Happyness Is Resistance

April 8, 2024

Finding home. 

I sit now in a place I haven’t sat for four years, in my own studio space, separate from my home. 

You see, seven and a half years ago, I published a piece  called Mother Artists Don’t Work From Home. https://hevria.com/rivka/mother-artists-dont-work-home/ It came out on the day that I gave birth to my youngest, at home. A friend shared it on Facebook: “Mother artist says don’t work from home, gives birth at home” he captioned it. 

There is a desire to make art from home, because, mainly 1)laziness and 2) money. Why can’t a little closet work just as well? Why can’t we just paint outside, in the (mostly) gorgeous California air? Why why why can’t you just make it work? 

But an artist absorbs everything from her surroundings. Recently, I finally admitted defeat. I am never going to actually paint, I admitted, if I don’t get a different place to do it.  Because I can Long Covid my excuses all I want, but the truth is that I haven’t consistently painted much at all since we moved from Long Beach over 1.5 years ago. 

Because when I am at home, even if no one is there, I feel a thousand little hands clawing at me, reminding me of their needs, the things I need to do for others besides my own greedy needy exploding little heart. I cannot escape those hands, no matter how I try. So I make peace with them, but I don’t expect myself to be able to fully let go or concentrate while they are grabbing at me. 

And here I am. The first ten minutes in a new space. no one knows where I am, no one and no thing is clawing at me, and I am talking to you. 

I’ve been thinking about home. The feeling of home. 

Purim came and went, and I think that Purim raises a lot of questions about how we deal with our material possessions. There’s a lot of materiality in Purim (even though it’s deep, don’t get me wrong) but there’s the costumes, how we clothe ourselves, all all alllll the food, how we eat, and of course what we chose to keep for ourselves and what we choose to give to others, to friends and the poor.

I find that after Purim, everyone’s talking and thinking about money. Not in a bad way. Just trying to figure out, how do we calculate and decide on our material possessions? What is our relationship to them? And then we continue to cleanse and cleanse and cleanse that until we get to Pesach, as we are combing through our possessions, throwing things away, deep cleaning all of the shmutz out of our lives. Remaking our physical home into something sustainable for our souls. 

And every so often, I will be driving or walking around Los Angeles, and I will be hit with an incredible feeling of gratitude, because I actually feel at home here. I actually feel at home walking the streets, interacting, building a life, in a way I haven’t in maybe, well, ever. And then I think, wow, so this is what it means to want to hang onto a piece of land, to ache for the ability to live in the way you want your family to live, to walk the streets and feel connected, attuned, intended. 

And then I think, of course about Israel. 

The thing that has been powerful for me is connecting with the organization A Land For All (https://www.alandforall.org/english/?d=ltr) and Standing Together (https://www.standing-together.org/en). Not just for what they are doing and to hear their dreams, but to hear their language. Because we can use the language of power and death and war all want, but if we don’t use the word home, my God, have we missed everything?

A Land For All puts it that we must just admit that this area is a homeland for two people. It is and was a homeland for the Jewish people and it will always be a homeland for the Jewish people, and it is and was and will continue to be a homeland for the Palestinian people,even if the stories of their homelands is different. And as Standing Together puts it, there are 7 million Jews on this land and 7 million Palestinians, and neither of them are going anywhere. And we could keep on trying to say that the place should work in only way one and ignore the other way, but then we would just be avoiding the reality in front of us. 

Easy, easy, easy for me to say. Easy for me, thousands of miles away from the trauma and the war and the history of trying and the history of pain and all of the death and destruction. Easy for me to say when I don’t know how the path forward will happen, when my children aren’t the ones on the front lines, when I can hear a dream and support a dream, and not know how a dream can happen and be so removed and yet… 

When I hear someone who is fighting to end the Occupation say that they understand and honor that this little strip of land is also and will continue to also be  a precious home for the Jewish people, when I hear them acknowledge the complexity and the pain and say the word home, all I can say is that everything changes inside my heart. 

I was talking to a new Jewish friend I met, who didn’t know me very well, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict came up. “Palestine,” she said, “Whatever the f*ck that is”. And I could not in good conscience not say anything back, in the very least allude to the fact that I did not jive to the same lingo, when literally the night before I had been dining at a  Palestinian friend’s home in honor of Iftar, whose family still lives in East Jersualem, who lost many things in the war of ’48, who very much believes that Palestine was and is a real place. 

I hate to bring all this up, because I know it’s such a divisive, complicated, painful issue, and I will not be responding to emails back about anyone’s political opinions. But I say this because I cannot stop thinking about it, until I say it, that the concept of home is so fundamentally deep and it’s really not enough a part of our conversation and our hearts. That we need to honor at the very least our reality and other people’s realities of home, from the warmth within us.

