Poet Adrienne Rich writes: “But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.”
I spent this summer living in Jerusalem, in dire need of radical imagination. The political and moral crises surrounding me served to parallel my internal crises around my gender and queer journey.
For years, I found myself called towards a rabbinical path, and dreamed of building Jewish communities grounded in values of justice, compassion, and liberation for all. But faced with the on-the-ground reality of state violence, settler colonialism, fermented trauma, and religious nationalism, I found myself asking: how could G!d have allowed this to happen? What was I being called to do in response?
This crisis of faith matched a growing discontent with my gender expression and being perceived as a cis woman by partners, family, and the world around me. I reached a breaking point. Walking around the old city of Jerusalem, surrounded by gendered expressions of religious devotion and religious expressions of gender, I realized I would need to medically and socially transition to live as my truest self.
One early morning, I walked to the Western Wall, the holiest site for the Jewish people, and stood for a while on the women’s side. Surrounded by women and girls lost in prayer, their heads pressed against the ancient stone, I found myself starting to cry. I realized this would likely be the last time I could ever stand on the women’s side of the Western Wall and be true to myself before G!d, surrounded by a political reality that was undoubtedly corrupting the many spiritual hearts of this holy land.
I was in a profound wilderness, a spiritual crisis, and a deep depression. In other words, I had what Rabbi Benay Lappe calls a crash. A crash is the pivotal moment when you realize your life is not going to turn out the way you planned.
I wish I could say I had a moment of revelation, looking over Jerusalem basked in the golden morning light and feeling a clear call towards my future. But like most journeys through the wilderness, this call lay muffled and distant. Instead, what emerged over time, with the support of friends and family, therapy and self-reflection, was that I needed to invest in radical imagination.
As a child, I spent hours entertaining myself with stories about worlds that did not exist. My daily life was grounded in play, creation, and dreaming beyond the norms of reality. When we realize our lives will not turn out the way we planned, we are called to reach back toward our child-selves and re-access the imagination that flowed freely within us in our youth. Like children, we need to see the world as a space of endless possibility.
But as adults, we are not often given permission to engage and play with radical imagination.
So, what do we need in order to imagine?
First, we need community.
We need people to trust and to explore ideas with. We need people who are like us and who can serve as models for who we can become.
Second, we need time and space.
We need time to rest and we need Sabbath. We need art we don’t have to be good at and respite from productivity culture.
Finally, we need grief. We need spaces to hold the names we no longer carry. We need rituals to honor the dreams of our parents that we will not be living out.
As queer and trans people, political radicals, abolitionists and anti-zionists, imagination is our calling. As people who exist in the hyphen, the slash, the parenthetical and the in-between, imagination is, and has always been, our home.