Emma Goldman on “Everybody’s Right to Beautiful, Radiant Things” (1931)

Contributor(s): Emma Goldman and Aharon N. Varady (transcription)

Shared on: 2 May 2024 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

Categories: Sefirat ha-Omer, Pedagogical Essays on Jewish Prayer

Tags: 20th century C.E., 57th century A.M., political and religious anarchism, first person, Freedom, Humanist, Jewish liberation, liberation, liberation from mitsrayim

I do believe that periodically, it is worthwhile to reflect on whether one’s religious practice is nurturing one’s creativity, curiosity, and compassion or yet another grim prison through which our perception of the Cosmos and our fellow inhabitants is terminally circumscribed, or worse: a worldview and ethos sanctioning for us the willful harm, oppression, and even predation of other beings. Adapting the phrase commonly attributed to Emma Goldman (see below), I try to remind myself: “If I can’t trip to it, it’s not my religion!” (and, If you’re causing harm to others through your praxis, then you’re most certainly “doing it wrong.”)

This reflection is, it seems to me, well suited for the period of reflection during the Sefirat ha-Omer, as we are now in the Midbar, and well on our way to who-knows-what (a theophany!) and it was in the Midbar that Mosheh had insistingly requested of Pharaoh that we depart to experience, through freedom, a divine Nature otherwise hidden behind the constraints, conventions, and familiar expectations of servitude. Are we free yet? How will we know? And what constraints must we accede to willingly to best appreciate this freedom, together, and safely so.

Note: I have added emphasis to Emma Goldman’s references to “the cause” after the convention of Isaac Gantwerk Mayer to substitute “the cause” as a circumlocution for the tetragrammaton,^[1] The note on the idiosyncratic circumlocution reads as follows: “The CAUSE” is used to translate the Divine Name YHVH, based on the philosophical idea of God as the Prime Mover and on the interpretation of the Name as a causative form of the copula – “causes to be.” and after the Open Siddur Project’s style guide suggestion to style divine names and epithets in unicase. This is not to misrepresent Goldman’s dedication to anarchism as something else. Rather, I do this suggestively to highlight what seems to me to be two inescapable truths: 1) that the experience of divinity (or its proxy: divine authority) will reassert itself under a new name and guise, in any place people imagine that the delusion of divinity has been undone or abandoned, and 2) that experiencing “beautiful, radiant things” is a consequence of embracing the freedom of our lives with kind consideration of each other’s mutual needs in “the midbar” — the wilderness, in the myriad ways we encounter its mysteries.

TOGGLE COLUMNS (on/off):

ADJUST COLUMN POSITIONS: select the column header cell and drag it where you want. show me!

COPY INDIVIDUAL COLUMN(S): use CopyTables, a browser extension.

TABLE HELP

Contribute a translation

Source (English)

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest.
One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside.
With a grave face,
as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade,
he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance.
Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway.
It was undignified
for one who was
on the way
to become a force
in the anarchist movement.
My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy.
I told him to mind his own business.
I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my face.
I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal,
for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice,
should demand the denial of life and joy.
I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun
and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister.
If it meant that, I did not want it.
“I want freedom, the right to self-expression,
everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”
Anarchism meant that to me,
and I would live it in spite of the whole world —
prisons, persecution, everything.
Yes, even in spite of the condemnation
of my own closest comrades
I would live my beautiful ideal.

As excerpted from Emma Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life, vol. Ⅰ (1931), p. 56. This incident was the source of a statement commonly attributed to Goldman that occurs in several variants:^[2] As detailed in the wikipedia article on Emma Goldman.

• If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution!
• If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution!
• If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.
• If there won’t be dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming.
• A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.

Consider supplementing this reading with a reflection on the tale of Aharon’s sons Nadav and Avihu and what cautious lesson it suggests in approaching divine or mysterious powers prudently. —Aharon Varady

Notes

Notes
1	The note on the idiosyncratic circumlocution reads as follows: “The CAUSE” is used to translate the Divine Name YHVH, based on the philosophical idea of God as the Prime Mover and on the interpretation of the Name as a causative form of the copula – “causes to be.”
2	As detailed in the wikipedia article on Emma Goldman.

. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike . 4.0 . International .

“Emma Goldman on “Everybody’s Right to Beautiful, Radiant Things” (1931)” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman (Yiddish: עממא גאלדמאן, June 27 [O.S. June 15], 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist political activist and writer. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Born in Kovno, Russian Empire (now Kaunas, Lithuania) to a Jewish family, Goldman emigrated to the United States in 1885. Attracted to anarchism after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist philosophy, women's rights, and social issues, attracting crowds of thousands. She and anarchist writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong friend, planned to assassinate industrialist and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of propaganda of the deed. Frick survived the attempt on his life in 1892, and Berkman was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Goldman was imprisoned several times in the years that followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally distributing information about birth control. In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal Mother Earth. In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to "induce persons not to register" for the newly instated draft. After their release from prison, they were arrested—along with 248 others—and deported to Russia. Initially supportive of that country's October Revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power, Goldman changed her opinion in the wake of the Kronstadt rebellion; she denounced the Soviet Union for its violent repression of independent voices. She left the Soviet Union and in 1923 published a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment in Russia. While living in England, Canada, and France, she wrote an autobiography called Living My Life. It was published in two volumes, in 1931 and 1935. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Goldman traveled to Spain to support the anarchist revolution there. She died in Toronto, Canada, on May 14, 1940, aged 70. During her life, Goldman was lionized as a freethinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and denounced by detractors as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman gained iconic status in the 1970s by a revival of interest in her life, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest. (via her entry in Wikipedia)

Aharon N. Varady (transcription)

Aharon Varady (M.A.J.Ed./JTSA Davidson) is a volunteer transcriber for the Open Siddur Project. If you find any mistakes in his transcriptions, please let him know. Shgiyot mi yavin; Ministarot naqeni שְׁגִיאוֹת מִי־יָבִין; מִנִּסְתָּרוֹת נַקֵּנִי "Who can know all one's flaws? From hidden errors, correct me" (Psalms 19:13). If you'd like to directly support his work, please consider donating via his Patreon account. (Varady also translates prayers and contributes his own original work besides serving as the primary shammes of the Open Siddur Project and its website, opensiddur.org.)

Stable Link: https://opensiddur.org/?p=55739

Associated Image:

Contact Improv (credit: Adam Meyer, license: CC BY-NC-ND)

(This image is set to automatically show as the "featured image" in category pages and in shared links on social media.)

Source Data: XML | JSON

Re-formatted: HTML | ODT

Terms of Use: Be a mentsch (a conscientious, considerate person) and adhere to the following guidelines:

Properly attribute the work to Emma Goldman and Aharon N. Varady (transcription).
Clearly indicate the date you accessed the work and in what ways, if any, you modified it. (If you have adapted the work, let us know so that the contributor might consider endorsing your revision.)
Provide the stable link to this resource: <https://opensiddur.org/?p=55739>.
Indicate that the original work was shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license. (To redistribute or remix this work in any format, modified or unmodified, you must refer to the terms of the license under which the work is shared.)

Additional Notes:

The views expressed in this work represent the views of their creator(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Open Siddur Project's developers, its diverse community of volunteer contributors, or its institutional partners.
We strongly advise against printing sacred texts and art containing divine names as these copies must be regarded with reverence, complicating their casual treatment and disposal.
If you must dispose of a printed sacred text (one containing Divine Names), please locate the closest genizah (often established by a synagogue) and contact its custodians for further instructions. We also recommend using Morah Yehudis Fishman's Prayer for Adding a Work to the Genizah.

Support this work: The Open Siddur Project is a volunteer-driven, non-profit, non-commercial, non-denominational, non-prescriptive, gratis & libre Open Access archive of contemplative praxes, liturgical readings, and Jewish prayer literature (historic and contemporary, familiar and obscure) composed in every era, region, and language Jews have ever prayed. Our goal is to provide a platform for sharing open-source resources, tools, and content for individuals and communities crafting their own prayerbook (siddur). Through this we hope to empower personal autonomy, preserve customs, and foster creativity in religious culture.

ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established." –Psalms 90:17

Pocket Reddit Facebook Bluesky Telegram WhatsApp SMS Email