Solidarity Is Sacred

On this last day of Ramadan and first day of the new Jewish month, Nisan, genocide takes no holiday.

The profane—colonialism, capitalism, statism, and fascism—eclipses our moon, our timekeeper of days and nights that don’t obey a white Christian supremacist calendar. This may seem a minor indignity. Yet this Gregorian disciplining of our cycles of life, as deadly as any military hardware, cuts us off from our intimate relations with ecosystems and each other—both of which, unlike the profane, thrive on a heterogeneous abundance of mutual aid and interdependence.

The sacred, in contrast, is a deep trust in olam haba, “the world to come,” even when nearly everything in this world flies in the face of such a belief. It is seeing the sacred in the here and now, even if only as the tiniest of “buds” (a meaning that can be pulled from the word “Nisan”)—seeing, already, the seeds of liberation and freedom. Meaning seeing what the profane has stolen from us—and continuously trying to steal it all back through collective direct actions that prefigure liberation and freedom.

For all.

After all, our rituals, Muslim and Jewish, put us under the same moon, through waxing and waning, crescents and halfness and wholeness. When we steal back the moon, which never really abandoned us even if popes and other tyrants would have us believe it did, we are home again with our guide, our muse, our teacher, each other. We’re reminded of what the moon sees and gazes on from above: that we Muslims and Jews say blessings, fast and eat, light candles, sing, grieve and rejoice, and resist a world that has too often been eager to assimilate, displace, erase, or eradicate us.

We remember that solidarity is sacred. And liberation and freedom only bloom when watered by our solidarity.

The profane keeps trying to disrupt our rituals, take our holidays and ceremonies and ways of marking nonlinear time, because it’s a surefire way—among others, like Zionism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and essentialisms of all kinds—to divide and conquer us, to break our bonds of liberatory love and rebellious solidarity.

#UntilAllAreFree

(photos: Palestinian solidarity grief altar set up by some of us Jewish folks)