The following is a reflection given on Yom Kippur by Hinenu member Tyler Vile, on the theme of makom.
What I’m about to share holds some harsh truths from the most traumatic parts of my life experience. To any and all fellow survivors listening, please take care of yourselves in whatever way you need to. If that means leaving the room while I’m speaking, that’s okay. You’re doing the mitzvah of pikuach nefesh, of preserving your life, your safety, and your sanity.
Baltimore is the place where I was born. It’s the place where I was physically, sexually, and emotionally abused and had several brushes with death, all before I was ten years old. Things no child should ever have to see, feel, or hear. As early as that age, I remember praying to G-d that I could die just so I could leave this place. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t have birthday parties, Orioles games, and a Bat Mitzvah, it just means that those things were underscored by a terrifying reality that no one else around me seemed to see. Around the time of my Bat Mitzvah, I stopped believing in G-d. Who could blame me? What kind of G-d would let a disabled girl be born to parents who beat her every time she claimed her girlhood? Hashem hadn’t even granted my wish. I was still alive, after all.
When I became a teenager, I wrote, I played music, I became an activist, I did a ridiculous amount of drugs, but most importantly, I made friends. I even started to see G-d again through the acid-fueled kaleidoscope that was my brain at the time. I saw G-d in the trees, in the dive bars, at the tops of buildings, and in the faces of the punks, queers, and other lost kids who actually loved me for who I was. Some of those people have died, some I’ll never speak to again, but most are still my family.
In my adult life here, I’ve been sexually assaulted, mugged, harassed on the street, but I can’t say I’ve ever really been afraid of this place. Almost three years ago, I helped to organize a ragtag bunch of radical Jews who shared dreams of a Jewish community rooted in tzedek, justice, chesed, mutual aid, and makom, divine place. It’s 5780, and here we are. Hinenu!
This is sacred ground for me, all of my pain, my joy, my loss, my gain lives in once place. Deep down, I know I’ll have to leave one day. I have dreams that stretch beyond this place. One is that I might find myself somewhere else giving dvar torah for a living. That all still feels a long way off. Until then, and always, Shekhinah, Baltimore, Hinenu, I am yours, I am yours, I am yours.