Daley-Harris is the author of “Reclaiming Our Democracy: Every Citizen’s Guide to Transformational Advocacy” and the founder of RESULTS and Civic Courage. This is part of a series focused on better understanding transformational advocacy: citizens awakening to their power.
At religious services for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, a writing by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel grabbed my attention:
“As civilization advances, the sense of wonder almost necessarily declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information, but only for a want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”
Of course, Heschel’s concept of wonder goes much deeper than “I wonder how anyone can still be undecided in the presidential election.”
Heschel marched with Martin Luther King Jr., and after joining King in Selma he came home and said he “felt a sense of holiness” in that march — he “felt his legs were praying.”
I pay particular attention to Heschel because of another quote from his that a friend includes in her email signature:
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“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement … get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
In an interview on “The Hopeful Majority” podcast, BridgeUSA CEO Manu Meel asked me, “Why do you see advocacy as an important part of finding joy in life? Why is advocacy something everybody should do. … What’s the power of advocacy for you?”
Our conversation had focused on transformational advocacy — deep engagement that brings advocates into relationship with legislators and changes their sense of themselves in the process, not the transactional advocacy of online petitions and email form letters. My response spoke to an aspect of Heschel’s “wonder” and his call to “radical amazement.”
I said that the power of advocacy is the power to be a changemaker. Not that you single handedly change the world, but right where you live. With your elected officials, with your newspaper’s letters to the editor and op-eds, you can be a changemaker. We all want our lives to matter, and our lives do matter in our homes with our families, it matters on our block and hopefully in our community, but do we have to stop there? I say no. We can demonstrate that it matters in the nation and in the world.
My answer to the question “Why advocacy?” is because advocacy is a vehicle to create a more perfect union. It is a means, a method, a tool — a gift, really, to making change.
Then Meel said, “You’re making the case for making your life matter outside the confines of your family, your community — [But I often hear people say,] “My life is perfectly fine the way it is. Why should I care about the nation when everything around me is doing just fine. When my needs are being met, why should I care?”
I told him that I didn’t know what touches a specific listener’s heart or the heart of someone who comes up to him when he's on the road, but I talked about the unspeakable grief that I felt when 20 first-graders were murdered in their Sandy Hook classroom. I don’t know what deeply touches the people he meets, but too often something moves us and then we stuff it. Something moves us and we shut it down and say “My life is just fine,” and close ourselves off to making change.
Instead, we can open ourselves up to it and find an organization that can empower us, an organization that delivers transformational advocacy by 1) forming local chapters and building community, 2) training us and 3) encouraging us to have real breakthroughs.
Listen again to Heschel: “As civilization advances, the sense of wonder almost necessarily declines.” Our declining sense of wonder closes us off to being changemakers. “Our goal,” Heschel said, “should be to live life in radical amazement.” A life of “radical amazement” is a life that is open to the hurts of the world, open to our desire to make change and followed by a deep focus, not flitting from issue to issue.
“The beginning of our happiness,” Heschel said, “lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”
Bring on the wonder.
