Spiral Time in Collapse: Dvar for Erev Rosh Hashana 5786
by Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg
Torah instructs us on observing what we call Rosh Hashanah in Numbers 29:1. “In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall observe a sacred occasion: you shall not work at your occupations. You shall observe it as a day when the horn is sounded.” That, I believe, is the core of this day: sound the horn, wake up!
This is both very simple, and very hard. It is easier to let the shofar sound wash over us and join the blaring cacophony. When I let the shofar wake me up, it is hard to know what to do. I feel the shofar inside me: when I let the news of climate chaos and fascism actually penetrate my consciousness, when I let the sunrise over the Boundary Waters break my heart, when I let myself think about the kids in my life and their futures, if they’ll get to see the sunrise over the Boundary Waters. When I think about so many unnecessary deaths all around us all the time, when I think about my own aging, wanting so badly to get old and not thinking that that’s very likely… When I let the shofar calls all around us wake me up, the fear and grief at first overwhelms me and I freeze.
Tonight, and the next two days of Rosh Hashanah and ten days through Yom Kippur, are about letting the shofar sound inside of us, and waking up together. We endeavor to let the shofar wake us all the way up, to move through our first fear responses to the sound, to collectively look deeper into the truth of what we’re facing this new year, and find our ways to renewed and more purposeful lives, together.
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I started reading about climate change when my dad was dying. Something about reckoning with his mortality helped me cut through the fear that stood between me and thinking about it. From there, it wasn’t long before I was learning and talking about collapse.
When I say collapse, I mean the ways in which the structures undergirding and organizing our lives, built on industrial, capitalist, modernity, are not working. The wheels are coming off the car. When I say collapse I’m talking about the relationship between the human-caused destruction of our ecosystems and planet, and the crumbling of the human-built infrastructure of our world. Most importantly, when I say collapse, I’m not making a prediction about the future. I’m naming and framing what is already here: in the weather, in the political conditions, in the economy, in our everyday lived experience.
Understanding collapse has not felt like a collapse. It feels to me deeply orienting. Terrifying, but sense-making.
The experience of using the masks we first got for Covid-19, to protect ourselves during summers of smoke from wildfires, and during protests against genocide in Gaza so that it would be harder for the militarized police to identify and track us feels terrible. But it’s not an aberration, it is the natural consequences of the collapses we’re living through. Taking a walk on a shabbos morning and happening upon one of our neighbors being kidnapped and taken to Fort Snelling, a literal concentration camp, by a fascist regime that is stripping away every last shred of environmental protection. Wondering when the next storm will come, when the next virus will come; in the meantime, not being able to afford or access healthcare.
Collapse names that the violence we are experiencing are the impacts of a broken system in downfall. Everyone in this room knows that this is happening. And yet, most of us struggle to let the full weight of the implications of this penetrate us. To ask, if this is true, and we know it is, how are we to live? We struggle because it is way, way too much to hold. It is, especially, too much to hold alone. Today, though, we don’t have to hold things alone. Today we are here to hold it together.
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For the most part, we go on in our day to day, because we have to, we have no other options, and because of the double edged sword of human resilience: humans can get used to a lot. We also go on without looking at collapse because it’s emotionally overwhelming: the grief I feel when I think about what we’ve lost and what we will lose wrecks me.
I also think it’s hard to understand collapse because we’ve been fed many wrong stories that get in our way. Apocalypse is one of those wrong stories.
Apocalypse is a modern word to describe the concept of a time that is fundamentally different from our lives. While it is not what most of our Jewish educations’ focused on, the concepts of apocalypse most prevalent in Western Christian discourse have seeds in Tanakh, specifically in some of the visions in the books of Nevi’im (Prophets), and in the book of Daniel. Daniel shares a vision of a final battle, an anointed one, Messiach, and Daniel’s people being saved. The dead waking up, the knowledgeable and righteous glowing, and others sent to “everlasting abhorrence.” In Messianic time, there is a final judgement and battle, with a clear before and after, this time and that time.
This, we know from being alive, is not what life is like. Life is very rarely clear cut with before and after moments, and even when we have flashes of that, time blurs and life bleeds through.
