They came to challenge received wisdom and to revive, they said, wisdom discarded, that of Ulster County's indigenous and of the Jewish people. They called it “F.A.E. Kol Nidre — Anarchist Yom Kippur Ball in the Streets,” and they gathered on Kingston's Academy Green on the evening of Oct. 1, the first rush of deep fall chill in the air, newly fallen leaves underfoot.

Their intention as they announced it was “that the walls around our hearts and the walls between us and each other and the walls between nations will come tumbling down and the rifts that we call borders and the wounds that we call states will heal and the true peace of shabbat shabbaton will rush in like an undammed river and olam haba’a will burst into being.”

Pretty daunting, that. And the mere use of the word “anarchist” is enough to push plenty of people's buttons. But in truth the event was as homespun and pacific and, for those open to it, as positively uplifting as any truly felt faith community gathering or, back in the day, that of barefoot hippies in Golden Gate Park. At moments — as when the voices of the assembled rose in song in the night air — the vibe was celestial.

The crowd was varied, mostly on the youngish, under-40 side; family-friendly — some with young children at play on the lawn; and sporting the whole range of gender-mash dress and demeanor representative of the LBGTQ+ population. Notable amongst the garb was the mix and match of the Arabic-style keffiyah as headdress or shawl — an homage to Gaza — and rainbow-themed designs of different sorts, the universal signifier of “out and proud.”

The evening's parade of song began with Native American drumming and chants and continued through original compositions by some attendees and a take on Jewish tradition as a “People's Mic Kol Nidre” prayer, e.g., “May that day arrive in blessing and beauty/To a people who see triumph over empire within our grasp.”

Tables at the event featured radical literature and petitions, home-baked goodies and soup. Whatever fantasies may be entertained and amplified in Washington D.C., if this is Antifa it's about as poorly funded as any abandoned downtown DIY storefront venue. That there is a touch of punk in the mix is undeniable. When we suggested to chief event organizer Andy Izenson that the evening's theme might be “peace and love,” they replied “some anger, too.”

An attorney and activist who lives in "a commune on Lenape land in the Hudson Valley of New York," Izenson's writing has appeared in the Queer Magic Anthology, the Texas Journal on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights, the After Marriage Equality Collection and the Brill Journal of Religion and the Arts. Raised in a reform Jewish household, they are well-grounded in matters spiritual — but with an unorthodox interpretation.

As a youth Izenson wandered from the family roots, but they returned to Judaism and discovered, they say, “more and more revolutionary potential that's just already there in the text, in the traditions, in the practices. We don't actually have to make up any of this stuff, it's just revealing what's already there.”

Kol Nidre, Izenson explains, is the evening service that precedes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, “the day where we really take a good hard look at the last year, at ourselves, at where we are placed in the systems of power and interconnectedness that make up our world. ... Every day, we are offered this opportunity to make the deal with empire and to accept placement in the system of race and power ... my hope is that we can use Kol Nidre as an opportunity to renounce that agreement with empire, to renounce all of the ways that empire has been given power over our hearts and our spirits and our bodies, and to step into the new year, ready to step into solidarity and to swear our allegiance only to the Earth herself.”

Wednesday’s was Kingston's second annual Anarchist Yom Kippur, neither event was troubled by police or hostile onlookers, Izenson said, though caution prevailed and a number of community members were assigned as sentinels, both as protection and for care of any attendees' issues. “The evening ended with some lovely dancing and schmoozing,” Izenson emailed. “And then we all cleaned up together. We raised more than $1,200 for the fundraiser.”

To watch these gentle folk urge hope on one another in a time when the “T,” especially, in LBGTQ has become a totem of evil to the nation's reactionaries and when those reactionaries seem at peak strength, with all the instruments of state violence at their command, we couldn't help but think of H.G. Wells' fictional Eloi and Morlocks, inhabitants of a far future Earth on which the former live lives of dream and delight and the rough-hewn latter harvest them for food.

Andy Izenson, not unaware of the abounding perils, seems resolute. “We are here to heal the world,” they said. “That is what we are doing. That's how we understand our job. Everything that we have tried up until this point hasn't really done it, so maybe it's time to try something new.”