Freedom Church of the Poor

September 26, 2021

Sukkot: Abundance Not Abandonment

Leviticus 23

Noam Sandweiss-Back, Kairos Center

Dr. Savina Martin, Massachusetts PPC, National Union of the Homeless

Phil Wider, National Union of the Homeless, Put People First! Pa, PA PPC

Responses:

        Alex Zane

        Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharris

Noam Sandweiss-Back

Welcome, if you’re just tuning in to Freedom Shul and the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, and I am calling in from Montclair, New Jersey, Lenape land, with my mom here, and my dad over here, and we’re sitting in our family sukkah that my dad built this last week and which we’ve been dining in and eating in and celebrating in the last couple days. The Jewish holiday of Sukkot is known in English by different names. Some know it as the Feast of Booths, others know it as the Feast of Tabernacles. Some call it the harvest festival. Sometimes it’s just known as ‘the festival.’ And we celebrate it every year just as the summer is turning into fall and it represents the completion, the end of two cycles. It represents the end of the seasonal harvest, when our ancestors reaped the abundance of the hard work of the growing seasons. It also represents, in some ways, the end, the punctuation mark, to the high holidays, to the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah and the great day of atonement of Yom Kippur, which we celebrated together with Freedom Shul a couple weeks ago.

So Sukkot, then, is kind of where everything comes to a head. On one level this is a time for celebration and for joy, it is during Sukkot, after all, where we see all around us the evidence of the abundance of the world. When we build the sukkah and spend a full week eating under its canopy, we are reminded how interconnected we truly are, all of us, to one another and to the natural world around us. And in the sukka we feel viscerally the truth of Dr. King’s words, when he said we are all connected, “In an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” And it is in the sukkah that we are reminded that within this web of mutuality, there is enough for everyone. Like, literally, there is enough food and water and money and housing and medicine and more for every person on this planet, and it is on Sukkot, as we sit in sukkahs like I’m sitting in and hear the sounds and smells of the fragrances around us, that we can no longer deny or hide from this truth of the actual abundance of this world.

So, on another level, though, this observance of Sukkot, we are commanded by God to consider something else. We’re told to look back and remember the great freedom struggles of our ancestors. Not only that, but we’re commanded to reenact the struggle every year by building the sukkah. So in the scriptural passage that Ana just read from Leviticus, God tells the Israelites to build booths and sukkahs every year, “In order that future generations will know that I made the children of Israel live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt,” [Leviticus 23]. And tonight we want to look back in two ways: In the Biblical sense, there is something so powerful about this commandment, to build a sukkah so we remember that earlier generations built their own sukkahs as they wandered through the desert after making a break for freedom. In this commandment to remember, we recognize that our ancestors, and their freedom movement left Egypt as homeless refugees. We are reminded that God chose these people, these poor and dispossessed people, not only to escape slavery, but to help build a new covenant with God, a new social order built on justice and on peace. And most incredibly, we’re reminded that these people began to build this new society as they wandered through the desert, living in tent encampments, living in these ancient shantytowns on the edge of empire. It was in sukkahs, just like the one I’m sitting in, where our ancestors drew up the blueprints for a new society and struggled to make it so. There’s so much in this story pointing us toward the agency and leadership of the poor. This story of the Sukkot teaches us so much about where God resides, and who God sides with, and about who can, out of necessity, and with nothing to lose from the current structures of society, be the leaders of a movement to end poverty and injustice. So, this is kind of looking back that we’re called to do tonight.

And as we celebrate the Sukkot, there’s another looking back that we want to do. Because to think about what it means to build a sukkah in our time is a really important question. And as we build sukkahs in our own time, we then really need to think about and remember the struggles that we ourselves have emerged out of, and which have helped to shape and form the movement that we’re building today. And so I’m so excited to share this space tonight with leaders from National Union of the Homeless, Phil Wider and Savina Martin, who over the years have led powerful housing struggles and organizing drives with the poor and homeless, in what, I think we could call, the modern sukkah struggles of our day. You know, the sukkah struggles led by poor and homeless people striving to build a better world out of tent encampments and abandoned houses and more, just like the ancient Israelites. So I’ll stop there, and I’m so pleased to pass it on to Rabbi Savina Martin.