I held my father’s hand while he was dying. There was a moment when he stopped breathing, a before, and an after. And, yet, even with that most final of times: he’s with me now, here in the room, in my blood and my heart, shaping everything that I am. In the years before he died, our life together was shaped by the proximity of his death. There is a before and an after, yes. But it is never, in the way of Messianic Times, final. In the messiness of our experience of life, the certainty and finality of Messianic Time is very appealing.
But it is also profoundly dangerous. Messianic Time and beliefs motivate Zionists, both Christian and Jewish, who want a Third Temple in Jerusalem, and believe the genocide of Palestinian people is part of the plan of the End Times. There are Evangelical Christians who believe that the climate chaos and the destruction of the Earth is a welcome part of unfolding prophecy.
Messianic Time is also dangerous in more subtle ways. This story limits our ability to understand the truth of what we’re living through. If we have been trained that the end time is a distinguishable day; that in the Apocalypse there is a before and after: then we can go about business as usual, even amidst horrifically worsening conditions that call on us to act. Because clearly when it’s really the apocalypse, we’ll know it, and there won’t still be grocery shopping to do or emails to answer. Messianic Time, in its definitive intensity, is an obstacle to our understanding and acting in response to the devastating collapse we’re living through.
Messianic Time, however, is not the only kind of time in Judaism. More familiar in our lived experience is Jewish tradition’s cyclical timekeeping, or Spiral Time, something we share in common with many other peoples. In this understanding, time is not as a straight line with a beginning in Gan Eden and an end at Massiach. Instead, the seasons, holidays, and stories layer on top of each other, interweaving in our experience. Jewish ritual turns us towards the felt experience of time as a spiral, with no beginning and no end. Rosh Hashanah is not a countdown to midnight; the transformation of the season stretches for a month before and after, from Tisha b’Av to Simchat Torah. When we enact a Passover seder, we bring the past into the present, and declare the future. On shabbat, the moments of candle lighting and havdalah flame extinguishing are held in extended rituals that hold us through the liminal space of the sunset.
When we let go of Messianic time, and live in Judaism’s Spiral Time, we can understand collapse much more adeptly.
Spiral Time has no beginning and no end, instead we are part of cycles that come back around, to the same spot in a different place. The implication of Spiral Time is that we don’t wait for something to be definitively different, day vs night. Instead, we are given anchors in time, these seasons, holidays, and stories, to come back to and make assessments around. When we let go of Messianic Time and embrace living in Spiral Time, being with Collapse is more possible. Both to understand, to be with, and to make intentional choices about how we want to live.
Spiral Time means not waiting for a day on the calendar that will never come to take action, it means an ongoing practice of understanding the gravity of our situation and acting: now, and now, and now.
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From this place, we can learn about collapse, not as a Final Judgement Day that we will wake up to one morning, but as a process, a falling apart of the structures that hold our world together that has already begun and will continue throughout our lifetimes.
There is a whole field these days studying "civilizations" that have collapsed, and learning what we can from them. This is not the study of the destruction of peoples from colonization and empire; when people talk about collapses of civilization they generally mean when those colonizing empires end. You won’t be shocked to learn that I’ve been particularly moved by arguments that the main cause of civilization collapse over human history has been hierarchy, wealth hoarding, and oppression. It turns out that a very few people holding all of the power and resources is not so good for the wellness and sustainability of anyone or anything.
Hierarchical structures with extreme inequality are fragile; they spread themselves too thin, they extract resources beyond what the ecosystem can handle, and then they do not have the skills to deal with pressure from internal or external forces, and they collapse. Empires destroy their environments, which destroys the individual and collective bodies of all beings they touch. Across different sizes, times, places, the main cause of societal demise is inequality.
The other thing these scholars will tell you is that in this type of collapse, after the dust settles, things are better for most survivors. The classic story of collapse that we’ve inherited has been told by the elites and hoarders, and their descendents. When systems of wealth and power hoarding crumble, the elites lose their palaces and armies, everyone else can go back to growing their own food and not worrying about tax collectors.
