Facing an Age of Polycrisis
by Rabbi Jess Belasco
I spend a lot of my time these days thinking about collapse. Maybe you do too.
On a societal and global level, the realities advance with what sometimes feels like a horrifying inevitability, even as so many of us do our best to fight them. A fascist regime in the United States that specifically targets disabled, trans, and black and brown people. Despite nearly two years of protest, an ongoing genocide in Gaza. A disavowed pandemic. And, the background and context to it all: the dread of a looming (and already beginning) climate collapse that threatens to swallow society as we know it.
Meanwhile, on a personal level… Disabled life is hard, and it has its way of stripping us of a sense of control: over our bodies, our life trajectories, our plans, and even our lives and survival. I have danced with this reality throughout my life, but it has been particularly present for me in the past year.
So: like I said, I spend a lot of my time these days thinking about collapse. Or really (maybe you relate to this?) I spend my time trying to perform an absurd emotional juggling act, in which I try to build what I can in the here and now, while also facing the most existential of existential questions. Often I feel like this is simply too much to ask of my own humanity, but we are here now, and what else is there to do?
Among the questions that I find myself returning to is this one: What does it mean to meet this moment in my fullest integrity? Often I feel that this is where "survival" truly lies: not in the physical survival that cannot be guaranteed (ultimately not for any of us, and certainly not in "these times”) – but in the soul-level knowledge of having turned towards – fully towards, rather than away from – the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
I don't say this lightly. It's probably the most difficult, and the most ongoing and fundamental, task that – I will speak for myself – I will have to do. And yet I also see an opportunity: a kind of survival, in the sense of spiritual integrity, that can live alongside the reality that none of us can actually control our own survival, or the survival of our communities or our planet, in the ways that we so desperately wish we could.
In order to do this, we need our own hearts and spirits, yes, but we also need wisdom to tap into. That wisdom comes in many forms and sources. Two sources of wisdom are particularly close to my own heart: Jewish tradition and disability Justice. And so, in this moment of Rosh Hashanah a new year, in the midst of the capital-M Moment that I have described above – I want to listen for what Jewish tradition and disability Justice have to say to each other and to us.
///
During the Musaf prayer on Rosh HaShana, we sing a poem called “U’Netaneh Tokef”/“And we should give power.” In it, we ask: Who will live and who will die? Who by fire and who by water? We list the ways that someone might perish over the next year, and then we conclude with the following statement: “But teshuva, tefilla, and tzedakah can reduce the severity of the decree.”
This central poem of our Rosh HaShana service puts forth a theology of God’s decree, coupled with our individual power to reverse it or soften it with our own good deeds. The logical flip side of this assertion is that those who die or face harsh realities have not done sufficient repentance, prayer or giving. Of course, this reading of the theology of U’netaneh Tokef is triggering for many people. At its worst, we could say that this prayer implies that those who suffer suffer because they have not been “good” enough.
However, I want to offer another way to interpret this prayer. We are, in fact, living in a world where people die and suffer in ways that are far beyond their control. We see this in the abduction and deportation of immigrants in the US, in the bombing and starvation of citizens in Gaza, in the isolation and deaths of disabled people in. These are forms of suffering that we inflict on one another. There are also inexplicable forms of suffering we experience as human beings that nobody can control.
And in the face of this suffering, I want to suggest that the model proposed in U’netaneh Tokef - Teshuvah, Tzedakah and Tefilah - are actually wise responses we have in our toolkit. Not as tools to change God’s mind about the punishment we deserve, but as mechanisms by which we might go about actually easing suffering in our world.
///
First, teshuvah. This word is often translated as “repentance.” The root word within it is “shuv”/ “return.” So what are we returning to when we do teshuvah? How can we look deeper into both the torah of disability, and into Jewish tradition, to think about what teshuva might mean amidst existential polycrisis?
