For the Sake of Our Ancestors

The image above is a 17th-century diagram called “For a Wildfire” (MS. Bet Din London 130 (17th c) (1)). It reads, “Write 3 Divine names on the doorway of homes near the fire. Write a Star of David amulet on a challah and throw it into the fire. Write 2 Divine names on an egg and throw it into the fire.”

I’d like to offer gratitude to my chevrutah Daniel Delgado for learning with me over Signal while I sit outside the Red Cross shelter, and to SVARA rabbis Mónica Gomery and Becky Silverstein for offering support in this time.

“The earth is not dying, it is being killed.” – Utah Phillips

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My friend sent me a text in the morning; “it’s gone.” It being the house where 40 queer Jews had just gathered for our monthly Rosh Chodesh, where we lit more Hanukkah candles than was physically safe in one living room. Collectively awe-ing at all the light in the darkness. The house where we gathered many times over the past 15 months for celebration, grief, and collective wrestling around Jewish identity and what was being done in our name in Gaza. We had planned to meet there again for Rosh Chodesh on January 30th.

Our friend had gotten out safe, but had taken nothing from that home. Not even a toothbrush.

Across Los Angeles, thousands of others have fled their homes with nothing. Even now we do not know the extent of upheaval and destruction that we are facing as air quality is being reported as “beyond the ash content from 9/11.” Despite this, our city will not go down quietly. Every donation center is overrun with volunteers and supplies (please stop sending your used clothes to LA; please send money and gift cards). Thousands of people are stepping in where the systems will not. Our own queer jewish community is making DIY air filters and delivering them to our most vulnerable. Healthy meals, clothing, and medication is being sourced for those who evacuated with nothing. This, of course, is emerging thanks to years of work to build mutual aid infrastructure by marginalized communities who knew they would see no help from the government. The Black Panther party began their Free Breakfast For School Children program in 1969, serving thousands of children, and eventually expanded to offer free medical clinics, community ambulance services, and legal clinics. Outside the FEMA sign-up in Pasadena, people are organizing victims to tell their stories in an effort to push the city to agree to a rent hike freeze, eviction moratorium, and immediate cash assistance. The lines are long and the air is still heavy with smoke. Handing out food and water, I talk to Bobby, a resident of the historic Black neighborhood of Altadena, who lost his family’s home of 50 years. He was upstairs asleep with his wife; he smelled smoke but didn’t think it was nearby. He only got out because his daughter drove to Altadena and got him out. We do not consider elders in disaster planning. Who will tell those without cell phones that they need to evacuate? We’ve read too many stories (one is too many, to be clear) of disabled folks left behind during eco-disasters, another built-in system failure.

A friend took only a suitcase with him when his house burned down, and today is “shot day.”  I briefly question what my Pastoral care professor would say about sharing medical supplies before dumping syringes, needles, and enough testosterone for a month into his hand. I already passed that class anyway. Pastoral care rules are murky in disaster times. When the fire is within 2 miles of where I am, I get a call: “pack a bag.” I find a backpack. I can not for the life of me think of what to put in it. A third call comes and suggests I leave, just in case. My backpack is still empty. I grab the hard drive of the last SVARA video project I filmed, along with two other drives that belong to other people; but not my own belongings. Eventually I settled on a group photo of the Transgender hockey team I founded, my father’s tefillin, and a pair of socks. Perhaps I am not as well-equipped for a crisis as I thought.

There is still ash falling from the sky as I make my way to an emptying grocery store on Friday afternoon to prepare for Shabbat. We crammed 15 of us into a living room for dinner, some still masked, and with a handful of air purifiers running on high in various parts of the room. I set out enough tea lights for everyone to light one for themself. I ask if folks want to light, and everyone shifts uncomfortably and mutters. No one wants to light anything. The two large candlesticks are too tall, the dog’s tail could knock it over, the book shelf is too close to a TV – “What about the drum set?”  We’re out of options and energy, so two small tea lights are placed high above a stack of storage bins in a glass cactus terrarium. Most of us have seen flames on mountainsides or next to our homes this week. Any fire is too much fire. 

