Living in Someone Else’s House: Dvar for Kol Nidre 5786

by Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, Kol Nidre 5786

Place 

I am trying to remember, every day, that I’m living in someone else’s house. 

On erev Rosh Hashanah I talked about time. When are we, and given when we are, what are our responsibilities? Tonight, I want to talk about place. Where are we, and given where we are, what are our responsibilities? 

We are living and worshiping on the homeland of the Dakota people.  As a group, we know this, we’ve named this before.  And, we know that we’re not collectively addressing what this means, we have not yet begun to engage in a process of teshuva.  Some of us are, and have been, engaged in indigenous sovereignty and solidarity, resource redistribution and reparations, fights for landback, and protecting water. As World to Come, we have not. As World to Come we haven’t done anything but pray together, and be a platform for connecting people. We haven’ t taken collective action on anything together; and it’s unclear, given the organizing landscape and that we are circled up as a ritual, cultural community, what makes sense to do. Nonetheless, I believe that we have to talk about what it means to be living on Dakota homeland, and we have to begin experimenting with how we want to collectively operate, given that  most of us are not Dakota or Indigenous to Turtle Island.   

We are on Mni Sota Makoce. From where we sit tonight, we are 6 miles from the Bdote. The Bdote is the confluence, the joining of two rivers, Haha Wakpa, River of the Falls, what we call the Mississippi River, and Wakpa Mnisota, the Minnesota River.  This is the site of the creation story of the Dakota people. All of this land of rivers and lakes is, Dakota land.  Settler Archeologists spent a lot of years trying to prove that Dakota people immigrated here. And so it is meaningful to not just say this is Dakota homeland. This is not just a place where Dakota people have lived; this is, specifically,  the Dakota place of creation. The Dakota people began here, and have had countless generations on this land, living in intimate, reciprocal relationship to this specific place. 

What does it mean that we’re living and worshiping on the homeland of the Dakota people?

I’m trying to pay attention to this more often,  and feel this truth deeper in my body. Not  just to let this  thought exist in my head, not just to feel sadness and anger,  grief and rage,  guilt and responsibility. I’m trying to feel this in my body and daily consciousness that I’m living on Dakota homeland.  Uninvited, in someone else’s sacred place, homeland, and house. 

When I’m walking by the river, I try to hold myself the way I would  when I walk into a sacred place, the way  we felt entering this room tonight, the way I feel in a cemetery visiting a beloved. I hold my body differently. 

When I’m in my house or walking in my neighborhood, I’m trying to remember, and feel in my body, the way I feel walking into someone else’s house.  I think about how I carry myself differently walking into my own house, throwing my bag on the chair, flopping on the couch, versus how I feel and carry myself when I go to a house that isn’t mine.  What happens, I began asking in preparation for these days of Awe,  if every day, I remember that I’m living in someone else’s house? 

The risk of this metaphor and exercise is that it might inadvertently minimize colonization. Colonization means everyone’s house being stolen, violently, for many generations. Settler-colonialism on Turtle Island has been the attempted genocide of Indigenous people. I tread cautiously. I am sharing this tonight because I have experienced that naming the overwhelming violence of colonization appropriately stops us in our tracks. It can be hard, once we’re stopped, for settlers to take action. To be able to move along a different track than the one we are trained to stay on. Many of us who are settlers get stuck in the questions: what are we to do ?  Where am I to go? Where am I to live that’s not someone else’s house? 

Rather than look away from the question, I want to stay with it  this year.  I want to ask it, and feel it, together. What happens if, every day, we remember, if this is true for us, that we’re living in someone else’s house?  I know there are members of our community who have already experienced this in material, not-metaphorical ways.  I offer this humbly, seeking forgiveness for all the ways in which this already misses the mark, seeking learning for  any way that anyone has developed to learn and talk and think about this. I know very well the ways my fear of messing up freezes me in inaction.  On Yom Kippur, this time of accounting, out loud, for the sake of transformation, I want to try this instead, and just be with: those of us who are not indigenous to Dakota land and Turtle Island are in someone else’s house. 