Let’s start with Jewish tradition. One of the core themes of Rosh Hashanah is that it is a kind of “re-coronation celebration” for God. That image (coronation! God as “king”!) might seem extremely distant from any conception of theology that could feel relevant today – but I want to offer that perhaps it’s less distant than it might first appear. When our tradition describes God as “melech malchei ha-m’lachim”/ “the Sovereign of Sovereigns of Sovereigns” it’s really saying, in the language of premodern times: There are m’lachim (kings). And then there are malchei ha-m’lachim (emperors). And THEN – beyond the emperors, beyond the highest earthly powers that we have been taught to worship – there is God. God is the enduring Truth beyond all the things we as humans feel the urge to grasp.
What are the “emperors” of our day? Many of them are the systemic forces of Empire: capitalism, heteropatriarchy, white supremacy. Ableism, in all its forms.
And we need to dismantle those systems. But I want to suggest something perhaps more fundamental that I think keeps us stuck – keeps us from [[ ]]. And I want to try to get at it through my own experience – of being disabled, but also just of being human.
One of the things I’m proudest of in my life is the times that I didn’t get what I wanted, and I used that energy to face something deeper that I really didn’t want to face. I certainly don’t always manage to do this, but one time that I did do it was in my early twenties, when I applied for – and did not receive – a certain Professional Jewish Fellowship. Now of course, in any number of practical ways, this was a big disappointment but not a catastrophe. But there were good reasons – rooted in the depths of ableism – that it was, at the time, an emotional catastrophe for me. I had a visible physical disability, and a prominent speech impediment, and I struggled with breathing to the point of severe daily fatigue and deoxygenation. The barriers to meaningful employment for me – in the Jewish world or elsewhere – were extremely high, and I’d struggled for years to achieve what seemed like scraps compared to what I saw coming to my nondisabled peers far more readily. And so, the fellowship wasn’t just a fellowship. It represented recognition: something that might, I imagined, counter some of the ableism that I was facing trying to enter the professional world – something, that is, that might give me a shot at the kinds of lives that my peers had.
In other words, I had deeply understandable reasons for feeling attached to this particular thing that I wanted. And I’m no paragon of equanimity: when I didn't get it, I was really, really upset. But here's the part that I'm truly proud of – that I can't say I've done and every moment in my life, but that I will forever be proud and my spirit that I did in this one. I managed to use this moment of not getting the thing that would have given me (I imagined) access to what my peers had, and I used the energy of that moment to turn towards the scary truth in my gut that I knew I had been avoiding. And that truth was: I had known for years that my ability to breathe was extremely marginal, and that I needed to get a tracheostomy so that I could easily use a ventilator 24/7. I was terrified of this for many very good reasons, ableist stigma against tracheostomies and ventilators being the biggest one. Getting the fellowship probably would have allowed me to ignore the impacts of not being able to breathe (you know, just a minor detail) on my life and capacity for a bit longer – but I had to face it sooner or later. Overcoming my own internalized ableism and the ableism of the people around me, and getting the trach, is still the bravest thing I feel I've done in my life.
As my chevruta, n, pointed out when I told this story: Empire says gets the fellowship at all costs. But teshuva says: yes, it makes sense that you want to grasp for that thing. It makes all the sense in the world; it’s a legitimate thing to want. But the grasping is also a way that you are trying to ignore, evade, distract from that terrifying truth that you know deep in your stomach. Teshuva says: what if we return to that truth deep inside ourselves, walk straight into the fire? Teshuva says: Get the trach.
In this age of polycrisis, what do we find ourselves grasping for? (Grasping, I think, is different from wanting.) And how might that grasping be a turning-away from that truth deep in our stomach that we don’t want to face? In this season of teshuva, how can we release our grasp, and turn towards, rather than away?
///
Next, tefilla. Tefilla means prayer. The root of tefilla contains within it the sense of pleading – but it’s a reciprocal verb, l’hitpallel, pleading turned inward, a process within ourselves, or between us and the Divine Mystery. There is a movement to it, but it’s not a movement that is about changing the world on the level of systems and externalities. Tefilla comes after teshuva, because we must return, face the pit of our stomachs, face the fire – before we can start learning to move with it, dance with it, feel its grief.
