Some Words from Your Jewish Friend

My friend Gee took me to see Between Two Knees. It was a funny, difficult piece of theater about Native American history. It ended with the audience chanting “white people have got to go,” which was one of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever had in a theater mostly full of well-intentioned (I’m assuming) white people.

I had this uncanny feeling of familiarity about the production though I can safely say I have seen nothing like it. I don’t remember when the light went on for me, whether it was during the show or on the drive home or maybe the next day when I thought, “Oh, that’s it. It’s Fiddler on the Roof.”

I have zero intent to diminish Between Two Knees or imply that it was in any way derivative; it was not. I was responding to the underlying story of a people displaced from their land. I refer to my family line as “Fiddler on the Roof Jews,” because we’re of that time and place. The Jewish settlements in Belarus, all around there, were destroyed by Cossacks. Sometimes the families were “allowed” to leave, other times, well, not so much so. I watched Fiddler again a few days after Gee and I saw that show. I needed to put ending punctuation on this sentence, to see if my memory was anywhere near accurate.

…

I was scrolling through the news even though I knew it would not make me feel better, even though it would not help me make sense of this madness. As I was looking at pictures of Palestinians piled into trucks and cars with what possessions they could carry, my brain dropped the needle on Anatevka, the song the cast in Fiddler sings as they gather up their belongings to leave what even they think is a crappy little village, but what else have they got?

What do we leave? Nothing much.
Only Anatevka.

Only Gaza City.

Fiddler does not have a happy ending; I had forgotten that. You see a string of refugees, dragging their possessions into the horizon, and the fiddler follows them, offering only minor notes, maybe to keep them from turning back.

…

My initial reaction to the Hamas attack on Israel was insufficient. Like a lot of lefties, I was not surprised. I wish I had been surprised. The more I read, though, the more I felt the horror of what Hamas did. I remain unsurprised. One can be shocked and unsurprised at the same time, it turns out.

Those of us who turned to Israel’s history as an occupying power to try to explain what the hell had happened have had to navigate the pain of those who were hit by the details of the atrocities first. I get it now, I did not know. I went directly to my own prior experiences in Israel where there were movie nights in the bomb shelters, where we calmly left the fields and waited for the all-clear. I did not realize the terror that Hamas wrought. These were not military targets and hundreds of people were murdered in cold blood.

…

I have not yet heard that I have lost anyone, but I guarantee you I am no more than one degree from people experiencing deep, gut-wrenching losses. It doesn’t matter that the losses aren’t on my doorstep though, because to be Jewish is to understand that this loss is yours, too.

I have had my feet on the soil where all this is happening. It was a long time ago, but I can tell you what it is like to sit on the bus next to a soldier carrying a machine gun, to pull dates directly from the tree, to feel the grit of the desert wind in your eyelashes and between your teeth. I do not subscribe to the notion of Israel as a God-given homeland, but I lived there for a while and it is the only place I have ever been where my Jewish identity was never a question of any kind. That is not something that is easy to forget.

I also used to hitchhike to the beach in Gaza. It was not what it is now. You could tell the soldiers at the checkpoint you were going to the beach and they would let you pass, and you would walk on the sand and then go back to the kibbutz. There were no walls. It was not a big deal.

I am aware that saying this now is, in fact, a big deal.

…

Jews are raised in stories of oppression and liberation, hell, so many of our holidays are exactly that. The most well-known ones, Passover and Hanukkah, are oppression and liberation stories. We’re raised on Holocaust stories and Fiddler on the Roof stories. When I was young, we were raised on stories of the Jews who were not allowed to leave Soviet Russia, the refuseniks, we would light candles for their freedom.

We are taught to pray for our return to the promised land, but when we learn this story, we do not learn about the people who were already there. This is the lesson you are not meant to take away from birthright tourism, that experience where young Jews spend a season, a semester, in Israel learning about the land of our people. We are not meant to acknowledge the people who had been residents of Jerusalem, of Haifa, of the whole swath of land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River before the establishment of the Jewish state. For generations. This is not to say there were no Jews there, there were pre-Israeli statehood Jewish occupants of the region. There were other people too, Palestinians.

