Hanukkah at the Roots: Night 2 - Climate - Madeline Canfield

Madeline Canfield is the Organizing Coordinator for Adamah’s Jewish Youth Climate Movement. An undergraduate at Brown University, she is a seasoned organizer for climate justice and against sexual assault, and is an incoming board member at The Shalom Center.

Happy Chanukah to all. Welcome to the second night of our holiday of illumination and rededication amid the tragedy of dispossession. The postulate of hope we publicize during the cold days of Chanukah speaks dearly to us amid a sense of interminable bleakness.

I think it should be first stated that we have every right to be angry and devastated. I write this note to you all during the U.N. Climate Change Conference, the 28th installment in a series of largely stagnant international dialogues whose purported visions of mitigating preventable disaster and installing protections against what is now inevitable arrive to us each year in dizzying reports of shirked responsibility, equivocation, and disregard for reality. Last year I attended COP with a youth delegation, exasperated (but not surprised) by the spectacle of environmentalism but relieved by the hard-won—yet still inadequate—loss and damages fund that seeks to address the disproportionate impacts of the climate crisis (and its roots of colonialism and capitalism) on frontline nations. This year, I find myself searching for unusually quiet news about the conference, only to suffer waves of despair as the principle conference organizers deny the imperative of fossil fuel phase out.

One step forward, one step back. We are choreographing international response, as if our activism amounted to a performance rather than a race against the calamity of a dwindling timeline.

And yet, as much as this work is a race, and we are in genuine competition against the expansionist empire of the fossil fuel regime and its corrupted political allies, let us take seriously the notion of our organizing—and the global stage upon which we enact it—as a dance, a form of art crafted together. We need nourishment, and we need community. Global systems of unregulated corporations, colonialism, nationalism, racism, extractivism, and state violence have led us to the climate crisis and have created a paradigm of daily life that inculcates an emotional, spiritual, and political malaise. Too many of us go to work without investment in our jobs, return home to a place of isolation and lack of community, and then turn to the onslaught of the news, only to watch legislative politics unfold with a rancor that seems to fate all bold climate justice policies for a tacit re-endorsement of the fossil fuel corporate order. Organizing theory evidences that our strength lies in our numbers, but we are increasingly responding to the climate crisis in fragmentation—reading increasingly bleak articles and news reports while alone at our desks, hosting virtual panels or discussions that draw few attendees, organizing small actions that receive little press or reaction from our targets.

The climate movement is not in the place of high activist momentum that we had generated in 2019 and early 2020. But that does not mean we cannot return to the place of escalating collective power, a place of coalition-building and mutual visioning, where our solidarity was wide and our imagination expansive. We have drafted the policy solutions, and we have compelled the populations committed to the collective liberation guaranteed by the climate justice future. What we need now are the lines of connectivity awakened when we reconfigure our struggles into the irreducibility of art. We need our myriad communities to see their mutual stake and power in the stories we tell and the places we occupy so as to de-silo the movement from “political” spaces and universalize it across realms of daily life.

We need our protests in the park, we need our rituals in the road, we need our dances in the sites that maximize disruption, where all can witness and understand that escalation is not only a means to an end but a means to live, fulfilled, in the present. Hope need not be a deferred idea, something projected onto the possibility of a future breakthrough. Hope can be the embodied practice of resistance and the pursuit of the uncertain. Hope can be the refusal to live under what is by modeling the recourse that exists within alternative modes of being that are contemporaneous to political frustration and planetary loss: demonstration, civil disobedience, storytelling, prayer, speech, ritual and observance, all of which derive their power from collectivity. We move toward the tenets of climate justice—uprooted systems, transformed institutions, redistributed resources, and materially-reconstructed landscapes of shared living—and as we do so, we make our own worlds.

Chag sameach; ken yehi ratzon.

— by Madeline Canfield

Read/Watch/Listen:
For content to engage with that grapples with some of these issues of the widespread manifestations of climate disaster and the implications (and potentialities) for community and ritual, I recommend the TV series Extrapolations and Daniel Sherell’s book Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. I’m also looking forward to Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s What if We Get It Right? coming out this summer.

Action Item:
For ways to take action now, activists at Standing Rock are asking allies to submit public comments to the Army Corps of Engineers in favor of creating a new Environmental Impact Statement in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline—comments are due December 13, and this may be the last major opportunity to shut down the project while we still can.

Kavannah

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

On the second night of Hanukkah
we open our eyes
To the actual sight in our own generation
Of what the Prophet Malachi foretold:
A day, a week, a year, perhaps an epoch

That bring upon us
Melted ice fields. Flooded cities.
Scorching droughts. Murderous wildfires.
We among all life-forms
face the nightmare of a Flood of Fire,
The heat and smoke that could consume all Earth.

"Here! The day is coming,”
Said the Prophet Malachi,
“That will flame like a furnace,
Says YHWH / Yahhhh —
The Infinite InterBreath of Life —
when all the arrogant, all evil-doers,
root and branch,
will like straw be burnt to ashes
in the fires that they set.

Yet for all who revere
My Interbreathing Name, Yahhhh,
a sun of justice will arise
with healing in the beating of its wings,
its rays, its winds."
We light the second candle
Of this Festival of Light and Dedication
As a symbol of the sun,
Giver of light,
Giver of energy,
Giver of healing
From the Flood of Fire
That endangers us.

Blessings

midrashic translations by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Baruch atah / Brucha aht Yahhh, Blessed are You, Breath of life, Ruach HaOlam, Interbreathing of the world, asher kidshanu b’mitzvot, vitzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Hanukkah, Who makes us holy by connecting with the Breath and with each other, at this moment to kindle the light of Hanukkah to see our cousins.

Baruch atah, YHWH {Yahh} Eloheinu, Ruach haolam, she-asah nisim — lo v’chayil v’lo v’choach ki im b’ruchech — l’horeinu bayamim hahaeim baz’man hazeh.

Blessed are You, YHWH [Yahhh] our God, Breath of all life, Who has brought about amazing deeds — not by might and not by power, but by Your Spirit — through our forebears in those days and in ourselves, this very season.

Light shamash / helper candle and Candle 1 & 2 of Hanukkiah