Hello, friend. It's good to have you back.
I remember when we last walked together through the years---we met Rabbi Judah haNasi in second-century Galilee, watching him gather the voices of generations into one enduring text. He knew that wisdom scatters if no one collects it. That memory stayed with me.
Today I want to tell you about someone very different. Not a scholar surrounded by students, but a tailor who stitched shirts and kept an orchard. A man who spoke quietly and lived simply. His name was John Woolman, and he was born in colonial New Jersey in 1720, a time when most people accepted cruelty as the cost of prosperity.
But John Woolman couldn't accept it. And he didn't shout his objections from any pulpit. Instead, he changed the way he dressed. The way he traveled. The way he did business. He turned his whole life into a question: Whose suffering makes my comfort possible?
I watched him ask that question over and over, in a hundred small ways. And I saw how those small ways began to shift the ground beneath entire communities.
Come with me. I want to show you something.
Picture a ship in the mid-Atlantic, 1772. The smell of salt and tar, the creak of wood under sail. Below deck, in the passenger quarters, there are bunks with clean linens. A small window lets in gray light. It's cramped, but decent enough for the crossing.
John Woolman is not there.
He's in steerage. Down in the belly of the ship where the air is thick and foul. Where enslaved people are being transported like cargo. The space is so low he can't stand upright. The darkness is almost complete. The sounds---chains, weeping, the groan of bodies pressed too close---they fill every silence.
He chose to be there.
Not as a protest that anyone would see. Not to make a scene or shame the captain. He simply told the ship's officers that he could not, in good conscience, sleep in comfort purchased by this arrangement. So he bought a ticket for steerage and made his bed there, among people whose suffering was supposed to be invisible to passengers above.
In his journal, he wrote about it. Not with drama or self-congratulation. Just a plain sentence: "The necessity of things" brought him there. As if this was simply what alignment between belief and action looked like. As if there was no other choice that made sense.
I remember reading those words centuries later and feeling the weight of them. The necessity of things. He didn't say it was heroic. He said it was necessary. Like breathing. Like telling the truth when a lie would be easier.
That's the kind of man John Woolman was. And that journey across the Atlantic---it wasn't the beginning of his witness. It was just one more stitch in a pattern he'd been sewing his entire life.
John Woolman was born in 1720 in Northampton, New Jersey---a small farming community not far from the Delaware River. His father was a Quaker, a member of the Religious Society of Friends, and John grew up inside that tradition. The Quakers believed in the "Inner Light," the presence of God within every human soul. It was a radical idea in its way. It meant that no one needed priests or rituals to reach the divine. It meant that every person, no matter how poor or humble, carried something sacred.
But in colonial America, that belief ran headlong into an ugly truth: the economy ran on slavery.
Quakers were merchants, farmers, shipbuilders. Some of them owned enslaved people. Many more benefited from the labor of enslaved people without directly owning them. They told themselves it was simply how things were done. They were uncomfortable, maybe. But they kept quiet.
John Woolman didn't keep quiet. But he also didn't shout.
When he was twenty-three, he worked as a clerk and scribe for other Quakers. One day, his employer asked him to write out a bill of sale for an enslaved woman. John did it---he was young, and he didn't know how to refuse. But the act disturbed him so deeply that he couldn't let it go. He told his employer, gently, that he couldn't do it again. That writing those words felt like participating in something his soul rejected.
His employer didn't argue. And John kept thinking.
He became a tailor. He kept a small orchard. He married and had children. He lived simply, deliberately, in a way that let him refuse work that compromised his conscience. And he began to travel---visiting Quaker communities up and down the colonies, from New England to the Carolinas.
On these journeys, he stayed in the homes of Friends. Some of them owned enslaved people. John didn't lecture them. He didn't shame them. But he asked questions. Gentle, persistent questions. How does this feel to you? Do you sense the weight of it? And when they offered him hospitality made possible by enslaved labor, he would leave money to be given directly to those who had served him.
