On praying with your feet
Hi,
So here are some things I’ve been thinking about this week.
(But first: welcome, new subscribers. You probably found me from the Patrick “patio11” McKenzie podcast, where I spoke with my friend Patrick, or from the report I co-authored on AI policy options, A Narrow Path. This will be a little bit more of a broad reflection, less policy analysis that you saw in those other things, but we’ll return to that focus soon enough in future issues.)
On praying with your feet
If you spend a year regularly attending Shabbat services in the United States in a synagogue, you’ll hear the following anecdote about the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, as related by his daughter:
When he came home from Selma in 1965, my father wrote, 'For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.'
This anecdote is usually related in a joyous, exciting way by the rabbis who use it, implicitly promising that your efforts to go to such-and-such event will be as impactful as the Civil Rights Movement, and explicitly talking of how energizing, and fun, and delightful it can be to go to a protest march or volunteer for a cause, to be submerged in a group.
That’s never really connected with me; I’ve never really felt that feeling of collective effervescence in a protest crowd, and only felt it rarely even at rock concerts.1 The metaphor just never landed, and that’s fine; theology is metaphor, and not all metaphors work for all people.
After the past five days, I think I have a different perspective on that story:
I took the past 5 days off from work2, and went up to Bucks County, PA to volunteer with the Pennsylvania Democrats. I knocked on 343 doors, I assembled hundreds of literature packets for volunteers to distribute matching to their state and local races, and I got far too little sleep. I saw a lot of the Pennsylvania countryside that I hadn’t seen in years, I got slightly threatened by one black-helicopter conspiracy nut along a rural roadside, I petted dozens of dogs and two cats, I met a lot of lovely people earnestly hoping that their votes for either side were the right call.
My feet are the sorest they have ever been, my shoes stink, and my belt is a whole loop tighter than it was at the start of the week. I did everything right in terms of living my values, in terms of committing to the causes and beliefs that matter to me, in terms of fighting hard and not giving up and choosing to do stressful things.3
And we got our butts kicked.
So, do I regret the five days spent?
I do not.
An earlier draft of this essay had the old joke, “G-d answers every prayer, but sometimes the answer is: ‘No.’”4 I love that joke, but I don’t think it captured the way in which volunteering was praying with my feet. G-d doesn’t decide elections, or if G-d does, then G-d is far pettier than we hoped. Heck, I’m on the record as only being roughly 50-50 about whether or not G-d exists. (Confusingly for the non-Jews in the audience, that doesn’t really affect whether or not I’m Jewish, or religious. On that question, we Jewish folks are weird by mainstream American standards.)
I’m not trying to tell you that one side was good, or bad, or in-between. I have my political beliefs; you can probably guess what they are. But this essay isn’t about that.
I’m just trying to say: praying with your feet is admitting that you’re part of something, and less than something, and at the mercy of something beyond your comprehension or understanding until it’s passed over. And all you can do is take another step, and wince, and look ahead at the horizon, gripping a flimsy pile of campaign literature. And then do it again, and again, and again, twenty-four thousand and six hundred and fifty-three times.
Prayer isn’t always fun. Sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it’s boring, or repetitive. Sometimes — all too often — it’s fruitless.
But prayer isn’t a vending machine. It’s about — as someone once told me — being awake, and trying to notice the world. Heck, I don’t truly know whether or not someone’s listening. But it’s not about who’s receiving the message. It’s about why I’m sending it.
I don’t think I’ve ever spent five days quite like this before, in truth. Five days in a class? Sure. Five days on a sleepless consulting engagement? Of course. Five days exploring back roads in the rural Midwest? Yeah, a lot while growing up in Ohio, but not for a while. Five entire days canvassing door after door, grinding my bad knees into failure and my old socks into holes? No. That experience startled me awake.
With each step, I felt I was saying: Democracy, democracy, democracy. Her choice, his choice, their choice. And it was a painful, slow journey, on my own in Pennsylvania back roads, that didn’t end the way I hoped; there was joy in the doing of it, but no victory in the result. If I was praying, then all I was praying for was this: to see, and recognize, and give thanks for, whatever divine spark gives us all the ability to make our own choices — good, evil, or indifferent.
And if that’s the case, then the work never ends. There’s always time to do more, so long as we draw breath, and as long as we can take another step.
So, take a pause. Take a breather, as long as you need.
But then after that, I hope you’ll join me back on the road.
Disclosures:
Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, the DC Default Synagogue, or the Jewish Reconstructionist movement.
As some readers might know, I haven’t always been the easiest to drag to a concert, possibly in part for that reason, possibly in part because I used to be an anhedonic, depressed, stick-in-the-mud. After working on that (among many other things) in therapy for the past 18 months and purchasing a Spotify Premium subscription, my statement on that past tendency is:
Yes, Saturday and Sunday were weekends so I didn’t take those days off, literally. I mean that this volunteering was in personal capacity.
Contrary to expectation, I’m an extrovert, but I’m fairly shy for the first few minutes of a social interaction before I can establish rapport. Those first few minutes are usually all that a canvassing interaction is. It’s draining.
Like many Jews and Muslims, and some Christians, I don’t write the full name of the Almighty for complicated theological reasons.