last night i was talking with an old friend, and the subject came around to the Notre Dame fire. and i said that one of the things i thought about most around that was what Europe was like in 1260, when it was (mostly) finished, how many evils had yet to be wrought

obviously, sexism and antisemitism were Going Strong, and feudalism and the divine right of kings were like, you know, Not Great All Around, but Europe had yet to start the butchery on the other side of the Atlantic, they/we* had yet to start the Triangle Trade,...

...by many definitions racism and homophobia in their modern Western incarnations had yet to be developed, and obviously the climate crisis would hardly even have been explicable. heck, even the 30 Years' War was hundreds of years away

and i am filled with such sorrow to think of that — much more than by the damage to a pretty building, i am grieved by imagining a world before so many evils were wrought, a world where there might yet have been time to avert them, if only people had acted differently

and that's a hard thing, to know that there did not need to be this much suffering and grief in the world, that it was all quite evitable. but i think, from another angle, it is also maybe a little bit hopeful. because if all of this suffering, all of this agony,...

...all of this violence, this cruelty, this grief — if all of this were inevitable, if the world *had* to be this way, then what hope could we have of changing it? but since it *didn't* have to be this way, then it *doesn't* have to be this way;...

...there can be a world — we can *make* a world — that does not have these evils in it. that will not retroactively make these evils ~worth it all along~, but it does give me the courage to fight for the day that they are gone from among us

and maybe it will give you courage too. shabbat shalom <3

*neurotic footnote on this pronoun split: genuinely unsure which to use b/c i know so little of my family prior to the mid 1800s. i know my dad's family (Jewish) is in Eastern Europe by then, and parts of my mom's family are in the US, tho where they come from . . . shifts...

...with the telling — i've heard stories that put my roots in Ireland, England, Germany, and Spain, and those places are . . . pretty different. i think it's easy to just use "they, they, they" when referring to Medieval Europe, but i also think it's very worth considering...

...the ways that history lives in us today. what does it mean to be descended from people who were living in Europe in the 1200s? what if we see their stories as part of ours, not in a historical sense, but in an ancestral one? i think those questions are worth thinking about

ok bye for real now this time!