Joy as Resistance

Newsletter February 3rd, 2025 Together, we're #keepingitsacred...

Billy Crystal spoke  at the Fire Aid concert this past week about the importance of humor- even amidst devastating life experiences.

He learned this in 1963 when a beloved uncle employed humor at the shiva gathering following Crystal’s father’s untimely death. He saw how humor can help people move through awful experiences of loss.

Humor helped him process the tragedy of 9/11 and humor is helping him and his family now through the loss of their family home due to the Pacific Palisades fires.

At the Fire Aid concert, Crystal stressed that, “even in your worst pain, folks, it’s OK and it’s important to laugh."

Joy can carry us through devastating circumstances. Sometimes joy is all we have. 

In the 14th century, Spanish philosopher Hasdai Crescas lived through the pogroms across the Iberian peninsula in 1391 where 150,000 Jews converted to Christianity and his son among many others were killed. He recognized that even when, and perhaps especially when, we cannot control the circumstances of our lives, the outer world, at least we still can control our inner world. 

Crescas identified this minimal limit of free will.

It is comforting to know that though, at times, we may be forced to acknowledge that the world ISN’T always (or maybe is never) in our control, we know that how we process experiences internally IS always in our control. We have free will over our spiritual orientation to the events that shape our lives. 

When ruling powers would otherwise restrict us in other areas, this kind of exercise of free will becomes a powerful form of resistance.  

We learn this from the Black liberation movement, as well. I recently completed the book we have been reading for our Rosh Chodesh Racial Justice Book Review called We Refuse by Kellie Carter Jackson. Her last chapter is called "Joy," and shows how joy can be a powerful tool of Black resistance. 

Jackson recalls a powerful act of resistance during the Haitian revolution, when, "rebel women smiled at their masters as they were marched to their public execution… these warriors refused to be dehumanized.” (We Refuse, Kellie Carter Jackson, p.211)

Smiling, in this context, was a response to the ultimate degradation. When these women had no other power, they had the power of the smile. What they were grinning at, or laughing at, is up for interpretation.

Maybe they were laughing at the absurdity of slavery, racism and white supremacy.

Maybe they were laughing to assert a particular power— the ability to escape white supremacy for that one moment in their own minds.

Maybe they were grinning to rob their masters of the demented pleasure of seeing them suffer.

In any case, that kind of joy was a radical act of resistance. And it was experienced as such. 

Toward the end of the book, Jackson notes a tender scene of her 5-year-old showing her a video of herself doing a so-bad-its-hilarious karaoke version of a song from a cartoon. The two were in stitches laughing at it.

"What did this have to do with white supremacy?," Jackson asks at the end of the chapter. “Nothing. That is the point.” (We Refuse, Kellie Carter Jackson, p.240)

In this reflection, Jackson shows how within the expression of Black joy, one can divorce oneself from a degrading experience of white supremacy— and in that, is power. Self-autonomy. Choice. Resistance.  

The Jewish and Black and Black-Jewish communities have developed joy is an expression of self-autonomy in times of trauma. Joy can heal in these ways. Crystal, Crescas, and Jackson know it. And our Keeping It Sacred community works to affirm it.

Affirming the radical healing power of joy is how we’re keeping it sacred, during Black History Month, and always.

Together, we’re #keepingitsacred…

Rabbi Heather Miller,

Founder, Keeping It Sacred

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