Back in the spring of 2017, Timothy Snyder’s recently published book, On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century [1]made a popular seder gift. It was an inexpensive paperback, could be read in one sitting, and it seemed to speak to our moment. Donald Trump had been in office for a few months, and we were just beginning to understand what it might mean to live in a country that elected a would-be autocrat. Snyder had spent decades studying societies that had succumbed to tyranny, particularly the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe. What did ordinary citizens remember about those times? What could we learn about our role in our moment?
Fast forward to November 2020. When Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump, many of us were elated. Trump’s malevolence had, it appeared, been tempered by his incompetence. Of course, our society was not without wounds: a pandemic mishandled, our Supreme Court damaged, xenophobia normalized. But our democracy appeared to have survived. The rule of law was still in place We had dodged the proverbial bullet. Maybe we would not need as much resilience going forward as we had feared.
On January 9, 2021, just three days after the failed coup of January 6, Snyder published an article in The New York Times Magazine. [2]. He explained how what we had just witnessed was not a surprise. Rather, he had been preparing the article for months before. Snyder’s study of Europe in the last century had led him to expect an insurrection. He based his expectation on Trump’s own words. He warned that Americans will tend to underestimate the ongoing danger that had been unleashed.
My friends and colleagues began digging around for our copies of Snyder’s 2017 book. Perhaps it was time to reread. As I began writing this essay in early July 2024, we were ordering extra copies. And we were not waiting til next Pesach to give them to our friends. Close to half the country is preparing to vote for Trump again. And the worry is not just about one man, charismatic though he may be. As Snyder says, “Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the 20th century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism.” [3]
Over the years, I have found Snyder’s words frighteningly apt. “Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen.” Snyder’s 20 lessons are about moving from stagnation on the chair and the screen to personal and communal transformation.
That doesn’t happen by magic. Consider Lesson 20: Be as Courageous as you can. I grew up hearing about the courage of Rosa Parks, a simple seamstress who one afternoon, the story goes, was too tired to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. The actual story is more interesting. Rosa Parks did not decide to resist and break the law in a moment of inspiration. Nor did she suddenly develop the habits of mind and heart, skills and muscle memory to do so. When Rosa Parks was arrested, she was mentally prepared. Earlier that summer, she had attended a workshop on implementing integration at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn. Highlander was a leadership training site, founded in 1932 by a student of Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Rosa Parks was in practice
One might think of Snyder’s 20 lessons as practices. The word practice has a specific meaning in the social sciences, and an extended meaning in the language of the sociology of religion. Robert Wuthnow, in an exploration of the word “spiritual,” has written about the search for God through “practice-oriented spirituality.” In contrast to spiritualities he calls “dwelling” and seeking,” Wuthnow describes practices as times when people “engage intentionally in activities that deepen their relationship to the sacred. He explains : ‘In many cases, these activities are life-transforming, causing people to engage in service to others and to lead their lives in a worshipful manner.” [4]
Writing about spiritual practice, Stephanie Paulsell, a Harvard Divinity School professor, reminds us that “ancient philosophical movements focused less on articulating doctrines about the good, about justice, about truth and more on cultivating the practices that would create an orientation toward life.” In short, she says “we can’t just think our way to the people we want to become. No matter what beliefs we profess, it’s our choices moment to moment about how we spend our time, how we respond to others, and the quality of the attention that we bring to the world that give our life its shape and its meaning” [5]
Turning to Judaism, what is called law in a traditional framework can be meaningfully recast as spiritual practice. Rabbinic Judaism, like ancient philosophical movements, did not articulate theology so much as tell us how to behave—morning, noon and night, eating, resting, praying, engaging in business, marking the year and the life cycle. Rabbi Michael Strassfeld writes powerfully about his own evolution. The three volumes of The Jewish Catalogue that he co-edited contained brilliant retooling of ritual and custom, mitzvot for those no longer in the halachic system. They could now be embraced a la carte in a do-it-yourself version of Judaism as beautiful and creative, joyful and enticing. In A Book of Life: Embracing Judaism as a Spiritual Practice, [6]Strassfeld goes further. As he explains later his book Judaism Disrupted: A Spiritual Manifesto for the 21st Century,[7] Strassfeld was encouraged to revisit the Catalogues 25 years after they were written. He realized, in part through his personal engagement in a Buddhist practice with Jewish meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein, that he now understood Judaism more deeply. As spiritual practice, the tzitzits and kashrut, the sukkah building and challah making can be embraced as transformative spiritual disciplines. They do not only enrich our lives. When practiced with rigor, they can help us to awaken to holiness, to become better people, and to create a better world.
As we consider how to organize our lives in the face of the potential loss of democracy, we can see the lessons Timothy Snyder proposes as spiritual disciplines. Reb Zalman reminded us that a practice is best taught along with a story. For example, the Jewish practice of hospitality (one that could easily be added to Snyder’s list) comes with a narrative attached. In Genesis 18:1-2, we learn that Abraham welcomed strangers in the heat of the day, strangers who later turned out to be divine messengers. The midrash embellishes the story by reading these verses to suggest that Abraham turns away from God to perform the important practice of hospitality. The Talmud report’s Rav’s understanding that what Abraham is teaching here is that “welcoming guests is greater than welcoming the presence of the Shechinah” (bt Shabbat 127a).
The story of creation found in Lurianic Kabbalah provides a powerful narrative scaffolding for a spirituality of practice. The story confirms what we see: the world is broken and in need of repair. In connecting to God, we transform ourselves. Religious practices bring us closer to the experience of the godly, to becoming the kind of people God would want. This leads to building the kind of world God intended in the first place.
Of course, this happens in small, often minute, steps. Snyder calls it “the politics of the everyday.”[8] Each time a Jew does a mitzvah, there is a tiny healing, a tikkun. Applied to a spirituality of practice, the story provides hope. As we consider the 20 practices Snyder suggests, we realize that many provide only miniature fixes. If I put up a rainbow flag on my porch, I have not passed legislation for gay rights. At best, passing drivers notice. But I have taken responsibility for the shape of my world. (Lesson 13)
None of us knows what the future will bring. Much like training for a marathon, we want to strengthen ourselves for the battles that may lie ahead.
During the dark days of the Trump administration, Jungian therapist and poet Clarissa Pinkola Estes encouraged readers not to “spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope…the fact is – we were made for these times.”[9]
Perhaps we were made for these times. Or perhaps not. But in any case, as Snyder reminds us, we need to make ourselves ready for them. As Sylvia Boorstein suggested with the title of one of her lectures, “These are the times we are practicing for.”[10]
[1] New York: Crown, 2017
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html
[3] https://timothysnyder.org/academic-work
[4] After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950’s; Berkeley: U of Cal Press, 1996, pp 169
[5] . https://memorialchurch.harvard.edu/blog/practicing-hope
[6] New York: Schocken Books, 2002.
[7] New York: Ben Yehudah Press, 2023
[8] Snyder, p.33
[9] https://www.dailygood.org/story/1538/do-not-lose-heart-we-were-made-for-these-times-clarissa-pinkola-estes/
[10] https://www.1440.org/blog/these-are-the-times-we-practice-forsage-advice-from-sylvia-boorstein
