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Publications > Footnotes > Work from Poetry, a Breaking Wave: Spilling, Plunging, Collapsing, Surging with Lara Mimosa Montes

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE, SPEEDILY AND IN OUR DAYS!

Miriam Saperstein

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE, SPEEDILY AND IN OUR DAYS! By the enduring depths of the Unending One Who Rested, may Shabbat seal each Anti-Zionist who takes on righteous action and takes on this protection—seal each and all of us with protection and endurance. May our descendants endure for us, and may our bodies endure for us, and may our sacred life-ways—older and deeper than any Zionist co-optation of Judaism—endure for us. May no tormentor harm, co-opt, or surveil us, by the name of El Maleh Rachamim, by the names of ancestors in their resistance & acts of visionary creation in the face of empire (may it fall) by the name of Rabbi Tarfon, who taught that we are not obligated to complete the work, and neither are we free to desist from it, teaching us to reject saviorism and each commit to our part, by the names of three opshprekherkes, exorcists around a stone who sent the evil eye back to whence it came, teaching us to send despair back to gum up the works of neoliberal business as usual, by the names we know ourselves by in rest, and the names within geologictime, in the names of the waters of life and the ever-evolving, cross-time conversations, who teach us all is connected & fortifying us with the cosmic capacity to hold our collective grief—I beswear you, demons of despair (They call you individualizing our survival. They call you perfectionism and avoidance. They call you incentives & intimidation to turn away, the guise of objectivity, the misdirection of attention away from stopping genocide. They call you colonization, imperialism, & white supremacy. They call you Zionism.) I adjure you and beswear you EVIL SPIRITS that you should dissolve, dissipate, unwind your grip from our tongues, veins, lungs, and the collective tissue of our movements. Reveal to us the tendrils of empire that grasp at our prayers and souls with bad-faith accusations. Extricate these demons from us. As we dive into the no and all time of Shabbat, may we be nourished & emerge transformed. May we be OBLIGATED TO OUR GRIEF and love. Bind us to each other in righteous, effective action that sustains the web of life. FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA, PALESTINE WILL BE FREE.

Work from Poetry, a Breaking Wave: Spilling, Plunging, Collapsing, Surging with Lara Mimosa Montes

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