I think about our core collapse story in Judaism, the collapse of the Temple. That was the collapse of a hierarchical caste system. What grew up afterward was Rabbinic Judaism: still oppressive in lots of ways. But, something you could, if you were an able bodied man, train for leadership in, without being born into a priestly class. In Rabbinic Judaism we get to make offerings via prayer in all the places we live, a direct line to God not mediated through someone or something else.
Collapse is in the eye of the beholder. The classic story of collapse that we’ve inherited has been told by elites and hoarders and their literal and metaphorical descendents. The actual stories of what mainstream history has historically called “collapse” is far more nuanced. Some people’s day to day lives can, in the aftermath, get better.
That’s the good news.
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This collapse, however, is different. Firstly, every previous human-involved collapse we study was restricted to the territory of that society. Back in the day, even the most sprawling empires had their physical limits. Today, we’re talking about the collapse of industrial modernity, which currently impacts the entire planet, every ecosystem.
Another big difference in this collapse is the ways in which we’ve been separated from the land, and deskilled in the things that would allow us to have a smoother transition in collapse. Some historians believe that the classic reports of civilization collapse involving mass-death are inaccurate; a lot of depopulation might have been people leaving urban centers, returning to rural towns and villages they had left not so long ago, and to a higher quality of life. This, we know, will be much harder for us, and most of the planet. We don’t grow enough of our own food, or gather our own medicines. Not to mention being acclimated and attached to our luxury items (cars, planes, phones, computers, coffee); very few of us can meet our basic needs.
And, it’s one thing to say that the survivors of previous collapses were better off; it’s a whole other thing to know many people have already been killed, lost their lands and way of life, are already refugees, to think about and watch ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and people around the globe be crushed in this moment of collapse. The Temple crushes people as it gets built, and it crushes people and whole communities as it falls. This is devastating. All the more so because we know how unevenly the damage is distributed; and we see how hideously this tracks to the very root causes of this collapse: colonized and subjugated peoples who are the least responsible for collapse are the first to be impacted by it; the wealth hoarders causing collapse are able to escape the worst impacts of it for the longest. Confronting collapse, while essential, is so painful, and we’d rather look away. In order to live in our integrity, we must look, we must help each other to look, together.
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Spiral Time can not only help us to look at and understand collapse. It can also, I believe, help us to live differently in collapse.
This year, Susan Raffo upended time for me, helped me understand Spiral Time more viscerally. There is, she told me, only the present. The past hasn’t ended: the attempted genocide of Dakota people is and will forever be present in this land. The future that we believe is possible and are dreaming of is here, now, today, in every choice we make about how we live. The past and the future are always living in the present.
Living in Spiral Time means being awake to the past stories, and very intentional about the future stories. This has changed the way I see my life and live in collapse: rather than a timeline with the past behind me and future ahead of me, I can see us moving through spiral time, and in every choice reaching and pulling into our present, what past and what future stories we want to tell. This has given me so much more agency in how I relate to the present and to collapse.
There are people with a lot of power trying to erase the past, and telling future stories of complete fascism, bodily control by Christian nationalism, and tech-oligarchachy, living those stories in the present, and trying to force us to live in them.
Instead, we must tell the whole truth of the history of colonization and slavery, about living in the ravages of capitalism and American Empire. We must tell the story of a future after the fall of capitalism and American Empire, of a future after Zionism, and let that shape our present and our choices, now, today, this year.
In the future story we must live into, we know how to grow our own food, and we spend more time repairing, tending the soil and the water, raising the babies and listening to the elders; doing the real work that needs to be done. We must live that future, now.
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Rosh Hashanah is the keystone, the heart center, of one of the cycles of time embedded in the Jewish year. 48 hours to celebrate the new year; the story that this holiday is a part of begins months ago and stretches for another month. That story begins on the 17th of Tamuz, a fast day that commemorates, among other things, the Roman siege of Jerusalem and breaching of the Temple walls, and is followed by Tisha b’Av, marking the destruction of the Temple. The season ends at Sukkot, sitting in a hut, where the primary instruction is to gather our harvest, eat with our neighbors, remember our ancestors, and look at the stars and remember how temporary everything is.
