Living On The Cusp Of A Whirlwind
What if you're the single cell that sets it all off?
Come study and practice with me!
I’m offering a 5-week online program, February 26 – March 26, 2026, in line with my forthcoming book, to examine our collective emotional responses to the crises of our time and learn to find inspiration even in the depths of despair.
Explore your emotions with curiosity – building resilience and working with the energy within our bodies. The Institute for Jewish Spirituality has a number of wonderful offerings you can check out here; you don’t need to be Jewish to sign up!
Hello friends.
On Saturday, I wanted to get in my regular run, but also wanted to protest ICE because I couldn’t make it to the big march on Sunday, but also wanted to spend time with my kids. So, after strawberry pancakes I ran 4 miles over the bridge directly to a small ICE protest in the rain in front of 26 Federal Plaza because I am nothing if not a hysterical optimizer. G-d forbid we fight fascism without a solid workout plan.
I spent a few minutes yelling “FUCK ICE!” with my fellow New Yorkers, which felt cathartic. Then I went to get my hair done, and then out for fancy cocktails like the bougie b*tch I fundamentally am.
Sunday, I had committed to a brunch for local climate leaders, which was great, but also meant I was missing both the big ICE march and the sustaining member meeting of the smaller climate group I hang wit. Then an editor saw my Facebook post about the arson attack in Jackson, Mississippi, at a synagogue I visited as a child, and asked me to write a piece for him about it, which I worked on until it was time to leave for the annual vision boarding party I host with my friends Elke and Jason Nunes at their community space in Ocean Hill.
This is my dream life, by the way. Not my dream world. But my dream life given this imperfect world. A life in an exciting city full of creativity and friendship and celebration and advocacy and writing and family, to be saying true things and to be in community with people making the world a better place.
Only problem is the world is NOT noticeably becoming a better place. So it’s hard to tell if any of this frenzy matters, or if I should just stick to the hair salon, the workout, the cocktails.
I haven’t cried for Renee Nicole Good yet, in case you are wondering. Underneath the chopped-up frenzy, an ocean of grief.
Where was I?
In social movement theory there is a concept called “the moment of the whirlwind.”
In Paul and Mark Engler’s 2016 movement bible This Is An Uprising, they attribute the phrase to Saul Alinsky, describing the rush of civil rights activity that followed the 1961 Freedom Rides.
The moment of the whirlwind is when nonviolent movements coalesce and gather the power that sweeps entrenched oppressive power structures away. The Berlin Wall. Tahrir Square. A highly disruptive activist campaign that succeeded in getting the Dutch government to ban fossil fuel subsidies just last year. Iran right now?
The rigidity and hollowness of institutions are exposed when they are no longer animated by public support. If they can’t move with the whirlwind, they will come down despite the violent force they exert.
These moments tend to start with a “trigger event,” a “highly publicized, shocking incident” that “dramatically reveals a critical social problem to the public in a vivid way.”
This event forces the public to take sides. It touches off a wave of activity that, the Englers write, “quickly spreads beyond the institutional control of any one organization. It inspires a rash of decentralized action, drawing in people previously unconnected to established movement groups.”
George Floyd’s murder was a trigger event, and Black Lives Matter was a moment of the whirlwind, although it might be another few decades before we can understand what it turned over and what it left us with after it touched ground. As a white person I don’t know that I’m fully equipped to judge.
I think there’s a good chance Renee Nicole Good’s killing, coming as part of a fresh onslaught of violent, unhinged behavior by the president’s paramilitary thugs, proves to be a trigger event. The triggers of this event include misogyny. Homophobia. State-sponsored terror. Viral video. And lies.
We have to sit with the fact that her killing resonated more than the 32 total deaths in ICE custody last year, the torture performed on people in El Salvador’s CECOT prison, or the violent deaths of Silverio Villegas González, Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdés, Jaime Alanis, Josué Castro Rivera, and Walter Francisco Cerrato Cabrera during ICE enforcement actions. And that’s uncomfortable.
But in order for the whirlwind to emerge, it must pull in people who haven’t shown up before. People who could maintain some kind of psychological illusion that the people being targeted are “not like me.” Now that illusion has been cracked.
Still, in order for many more people to show up they also have to believe it will matter. And I show up a bit already and I’m having trouble believing it will matter, so how can I convince other people who haven’t shown up yet?
In the climate world there is a rapidly evolving field known as “attribution science.” Using data and modeling, scientists are getting better at quickly attributing specific extreme weather events to climate change. In some studies, they are even calculating the monetary losses and damage to human health from environmental harm caused by particular fossil fuel companies responsible for certain climate emissions. This kind of evidence is being submitted as part of class action lawsuits, in state “polluters pay” laws, and in international “losses and damages” negotiations which determine the responsibility of rich countries to pay for the heat waves, floods and droughts suffered by poorer countries.
I wish we had attribution science to determine the contributions of our individual acts of protest and community building and aid and true speech and small kindnesses.
Gandhi referred to “raising a ferment in society,” and that is an alive idea.
Yeast is a tiny, single-celled organism. It’s in the air, invisible all around you. And when the conditions are right, it will rise. It can create an intoxicating brew.
In the absence of big-data modeling, we need to follow Kant and run the simulation in our minds best known as the categorical imperative: what if everyone did what I am doing? I don’t know which of these activities will help, but I will keep mixing the dough as sustainably as I can, not least because I know my kids are watching and they are getting old enough to follow me. No one person can knowingly set off a whirlwind. But also, without you it can’t happen.
There is a personal payoff too. My friend Elizabeth Svoboda just wrote about a study that showed that taking a small action, in line with your values, improves well-being and reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety. Simply reflecting on your values, without taking action, did not work. The researchers suspect this is because action amplifies a sense of agency—not the other way around.
We don’t have to feel empowered to act. We have to act to feel empowered.
My friend Jay Michaelson has an excellent, concrete set of things to do now:
And if you want to read my Forward piece, it is here:
I grew up dreaming not only of a mythical Yerushalayim but of a mythical New York City, a place I watched on Seinfeld and visited with my Sunday School class: where Jewish shrugs and cadences were the norm, where real-life Hasidim spoke Yiddish, where billboards on the Lower East Side advertised Passover wine. I firmly believed I would grow up, move out of the South, and leave behind Confederate flags and ugly antisemitic rhetoric for good.
I made it to New York City, but the antisemites aren’t history anymore. At this moment, violence and prejudice against Jews certainly feel like they’re accelerating. At Jacobs Camp, we used to joyfully sing a song that went, “Wherever you go, there’s always someone Jewish.” Now that sentiment makes me feel less powerful and more vulnerable, because whether it’s in Bondi Beach, Manchester, Boulder, or Jackson, Mississippi, members of my extended family are coming under attack.
But my visceral response to yet another incident like this isn’t only to be afraid and draw closer to fellow members of the tribe. I think about the reason that Nussbaum and his congregation were attacked 59 years ago. It’s because they embraced pluralism and coexistence. Because they loved justice and refused to back down to terrorists. Because they raised money for Black churches that were set on fire. They were on the side of the poor and the less powerful — the right side of history. That’s the kind of proud Southern Jew I want to be.
Finally, Climate Mental Health Network, where I am an advisor, has released its first impact report. I’m so proud of all we have been doing to make people feel less alone when facing emotions that arise in relation to climate change.