The following teaching was given by member Lena Amick on Rosh HaShanah, September 7, 2021/1 Tishrei 5782.
I spend a lot of my life thinking about “return.” This is my duty as a chronically nostalgic person. Return can be as intense as a trip to an ancestral home in the old country or as casual as running our fingers over the fabric of a project we had started and left, months ago, materials still scattered in a corner. But I invite us this year to think of “return” not as coming back to “normal”, or of resuming something once forgotten, or of finding ourselves in the same place again, but to think of it in its linguistic parts: re-turn, or turn again. In this view, Return is not defined by our expectations of normality but by the motions of our bodies, however they show up, by the direction of our gaze, by the focus of our intention. We re-turn, turn again, for comfort – like a dog laying down before sleep; we return in search of what we missed the first time – like scanning the table for our keys; or we return in a way that alters fate, like Orpheus’ pained backward glance. In our second Zoom services for the Days of Awe as the pandemic still rages, we can look to the idea of “return” as a way of taking stock, of seeing what is left and what we can make from it.
I’m a teacher at Owings Mills High School, a public school in Baltimore County, and I am starting my fifth year of teaching in a profession that fills me with live-giving purpose but that seems structurally designed to burn people out. This year was, in an understatement, worse than usual: adapting all lessons to virtual learning, a ransomware attack that knocked out our HR system, adapting all lessons again to a hybrid situation, a return to schools with some children but with no functioning wifi, and a Board of Education that repeatedly did not communicate effectively and did not prioritize our health. As usual, educators and school staff spent our free time and limited energy picking up the pieces.
But spurred by these challenges, and by the realization that our employers would not prioritize our safety and our students’ safety like they would their own (our BoE, by the way, still meets virtually), a group of educators across the district and I began forming a progressive caucus to activate our union towards being a more democratic, proactive, and outspoken collective voice of all BCPS teachers. This spring, after school, we’d get on Zoom together and plot our response to the multiple crises we found ourselves in. We passed strongly worded resolutions through our unions decision-making body, we built active networks of union reps, and in April, we organized a work-to-rule action over the lack of internet and other basic infrastructure in our schools, accompanied by weekly protests at BCPS Central Offices in Towson. Our contract mandates that salaried educators work a 6.75 hour work day, with a half hour lunch break. Please consider, just briefly, if you know any educators who work only 6.75 hours a day – I do not. In a work-to-rule action, teachers work just the amount of time we’re paid for, and nothing more – it’s the strongest collective action we have before a strike, which (until we rise up in an undeniably powerful coalition and change the law), is illegal for public sector unions in Maryland to organize. And while the demands of our work-to-rule action focused on lack of internet, I noticed this politicizing effect as well for my coworkers and I who participated. We started saying, why do we have to work all these unpaid hours? How did this system get this way? And a question that many of us have been asking, after a year and a half of destabilization, of loneliness, of shaken futures, of staggering grief, as some places in our country “open back up” again - “How could I possibly return to how it was before?”
Our progressive caucus’ model this year, at least amongst ourselves, is the idea of “no going back.” Not no going back into school buildings; but no going back to the “normal” that was burning us out – the long hours of planning and grading after school and late at night, just to be ready to meet our students’ whole selves the next day. For many of us, returning to the “before times” feels just as impossible. Too much has happened. WE have happened. We are different now.
Re-turning doesn’t ask us to go back. It asks us to look again, with all our senses. Yesterday morning, I ate brunch with my dear friend of 12 years, who moved to this city to be near me just as years ago I moved to be close to her. Over a crumble made of farmers market peaches, I told her I was writing this vort last minute, and she, a writer, told me about the idea of maieutics. This was the method Socrates used for eliciting knowledge through questions and answers. She said the idea is that everyone already has the knowledge and understanding inside them; that the questioner simply draws it out into consciousness. Maieutic comes from the term maieutikos, the Greek word for “of midwifery;” Socrates’ mother was a midwife. This, too, gives us a new perspective on returning – that returning is dialectical, a call and response. That maybe when we return, we discover something wholly new to us, but that was there, in some seed of potential, the entire time. WE have happened. We comb the garden again, with eyes, with hands, seeking out the last pole beans that may have lengthened when we had been looking away, outside ourselves. We find the others doing the same.
I have a problem of negative thinking about the future – about this pandemic, about climate change, about the future of humanity and our planet. I’m working on it therapy. I read a lot of sci fi. I read the news, I put on my mask and do my active school shooter online training, make my doomsday prognostications, and call it “realism.” But I think my “realism”, designed to protect me from future hard feelings by expecting the worst, also cuts me off from the hard feelings I’m actually having about NOW. I feel like I’m among kinfolk with this one. And I think the idea that there are resources within us, individually and collectively – that there’s instincts, there’s things our ancestors remembered, there’s songs and colors in there, there’s lessons in building rank-and-file democratic structures, there’s wisdom, there’s the impetus towards care – this makes the future less set in stone. I feel weird about using midwifery as a metaphor, but I wonder what kinds of questions we can ask this year, of ourselves and each other, to help us turn again to the parts of ourselves we didn’t realize, to understand the qualities of the systems we live within – and what we’re going to do next.
Or to find something we loved and forgot about. Or to find grief and sit with it in a strange landscape. Find the part of ourselves that keeps us company in a world where we cannot go back.