Against the Rapture States
Finding the future in my past
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new Guardian essay “The Rise of End Times Fascism” is a bracing read. Klein and Taylor diagnose the dismantling of government by DOGE and the tech broligarchs yearning for sovereign cities and the colonization of Mars as evangelically inflected fantasies of the Rapture, “when the faithful will supposedly be lifted up to a golden city in heaven, while the damned are left to endure an apocalyptic final battle down here on earth.” Most of their essay, in good hellfire sermon fashion, is devoted to detailing the grotesque consequences of these beliefs, which we are all suffering through now. Toward the end they unfold the beginnings of a counter-ideology called Doiykayt, a Yiddish word meaning “hereness”:
Go back far enough and every culture and faith has its own tradition of respecting the sanctity of here, and not searching for Zion in an elusive ever-distant promised land. In eastern Europe, before the fascist and Stalinist annihilations, the Jewish socialist Labor Bund organized around the yiddish concept of Doikayt, or “hereness”. Molly Crabapple, who has written a forthcoming book about this neglected history, defines Doikayt as the right to “fight for freedom and safety in the places where they lived, in defiance of everyone who wanted them dead” – and rather than be forced to flee to safety in Palestine or the United States. Perhaps what is needed is a modern-day universalization of that concept: a commitment to the right to the “hereness” of this particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable shocks forces us to move. “Hereness” can be portable, free of nationalism, rooted in solidarity, respectful of indigenous rights and unbounded by borders.
As most of my readers know, I’ve written a science fiction novel, Concord, about one of these technological Zions and its moral consequences for its creators. It’s been a source of unceasing frustration for me to have written something so goddamn timely but not to have been able to find a publisher for it. But my literary career ought to matter less to me than the use of literature to understand the world that made me, and which in some small way I am trying to make.
For as long as I can remember I’ve been preoccupied with utopia and its opposite; it’s the consistent thread running through all my writing, at least as far as my first poetry collection, Selah. Utopia begins with lived experiences from my childhood: early memories of Star Island, the Unitarian conference center off the coast of New Hampshire where my family spent a few key summers in the mid-1970s, along with another similar center called Ferry Beach in Maine. These memories are contained within a few images: the ferry ride to the island, passing buoys with bells in them, a thrilling voyage for a small boy away from the mundanity of the New Jersey suburbs toward what might as well have been the Grey Havens. The island itself, with its rambling turn of the century hotel converted to a conference center, beneath which a vast lawn ran down to the water. The big lobby with its velvet island sofas and wallpaper covered with tiny hanged pirates. My mom reading a book in an Adirondack chair on the endless porch; my dad playing his guitar at a campfire on the rocky beach. A candelight procession ceremony closing out the conference, the night before we sailed home. An enormous light-filled moon hanging over us kids running in white clothes through the dark.
This was my first glimpse of collective living, which in spite of the picture above was far from luxurious. Everyone ate together in a big dining room, and people were expected to help out with the dishes. The rooms were bare bones; my sister and I slept, I think, on bunk beds. The programming centered on creativity, spirituality, and social justice (looks like they’re still at it). The water was freezing, even in summer. But I loved it. The fresh air on that island filled my lungs permanently. And my parents loved it too. We moved on from Star Island to Ferry Beach in my teen years—it was there I discovered another portable utopia, Dungeons and Dragons. And they tried to build utopia at home, on Headley Road in Morristown, New Jersey.