I failed birthright, I came home with excellent spoken Hebrew and a bunch of socialist ideals. It’s stayed with me, the kibbutz utopianism, the peacenik movement, the idea that peace is even possible. While creeping conservatism, fascism, has undermined my optimism, this last week shattered my sense of what’s now possible in this fractured part of the world.

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Anti-semitism, Islamophobia, any kind of racism is so boring, so lazy. The notion of hating a people because of what you think they believe, what the hell is that?

I suppose when you have a tiny population of people — Jews are not even 1% of the world’s population — you don’t have enough sources. Not long ago I met a woman who had never met a Jew before she moved to Seattle. And the Muslim population is so vast as to be undefinable as one thing. Palestinians aren’t all Muslim, there are Christians and Druze and secular people. Israelis and Jews aren’t synonymous, there’s a growing anti-Zionist Jewish movement, and learning this requires you to stop thinking everyone shows up at the table with the same ideas.

That’s part of what internalized racism does, it causes you to lump everyone together. I recently tried to help my employer do a better job of recognizing religious diversity. It went okay, they wanted this, but also, when they drafted an email to share about the Jewish High Holidays, they linked to Chabad, a conservative sect of Judaism. Imagine yourself a Unitarian explaining Easter to a group of non-Christians and then, your employers use a Mormon website as the definitive source of what the holiday means. Mormonism is representative of Mormonism, not Christianity as a whole, though there are some common threads.

I know Unitarians and Mormons and Evangelicals and Protestants exist. I don’t expect Christians to hold a single, unified perspective about the world. As a Jew, though, I rarely receive this courtesy. Islamophobia does this same thing. Not every Muslim supports Hamas, I can’t believe this needs saying.

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I have two Hebrew tattoos, one says ‘emet’ — truth — and the other says ‘hineni’ — I am here. The Rabbi of Prague inscribes truth on the Golem to bring him to life when his community is under attack. It is a medieval Jewish fairy tale, gruesome and moralistic, too many people die but I find it grounding that truth is what the Rabbi invokes as protection.

“I am here,” is what Moses answers when God calls him. It is perhaps strange that such an atheist chose something so biblical, but being Jewish means you get to question interpretation at every possible opportunity. I choose to see this “I am here” ink as staking a claim in the world. I exist. Jews exist. In a time of such isolation and loss it is easy to feel yourself going blurry around the edges so it’s good to shout “Hineni, I am here” at the sky as a reminder.

I’m pretty self-conscious about the ink right now. That’s a thing.

…

I am a fog of grief and anger and confusion, of wrong conclusions, and shifting feelings and every day we live with this heart-breaking uncertainty all of it changes. I’m outraged by Hamas’ brutal terrorism and furious with Israel’s apartheid government.

I’m angry at the world at large too, and here’s where I tell you the thing you already know and often want us to not say: Israel would not exist were millions of Jews not murdered in the Holocaust. The world would not help us, so we fought and helped ourselves.

The world turned its back on Palestinians, too. What have we done as a broader society to help them succeed? We refuse to implement sanctions on Israel, though we did it in South Africa, we’ve done it to Iran. Is our collective guilt about the Holocaust preventing us from seeing clearly what Israel is doing today? I don’t know. The Arab world surrounding the occupied territories has refused to absorb the Palestinian refugee population and also, they should not have to. Palestinians had their own land for generations, an apartment in Amman, in Cairo, is not a door prize.

…

I can not coherently gather my thoughts right now, anyone with deep ties to the region feels the same, I imagine. Folks have asked me what they can do, how I am feeling, what’s next. Everything, anything I can say will make someone angry. I’m not sure they’ll be wrong, either, to be angry with me.

I’m okay being your Jewish friend, but I am only one person. If I have to pick, I’ll take liberation theology every time. My beliefs aren’t aligned with every other Jew out there, not by a long shot, but I do have this ineffable tie to the Jewish people.

Also.

I believe Jews have a right to exist safely in the world.

I believe Palestinians have a right to exist safely in the world.

I do not believe those ideas have to be in conflict.