Moon of Shameless Joy in the Face of Empire
Happy new moon! Happy lunar new year! Happy Black history month! And welcome to Adar, the month in which JOY INCREASES. It is said in the Talmud, “As soon as Adar has entered, we increase in joy.” Joy can feel far away for many of us right now, and yet Jewish tradition compels us to practice joy even in, perhaps especially in the most dire and grim times. This year is a leap year, which means we get two Adars – double the Adar, double the joy.
I love this little book called Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman, in which they pull the ideas of happiness and joy apart and talk about how a joyful process is one that “is resonant with emergent and collective capacities to do things, make things, undo painful habits, and nurture enabling ways of being together.” They write, “under empire, happiness is seen as duty and unhappiness as a disorder…the point is not that happiness is bad or that being happy means being complicit with Empire. Happiness can also be subversive and dangerous, as part of a process through which one becomes more alive and capable…joy, in contrast to happiness, is to move away from conditioned habits, reactions, and emotions…It is a process of coming alive and coming apart.”
This is a Joy that is about one’s capacity to affect and be affected – to be uncomfortable, uncertain, in the mess of creative process, to be willingly undone, remade, and full of angst, desire, chaos, wildness, sensuous awareness, and feelings. “What if joy was seen as fundamental to undoing empire?” bergman and Montgomery ask. If empire tries to grab a hold on our desires and control our capacities to change, then allowing ourselves to feel, to desire, and transform is a practice of resistance. We do this with friendship, our art, our bodies, alone and together, in small daily pleasures and rituals and in big shatterings and breakthroughs. Letting ourselves feel, be moved, yearn, ache, and weep tills and builds the soil into which we plant seeds of joy.
This Joy is not about denying or avoiding pain or discomfort, but being present and alive to it, letting it change us and widen our capacity for all aliveness, making even more space for joy to flow through. This week I had a series of conversations with my dear friend/heart sibling Leah, who is finishing their book (baruch ha shem!) and we exchanged excited, breathy voice memos back and forth about crip femme joy, Jewish and BIPOC adornment, the beauty we make by hand, with each other, as resistance and life affirming practice. I shared with them the Jewish concept of hiddur mitzvah (which would be a great drag name – please take it and run with it), which literally translates to “beautifying the mitzvah.” This is the practice of sacred bedazzlement – pouring time, love, embroidery, velvet, sequins, whatever is beautiful to you — into something as a devotional practice, as a practice of joyful resistance. To me, this is also the power of amulets – the protection we weave by hand, made with care, that doesn’t rely on the harmful practices of the state, which purports to offer safety, but actually produces massive unsafety.
We do this in the way we dress ourselves as altars, when we don our femme armor, the way we make ourselves as offerings to life and joy, like how flowers seduce bees. I always look to the flowers as teachers on this practice – like you could just be chill, but okay mimosa, go ahead and look like the softest hot pink firework explosion sex toy. I see you, checkerboard fritillaria, with your punk ass petals and moody victorian teen witch vibe. Oh hello, black iris, why yes I would like to wear your dark velvet pussy as a hat. And, passionflower, I don’t know what to say, like what is even going on with you?
Flowers teaching us about hiddur mitzvah
What are your practices of joy right now? One of my main sources of joy is losing myself in a sea of sweaty bodies in a dimly lit club, dancing to blood pounding music, gazing at the glittering faces of strangers with eyes closed in collective rhythm, pulsing with queer desire. I miss that feeling like a thirsty flower. This month’s playlist is basically like the flower essence of a gay disco. Take a drop, move your body, find the joy where you can.
Inspired by Joyful Militancy, here are some questions to be with for Adar: How do we create situations where we feel more alive and capable than before? What joyful practices help increase collective power and creativity? What if joy was seen as fundamental to undoing Empire? What would it mean to be militant about joy? How can we be more fully alive, as we, as so many things, come apart?
✨ UPCOMING/UPDATES/INSPIRATIONS ✨
❦ SPRING OFFERINGS
- I’ll be offering a class on the healing & collective liberation traditions inspired by prophetess, healer, & movement ancestor, Miriam for Passover
- Jewish traditions of mutual aid!
- Cooking up some more, small, bite sized Jewish Protection Magic as Liberatory Practice offerings!
- Garlic class!
❦ HEALING PRACTICE: I am continuing to mostly focus on teaching and writing through the spring, and seeing folks for intuitive healing consults on a very limited basis. For now, my waitlist is closed.
❦ SACRED ORCHARD: Jewish Tree Magic, Myth, and Medicine
SACRED ORCHARD is a collaborative poster project honoring trees in Jewish myth, medicine and magic. With illustrations and design by Sol Weiss and writing by Dori Midnight, this poster series tells stories of 7 trees in Jewish lore: Apple, Cedar, Almond, Willow, Olive, Birch and Pomegranate. These seven trees create a sacred grove in Jewish imagination and in the landscape of our diasporic cultural memory. Orchards can be a site of rest, dreaming, pleasure, healing and connection. Among these trees, you will find ancient rituals and remedies, folk tales, ecological wisdom and seeds of torah. We hope these tree portraits and stories offer a sweet taste of ancestral wisdom and magic.
You can also get four different individual prints with love poems to Pomegranate, Cedar, Almond, & Willow
A portion of sales will go to revitalizing olive groves in Palestine and to land rematriation in the Northeast.
Order HERE!
TZEDAKAH : Jade’s kidney transplant fund – please help support my friend Jade Fair – donate and share widely !
ADAR PLAYLIST: get wild in your living room
Sending Adar blessings of winter thaw, rising sap, gay desire, dancing in uncertainty & love that dissolves what has been stuck. May we find abundant moments of joy that undo empire every day.
Love,
Dori