Savina Martin

Like the sukkah, like the booths, tent cities are a type of political organizing, right? It’s a form of protest, and it’s especially important for today’s struggles of the poor and homeless. This is so timely, so biblical, so right on for this moment in current history that we are all witnessing. We continue to witness the further dismantling of the welfare state and the deepening crisis of neoliberal policies. A tent city paper reported not too long ago, written by Willie Baptist, Kristin Colangelo, myself, and Anthony Prince states that, “These policies all brought about by the systemic economic crisis of global capitalism.” Right? Today, we are witnessing, in bibilical proportion, deteriorating conditions. Humanitarian health and housing crisis, climate change and economic theft. We can therefore expect mounting social dislocations, global instability, and rising mass resistance. We can expect that this resistance will assume many forms, including all kinds of survival tactics such as in the proliferation and spread of illegal homeless encampments in major and small cities around the world.

In Leviticus, God is telling the people to build the desert booths, the dwelling tents, as a way to freedom, somewhat like what we are witnessing today as people lose their homes, but at the same time struggle to survive, while at the same time fighting to build unity among the poor to unite the poor, the dispossessed, to demand the right to housing and the right to live. In 1989, the Housing Now! march was organized by the union. The late Ron Casanova led the exodus marches from New York City’s Tompkins Square Park, along with others who had left their tents, or booths, to join the two-week march. It rained the whole time. Marchers made their way into Washington, D.C., while there were two heart attacks and three miscarriages along the way. They made their way into Washington, D.C., only to be turned away from housing yet again. And we were left no other choice but to take the last resort given to us, which was, “You can stay here for two days,” on a wet ground, in the back of the RFK Stadium, on an Anacostia River that never dried for the whole two days we were there, in back of an Aids testing clinic.

But it was there that the blessings happened, when we banned together once again to turn up the street heat! We marched and chanted. We left with no food, but food arrived that evening. Churches brought us everything we needed. We had fruits and bread and water and juice. Our unity that we [unintelligible] under great pressure was used. We used our words, and turned them into action, chanting, “You only get what you’re organized to take!” The following morning, we got into line, got into formation, and headed to the staging area of the Housing Now! march. So, in the film, Takeover, you see what we accomplished. Ron Casanova represented the people that day. The exodus marchers, who marched for two weeks, 450 miles to be free, to build the booths, to speak, to speak about our freedom. So today, as we celebrate the festival of booths, the tent cities, in remembrance, in remembrance of the Ron Casanovas today, and these tent cities that are cropping up all across the U.S., as a way to our freedom, a way of resistance, and a way to build power. And I’m going to pass it over to my comrade, my Jewish brother, Phil Wider.

Phil Wider

Like Savina, I too have stories of encampments and tent cities from the Philadelphia/Delaware Valley Union of the Homeless approximately 40 days encampment at the state office building in Philadelphia on the corner of Broad and Spring Garden in the summer of 1991, to a trip to the Second National Survival Summit of the Up and Out of Poverty Now! coalition in the summer of 1992 in Detroit, Michigan, where the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization was in the midst of what they called Operation Michigan Storm, to protest welfare cuts by setting up tent cities in four points throughout the state of Michigan, including one at the state capitol, to many other housing takeovers, a church takeover, freedom tourists, and tent cities. Of DHS, Department of Human Services, taking children from protesting mothers, of the city turning water off from fire hydrants much needed by tent cities, to evictions. Of summits, meetings, convenings, where leaders from across the country and world swapped stories and compared notes of their experiences with tent cities and sleepouts. In these struggles and convenings, I and many others experienced a loss of innocence, a stealing by fire, a spiritual experience. We made commitments to this movement, we organized our lives around this movement, dedicated to this movement.

On a holiday like this one, we are called, not just to remember that these past events happened, not just to draw inspiration from the fact that they happened, but to learn the lessons from them, the real guidance for our work today. The truth is, we can’t navigate the adversity and attacks that rain down on our people and our organizing without the knowledge that comes from looking back to these experiences and their lessons. And the reality is, leaders of encampments have always made studies and constructed and attended schools to look back at previous times when those travelling from slavery to freedom made camp in temporary, fragile, field, desert, or urban huts. We’ve looked to the previous campaigns, treks, encampments and tent cities, we’ve looked to the Underground Railroad which inspired the movement to end slavery. We’ve looked to what W.E.B. Dubois called the general strike, when the enslaved Black workers en masse, in the hundreds and thousands poured across the Union lines setting up tents as part of the camp of the Northern armies. We’ve looked to Hoovervilles, Roosevelt-Burbs, and the Bonus Army encampments in D.C. during the Great Depression. We’ve looked to the original Poor People’s Campaign Resurrection City that’s marked on the poster for tonight’s service, and is hanging on the wall of the sukkah behind Noam, there. We’ve seen that all concessions won came through struggle, and that often what was given was not all that was wanted. And what was often provided in ways that further divided us.

