Place-Based Community Politics

I set out trying to write an essay about the reasons to prize community over the divisiveness of politics. I ended up with a few different reflections that may land upon this ideal, but give a certain kind of honesty to the discussion so that it’s not one-dimensional as an opinion.
 

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When I began college, my dream was to become a diplomat. I wanted to be like my hero, World War II Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who rescued my great-grandparents and grandmother from the Holocaust by writing transit visas through Japan against the wishes of his government. 

I studied international politics at a college well-known for its United Nations pedigree. But over the course of time, I grew disillusioned with the idea of entering the Foreign Service — partially because I couldn’t immediately do it, and partially because I realized that politics was not the answer for every societal question.

I noticed that Sugihara himself worked against his own government, because of his own conscience. It is not a good reason to enter the government in order to figure out how best to defy it. 

I noticed that governments are not very different from the societies they govern. Perhaps real change happens in society?

This is when I began my path to the rabbinate, with the intention to change society for the better.

But after becoming a rabbi, I became skeptical that a rabbi can make society better and inspire people for lasting change. As an American, I have seen in my day how spontaneous protest and uprising lead to paradigmatic shifts, completely leaderless in the popular sense of the word. 

Paradigm shifts are the phenomena of a new consciousness that suddenly overcomes the world, a people or a nation. In the last few decades, they have come one after the other, but they are not acknowledged in writing or in conversation. They exist in the spiritual realm, and they are documented only by rarely-examined public opinion polls. They are treated with great skepticism because the familiar political stances default to the idea that the world is not getting better, or to the idea that new tolerance and understandings exhibited after the shift are somehow not new at all.

I think easily back to the George Floyd protests, which at times became chaotic riots. It was hard to tell that anything dramatic changed for the positive, but when I saw that small towns in rural Idaho were holding Black Lives Matter protests, and when property owners in Los Angeles were not willing to be angry enough about their property damage to blame and castigate black people, I tracked that in my mind. I saw how Black Lives Matter transformed from a marginal movement to the national consensus. And then it all appeared to regress politically, but a basic standard of how black people were seen never really regressed. Politics did not track with society in this sense.

I think further back to the days of Occupy Wall Street. I remember hearing about how nothing changed, but I saw a public opinion poll that demonstrated a massive jump in American attitudes towards wealth inequality. In only a week, for the first time in perhaps a century, the American populace began caring about and being upset about inequality.

This is what’s fascinating about watching politics play out in the streets of Downtown. There’s a line that’s blurred between watching a script, prewritten in the halls of Washington and marketing agencies of New York, and feeling of people standing together, changing their scope of existence spontaneously.

Leadership is important in the political sphere, but the true dynamism of it exists with the people, for good or for ill. I don’t think that Mao was being purely facile when he declared himself the Will of the People, as though it were a divine force.
 

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We need to participate in the political arena so that we can be part of these sea changes in society. Our participation, even online, makes us part of the Hegelian synthesis that moves the world forward; it changes who we are, and it allows us to never live with the feeling of isolation and helplessness in the direction of our country and world.

This idea often intersects with a darker reality: the more un-embodied and impersonal the political appeal or cause, the more likely that there will be a faulty product sold. The false belief that you individually make a massive difference to a world-historical problem. 

This is the marketing of any well-oiled political machine (and deceptive presentation of many media outlets), but it is obvious that an advertisement does not clearly outline where exactly you will make such a difference. Perhaps by being the 100,000th signature? The 1000th social media share? Are you the tipping point? Likely not, and those points are unquantifiable in any case, because the changes we are looking for politically are delivered primarily by other means — socially, culturally, morally, etc.

When we buy into this quantified reality, this urgency to cause change based on an emotional reaction to essentially an advertisement, the cause over-succeeds. Yes, you may end up at the right demonstrations, but you carry that pain into your life, the pain the ad is trying to provoke in you, in ways that are hard to understand — but may cause you to damage the spheres of influence you do have to make for a better world.

We are told that in order to really make a difference, we need to convince our friends and family of our rightness. This is true, but at what cost? Given that our directive was ordered from afar, is there going to be any sensitivity instructed for these conversations? Or, like all affairs of industry, are they demanding brute force: violent videos, violent imagery, violent language, intense ultimatums? What then happens to friends and family, even those who may agree with us, but cannot and will not devote themselves to the cause in the same way?

We get called cowards for backing down, but in fact, we preserve our power, because those who are close to us experience real politically-informed events in our lives. We experience hate speech and economic problems; we experience the suffering of those on the streets by empathy, and we experience government-sponsored brutality. A community-first political approach reacts to the conditions on the ground as a human being, and reacts collectively, outside of the influence of the marketing campaign. 

I’ve seen, at Der Nister, right and left wingers alike pursue community interests and politics, specifically by failing to categorize the suffering of the people around them as a political issue that they can map onto their politics. There is unanimity about the need to treat the unhoused better in ways that are not uniform outside of Downtown, as an example. I can’t imagine losing real political power like that, if that ultimately matters to you, by undermining your argument by emphasizing pre-existing fault lines in ideology.
 

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The COVID pandemic weakened communal organizations and communities by destroying place and time. 

Asynchronous work and a lack of common meeting area encouraged groups to not be anchored by the usual factors of membership like proximity and presence, but by more ethereal concerns like interest and ideology.

When it is possible to pull members from anywhere, attracting people through their specific interest is lucrative, because the right niche and advertising pull might greatly increase attention, and subsequently, revenue. When this becomes the anchor of an organization, ideology takes hold, because interests often become coded into a lifestyle, often determined algorithmically, wherein a specific interest is understood to be linked to a certain political opinion and aesthetic.

The unusual circumstance here is not the pull of interest and ideology. What is unusual is their complete domination. Businesses that once relied on seducing locals started relying on online orders and international clients who could be pulled in on social media, usually by complying with a given ideology or aesthetic vision.

Brick and mortar businesses nonetheless largely retain their sense of having to live with whoever is in their area. They gather those who have competing pains and therefore competing causes to purchase the same things. These forces, the miracle that people still walk these streets, is what saves them.

Synagogues and community organizations used to live under the pressure of divided congregations as a normal reality. This was a better, healthier sense of community, because ideology demands an almost immoral conformity, a willingness to reject the views of the other side as insignificant in nature. Ideology splits like biological cells, reacting to each crisis with a different permutation. Ideology binds people together, and it splits people over time.

Places do not divide. They are assumed to be ideologically divided, and people work to unite above that, to a community-minded politics. I fear for the future of a Jewish world that has lost place and time.
 

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We don’t often completely grasp the power of a place-based community, a community whose make-up is of neighbors, not internet-bound acquaintances. Their unique skill is to help people know the other, and make peace with the fact that they are not the other, and will never be the other. The people in them hold common interests in a better world around them, and can contribute tangibly to these improvements.

I sometimes wonder about our need to move from city to city, and even to travel. I wonder if there is a tragedy of the commons, where those who stay home and build provide for those who come, but those who move around can’t stay long enough to build.

This is another tragedy that began decades ago, but was accelerated by COVID.

I think about the teaching in the Talmud that states that one must pay for various government services the longer they dwell in a given city. I think about the teachings of Tikkun Olam from the Talmud, which describe not the repairing of the world, but the necessity to benefit the non-Jewish poor of a mixed city. These teach us how important it is to contribute to a collective.

I would never be disappointed by building a strong place, even if I can’t become an important political figure or activist. Strong places set examples of a better world; they show, but do not tell. They are the power of our example.