People describe the exhaustion, the constant somatic vibration of hypervigilance. The Watch Duty app alert noise is burned into our brains. It chimes on everyone’s phones during dinner like a symphony no one asked for. There is no way to feel this and not think of those across the globe who have lived through this countless times, for months and years on end. This is a small and deeply related symptom of the same problem. We talk about Gaza, but the physical manifestation of anxiety and trauma too connected to our sleepless bodies make it impossible to fathom feeling this way for over a year; never knowing what the sound on the phone is warning you of. There are no equivalencies, but there are parallels. 

No one really looks at the candles again, there is no collective awe at the fire. I wait until everyone is gone, and for the first time in my life, I blow the candles out before they finish.

Time itself is murky in disasters, and I’ve been thinking about Hoshanah Rabbah a lot. On the seventh day of Sukkot we circle each other and beat willow branches on the ground. In its liturgy, we pray in the merit of our ancestors and our history which has always wrestled with fire. For a holiday focused on bringing rain and life, I am always intrigued by the departure into the fire; most often connected to sacrifice and revelation. Fire as a pathway to the Divine.

לְמַעַן אֵיתָן הַנִּזְרָק בְּלַהַב אֵשׁ

For the sake of the great one thrown into the heart of the fire,

לְמַעַן גִּבּוֹר הַנֶּאֱבַק עִם שַׂר אֵשׁ

For the merit of the strong one who wrestled with a prince of fire.

לְמַעַן רִבּוֹא רִבְבָן חָז וְנַהֲרֵי אֵשׁ

for the sake of the one who saw myriads and myriads and rivers of fire

לְמַעַן שִׁמְמוֹת עִירְךָ הַשְּׂרוּפָה בָאֵשׁ

In the merit of the ruins of Your city which was devoured in fire.

For the sake of our ancestors who were tested by fire, help us. 

הוֹשִׁיעָה נָּא

The sounds of the willows on the ground symbolize the song of rainfall, the sound we’re praying for, and in Los Angeles desperately need. Our Rabbis don’t leave us with a clear answer about this somatic ritual. Just its importance. Months ago, at that Sukkot meeting of our queer radical Jews, we sat under a makeshift Sukkah, a pop-up tent without a roof, covered with dry palm branches from the neighborhood. Over tea and ancestor cards, we talk about why there are so many non-native eucalyptus trees in the state. Colonialist fire hazards. The entire summer passed without a drop of rain. 

Our tradition is ripe with themes of fire. I think of the gift of the fiery bush that can not be consumed. The Divine Presence appears to Moshe, but Moshe turns aside.

וַיַּ֥רְא יְהֹוָ֖ה כִּ֣י סָ֣ר לִרְא֑וֹת וַיִּקְרָא֩ אֵלָ֨יו אֱלֹהִ֜ים מִתּ֣וֹךְ הַסְּנֶ֗ה וַיֹּ֛אמֶר מֹשֶׁ֥ה מֹשֶׁ֖ה וַיֹּ֥אמֶר הִנֵּֽנִי׃

When GOD saw that he had turned aside to look, God called to him out of the bush: “Moses! Moses!” He answered, “Here I am.” Shemot 3:4

The root of the Hebrew word סוּר means to turn aside or depart – out of one’s course. When the Divine calls out to Moshe—and by lineage to us—They are calling us to depart from this course. The course of worship of empire, of ethno-nationalism, and white supremacy that is quickly eroding the Planet before us. 