This year, being with collapse, this journey took on profound new meaning. The temple is, indeed, falling. And while we do not grieve the end of American empire, we do grieve the destruction: this temple built on stolen land and by stolen labor; the bricks killed people in the building of it, and it is killing people as it falls, and it is devastating, devastating, we sit on the ground and we weep, we weep every day at the destruction of life and land. We carry our grief with us, so many destroyed communities and worlds, and we let it transform us, and, slowly, we let ourselves build. Not with bricks, but with wood and leaves and sticks and branches. We journey from the Temple to the Sukkah.
My prayer for our community in 5786 is that we let ourselves grieve, deeply; and that we build our humble hut together, and decorate a sukkah where we can share our harvests, feed each other, invite in our ancestors and our neighbors, and offer each other a shelter from some of the storms. One other thing about seeing Collapse in Spiral Time: just like there is no Final Judgement Destruction Day coming, there is also no Final Winning We Did It Day coming. Living into the future story we want to tell is, in fact, quite mundane. Every time we create a connection in defiance of and prying ourselves from capitalism and American empire for our necessities, we live in the future we want, in the world to come.
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When we chose the name The World to Come; we did not talk about what it means. There is the World to Come in the book of Daniel: the final judgement day. There is also, throughout Jewish tradition, World to Come in spiral time: things that were created before the world was created (including, beautifully, teshuva), and things that are a taste of the world to come in this life (my favorite: in Berakhot 57b, Three things are microcosms of the World-to-Come, and they are: Sabbath, the sun and tashmish. Tashmish, literally means “usage”, they’re talking about sex).
In conversations about collapse, people sometimes get to the question of hope. A question of: if it’s this bad and going to get worse, why, and how, do we go on? There are many reasons; I’ll share mine, and I want to hear yours.
I keep going because life is precious. Because so many moments of what I experience of the Aliveness in the world are gorgeous miracles: shabbat, the sun, and tashmish, for sure. And much more. I keep organizing because I feel an ethical and spiritual obligation, that it is the only possible response to the gift of aliveness, to try to relieve suffering and increase life. To reach for revolution in our lifetime.
But, also, I do have what you could call hope. I don’t mean a belief that we’re going to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. I think we are going to experience a lot more suffering in our lifetimes. By hope, I mean I have a vision of what I’m living towards, a future story that I return to and try to live into. When I get tastes of that World to Come in the present, I try to notice and savor them. They are rarely what white, male dominated organizing traditions have trained us to look for as wins. They are, instead, as the Talmud suggests, the little things. Feeling the sun and the air, feeding each other, fighting for each other, sheltering each other.
By hope I mean: I believe I can have and be part of creating for others, many moments, however small, of Aliveness that are so, so much better than the moments of Collapse that dominate our lives now. One reason I believe this is possible is because I’m in this room right now.
Twelve years ago I moved away from this place that I love, in large part because I couldn’t find a minyan of anti-Zionist Jews to pray with. I went to rabbinical school because some part of me heard the whispers of a future story in which being an anti-Zionist rabbi was possible, even though I didn’t know anyone who was one. Now we’re here, our 5th Erev Rosh Hashanah, marking the years together. Everything is, of course, much, much worse than it was twelve years ago. And at the same time, we have this room, and we didn’t before. It's better to have this than not, and I am so grateful it brings me to tears. Does this gift outweigh the losses? Profoundly not. But there are no cosmic scales, there is no final judgement day.
There is just, every day, trying to live, choosing our stories for the sake of protecting and cherishing life, choosing each other, protecting and cherishing each other. To be in as honest and specific a story of the past, and living into as clear a vision of the future as we can, together. May it be so. Shana tova.
Profound gratitude to Roan Boucher, Shelley Rosenberg, Dean Spade and Susan Raffo for reading and giving feedback on drafts of this dvar, to Rabbi Mónica Gomery for collapse dvar discussions, and to World to Come for the honor and privilege of getting to offer words of Torah.
