Destroy Capitalism

Two days ago, on an “unseasonably” [fill-in-the-blank] day as I slogged through the discomforting humidity en route to a do-it-ourselves Shabbat in a park, I wandered by a fresh wheat-paste proclaiming “Destroy the Billionaires” in bright leafy-green. Two hours later, along with about a dozen rad Jews, I watched the sky burst into a pink-and-purple flame of a sunset as we were lighting the Shabbos’ candles—as if nonhuman nature were conspiring with us to win back otherworldly time-spaces, even if only briefly. And not the kinds of time-spaces that money can buy, or can be contained by the sinking submarine, metaphorically speaking, of capitalism and havoc it’s wreaking on this earth.

For three precious hours on Friday night, we cobbled together a sweet taste of olam haba, “the world to come.” We co-created something out of nothing—out of everything: us. Out of water, fire, breath, laughter, song, memory, ancestors. In the company of each other and the nearby trees. Out of centuries’ worth of sacred words that we queered to fit our gathering, which included one person bringing a tiny nest they’d found, empty yet expertly crafted as a diasporic home for birthing new life, to share with us. As we each cupped the nest in our hands, one after another passing it gently around our circle—soon after having braided together to bless the challah—it felt as if a whole ecosystem of possibility was hatched, even if as fleeting as the moment when a baby bird first takes flight, soaring with newfound bravery and joy.

Today, in the time beyond Shabbat, the time of the mundane, it’s “unseasonably” smoky across the whole of Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, now in the seasonably new normal grips of the most toxic air in the world “thanks” to colonial- and capitalist-fueled fires in Quebec. What amounts to a handful, relatively, of billionaires and their death economy has the power to co-create this time-space of ecocide, which may well take us humans as a species with it.

We humans, though—or at least some, or I hope, many of us—have countless #RitualsOfResistance that can—and must—counter dystopia and gesture toward promise in the here and now, in whatever short time we may have left.