The Gathering | A ritual to resist complacency

During Pesach last month, as I looked up the ingredients in tempura batter before placing a dinner order, I paused to wonder why I was doing it. I used to follow the Pesach rules far more strictly and I remember the value in changing so much of how I lived for these small stretches of time, but as my current practice has come to be more piecemeal and less holistic, it can sometimes feel a little arbitrary—why am I drawing a line here instead of there, eating this but not that?

One important reason is the power of practices that make us pause and act with intention. There is a saying (with murky attribution) that religion exists to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Most of us are both comfortable and afflicted at different moments in our lives, sometimes in need of deep support and other times an agitating push. In accessing the things I need (or often, even the things I want) to get through a given day, I am unquestionably one of the comfortable: for food in particular, my neighborhood has a large array of grocery options and I currently have the economic security to afford them. So there’s an important impact in encountering various moments throughout the calendar that require a pause and a reorientation, in this case creating a reason for me not to unthinkingly just have whatever I might want.

Injustice thrives in complacency and compartmentalization. The more comfortable we are, the easier it is to turn away from the many harms and inequities around us, walling off the understanding of how they impact all of us. As with each edition of The Gathering, the resources below invite us to shift and open up our thinking. It’s on each of us to make sure we’re answering that invitation and finding ways to continually provoke our engagement and activation.

— Sarra Alpert, Director of the Avodah Institute for Social Change