I’m trying to imagine how I would feel if, for some reason, I had to go into someone else’s house. Perhaps I’m caught out in a storm. If they aren’t  home when I come  into the house, I would be very, very careful not to touch or disturb anything. I would try to leave no trace. I would try to leave as quickly as possible. I would try to thank them. 

If they were home I would knock politely, and if they let me in I would try very hard to be a respectful guest.  If I came into one part of the house and didn’t realize they were home, once I did learn, I would say, oh shit, I’m so sorry I came into your house without asking. 

What If I had no where else to go? I would try to make myself as useful as possible in the house.  If I didn't have anywhere else to go, I would say I’m so sorry, is it at all possible that I could stay? What can I do to contribute to the household while I’m here? I would do my very best to respect the family who’s house I was in. 

I’m trying to imagine being a child born into someone else’s house. Some of our parents and grandparents broke in, knowingly, trying to steal the house.  Some of our parents and grandparents  were on the run, had been kicked out of their houses, and did not know anyone was still in this house. Some of our parents and grandparents were themselves kidnapped and brought into the house. Some of us, this is our parents and grandparents house.  Many of us come from multiple of these legacies; we are the descendants of people with different ways of coming into this house. How our parents and grandparents got to the house matters, and it might, at some moment, impact how we’re understood and how we relate in the house. And if it’s not our parents or grandparents house, we are still obligated to understand ourselves as not in our house. 

And, we must remind ourselves that  it’s even more than that. We're not only living in someone else’s house. We are not only living in the place of Dakota creation, a sacred land, we are living on a site of attempted genocide. 

I’ve never been to a Nazi concentration camp. I have visited Lituania, Latvia and Belarus with Yiddishists who organized a trip that was supposed to be focused on the more than a millenia  of Jewish life in Ashkenaz before the genocide of European Jewry. We would go to empty fields and they would tell us about the villages, towns, and thriving communities that used to be there, the poets and organizers and musicians who were born there. We would sing their songs. We would try to feel their lives. It was a surreal trip for me. I know the trip organizers and teachers meant well, I understood what they were trying to do.  But it  is hard, very hard, to grieve the overwhelming losses of millions of people, the destruction of culture and languages, while also being with aliveness, Jewish persistence and resistance. 

Dakota people are still here, alive and present and organized in this place, living in, and trying to return to their homelands. We have to learn how to hold it all: the felt experience of being in someone else’s house, of being in a land marked by genocide, and living alongside the survivors of attempted genocide, all while  asking ourselves: What do we want to do about this, how do we want to live in this experience? 

Kol Nidre ~ All Vows 

I came to Kol Nidre this year thinking about this question, about what it means to be living on Dakota homeland.  I am seeking to understand this more deeply and, therefore,  live differently than I have in the past. 

Kol Nidre is a controversial text.  Its origins are mysterious. It’s not really a prayer, it’s a legal text, in Aramaic.  Kol Nidre’s origins are unknown. One of the earliest references to it is in a 9th century rabbinic text from Babylonia opposing it. Rabbis throughout the centuries have forbidden it as superstitious. Scholars have linked the language, rhythm, and style of Kol Nidre to the texts on incantation bowls, bowls with writing on them, to call upon God or protect against demons, buried upside down under the floor of the house.

Kol Nidre has gotten Jewish communities in trouble: non-Jews have used it as proof that you can’t trust Jews, that we will break our vows.  And, Kol Nidre has been understood to have a particular power in times  when Jews were forced by the Christian authorities to convert or die. Kol Nidre, the story goes, would be said by Jews in secret, as a way of saying, “I don’t mean it.”

Praying  Kol Nidre this year, I am thinking about how it relates, how we want it to relate, to living on Dakota homeland. 

Settler life on Dakota homeland is possible because of land theft, genocide, and because of broken treaties.  The treaties that the U.S. made with Indigenous tribes, here and across Turtle Island, were obtained through trickery, lying, stealing, and intentionally misleading Indigenous leaders. And then they were never paid, and they were broken. 

Vows and oaths are only as honorable as the people who make them. 

I am thinking about the lies that we have to live with in a settler society on stolen land. How we are encouraged to, in big and small ways, every day, perpetuate the lies of the United States as a somehow valid and lawful place, instead of an illegal occupation of stolen land, a place of genocide. 