The struggles of the poor are struggles for survival, transformation. The forms of struggle be they tent cities, encampments, housing takeovers, eviction defenses, emerge out of dire conditions and come up against the violence of empire, of government, of state apparatus, defending as they always do the status quo, the law of the land, property, which are hell-bent on keeping these struggles, these forms of struggle, divided. Leaders forged in earlier rounds of struggle, earlier rounds of tents, employed lessons learned, commitment built, connections made and competencies developed in giving leadership to the forms of struggles that they can sustain, meet up with each other, coagulate into a powerful force, a new and unsettling force.

There is much that has happened, does happen, and needs to happen in and through these survival tents, these fragile field, desert, and urban huts. There is protest, which calls attention to the hypocrisy of poverty and its plenty and abandonment amidst abundance. There are projects of survival which provide for basic need: Shelter, food, and community. For those in isolation, breaking their isolation. And there is political education, the education, training, and forging of leaders. And there is a charting out of a politically independent path from the two party system and all representatives of Wall Street, and the actions of those who out of necessity take up tents and build encampments. There is leadership for the rest of society, foreshadowing even more massive battles and struggles to come. Through the ups and downs, through the victories and defeats, advances and retreats, the real fruits of the harvest, the real victory lies in ever-growing organization and unity of the poor. The real fruits of struggle are lessons and leaders who carry these lessons, and lead in the organization of the poor. The collective action of the poor is an unsettling force, it breaks isolation, it rallies resources and abundance to the cause of the poor. And on the occasions where that rallying of resources is insufficient, it provides lessons for future rounds of struggle, arming those to come.

Finally, I want to say that on this holiday we celebrate the growth that has happened for the harvest to ripen, for the abundance to have been constructed. We also celebrate the growth that has happened in these temporary, fragile, field, desert, and urban huts. We celebrate the leadership and organization that serves as foundation for a broad and powerful movement that will enable this abundance to be shared by all.

Respondents:

Alex Zane:

Greetings, sisters and brothers. Alex here, joining in celebration on this holy day. I’m very grateful for these meditations and for showing us how such an ancient practice is so relevant for today, and for attuning our sensitivities and our practice for today. One thing that occurs to me is that what’s special about today, this construction of these temporary shelters, it highlights the fact that they’re supposed to be temporary; that any time we’re unhoused and unsheltered, that’s never supposed to be a permanent thing. We’re always supposed to be on our way home, and we treat so many people in our society as if that is not the case, that there is no home for them. And this holiday, I think, wants to insist on how that’s false. Any time we might be in some sort of in-between time or transition through tragedy, through liberation, then there’s still a destination that we’re getting toward, and, you know, they didn’t leave people behind in the wilderness. The community came, they got home together, and that seems to be the call for us today, is the way that any of us are gonna be able to feel at home in our world and our society is if we’ve brought everyone home. So thank you for illuminating that for me today, and may all unsheltered people be sheltered in security and in health and in community.

Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharris:

I’ll just jump in for a second. I was thinking a little bit about the framing Noam put in front of us, in terms of this festival of booths, this harvest festival where we celebrate and recognize the abundance around us, and I think it really connects with, you know, the words from Savina and from Phil and this point that Alex just made of, just that homelessness doesn’t have to be, and is not God’s will, and there is enough, and that we can see that all around. And we can see that, particularly when we’re as close to nature, as close to God as we are in this season, and in other seasons. So just thinking about this abundance, this lie of scarcity, this lie that if God wanted there to be no homelessness and to not have everyone reach the Promised Land, God would have made more, when it clearly has to do with systems and structures of empire, systems and structures of the wealthy and billionaires who hoard those resources and hoard that abundance, and therefore allow for the abandonment of people in the midst of that and how just immoral and wrong that is, but that’s so powerful about this group of people coming together. So just thinking about abundance today.