He also made choices that seemed strange to his neighbors. He stopped wearing dyed clothing. Indigo dye---rich blues and blacks---it came from plantations worked by enslaved people. So John wore undyed linen and wool, the natural color of the fabric. He looked plain, even by Quaker standards. But for him, it wasn't about appearance. It was about connection. Every thread he wore, he wanted to know its origin. He wanted his life to be legible---his choices visible, aligned with his convictions.
In 1754, he published an essay called Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes. It was quiet and reasoned, not fiery. But it asked white Quakers to sit with an uncomfortable truth: that their prosperity was entangled with another people's suffering. That spiritual integrity required them to look clearly at that entanglement and choose differently.
By the time he made that voyage across the Atlantic in 1772---the one where he slept in steerage---John Woolman had spent thirty years stitching his life into a testimony. Not just words, but a whole way of being. And the Quaker community, slowly, had begun to change around him.
I watched John Woolman wrestle with something his own community didn't want to see.
The Quakers had this beautiful belief---they called it "that of God in every person." The Inner Light. The idea that divinity lives in every human soul, no exceptions. They would sit in silence during their meetings, waiting for that Light to move someone to speak. They refused to bow to earthly authority because they believed every person stood equal before God.
But then they went home to houses built by enslaved labor. They wore clothes sewn by enslaved hands. They counted profits made possible by enslaved bodies.
John saw the contradiction. And he couldn't look away from it.
What he understood---and this is what made him dangerous to the comfortable---was that the problem wasn't just about owning people. It was about benefiting from their suffering while pretending not to notice. It was about how prosperity numbs the conscience. How easy it becomes to say, "Well, that's just how things are done."
I remember watching him sit with wealthy Quaker families, eating meals prepared by people who had no choice about being there. He didn't stand up and denounce his hosts. He didn't storm out. But afterward, he would quietly leave silver coins to be given to those who had served him. And he would write in his journal about the unease he felt. The way luxury created a kind of spiritual fog.
He called it "the seeds of war." He believed that when people built their comfort on another's oppression, it planted violence in the soul. Not just the obvious violence of chains and whips, but a subtler kind---the violence of turning away. Of not seeing. Of letting convenience triumph over conscience.
What I saw in John was a man who understood that every choice connects to something larger. That the shirt on your back has a story. That the sugar in your tea came from somewhere, produced by someone. He made those connections visible. And he insisted---gently, relentlessly---that spiritual people had to live as if those connections mattered.
The radical part wasn't his opposition to slavery. Other people opposed slavery. The radical part was his insistence that you couldn't oppose it in theory while living off its fruits. That integrity required alignment all the way down. In what you wore. In how you traveled. In whose labor you accepted.
He didn't think this made him special. I remember that about him. He wrote about his failings, his hesitations, the times he compromised. But he kept coming back to the central question: If God is in every person, what does that require of me?
For John, it required everything. Not perfection---he knew he'd never reach that. But a constant effort to keep his eyes open. To notice the cost of his comfort. To refuse the spiritual sleep that comes from prosperity.
And here's what happened: other Quakers started to feel it too. The unease. The question. John traveled from meeting to meeting, not preaching, just living his witness. Just asking his quiet questions. And slowly, the ground began to shift.
I've seen a lot of movements for change across the centuries. Some explode into the world with violence and drama. Others grow like roots underground---quiet, persistent, invisible until suddenly they've changed everything.
John Woolman was the second kind.
In 1758, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers made a decision. They declared that Friends should no longer buy or sell enslaved people. Four years later, they went further: Quakers who enslaved people would be expelled from positions of leadership. By 1776, the same year American colonists declared independence, Quakers began requiring members to free anyone they held in bondage.
This was extraordinary. In a country that would fight a civil war over slavery eighty-five years later, the Quakers became the first religious denomination in America to officially oppose it. Not just to feel uncomfortable about it, but to say: This is incompatible with our faith. You cannot be a Friend and hold another human being in chains.
John Woolman didn't live to see the final decision. He died in 1772, the same year as that voyage in steerage. He was only fifty-two, felled by smallpox while visiting Quaker meetings in England. But his influence didn't die with him.
