Communities Bound By Love: Listening to the Silence with Cannabis

I’m a person who likes listening to the world and for many years I was ashamed of my preference for silence and invisibility. Turns out, invisibility is my superpower. I’m a person of faith but I wouldn’t say I’m a believer. But I am passionate about the need for all of us to be members of communities bound by love, and believe that if we are ever going to stop judging each other we must learn to be silent and listen.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what a community is since the early 1990s when I was required to write a short essay on this topic on the first day of an academic class. It’s a surprisingly hard question to answer because a community can be very insular with specific rules and boundaries, or open and expansive and harder to define. When first presented with the riddle of defining my own community as a young graduate student, I began with what I understood about who belongs and who is an other. But despite my intent to figure out my own community, I understood  my understanding was limited and have been pondering the question of community ever since.

I’m a Jew, by birth and now choice, but for most of my life I would define myself as reluctant. At the tender age of seven-years-old when my Hebrew School class was ushered into the dark and musty synagogue to watch a grainy black-and-white film of bodies piled like logs near a darkened open pit, I’ve understood that people hate me. There are people who are willing to kill me because of my faith. There are people who believe my faith threatens them. 

Persecution is at the center of the Jewish story. Not surprisingly, many other faiths around the world define themselves by persecution as well. I find this somewhat comforting in knowing that we are all in fear of someone, but am alarmed when the faiths with power use the idea of persecution to impose their own extreme views.

In college I studied the religions of the world and travelled on a boat around it. It allowed me to see our world as a complicated and unknowable place and came to understand there are many different ways to live a good life. In addition, I came to appreciate the freedoms I had in this country in deciding how to live my own as a person with a vagina, and it never occurred to me that our country would walk those rights back.

I believe religions exist to define structures and boundaries in our world, because life is just a little easier that way. That’s why communities across the globe each have their own. Which is why I have faith in the teachings of Judaism but understand all communities bound by love, as religious communities should be, have truths for all humanity. And these truths have been codified in stories by storytellers in the books that our different religions cherish. In Judaism the word Maggid means storyteller and the great Maggids do not just share the story -say the words - but demonstrate how to be Torah. Torah meets you where you are. That is its magic. That is the power of storytelling.

The ideals of freedom that have allowed mine and many other communities of faith to live in America without the fear we experienced across centuries in other nations is being threatened by communities claiming to be bound  by love but using fear to scare their believers.

If you are living in fear, you are being manipulated.  

To be silent we must be one with ourselves. It is the teaching of many great religions. That may be why cannabis is central to many communities around the globe as a tool that helps them listen, be one and live in harmony.  

If you are feeling persecuted, please rethink your narrative. We can go from mourning to joy by holding tight to our communities bound by love while also allowing doubt in our beliefs. Giving space for the other. Your ways may heal you, but your freedom to believe does not give you the right to impose your ideals on me. Have doubt with your faith and listen to the silence of others and our country will have the chance to heal. That is the power of communities bound by love, we can join together because no one is in or out. No one is an other.

Perhaps my Christian friends are correct to understand Trump as an instrument of God to bring forward an America fashioned only on their particular world view. But then again, the irony of a virus on our nation being infected and defeated by a virus he scorned, feels like an excellent allegory to open our eyes to heal ourselves. A story of religious proportion.

In this Jewish New Year numbered 5781 I implore each of us to ground ourselves in courage. In the universe of my imagination that is bounded by my community of faith, I understand that each of us is to go as far as we are able on this journey of understanding but that God will meet us where we are. This is a universal conviction. 

Come on this cannabis journey with us, with me. We all have the power of our imagination to be Maggids and utilize the power of a well told story that we all can share with our communities bound by love as we march forward and heal ourselves in 5781.