Shana svira.
Have a manageable year.🤷♀️
Today at sunset begins Rosh Hashanah. Shana tova to those of you who celebrate. Happy New Year, and may 5781 not be a total shanda. I like what this rabbi has to say about Rosh Hashanah this year:
B’hatzlacha, indeed.
I’m not Jewish. If I were forced to convert to another religion upon pain of death, Judaism would be in my top three.
Just kidding. Judaism is my top converting-to religion. If there weren’t the pesky problem of me not believing in any god or supernatural force whatsoever, I actually could see myself converting to Judaism.
Sincerely.
But my lack of belief is much stronger than my desire to join a religious community, no matter how much admired.
So, I’ll continue to be the goyishe friend who peppers his conversations with a handful of Yiddish words and has very strong opinions on what makes really good chopped liver (gotta brown the onions until they’re almost falling apart and don’t be afraid of the schmaltz).
As you can see below, I was originally going to title this post “SHNAT MAHAPACHA! A year of revolution!”:
Shana svira—have a manageable year 🤷♀️—is much more my speed.
But that made me cringe upon re-reading it. I have never believed in the power of the people.
Never.
I mean, I believed in at least the concept of God well into adulthood, but the power of popular revolution?
Never.
I wish that I did believe in it, truly. My admittedly haphazard reading of history has shown me that popular revolt is always co-opted and corrupted by an entrenched elite that simply replaces, or as is often the case, joins the old guard.
And populism always ends in ethnic cleansing.
Always.
I promise that this foray into the darker corners of political science and history is going to be very brief, but let me say unequivocally, I do not wish you a year of revolution. All I wish for is that in forty-eight days that the current regime loses bigly at the ballot box. I wish that early next year, on my Trump-supporting dad’s birthday that that “asshole baby” as my mother-in-law called him is out of the White House. Will it happen? Will it be remotely peaceful?
Who the fuck knows?
We may get a revolution/counter-revolution/civil war/Qanon insurgency. I bloody well hope not, but these days, who the fuck knows?
I’m not sure what this blog is going to look like for the next forty-eight days. I promise that I won’t get into politics again, though. It’s not that I am too privileged for them. No, I have a very serious fear that if an emboldened Trump “wins” again that I will be stripped of my health insurance, and with my many pre-existing conditions, I will never be able to get insured again. I also care about what happens to my BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ friends who have suffered immensely under this administration. This election matters a whole damned lot to me, and I will be casting my ballot with the force of thirty megatons of TNT.
I hope that we have a manageable year with a new, but far-from-ideal president. May he have a sane and science-based approach about getting us out from under this pandemic. This pandemic that has killed more than the entire population of Little Rock, Arkansas in six months. Imagine a whole mid-sized city—a state capital even depopulated in that period.
Gone forever.
It fucking happened!
Our whole nation should be livid. Instead, everywhere I look on my social media are friends of various political stripes taking maskless fucking group photos with people who do not live with them. Going to bars, eating indoors, smoking cigars inside a shop—being oblivious idiots. Last night on my walk I saw an entire Zumba class of twenty, just jammed together sweating to the samba music, and not a mask in sight.
We live in a world where irony is undead and shambles across the earth seeking living flesh.
Magical thinking is just rampant, and combating it has to start at the top. I hope that Biden, despite himself, rises to the occasion and begins to repair the world bit by bit.
My favorite concept of Jewish thought is tikkun olam (Hebrew: תיקון עולם) which literally means ‘repair of the world’.
The belief that it is not enough to take care of oneself and loved ones, but that one must strive to improve the world for everyone. I do not claim to live up to this, but I do aspire to it. May I find some small way to repair the world this year. May we all find a small way to repair the world. May we all be able to manage to find some peace and a little happiness this year. Lord knows we’ve had enough tsuris (trouble, aggravation, or woe) to last a lifetime.
Shana svira. A manageable year. Pray for one, those of you that pray. The godless amongst us have to step it up a bit more, I suppose.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
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