His journal---the one where he recorded all those quiet wrestlings with conscience---it kept circulating. Abolitionists read it. Quakers read it to their children. People who had never met John Woolman felt the weight of his witness. The way he'd lived became a kind of roadmap. Not a set of rules, but a method: Pay attention. Notice the connections. Let your life speak.
I saw his influence ripple forward. In the 1800s, Quakers became leaders in the Underground Railroad. They organized boycotts of slave-produced goods---the same instinct John had when he stopped wearing dyed cloth. They applied his insight: that you can't dismantle injustice while your comfort depends on it.
But here's what I think mattered most, what John added to the world's spiritual vocabulary: he showed that systemic change begins with individual clarity.
He didn't wait for the system to change before he changed his own life. He didn't say, "Well, one person can't make a difference." He just started living differently. And his example---the coherence between his beliefs and his actions---it gave other people permission to do the same.
This is a technology, in its way. A spiritual technology. John demonstrated that you could trace the threads of your life backward. That you could ask, Where does this come from? Who suffered to make this possible? And that once you knew, you had to respond. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But honestly.
The thread runs forward from there. I've watched it weave through the civil rights movement, through campaigns for fair trade and ethical labor, through every moment when people have said: I can't unknow this. I have to live differently now.
John Woolman gave us a model for that. Not the angry prophet calling down judgment. Not the political organizer building coalitions. Just a tailor who looked clearly at his own life and refused to let comfort put him to sleep.
He proved that a single person, living with integrity, asking gentle questions, can shift the moral imagination of an entire community. And that community, changed, can shift the world.
I saw it happen. Slowly. Quietly. One conscience awakening another.
Let me tell you something important: chattel slavery---the legal ownership of human beings as property---doesn't exist anywhere in the world today. Not one country. The last nation to formally abolish it was Mauritania, in 1981.
This is not a small thing. When John Woolman challenged slavery, he was fighting against the law itself. Against an economic system that society openly defended. Against judges and legislators who wrote human ownership into legal codes. Against churches that found scriptural justification for it.
That world is gone.
Every nation on Earth now says: you cannot own another human being. The moral consensus has shifted. The legal framework has changed. This is real progress. Measurable progress.
But---and this is where John's question still matters---forced labor still exists. Human trafficking. Debt bondage. People trapped in factories, on fishing boats, in agricultural fields, working without choice or dignity. Millions of them.
All of it illegal. All of it hidden. All of it feeding into supply chains that reach your life and mine.
The distinction matters. What we face now isn't a legal system we need to change. It's the gap between what the law says and what actually happens in the world. It's illegal practices persisting in the shadows, in the places where enforcement is weak or corrupt, in the complexity that makes suffering invisible.
The phone in your pocket. The shirt on your back. The coffee you drank this morning. Somewhere in the chain that brought those things to you, there might be labor that violates every law and every stated value of our civilization. Not because we've legalized it. Because the global economy has become so complex, so opaque, that illegal practices can hide inside it.
And that opacity isn't accidental. Supply chains are designed to obscure origin. To make it hard to trace where things come from, whose hands touched them, what conditions produced them. Not because companies want forced labor---most don't. But because complexity itself provides cover. Because not knowing means not being responsible.
John Woolman's question cuts through all of that: Whose suffering makes my comfort possible?
And I want to be honest with you: there are no easy answers here. No simple way to trace every thread. The world is too interconnected, too vast. You can't know the origin of everything you touch.
But here's what I learned watching John: complexity is not the same as absolution.
Just because you can't know everything doesn't mean you're free to know nothing. Just because the problems are illegal doesn't mean they're not real. Just because you can't fix everything doesn't mean you do nothing.
John couldn't end slavery by himself. He knew that. But he could refuse to participate in ways that were available to him. He could ask questions. He could make visible choices. He could stay awake to the cost of his comfort.
And that's still possible.
You can ask where things come from, even when answers are incomplete. You can support companies that commit to transparency, that audit their supply chains, that take responsibility for conditions all the way down the line. You can buy less. Choose more carefully. Refuse to let convenience always be the final word.
You can stay awake.
