Destruction after Destruction, Renewal after Renewal

By: Rabbah Gila Caine

Full disclosure, I’m writing this as my immediate family and close friends in Israel are running in and out of the shelters, so my mind and heart are over there. But, my thoughts are also here in Canada, and I know many within our Jewish community carry the burden of deeply conflicting, confusing, and confused feelings regarding the war raging between the US, Israel, and Iran. Many of us are worrying for the lives and wellbeing of our Israeli family and friends, while also worrying for our local Iranian friends with family back home. So many of us, especially those who have experienced it, know that the fog of war hides harsh violence and that war always places a huge question mark on the future.

How do we help each other with this burden? And most importantly, how do we remove this question mark from our future?

To begin articulating an answer, I’ll first go into the realm of art, and share my opinion that science fiction is a more powerful spiritual tool than fantasy, because it invites us to imagine our present and our future within the real constraints of time, space, and physics. In this sense, it’s more similar to the feeling of “hope” as lived in reality, and not in our dreams. Yet even within the expansive space of an artistic genre, our imaginations can get locked in, as entire art forms collapse into a single aesthetic or a single vision of what the future might look like. Many of us are familiar with cyberpunk (which Encyclopedia Britannica describes as “a science-fiction subgenre characterized by countercultural antiheroes trapped in a dehumanized, high-tech future”. You know it if you’ve watched Blade Runner), but how many of us know about Solarpunk (which has yet to gain an entry in the online Britannica)? Both genres acknowledge that we are living in times of upheaval and crisis, but only Solarpunk looks this crisis in the eye and then reaches for the tools already in our hands: technologies, social structures, architecture, and art, to build something beautiful, a quality we rarely allow ourselves when imagining the future. Though Solarpunk tends to express itself more through visuals of lush, verdant, sun-drenched images, its core vision is unmistakable: a future in which humans have not dissolved into isolated units, been uploaded into the ether, or surrendered their bodies and souls, but instead one in which human community, human technology, and the living earth have meshed in a stronger, more decentralized way. A future where smaller, more intimate communities thrive, where people have enough, and where no one needs to be lonely or rageful.

Jews in Canada find ourselves navigating a deeply chaotic moment — watching our synagogues attacked in Toronto, observing the war between Israel and Iran with a mix of relief and bewilderment, and witnessing radicalized elements within Israeli society growing ever more violent against ethnic and religious minorities, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. The paths that brought us here, the tools we’ve used, and many of our assumptions about our allies and about what a viable Jewish community looks like have, in too many ways, proven unreliable. We seem to have stopped trusting ourselves, and stand at this crossroads questioning the way forward.

In this week’s Torah portion we read: “Take, from yourselves, a raised-contribution for YHWH” (Sh’mot 35:5). “From yourselves”,  from what you already carry: your tools, your traditions, your cultural and spiritual inheritance. The story then unfolds into a vision of hard work and beauty as Am Yisrael comes together to build the spice-infused, purple-dripping, golden Mishkan (Tabernacle). This is Am Yisrael’s Solarpunk moment, when they recognize the correct tools already at their disposal to devise an image of beauty. And this image of beauty and purpose will be with them not only in the desert wilderness, but through the ages — destruction after destruction, renewal after renewal.

What does our Tabernacle look like? What are the most luminous, most honest images of Jewish collective beauty? What’s the Tabernacle of Jewish community in Canada, the Tabernacle of a Jewish future,  that is neither self-righteously dogmatic (on the right or left) nor defeated, but humble, joyful, and real?

Over these past difficult months, one of the ways I’ve quieted my own anxiety has been returning to science fiction, because those stories, even when full of very human conflict and complicated ethical questions, are animated by something we should aspire  to right now: a narrative of building. We live, especially in liberal circles, within a culture that has made an art form of deconstruction, leaving less room for the harder, slower, more vulnerable work of construction.

It’s a matter of where you direct your gaze. When you deconstruct, you search for the weak points, for the obsolete and rotting sections, in order to tear down. When you build, you also look for the weak points, but you do so in order to strengthen them — and more than that, you create a blueprint of the beautiful structure you are setting out to build.

An Israeli friend I spoke to this morning said to me “Say something that will give me hope”. She says this in almost every conversation we’ve had over the past few months, and then we talk about the small things that help us move forward: looking for a tallit for her daughter’s Bat Mitzvah (they might have to get it after the war, but you can always choose the colours you like!), or a tree in her garden.

Within the confusion, here is our blueprint: “Take, from yourselves” and bring with you everything of beauty and joy and wisdom that you have from our Jewish culture. All the good knowledge and best practices and sweet spices and glorious ideas, and life. And even from within the bomb craters and disappointment and pain, we will rebuild better.