For four or five years the Coreys shared a house with the Gelbeins, transforming our two nuclear families into something else. Abe and Joan were my parents’ closest friends; in an inspired, clumsy mix of socialism and capitalism they bought together a small Georgian mansion they couldn’t quite afford and we all lived together, happily at first and then contentiously as the cost in money and labor of maintaining the place began to mount. I went from ages nine to thirteen in that house, mostly oblivious to the bickering and to how unusual our living arrangements were. Although each family had its bedrooms in different wings of the house, it was not divided; we ate together, celebrated holidays together, and fought together. It was in that house that my mom was diagnosed with cancer for the first time; I imagine that having Abe and Joan around for support must have made that a bit easier for her and my father to bear. (None of these folks are still around for me to ask, alas, though my semi-sisters, the Gelbein girls, are still with us.) Still, the strain of communal living eventually became too much; I remember the breaking point as coming one summer when my father and Abe broke their backs stripping all the ivy off the brick facade of the house. It seems all too symbolical: ivy is bad for bricks, yes, but when it all came down the house became naked and unbeautiful. There was some disagreement, I think, about whether and how to do it, as well as what may have been the unequal distribution of expenses. My family moved out, circa 1984, and the Gelbeins lived there on there own for a few years longer before decamping to the Midwest, where Joan became a Unitarian minister.
We were Jews turned Unitarians: Jewnitarians. Whatever spiritual life I have remains a compound of these two things: I carry within me the spirit of Concord that informed Paul Ratzlaff’s sermons at the Morristown Unitarian Fellowship (with its unfortunate acronym) throughout my adolesence. It was a congregation of well-meaning bien pensant liberals; my mother once made gentle fun of them in a poem:
SUNDAY SERVICE by Judith Montag Corey Singing in a high pitched voice the sentimental music of black people. Written by a white man for profit in front of a congregation of well-buttoned intellectuals clutching balloons.
God, I miss those people. I miss the feeling I had when I was a kid that liberalism was the rising, inevitable force—the moral arc of the universe, blah blah blah. Even though it was the age of Reagan and Star Wars and greed-is-good. Then in 1991 the Berlin Wall fell and it seemed like utopia, or at least a genuinely better world, would fall into our laps. I did not miss the other world promised by actually existing Communism. I did not miss the fear—impossible to communicate to younger generations—of everything being annihilated all at once without warning by nuclear light.
But the end of the world was always there. Klein and Taylor remind me that the United States of America is the original rapture state: the Zion from which Europeans fled in search of religious freedom and unlimited profit, exterminating the indigenous people who stood inconveniently in their way. Israel too is a rapture state, in an even more literal sense, since American evangelical support of its genocidal government is rooted not in any love for Jews but in a desire to bring about the Rapture with a capital-R. That is to say, the end of the world, already in progress.
The flight to safety is in my bones: as a child of the Transcendentalists, who were children of the Puritans; as the son of a Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust while separated from her parents and who then came to this country in search of a better life. The dream of Zion and its inevitable failure is the primary engine of my imagination. But I like Doikayt. I like that it’s a Yiddish word and that it’s a concept from the heart of diasporic socialist Jewry. I like it as a response to the rapture-poisoned Zionism that builds bunkers (some of them the size of a country) and energy-depleting data centers, and that deports human beings to foreign prisons with the cold efficiency of an Amazon shipment. I well understand the fantasy of escape: to Portgual, to New Zealand, to Germany (of all places), to anyplace that still tries to maintain the values of cosmpolitan civilization. But I’m sticking. Here and now, on this patch of ground in northern Illinois, in this great and troubled city, part of a nation with a poisonous past that could still, potentially, be good.
“Life,” Wallace Stevens wrote, “is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.” Isn’t that the trouble with all of us, who think that we can escape to a place and make a life there, without all these inconvenient people making demands on us? That’s what the floating settlers of my fictional island are trying to do. If the book is ever available and if you ever care to read it, you’ll discover where that impulse leads.
Klein and Taylor cite the singer-songwriter Anohni as part of their diagnosis of what ails the tech bros—and us: “a very long-held myth that we are enacting and embodying. This is the culmination of their Rapture. This is their escape from the voluptuous cycle of creation. This is their escape from Mother.”
Not to spoil things, but the central absent figure of Concord is a mother, Suzanne, once wedded to the technocapitalist creator of Concord, who ultimately refuses to abet his flight from life. Her unexpected return, and the persistence of the life of the Earth, is at the novel’s heart. It’s my heart as well.
I like your mother's poem.