It's the End of the World
Reflecting on what it's like when everything you know falls apart, and how you pick the pieces back up again. And how it can help us deal with fascism.
It was 2019, I was broke, and I was feeling hopeless and defeated.
I had been working for the past 5 or so years to build a Jewish community in Brooklyn. I had put all my heart and soul into it, convinced that it was my life’s mission. And that was part of 5 years before having planned to build it, imagining it, dreaming of it.
After years of building, I finally secured enough funding to work on the community full-time. It felt like the dream was becoming real.
But right around that time, I also was going through a personal transformation. My experience with the community and the publication it had spawned had made me aware of systemic abuse in my Orthodox and Hasidic communities. And Trump’s rise had caused me to move from the right wing views I had adopted.
That work killed my work with funders, who were afraid to touch these divisive topics.
So shortly after I went full time, the funding dried up. Some of our community members had also left because of my activism. And the publication had to shut down.
I kept holding on, though. Because it was my life’s work. It was my mission. It was everything. I couldn’t imagine anything else.
It didn’t take too long after for the money to completely dry up. And I was facing something that only a year before I could not have imagined.
I was broke. I was hopeless. I was defeated. Even though I couldn’t let go, the world was making me anyway.
I spoke with my therapist as I was coming to terms with it all. I told him that it felt like the end of the world. Not like, a metaphorical end of the world. It felt truly, like the entire world was dying, was over. I was lost in it. My life mission was disappearing. My money was gone. My community dissolving. My friends leaving.
To guide me, my therapist asked me what would come next. To think about what I saw happening if it all truly ended.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I literally cannot see anything. When I try to imagine the future, it is blank.”
That was the thing, he pointed out.
“You envision the end of the world because you haven’t imagined a future. But there will be a future. No matter what.”
The imagining took time. For a while, it was just about surviving. I needed a job. Jewish organizations wouldn’t hire me. When Jewish organizations wouldn’t hire me, I returned to marketing, accepting a job out of sheer necessity. I just needed money in my bank account.
I still couldn’t imagine what came next, all I could do was live it. But already, walking into my first day at the job, inhabiting work that I thought I would never do again, I was seeing that something was happening. And that the next steps of my life were happening no matter what, just as my therapist had said. The blankness was being painted over. I just couldn’t see the full painting yet.
Eventually, my job went well enough that they offered to move me to California to set up a new base of operations.
But, in many ways, my life was far darker than before. By the time we moved, I was broken, traumatized from my community, and had completely left Orthodoxy. It was COVID, so we were completely isolated, with no friends, let alone a community. My purpose felt blank. I wasn’t writing. With the entire world shut down, in many ways it really did feel like the end of the world.
Even so, life moved forward. As much as I expected an “end” to the story, there was no end. That’s not how time works. Time means change. On a physical level, every single moment is new, different than the one before. There is no going back, there is no stopping. There is only going forward.
Imagination is nice, but when I couldn’t muster anything due to the trauma, the world filled in the blanks for me. All I could do was stay in the present and work my way through it step by step.
It was in the healing that I found a new purpose. I heal by learning, and I needed to study the extremism I had left behind. I needed to know what drew me to it. Why other people are drawn to it. Why it had overlapped so well with extremism in the world and the rising fascist movement in the United States.
The more I learned, the more I could see the tendrils of authoritarianism, fascism, and extremism everywhere. It wasn’t just about Hasidic communities, and it wasn’t just about Trump. Authoritarianism was the air we breathed, and the empty, capitalist, communally deadened, boring world we inhabited was what lowered our immune systems and let it in.
Healing more and more, my wife and I decided to move to Los Angeles. Back in a mindset of fighting for good, slowly, I started my own marketing agency, one that would allow me to use my skills while still making it about justice work. I started writing again. I began to connect with progressives. My imagination was starting to stir. I could begin to see a future again.
Time had allowed me to heal, allowed me to grow. The change it brought with it also stirred change within. A new life spawned.
I am sharing this all with you because today feels like another day that’s the end of the world. And in many ways, it really is. The liberal agenda as the Democrats sold it to us is dead. Centrism is dead, and the people who believe in it will need to decide whether they absorb into the fascist collective or choose something else. It is possible that democracy itself as we experience it in America may be dead. Either way, it is dying.
The future we are about to experience will be very hard. The most vulnerable will be the ones most affected. None of this is minor. Trans people, immigrants, poor people, working class people, women, and many more will be targeted in ways we can only begin to conceive of.
Yes, it’s the end of the world. And that shouldn’t be downplayed. We shouldn’t lie to ourselves.
And.
I shared with you my story above because I want to share the lessons I’ve learned from that and how they apply to the moment we are in. I know it’s not in any sense on the grand scale of this moment, and it is not meant to diminish it.
The Hasidim, the Sufis, Taoism, the Hindu mystics, and many others teach that the small is a reflection of the big and vice versa. What we experience in our individual lives exists in the world around us and in the spiritual world.
So yes. This is the end of the world. Life here and in the rest of the world will never be the same.
It is in many ways impossible to know what will come next. We are going to deal with our own trauma as we pass through it, and part of it will be ensuring simply that we survive, that we are safe. We can’t see the painting yet.
