Circles of Care

Drash for Songs, Skills & Stories for Fighting Fascism, at Let My People Sing, March 29th, 2026

Who is in your circle of care? Who would you let stay with you if they couldn’t go home, who would you wake up at 5am to drive to work? Who would you go with to their doctors appointments, or ask to come with to yours? Whose hobbies do you know about? Who do you know who’s looking for work and what they’re looking for?  

This year, the answers to all of those questions changed for me. If we are going to win against fascism, if we are going to survive, they need to change more, and for us all. 

Mutual aid as a term was popularized by Russian anarchist naturalist Peter Kropotkin in his 1902 book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. It is a name for something that was, for all of human history, just how people lived, but that 19th century Christian European men were profoundly bad at, and needed a book to teach them about. Kropotkin showed that, in contrast to ideas of social darwinism and survival of the fittest, humans like all animals survive and thrive through cooperation.  Dean Spade explains mutual aid as: “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them.” 

Traditional Jewish life, like all peoples whose ways of life were formed before capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy, does not need a word for mutual aid. It is an assumption of how we live that the community makes sure everyone has their basic needs met. “Collective coordination to meet each other’s needs” is also a way of describing a lion’s share of practical halacha. 

I’ve been part of movements for justice for 20 years. But my circle of care, and the day to day rhythm of my life, the collective coordination to meet each other’s needs that I’ve been a part of was family and like-minded friend groups. My family and friend networks are queer and sprawling, they are in many ways non-normative, but they are, at the end of the day, friends and family. That’s who I’d pick up if their car broke down. 

But, in the past few months, based on the necessity of crisis and urgency of conditions, that has changed. Now who I pick up from work, drop groceries off for, cash a rent check, just in the fabric of my daily lives, are my neighbors, whether or not we are friends.   

What was powerful about this time in Minneapolis is that it was a substantial transformation in our ways of relating: of who we are in relationship to, and how. There are rent funds, which we hope you donate to, and, there are also people, many, many people, asking our friends and family for money to give to our neighbors who we previously did not know at all. There are grocery and supply distribution centers, many many people volunteering for shifts. And, there were many of us who just included some grocery items for our neighbors in our shopping. People who used to drive just their own kids to school, who now drive their kids’ classmates to school. Retired elders who sit on their porch with a whistle at school drop off, recess, and pick up, whether or not they signed up on the spreadsheet. There are people trained in ICE watch, dispatch on rapid response calls. And, everyone has a whistle, and knows how to plate check an out of state, clean car, on our way driving anywhere, to see if it’s in the database of ICE plates. There is massive amounts of coordination happening, which I never ever want to minimize. And, why it worked is because of a transformation on the level of our relationships, our circles of care, our day to day enacting of those relationships. 

This life change, the fact that the resistance was all day every day, woven into our relationships, is why we are, collectively and individually, exhausted. And, it is what gives me profound hope for our ability to fight fascism. 

Fascism, authoritarianism, any political system based on control of the many by the few, rely on division and isolation, so that people can’t successfully fight back even though we far out number our oppressors. Capitalism is a perfect economic system to birth and nurture fascist, authoritarian regimes, because we are already divided and isolated: capitalism relies on and creates individualism because wealth is never shared. 

Whenever mutual aid surges in visibility we hear critiques: that it lets the state off the hook, it’s too small, it could never grow to the scale we need for these massive crises, mutual aid doesn’t address root causes. I could joyfully get into it about each assertion. What I learned in Minneapolis in 2026 is that one main issue with these critiques of mutual aid is that they see it solely as a political strategy to get somewhere, and ignore the way in which mutual aid is, requires, and creates profound, fundamental culture shifts at the level of the relationship and circle of care. 

It is absolutely a political strategy: mutual aid can, it must, be deeply threatening to the state, it can transform how we understand our own power and agency. It can sow the seeds and till the soil for bolder, more coordinated, wider spread organizing in the sense of campaigns and actions. 

But mutual aid, “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs,” is most powerful when we understand it as a profound culture change. As not only the means to an end, but an end in and of itself, because it fundamentally changes how we relate to each other, and how we organize our lives, as who we see ourselves responsible for and to, and who we ask to be responsible for us. Mutual aid is a widening of our circles of care, which, when practiced on a mass level, can threaten and topple fascism. Because when we are woven together in this way, we fight for everyone. 

Culture change is, of course, inherently political; most of us currently spend a lot of our time in, or have major aspects of our lives shaped by, dominant U.S. culture, which is forged through white supremacy, capitalism, and settler colonialism. Political change and cultural change are braided together, require and feed each other. Mutual aid, what makes it possible and what it makes possible, shines an illuminating spotlight on the place of their entanglement.

Everyone in Minneapolis talks about not wanting to go back to normal. People around the country are asking how to emulate what we did here. One way we can grow this movement is to be intentional about practicing it as culture change. This way of life, where we intimately care for our neighbors across differences of class, race, language, ethnicity, is counter-cultural. While beautiful, this way of relating to each other is also inconvenient, hard, exhausting, and deeply disincentivized. The rides are early in the morning and late at night, the rent money needs grow and grow, people are forever peopleing. And so, as we’re doing here today, we must infuse it with song, humor, creativity, rituals of grief and of joy. If there is one thing you do to seed this movement where you live, I’d say: host a block party. Go door to door with flyers, invite everyone. Sing even if it’s awkward. Meet each other. Learn who knows how to change a tire, and who speaks what languages. When the army comes, you will already have practiced gathering together in the streets. When the flood comes, you will know who needs assistance getting out of the house. This is how we fight fascism, whatever may come. 

In the Exodus story, after years of suffering and struggle for freedom, our ancestors cross the sea. When they leave Mitzrayim, they do not arrive into a problem-free freedom. Instead they crossover into the wilderness. There they have to learn to be in caring, reciprocal, interdependent relationships with each other, the earth, and the Divine. They wander, they weep, they forget, and the struggle to build a new society continues until today. It is from this place that they receive revelation, receive Torah. This Pesach, we recommit ourselves to the lifelong work of creating community in the wilderness, everywhere we live, with our mixed multitudes. This is how we get free.