The news has reporters on scene at the fire (who are not using nearly enough PPE), asking people how they are feeling. (I hate this, both as a student Rabbi and a documentary filmmaker. Re-traumatizing your character isn’t good television. Stop it.)  After getting his soundbyte, the reporter turns to the weather update: the winds will not die down, there will be no rain; “Mother Earth is failing us.” I wanted to scream. The same way I, and many of us, have been screaming to anyone within earshot about the climate crisis since before it was a crisis and it was merely just a change. This is not the Earth’s fault. Homes are burning and lives are lost because of what is being done to our divine home.

Every reporter and article repeats the line around wildfires. The fires that were burning down the street from me; the ones that have wiped out an entire Black neighborhood in Altadena, taking with it irreplaceable generational wealth. The one that took a Jewish synagogue, and the one that destroyed one-third of the congregation’s homes. Wildfire? This? No. This is not the kind of wildfire we know and have become accustomed to. This is entirely different. It is impossible to look at what the governor is calling the worst disaster in the state’s history and think, this is a natural disaster. There is a responsibility to this disaster that needs to be named, and as climate catastrophes multiply and worsen, we need to change the language around them. They are inevitable only if we stay on this path we are on. We are the ones that have failed Mother Earth. And it’s not the first time. We called on each other and our governments to depart their course during Hurricane Helene. We said it countless times over the past 15 months as we saw thousands die and be displaced across the global south, and Gaza. We have said it every time a disaster, natural or man-made, bursts forth in flames and engulfs our attention and spirits. This is being done to us, and those responsible must be stopped. This is just Los Angeles’ time; because we don’t seem to learn that this will continue to happen. I pray that this time, we will learn and we will depart.

Outside the Red Cross shelter, I met Salvador and we talk about the phrasing around rebuilding and getting back to normal after a disaster. “I don’t want to rebuild to what was. The status quo wasn’t working for anyone. That’s why we’re here and they’re not.” The “we” refers to working and lower economic families of color with no family to take them in after the fires who are largely inhabiting the Red Cross shelter; the “they” refers to predominantly white families who were able to leave and find shelter amongst friends or relatives. In talking to the workers at the shelter, it is shared that most of those housed here will become part of the houseless population in Los Angeles once the aid and attention is gone. “Why can’t we reimagine how this all works?” Let’s collect rain, let’s fill our parks with botanicals and ecosystems that provide food. “It could all be so different, so the next time is different.” 

13th century French commentator Hezekiah ben Manoah, known as Chizkuni, picks up the phrase from Shemot 3:4  “כי סר לראות, that he had turned to have a look,” saying that whenever the expression סור appears and is followed by the prefix letter מ, it means that someone has distanced himself further. But if the word following סור is the prefix ל, as it is here;  it invites us to come closer. Turn aside and come closer. Depart from the course you are on, and come closer to the Divine. Maybe next time can be different. 

It’s a week out, and the winds are supposed to come back. The fires are not contained and the death toll is rising. While the donation centers are still full, the system of mutual aid is starting to crack under the heavy need. The elderly, the disabled, the most marginalized are unable to access these centers, nor the lifesaving help they contain. A therapist friend of mine talks about cultural memory; what was lost for generations of people that knew every corner and tree in Altadena, and her 18-year-old clients whose teenage life was marked by the beginning of COVID only to end high school in this apocalyptic scene of smoke and ash. Eventually our conversation will have to shift to long term recovery, physically and beyond; something we are not fluent in. North Carolina is just now receiving funds from the federal government in order to rebuild. This is not a quick process, and we know its brokenness extends to all places where climate disasters hit.

We know all this, but for now we continue our mutual aid and care work at the Fraternal order of Eagles, the Bike Oven co-op, the Zebulon bar, wherever the distro centers have popped up. There is still no rain in the forecast. The fires have not ceased, and the ceasefire is stalled. We know the long-term physical and mental health impacts that occur here are ever present for those who have lived in their ash for a year. 

Someone managed to get past the national guard to check on the home of our friend.

“There’s nothing left but a couple plants…and the Sukkah.”

For the sake of our ancestors who were tested by fire, help us.