I'm a midwife in Canada and a year ago when the war started in Gaza, my team asked for a ceremony to process our grief. I made one up, and then wrote it down to document what we did because I realized we had done a spell at work - that is the piece you'll find below. I sewed through the wax and paper ball and now it's hanging in our office. So while this spell is a year old now, it's still active in our lives. I often reach out to touch it when I'm at work. We are modern medical care providers. We work mostly in hospital. But we are still witches.
Our grief has only become more acute in the past year. We are a group of midwives who take care of recent newcomers and people experiencing homelessness. Every war and wave of political violence shows up in our clinic room. In the past six years of our practice, we have taken care of women from Yemen, Uganda, Ethiopia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Sudan, Burma, Iran and the list goes on. We also provide abortion care and most of our clients are international students who have come to Canada for the promise our country offers, only to find they aren't covered for reproductive health services by their student insurance.
In solidarity,
Jenna Bly RM (they/them)
We will keep moving, even through grief.
We gathered to mark time and to grieve.
We gathered to reject violence and to bind ourselves together with enough hope to move forward. We have survived a global tragedy. A pandemic that stopped the world we knew. Out of that stillness came a surge of grief and a demand for justice. Millions of us came together demanding better. Demanding that the world heal itself. We said the names of many of the people and things we had lost. (Not lost!) People and things that had been taken. Lives, freedom, autonomy, choices, land, ritual, ceremony. We grieved together for the theft of all of those things and people and more. And we grieved together for the lack in the world, of kindness, of compassion, of mutual respect and of delight.
And we have slowly emerged from the stillness that was forced on us by something invisible to the naked eye, yet powerful enough to stop the world, fearful and joyful, to greet life again. In slowly opening our doors and cautiously stepping outside again and again and again, and again, we have rediscovered joy and connection but we have also found war and violence, again and again and again and again. Syria, Afghanistan, Haiti, Burma, Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan, Uganda, Palestine.
Today I brought a havdalah candle that had served my family for the entire pandemic, marking time and creating ceremony for us when time stood still. Usually, this candle is lit for a couple of minutes and then dunked in a glass of juice or wine that has been shared by everyone in the family. This short ceremony marks the start of the week with a wish for sweetness and light. Usually the braiding in this special candle represents a single family moving out into the world and then coming back together for rest and renewal, and then returning again to the world.
Today, in a time where Jewish values have been warped by war and hatred, we co-opted this Jewish ritual object and demanded that it expand beyond ideas of family that have become so narrow that they have turned to indescribable violence. We coaxed the braided wax to represent all beings everywhere, seen and unseen, known and unknown, born and unborn. We invited this candle to stretch itself as it melted to represent ideas of family that stretch beyond the walls of our homes, of borders, of all the other ways we divide ourselves, and we asked the wax to represent the interconnectedness of all beings everywhere. Each strand of wax, though separate to start, is so intricately woven that it becomes impossible to distinguish one line from the other. So should we be in the world with each other, with all people. There is no them, only us. This morning two babies died in Gaza because their hospital ran out of fuel and their incubators were turned off. More than 4000 children have been murdered in this conflict that shows no signs of stopping. The grief is unspeakable. This conflict offers no obvious path forward for life, even if it stopped today. All of the babies are ours. Any notion that children do not belong to this entire world is a distortion.
Today we wrote things we wanted to banish and release and also things we wish and hope for and things that need protection on slips of origami paper. We placed those banishments and wishes in a folded box made of heavy paper with a block print of spring reed on one side and a wild pink bloom on the other.
These prints were made by my grandmother’s friend, an artist called Gwen Frostic, who survived polio and overcame a prognosis that she would never walk, talk, or write again. With her body that had defied the odds, she made delicate, beautiful art, documenting all the wild things in the dunes where she lived near Lake Michigan. Any notion that anyone’s life, freedom, autonomy, choice, or safety should be diminished because of the body they have is a distortion. We collected these wishes and banishment and then we went outside and lit the braided havdalah candle. We recited a prayer in Pali wishing that all beings, all breathing things, all creatures, all individuals, all personalities, all females, all males, all
noble ones, all those who are not yet noble, all goddesses and gods, all humans, all happy ones, and all unhappy ones may be free from suffering and may be safe and protected from harm. We chanted while the wax burned, and then we told our own stories of grief related to war, related to lack of help, related to helplessness, related to lies, related to complex braided feelings that do not make sense together and yet are braided together anyway. Watching as the candle burned, we realized how much the dripping wax looked like tears.
We burned the entire candle, letting the wax fall onto the paper box, holding our wishes and banishments, and allowing for the anger that made us long to burn everything down manifest as the candle disappeared. But rather than letting our anger turn to violence, we asked the heavy, folded paper to receive our anger gently. When the candle was completely burnt, we extinguished the last bit of flame on some moss in the garden box. Some Sage still growing in the rooftop garden caught fire for a moment and the scent reminded us that we are all treaty people on this land. We bent the paper covered in hot wax into a ball, forming something new. A new thing we can hold that contains our hope and fear,
and the past and the present and the future. Something that reminds us that the only truths are interconnection and change.
We will keep moving, even through grief. We will keep holding each other. We will cling to the truth of our belonging to each other and to this world. We will recognize that anyone who tries to divide any one of us from the others is lying. I heard someone say that the opposite of fundamentalism is humility. We each held the hot, papery ball with a pink bloom on the outside, passing it slowly around the circle, and then we held each other’s hands, and we bowed our heads, and we prayed for peace.