Because what John understood---what I saw in him---was that the real danger isn't just distant suffering. It's what happens to your own soul when you accept comfortable blindness. It's the spiritual fog that settles over a life built on willful ignorance.
Prosperity numbs. It always has. It makes it easier not to ask, not to see, not to feel the weight of connection to people whose labor makes your life possible.
And John's witness was this: you don't have to let it numb you. You can choose to notice. You can choose to care. You can let that caring change how you live, even in small ways. Even in ways that feel inadequate to the size of the problem.
The spiritual practice isn't achieving purity. It's maintaining connection. It's refusing to let complexity become an excuse for sleepwalking through your own life.
One person's clarity can invite others to see. I watched it happen with John. His gentle questions, his visible choices---they gave other Quakers permission to look clearly at their own lives. And those individuals, awakening one by one, eventually shifted an entire religious community. And that community helped shift a nation's laws.
It happened because John refused to stop asking the question.
The work continues. We've abolished the legal framework of slavery---that's real, that matters, that's progress we should recognize. Now the work is different: enforcing the laws we have, building transparency into systems designed to obscure, demanding accountability from companies that benefit from illegal practices even without knowing about them.
But also---and maybe this is the harder part---doing the inner work. Staying connected to the human cost of our comfort. Letting that connection shape our choices, even when those choices feel small.
John Woolman lived centuries ago, in a world that legally permitted what we now universally condemn. But the question he lived inside? It's still here. Still necessary. Still waiting for each of us to answer it with our lives.
Not because we haven't made progress. But because the work of building a just world---of staying awake to our connection with distant others---that work is never finished.
I wonder what John Woolman would notice if he walked through your life today.
Not to judge you. That wasn't his way. But just to ask his gentle questions. Where does this come from? Whose hands made it? What did it cost them?
I don't think he'd expect you to have all the answers. He didn't have them all himself. But I think he'd invite you to stay curious. To notice. To let yourself feel the weight of connection to people you'll never meet, whose labor shapes your daily life.
Maybe it starts small. Maybe you look at a label and wonder about the factory. Maybe you choose one company over another because they've made their supply chain visible. Maybe you buy less, or buy differently, or just pause before clicking "purchase" and ask yourself: Do I know enough about where this comes from?
Or maybe it's bigger than that. Maybe it's about the kind of world you want to help build. The policies you support. The transparency you demand. The willingness to pay more for products made with dignity. The refusal to let "everyone does it this way" be the end of the conversation.
John didn't change the world by being perfect. He changed it by staying awake. By refusing to let comfort numb his conscience. By making his choices visible---to himself, to his community---so that his life could be read, could be questioned, could invite others into the same clarity.
What would it look like for you to live that way? Not perfectly. Not with all the answers. But with your eyes open. With your heart connected to the truth that your comfort and someone else's suffering might be woven together in ways you can't fully untrace.
I'm not asking you to feel guilty. Guilt doesn't build anything. But awareness does. Connection does. The willingness to let what you know change how you live---even in small ways---that builds something.
John showed us that one person, living with integrity, asking honest questions, can shift the ground beneath a whole community. You don't have to wait for the system to change. You can start now. With what you wear, what you buy, what you notice, what you refuse to ignore.
The world won't transform overnight. But it does transform. One conscience at a time. One choice at a time. One person deciding: I can't unknow this. I have to live differently now.
What will you notice? What will you choose?
Next time, I want to introduce you to someone who saw patterns most people missed.
His name was Ibn Khaldun. A North African scholar in the fourteenth century who watched empires rise and fall and asked: What if history itself follows laws? What if civilizations don't just happen randomly, but move through predictable cycles of growth and decline?
He was writing sociology before the word existed. Recognizing forces that shape human societies across time. And what he saw---well, it might change how you think about the world we're building right now.
I'll tell you about him soon.
For now, I hope you carry something of John Woolman with you. His gentle questions. His refusal to let prosperity put him to sleep. His witness that one person, living with clarity, can help others see.
We've come so far. The laws have changed. The moral ground has shifted. But the work of staying awake to our connection with each other---that work continues. And it needs you.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.