But the end of this world also means the birth of a new one. And while birth is painful, it is still new life. Time still passes. The atoms still move in each moment.
I am often asked if I regret leaving my community. I did, really, for years. I missed them so much. It was the only time in my life that I felt like I belonged. I had always felt I was walking alone in the world, not understanding it and it not understanding me. So leaving was beyond painful, and going to a city without knowing anyone felt like cutting my arm off.
But as I look back today, my view has changed. The end of my community was happening no matter what. Leaving Orthodoxy was going to happen either way. The money just could not be there with the new choices I had made.
But because I couldn’t imagine a new life, I just held onto the old one. And it was that holding on that caused me the most suffering, truly. It was what led to being even more broke, even more hurt by the rejection, even more hurt by the negative reactions I was getting.
It was the holding on that caused the most suffering.
The truth is that this world was going to end anyway. It was always unsustainable to imagine that we could just hold onto the status quo. That was what Biden represented to people, the hope that they could somehow freeze time with an old school politician.
But Biden himself couldn’t even be that for them. Time moved forward for him just as it did for our dying democracy, and it soon became impossible for people to ignore that they couldn’t freeze 90s politicians nor the era they represented. We can try and freeze time, but time will move forward either way.
That failure, though, can be a guiding light for how we enter the age of fascism in America. Because now that we look at the old neoliberal agenda falling apart around us, there is an opportunity to find hope in the ashes.
The opportunity is in the letting go. Because in letting go, we can finally mourn our lost democracy instead of holding onto the past with a vice grip.
There will be many people today who will try and gaslight you into thinking that it is still possible to hold onto that old world. They will talk about what Democrats can do better “next time” as if next time will be in any sense the same as the past. They will try to make it seem that the changes you see in front of your eyes aren’t that bad.
They have done it since 2016.
They do this all because, in truth, they are gaslighting themselves. They are holding onto a world they are afraid to mourn. And they are afraid to understand the implications of mourning, not to mention letting go of the benefits that time gave them.
The rest of us don’t need to do that. We can look at the world as it is, because in it are both the bad and the good of time marching forward.
Mourning will allow us to move forward because it will also be an acceptance of change. It will be an acceptance that the world of the past truly is over. And, just as importantly, it is an acknowledgment that something comes next.
It is now 2024, 5 years after I acknowledged it was all over for me. Since moving to Los Angeles, I have found a home to live in. My agency is growing. I have built a new Jewish identity and live in a Jewish area again. I am writing more than I ever did. And, most importantly, I am part of and building a new community again. I am happier, healthier, more balanced, and more stable than I ever have in my entire life.
As I look back on my life in Brooklyn, I am now kind of amazed that I was holding on so hard. I understand the emotions and all that. But what I was holding onto looks so small in retrospect. It was in such a tiny niche, not the real world-changing work I had always wanted to do. It was within a belief system that was narrow, small, inward focused.
The life I’ve chosen today is really just more me. That new community is multi-racial, multi-ethnic, interfaith, and we envision building a movement. We are creators, dreamers, healers, and warriors. It is in this community that I finally feel like I am living the life I always wanted.
My work in learning about extremism taught me how to see that the world of the past was dying, and was really more of an illusion than anything. It brought me to a philosophy and a belief system that was inherently based in democracy, progressivism, and spirituality. In other words, a vision and belief system within myself that reflects the world I’m building with those near me. I feel an alignment I never felt before.
In other words, 5 years later, I have absolutely no desire to go backwards.
I had to go through years of hell before getting here. I had to grapple without seeing where I was going for a long time. I had to be alone in the middle of a pandemic. I had to recover from deep trauma. But I got here.
People are surprised that I write so much about extremism, study it, and visit the place extremists inhabit online, and yet am so hopeful.
There are many reasons I feel this way, but a big one is what I have experienced in my life story. In addition to this story I just told you, there are other times I have lost everything. In college, I had a manic episode that led to a psychotic episode that led to a near death experience that led to a psychiatric hospital stay. I was left with no friends, no money, no idea what I would do next. And yet, here I am.
I have been beaten by police in Israel, visited towns during war as rockets rained down on them.
And yet here I am.
This is why I both embrace extremism as my life’s work while also envisioning a better world in the future. I do not believe they contradict. Rather, I think that the extremism of the present is a symptom of the sickness of our society as it has been for ages. And I see the present fascism as the next stage in that illness.
But that sickness has always had the same cure: pluralistic, true democracy. Not the fake one that just died. Not one that attaches itself to money, individualism, and power for the sake of power. Not one that still holds onto the remnants of slavery.
A true democracy. One based in solidarity. In power that is built for the less of us instead of those on the top. One where collectivism is prioritized over individualism. One where spirituality (a sense of meaning) is higher than materialism. One where the widow and the stranger are prioritized.
Hope is not optimism. The world is ending. People are suffering. And there is no way to guarantee where or how we come out of this.
But there are things we do know. They are simply facts of life.
Time passes. Things change. Death means new life. Change leads to new opportunities. Letting go of the old allows us to imagine something completely new. Our ability to experience trauma is matched by our ability to heal.
These are facts. They do not require hope to believe in because they simply are, whether we accept them or not.
But these facts are tools that can allow us to build hope. Because they mean we have agency, and that we can take advantage of the inherent change built into times where worlds end.