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 prism/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,^[1] 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.”)

From her autobiographical work, Living My Life (1931):

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. (p. 56)

This post was first published on my Facebook page on International Womens Day, 8 March 2018. I later adapted this Emma Goldman quote into a reading shared through the Open Siddur Project.

1. This incident was the source of a statement commonly attributed to Goldman that occurs in several variants:

   • 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.
   • A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.
   • If there won’t be dancing at the revolution, I’m not coming.[↩]

About Aharon N. Varady

Aharon's Omphalos is the hobbit hole of Aharon Varady, founding director of the Open Siddur Project. He is a community planner and environmental educator working to improve stewardship of the Public Domain, be it the physical and natural commons of urban park systems or the creative and cultural commons of libraries and museums. His advocacy for open-source strategies in the Jewish community has been written about in the Atlantic Magazine, the Yiddish Forverts, Tablet, and Haaretz. He is particularly interested in pedagogies for advancing ecological wisdom, developing creative and emotional intelligence, and realizing effective theurgical praxes. He welcomes your comments, personal messages, and kind words. If you find his work helpful to your own or you'd simply like to support him, please consider donating via his Patreon account.

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“If I can’t trip to it, it’s not my religion!” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.