy, adventurous analogues for my brother and me, who would be sent off by their parents to undertake great adventure. When the going got rough and the children couldn’t go on, they would [...]
Folly and Wonder: A Reflection on Summer Work
My neighbor says anything we plant in September takes hold. She’s lining pots of little grasses by her walk. I want to know the root goes deep on all that came before, you could lay a soaker hose across your whole life and know there was something under layers of packed summer earth and dry [...]
CeCe McDonald and the Need for Transformation: What Jacob’s Dream has to teach us about justice
CeCe’s story is a particular story, a story of one woman living in a society with a long legacy of violence against women, violence against people of color, violence against queers, who fought back in when confronted with hate speech. CeCe’s story is also a vertical protrusion, emerging out of the horizontal smoothness of our society’s narrative. What if we, individuals who buy-in every day to the legal narrative of this nation, who integrate ourselves into the social and legal fabric of our communities, were to collide with CeCe’s story? What possibilities and new paradigms would we discover by the next morning’s light?
An Invitation to Us All: The Coalition of Immokalee Worker’s Fast for Fair Food
Fasting when justice is absent, as with the CIW’s Fast for Fair Food, provides individual bodies a time to change our rhythms, learn new cycles, to find sustenance in each other when we are unable or unwilling to take sustenance from food. If the fast is successful, Publix will accede to the demands of the CIW to bring justice to the tomato fields.
When rain doesn’t fall, the earth grows cracked and dusty, plants do not grow or wither in mid-season. When the rains of justice don’t fall, workers are exploited, treated like units of production rather than partners in cultivation and harvest.
Jews around the world will be fasting on March 7th for Taanit Esther, embodying the three-day fast of the Jews of Shushan, who heeded Esther’s call for a community-wide fast before undertaking a campaign to change the fate of the community. We have the chance this year to bind up our fast with the Fast for Fair Food, as a community of farmworkers and allies fast for six-days in recognition that the rains of justice have yet to fall on the fields of Immokalee.
Arielle
Arielle Rosenberg is a third year rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Boston. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Arielle spent the last decade working as an organizer with migrant and indigenous communities in Honduras and Seattle, Washington.
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Contributing Scholars
Tasi PerkinsTasi Perkins is an ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church and a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Theological and Religious Studies at Georgetown University. He earned a B.S. from Cornell University (Statistics and Biometry) and an M.Div. from Duke Divinity School, and completed a year of Th.D. work at Boston University.
Bridget LiddellBridget is an independent earth spiritualist, a humanist-feminist pursuing integration, connection, and community. Her current intellectual interests are alternative social structures, performative cultural theories, and empowering educational practices.
Lee PaczullaLee is an MDiv candidate at Harvard Divinity School, preparing for ordination as a Unitarian Universalist (UU) minister. She spent the last five years doing community-based youth development and health action work in Washington, DC, and has a BA in psychology and women’s studies from Swarthmore College.