I want to offer that, within this framework of “How do we existentially face polycrisis?”, we might think of tefilla as full emotional presence with the things we cannot fundamentally change. This type of presence, I think, is something that disabled life often demands, often teaches us.
I think of hospice. I think of sitting at the bedside of a dying friend. I think of the many friends that I could not help – and the friends who could not help me – with anything but presence. I think of things I have wanted for myself, that have not been possible: sometimes because of disability inherently, and sometimes because of ableism. I think of the ways that disability experience has taught me to mourn – and of the ways that it teaches many of us to mourn, perhaps earlier in our lives or in more profound ways than me might have found ourselves doing otherwise. I think of the raw humanity of presence, of how it does not remove but also somehow transforms the horror of loss in some inarticulable way.
I think of hospice for the world we know. I think of hospice for the people and the beings within it that we will not be able to save. I think of our planet as having an acquired disability, a grievous injury at the hands of capitalism, white supremacy, ableism. Can it survive? And in what form? Having suffered what pain, what loss, with what new limitations? Disabled wisdom teaches us that it’s possible to be prayerfully present with that grief – that there are options besides simply turning away from its enormity.
In this time of crisis and collapse, how might you find prayerfulness, motion, presence within your grief.
///
Finally, tzedakah. Tzedakah is often translated as “justice,” and its connection with disability justice is, therefore, perhaps the most clear.
One of the things that I think is particularly complex, and also powerful, about disability experience is that it so fundamentally holds both grief and justice. Our bodies hold inherent limitation; and, unjust systems profoundly oppress us and must be fought. Acknowledging the things we cannot change does not change our responsibility to fight for the things we can.
We must seek the root causes of injustice, seek to understand intersecting systems of oppression. Ableism: the fundamental idea that it is possible to define features of some bodies that make them worth less, that make them disposable. All the ways we create hierarchies of bodies: Capitalism. White supremacy. Ethnonationalisms. Eugenics. Cisheteropatriarchy, and more.
Even when the systems seem too powerful, too intractable to change, we must take action. Even if the actions we are capable of taking seem insignificant, or the path to change seems impossible to see, we must act. With mutual aid, with protest, with advocacy, with building pockets of a different, more liberated world wherever we can, for as long as we can.
In this age of polycrisis, what does disability justice or disabled experience teach you about where and how to act?
///
Teshuvah, Tefillah, and Tzedakah all need each other. I think of tefillah without teshuva as the kind of enforced “I’ll pray for you” that disabled people so often dread – an offer of “presence” that becomes destructive because it is rooted in erasure of humanity, rather than encounter and entwining with humanity. Tzedakah without teshuva risks turning into charity model “helping” rather than redefining systems of power. But taken together, teshuva roots us in unflinching honesty. Tefillah invites us into presence with grief. And tzedakah moves us toward action and justice.
These days, I think especially about the relationship between tzedakah and tefilla: How protest, even when change feels impossible, is tzedakah that we offer to the wings of tefilla, to be taken beyond us to a place we cannot ourselves reach. And how intentional presence with each other in our grief and in our need is an act not just of tefilla but of tzedaka – and no less needed than protest.
This coming year and beyond, may the practices of teshuva, tefilla, and tzedakah guide us in turning towards the polycrisis that we face, and meeting it with integrity of soul, of action, and of spirit.
Sincere gratitude to my hevruta, n, for their hevruta-ship on the topics in this piece.
Jess Belasco is a radical Torah teacher, organizer and community convener primarily focused on disabled and queer Jewish communities. They were ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where they focused on midrash, Tanach, and pastoral care, and were a Wexner Graduate Fellow. Jess’s interests include using Jewish sources to facilitate honest conversations about human and spiritual experience, developing disability-justice-informed readings of Jewish text, and helping more marginalized people speak truth to power. Jess runs the Disability Justice Torah Circle, which hosts classes, facilitates connection and provides pastoral resources for disabled and chronically ill people who desire Jewish community.
