Justice

Grace Lee Boggs – Her Memory Should be a Blessing

[pullquote align=right] He’d never heard ideas like that before and he wanted to know where they came from: Grace Lee Boggs.
[/pullquote]Grace Lee Boggs was a writer, philosopher, and community activist, who lived more than 60 of her 100 years in Detroit, Michigan.  She left this world last Monday, October 5th.  I’ve been thinking about her ever since.
At a Hazon Food Conference in 2012, I spoke on a panel about Detroit.  I shared what felt like a common narrative, the grassroots vision of a city that is healing itself, where slow and deep work has moved to the forefront of the activist community.  Where talk is about growing our souls instead of the economy, and where we reimagine what work can mean and how our hands can be of use.  After the panel, someone told me how moved he was by what I had shared– he said that he’d never heard ideas like that before and he wanted to know where they came from.  I thought for a second, and without missing a beat, I realized I had the answer: Grace Lee Boggs.
Grace became a sort of rebbe in my life in exactly this sneaky way.  
[pullquote align=left] Grace’s Torah of Detroit reinforced the lessons I learned from the Rabbis.
[/pullquote]I never learned directly from Grace, but her influence loomed large as soon as I moved to Detroit in 2009.  Grace was not only herself, she was also the ideas that made their way into the lives of the many people she surrounded herself with.  She was a lifelong teacher and learner, and her students, in turn, have gone on to teach so many others.  It was Grace’s students, Shae Howell, Rich Feldman, Ron Scott, Jackie Victor, Myrtle Thompson, and many more, who showed me a Detroit that has helped to shape my sense of what can be right and good in the world.  These individuals, each in their own unique way, were adult solutionaries I sought to emulate in my own thinking.  I still get mucked and mired in white guilt, class privilege, suburban guilt, and I still want to escape into a place of blame and critique.  Reaction feels so much safer than the vulnerability of creation.  But I am also learning that I can’t avoid being wrong, can’t avoid growing and changing… I can only keep striving to connect, to create, and to open where I feel myself wanting to close.

[pullquote align=right] Grace’s message seemed to be, to whisper at every opportunity, let go. Evolve.
[/pullquote]Grace’s Torah is about looking within and transforming ourselves as neighbors and citizens, words that hold such promise, because they invoke a world where people feel a sense of mutual responsibility.  Hers is a Torah of being in a place, being responsible to it and to the lives and stories that spring from it.  As I became increasingly Jewishly observant in my 20’s, Grace’s Torah of Detroit reinforced the lessons I learned from the Rabbis.  We are not allies with God, helping God in some abstract mission that loosely affects us; rather, we are in a covenantal relationship with God and with life.  We are responsible for every action and everything we do counts.

It can be an exhausting way to live.  But Grace, somehow, was larger than life precisely because she seemingly inhabited it so fully.  She saw a century, she read voraciously, she lived rooted in a place, she surrounded herself with chosen family.  All things that I find myself envying while I also know that I too could commit to living in this world in that real way– it would just take letting go of some of the securities and certainties, some molds, that I still cling to.  And Grace’s message seemed to be, to whisper at every opportunity, let go. Evolve. Another world is possible. Join me. Live in the present. Be a neighbor. Be.
If you want to learn more about Grace and her life- I recommend listening to this short radio clip about her life.  PBS also happens to be free streaming an excellent documentary about her, American Revolutionary, for the next few weeks.

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