I also walk around with also the knowledge of all of the destruction and my rather sunny, unbothered life in California, with the knowledge that months, years from now, I will look back and know that I did not do enough to help, that I spent too much of it just trying to make sure my own life and children’s were stable and thriving, and while I am not proud of that, I am also accepting and understanding, resigned to the reality, resigned to my own smallness, trying, trying in my little way but still knowing, if we can be honest, that I wish it could be more, that my own power and futility and limited understanding are but the grand disappointment of it all. Even as I try to build beauty in all other ways, even as I try to create a better home here, where I am planted, for myself and all those around me. And that is something, something real and significant, but just not enough. 

But still, always, always, in hope, and in blessing, and in gratitude for all those everywhere on the front lines of it all, wishing for a better tomorrow, believing that if God created home, He could help make it happen for all us. Somehow. 

June 25, 2024

Husband and I have an ongoing (joke? Annoyance ?) because I complain that he complains too much about the problems with America and the need for walkable communities. I just don’t want to hear it. Not that I don’t agree. For sure, walkable communities would help society in so many ways.

But it’s one thing to despair for greater structural change and it’s another to make do with what you have and build the best from what you’ve got. And I’ve only got room in my heart for one of those options.

And while I would love walkable communities, there’s not that much I can do with that with what I’ve got.

Instead, I try to make walkable communities of the heart, webs of community from the heart.

Kids don’t spend enough time in each others’ homes. For one.

I found myself today remembering our time in Long Beach and the greatest luck we could ever ask for, to have a couple of girls around our kids’ age across the street who knew what it meant to spend hours outdoors in each others’ spaces running amok and being a little weird. They were children of immigrants, and I think there was something there that played into it as well, two families who both felt belonging and not belonging, who didn’t care to try too hard to seem acceptable, and the mother felt it perfectly normal to release her kid to the wild of our very safe street. Every day, we would open the window and there her seven year old would be, floating outside. There she would be, knocking on our door. And there our kids would join them, barefoot, whooping and hollering. And always giggling.

So in that great transition space of our lives, I remember the late night summers with all five of them on the porch, being messy and dirty and silly and laughing and eating  Israeli salad and pasta and it all being enough.

Now, we have a lot of other things, but we don’t have that. We don’t have walkable communities of the heart for my kids. We all need more of that.

This past Saturday Shabbat, we hosted an Interfaith lunch with bridge builders - big hearted, big souled- people from the Newground fellowship. And we sat and talked and laughed and shared stories, some of them about life of challenge, some just about life.

It was wonderful. And let me tell you, as I’ve told you so many times, that I love my neighborhood and I feel good and safer there in a way I haven’t felt in so long or maybe forever.

And also.

And also I am aware that it is not the same for everyone.

I am aware that for these Muslim friends, and these Brown Muslim friends, that walking out of the cocoon of our backyard and into the streets of Pico Robertson doesn’t feel as safe to them. That I can feel the eyes of our neighbors darting over to them. That I can feel myself wanting to psychologically put my arms around them, use my body language to show that they are with me, that they are wonderful. I am aware that our Palestinean friend who lost so much in her life and in the last eight months, is walking past signs saying “if your child’s teacher starts taking about Palestinian genocide, it’s time to send them to a jewish school”. I am aware that the mere sight of them will probably evoke fear in my jewish neighbors while they place the sight of me as one of safety and oneness.

I wish that what makes me safe would be what other people feel safe in as well.

And I can’t shake the feeling that that’s a microcosm of everything else.

I also can’t ignore the bitter reality that 24 hours after our cozy lunch in which we shmoozed for five hours, I receive a text from Husband.

A block away from our home, from our outdoor lunch, is the LAPD lined up en masse around a synagogue. With on one side pro Palestinian protestors shouting Intifada. On the other, pro Israelis putting up their fists and charging through.

And so many more, caught in the middle.

The thing my heart centers on most right now is the need for boundaries and dialogue about what is acceptable during protest and what is not. What does “Intifada” mean to Jewish ears? What does “ Zionism”mean to Palestinian ears? What does it mean to walk into a Jewish community that has been subject to recent antisemitic violence and stand outside a synagogue? What does it mean to feel the years of death and defeat and still have hope for something different? What does it mean to hold the complexity of history ? What does it mean to step into a new space ?

What are we not hearing from the other? What are we not feeling heard about ?

Most of all- How do we build walkable communities of the heart?

We may not have the funds to convince LA to build more train infrastructure and to build communities in which we don’t have to always get into our separate little spheres to get to where we need to go.

But in this time of AI, in this time of immense expansion of technology and video sharing and rapid communication from anyone who wants to speak, what we can bring to the table as humans is emotional Intelligence. What we can build now are walkable communities of the heart.

As the great Shaboozy puts it, where I’ve been isn’t where I’m going.

We need to go somewhere different. It’s up to us to build the roads and open our homes.

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