This Kol Nidre, I am trying to, and inviting all of us to, declare null and void any oath we have inadvertently taken to recognize the U.S. and the state of Minnesota as legitimate.  In the words of Kol Nidre: “We regret having made them; may they all be forgiven, eradicated and nullified, and may they not be valid or exist any longer. Our vows shall no longer be vows, and our prohibitions shall no longer be prohibited, and our oaths are no longer oaths.”

Kol Nidre, breaking the vows and oaths, refers, importantly, to vows and oaths taken between people. It does not break us of vows we’ve taken that are between us and God, and it does not relieve us of the baseline obligations we have in halakha. Halakha literally means “the way,” as in, the path; as in, the way of moving, walking, being in motion in life. How we move on the land.  

Waziyatawin, author of What Does Justice Look Like: The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland, points out that when treaties or agreements are broken, the land in question goes back to the original owners. This is Dakota land. This always has been and always will be Dakota land, homeland, place of creation. 

We ask: What obligations remain and are uplifted when we nullify all vows to the settler state?  

The Year to Come 

How do we want to live this year, from a place of rooted obligation? When we nullify vows to a state that has broken all of its treaty obligations, what is the halacha, the way of moving, that we adhere to? 

There is not one answer to this, and there is no easy answer to this. There are many answers.  In the often repeated words of  Pirkei Avot, 2:16, Rabbi Tarfon used to say: it is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to neglect it.  Which is to say: the work of reparations will never be done, and, kal v’homer, all the more so, we must persist in it. 

This year, I deeply want to explore with all of you what it means to take this on collectively. This feels important to me for a few reasons. First of all, we are coming together to make ritual, to learn the languages and songs of our ancestors, to bless the seasons, to grieve and celebrate together. That spiritual and cultural work, I believe, is lacking integrity when it does not recognize and is not in relationship to the people whose land and homeland we’re on. Many of us were not raised Jewish, or practicing Judaism, or practicing Jewish traditions in ways that align with our values; I think it’s fair to say all of us are in a process of learning and, or, relearning Jewish cultural practices, languages, songs, ritual, prayer, ways of being. The United States government made practicing Indigenous spirituality, culture, and therefore life, literally illegal from 1883 until 1978. 1978. Until less than 50 years ago Native people could and did receive prison sentences for participating in ceremony.  As we do the work of claiming and reclaiming our traditions, I believe it’s incumbent on us to support the processes of others, especially Native people who are doing that sacred work. 

Second, we are a community profoundly shaped by our opposition to Zionism as a settler-colonial project. We know, and I believe are in alignment, that it is hypocritical to act in opposition to settler colonialism in Palestine, while not taking action in opposition to settler colonialism here. To oppose genocide in Palestine with integrity, we must oppose the ongoing genocidal work of the settler colonial state here. 

I’m also thinking about the process we’re going through to formalize and give more shape to our organizing structure. One thing we might have to do this year, hear me out, is incorporate with the state.  This is not something anyone’s particularly excited about; but in order to do things like gather in space and buy food, make copies and have candles, we have to collect money and be able to spend it. In order to do that transparently, without putting an undue burden on any one of our members, we will likely, sooner or later, incorporate with the settler state of Minnesota, and the genocidal government of the United States. At this moment in history, given who’s in charge, that is an even more harrowing prospect, one we don’t take on lightly. 

As we do so, I believe it is essential that we ask, what does it look like to live in relationship to the original and contemporary stewards of the land? What do we want our collective relationship to Dakota people, and other indigenous communities here, to be, while it is alongside and more important to us than the relationship we might take on with the settler state? 

In order for this to work, collectively moving towards Indigenous solidarity, I believe we also will need more of us to more fully commit to World to Come organizing. One pattern in settler culture can be to be half in/half out, one foot in one foot out. Nothing is perfect, community is messy, organizing is hard, finding belonging in Jewish community is fraught,  and this instinct makes so much sense. And, this perpetuates building unintentionally, inadvertently building up ways of being, if we’re not giving our attention to it, that shirk our collective responsibilities. We are, while still new and figuring ourselves out, a community, and we need more of us in the process of asking and practicing what that means. If this particular part of our work of figuring out how to be together calls to you, I would love very much to connect. 

