east window offers V’AHAVTA

with permission from poet Aurora Levins Morales

Aurora Levins Morales is a poet, essayist, historian, and activist who works “to change the stories we tell and help us imagine a world where greed has no power, the earth is cherished and all people get to live safe and satisfying lives.” Aurora’s poem V’AHAVTA  is a joyous and radical imagining of a liturgy that is rooted in global diasporic Jewish cultures, fully integrating Jews of Color, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews into the center of Jewish practice, not the margins. The author richly blends the depth of meaning we find in words repeated for thousands of years with the spiritual, moral and political needs of this moment.

V’AHAVTA

Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up,

when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning

and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts,

embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your shoulders,

teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies,

recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire:

Another world is possible.

Thus spoke the prophet Roque Dalton:

All together they have more death than we,

but all together, we have more life than they.

There is more bloody death in their hands

than we could ever wield, unless

we lay down our souls to become them,

and then we will lose everything.  So instead,

imagine winning.  This is your sacred task.

This is your power. Imagine

every detail of winning, the exact smell of the summer streets

in which no one has been shot, the muscles you have never

unclenched from worry, gone soft as newborn skin,

the sparkling taste of food when we know

that no one on earth is hungry, that the beggars are fed,

that the old man under the bridge and the woman

wrapping herself in thin sheets in the back seat of a car,

and the children who suck on stones,

nest under a flock of roofs that keep multiplying their shelter.

Lean with all your being towards that day

when the poor of the world shake down a rain of good fortune

out of the heavy clouds, and justice rolls down like waters.

Defend the world in which we win as if it were your child.

It is your child.

Defend it as if it were your lover.

It is your lover.

When you inhale and when you exhale

breathe the possibility of another world

into the 37.2 trillion cells of your body

until it shines with hope.

Then imagine more.  

Imagine rape is unimaginable. Imagine war is a scarcely credible rumor

That the crimes of our age, the grotesque inhumanities of greed,

the sheer and astounding shamelessness of it, the vast fortunes

made by stealing lives, the horrible normalcy it came to have,

is unimaginable to our heirs, the generations of the free.

Don’t waver. Don’t let despair sink its sharp teeth

Into the throat with which you sing.  Escalate your dreams.

Make them burn so fiercely that you can follow them down

any dark alleyway of history and not lose your way.

Make them burn clear as a starry drinking gourd

Over the grim fog of exhaustion, and keep walking.

Hold hands. Share water. Keep imagining.

So that we, and the children of our children’s children

may live

- Aurora Levins Morales

  7/25/2016