I have, so Jewishly, more questions than answers. Part of transforming the mindset of settler colonialism, while we work to shift material resources, is about humbling ourselves, de-isolating ourselves, knowing we do not need to have all the answers in order to start somewhere and to commit to learning in the process. 

I believe we must be in a process this year, and for all the years to come, of learning the histories of this place, listening to the land we’re on, reawakening our ability to listen to the land we’re on, building relationships, and working to materially shift conditions. This room and this community includes many of the people who I’ve learned from about being settlers on stolen land, and I’m so, so grateful for the abundant wisdom in this room and community.  Across the diaspora are Jews who’ve been in and are asking these questions who we can learn from.  Our neighbors and across the cities include  people and organizations who’ve been asking these questions, who we can learn from. 

There are Dakota organizations, people, groups, communities, Indigenous organizations and projects and campaigns, and many of us are already connected to them in some way or another. 

Makoce Ikikcupi is a Dakota Land Recovery project of reparative justice is acquiring land, settlers have raised money for Dakota people to be able to buy back the land stolen from them, to bring Dakota relatives home, “create new communities based on sustainability and adherence to [Dakota] ancient ways of being.” (https://makoceikikcupi.com/our-dream/)

The MN Honor Tax is a voluntary payment made directly to the [Lower Sioux Indian Community] by those who live in, work on, and visit traditionally Dakota land within Minnesota.” ( https://www.mnhonortax.org/)

In our Jewish community Edot, the Midwest Regional Jewish Diversity and Racial Justice Collaborative has organized Jewish Indigenous ceremonial fires and supports the leadership of Native American Jews organizing and worshiping in our community. (https://edotmidwest.org/)   

There are Dakota language projects, Indigenous artist and cultural workers, Native plant and medicine cultivation, foodways and music and ceremony. There are birthworkers,  storytellers, healers. There are countless other organizations we can  learn from and support.

This is not a definitive list, by any means, this is not meant to be a pre-approved list.  

Whatever we do must be based in relationship, relationships we must build together. 

This year, I invite us to share what we know, to ask questions, to support each other, to turn and to keep turning, to build and deepen relationships. 

It might feel difficult, in this time of everyday threats to the safety and survival of our communities under fascism, to take this on. I believe that this time of fascists tearing apart the bare minimum of a safety net that the U.S. has begrudgingly offered to some people in the past decades is in fact an essential time to support the capacity of Indigenous people to survive and thrive on their homelands. 

If we attempt to do this work in real ways, it will be uncomfortable, it will be agitational, it will raise more questions than answers. And, Yom Kippur teaches us that it is okay to be agitated and uncomfortable, that real transformation stirs us, and disturbs us from our regular ways of being. In Jewish tradition we say that the gates of teshuva are always open, moving towards transformation is always possible.

In the next prayer we’ll say together, Ya-aleh tachanuneinu, we will sing: 

May our prayer arise this evening, יַעֲלֶה תַחֲנוּנֵֽנוּ מֵעֶֽרֶב.

May our cry come before You by tomorrow morning, וְיָבֹא שַׁוְעָתֵֽנוּ מִבֹּֽקֶר.

May our song be heard by next nightfall. וְיֵרָאֶה רִנּוּנֵֽנוּ עַד עָֽרֶב:

This prayer, and Yom Kippur, reminds us that transformation is a process, never completed in one prayer, one service, one holiday, one season, or even one lifetime. We are living on sacred land, we are living in someone’s house. I pray that as we form and  strengthen our own community and spiritual practices, we honor in spiritual and material ways the communities that have been here and are still here, and work towards land back, Indigenous sovereignty, Dakota people making home in every way possible.  

 May our prayers arise inside us this evening, may they come before Holiness, source of Life, in the morning, and may they be heard by nightfall.  And may that continue, the next day and the next day. May our understanding arise in us, may our listening come again, and again, may these prayers for transformation be heard and answered, to us and by us, by nightfull, and the next night, and in all the nights and days to come.