Musings on being a Jew and on Antisemitism

A sign made by me at a neighborhood sign-making party before an action to urge our representative Glenn Ivey to support a cease-fire.

My ancestry is one hundred percent Jewish on both sides, but I was raised Jewish Christian. When I was a kid, people who asked me about my family’s religion looked puzzled when I said this, though (as is usual with children) it seemed normal to me. My grandparents became Christians not to assimilate or hide their Jewishness but because friends and personal revelations had convinced them.

My early experience convinced me that it’s fine to sample various ways of thinking to help make sense of the world. This may not have been the lesson my elders wished me to learn, but you never know what kids will conclude from what you show them.

Be that as it may, I like lighting Shabbat candles and singing peace songs on Friday evenings. I enjoy getting together with neighbors for Passover and Sukkot. I’m close to many Christians, and participate in my family’s Christian holiday celebrations. My personal amalgam of the various beliefs mentioned helps me understand the world and my/our place in it, and connect with others despite differences in our outlooks.

What I take from Judaism is the principle of Tikkun Olam, repairing and healing the world. I aspire to pursue peace, justice, and compassion alongside many Christians and folks with a wide range of spiritual practices. Deep respect for and connection with Mother Earth is a principle I try to practice in the spirit of Indigenous and Earth-based beliefs.

Personally, I’d say I’m an immanentist. I view the power, energy, complexity, interconnectedness and life force of the universe, including us humans, as intrinsic to the universe itself, without a supernatural force to create, contain, or control us.

Each of us has—should have—the right to explain the world to ourselves and practice whatever set of observances support this understanding.

What is Religion for?

Religion is supposed to serve as guidance for living well in and with the world. Yet it is often used to do the opposite, to justify destroying and dispossessing others who have different beliefs, color or culture. Religion is used to justify apartheid, dehumanization, expulsion, colonization, extermination.

It is unconscionable when Christians do such things to Jews, and when Hindus do them to Muslims. It is is equally unconscionable when Jews do this to Palestinians.

The above statements do not make me anti-Christian or anti-Hindu. Nor do they make me antisemitic. The “antisemitic scare” now sweeping the U.S. is a manipulation, like the red scare, and equally damaging, causing people to stay silent about the obvious wrongness of our tax dollars being used to support military occupation, massacring civilians, and other violations of international law and universal moral precepts, because they fear losing friends, jobs, funding; they fear being attacked and ostracized, all of which forms of repression are currently happening across the country.

Domination and exploitation are the basic material motivations for war and conquest. But they are not morally defensible; people will resist committing cruelties and risking themselves for greed, especially their rulers’ greed. More convincing reasons are needed to send them rampaging, such as the need to defend one’s religion and nation.

Throughout history, Jews have repeatedly experienced mass displacement and near annihilation. This trauma is cynically manipulated to push Jews to lash out in terror and extreme defensiveness, and to hear legitimate criticism of horrific policies and manifest injustices as calls for their own extermination. Israelis are barraged with messages that they are in a struggle of life or death, us or them—“them” being the Palestinians, who threaten their very existence merely by existing, with the only safe option being to eliminate them.

Particularly ironic, and heartbreaking, is that the aggression and destruction stemming from this trauma-induced terror, generates tremendous rage at the perpetrators, and risks producing what Israeli leaders say they are combating, namely, hatred of them and their fellow Israelis, who may well get conflated with Jews as a people precisely because they have so insistently sown this confusion.

Many, many Jews are now pushing back against the manipulation and weaponizing of Jewish trauma to massacre Palestinians. I am one of those.

mondoweiss.net

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We just got a letter from an NGO saying that hospitals in Israel need help. My first thought: what about the billions of tax dollars we send to Israel? That money should be used to help their hospitals if they need it, not to buy enormous amounts of lethal military equipment to attack Palestinians.

As far as I’ve heard, no Israeli hospitals have been destroyed by bombing, unlike in Gaza, where well over half its hospitals, including all the ones in Northern Gaza, are nonfunctional due to Israeli bombing and electricity and water cutoffs.

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Settler colonialism causes dispossession and annihilation of indigenous peoples, wherever they are—South Africa, Australia, or here in the Americas. What we’re witnessing in Gaza, the West Bank and the rest of Palestine is not some monstrous exception. We are seeing in real time the savagery that all settler colonial regimes inflict.

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Rainwood Update

As mentioned last month, despite distractions aplenty, this past month I revised my draft of Rainwood House Burns and am now on draft 4. Hopefully there’s just one more structural draft and then I’ll be down in the weeds, I mean, the scenes.

Doing this draft required a bunch of research, into:

• house fires

• hate crimes

• asylum-seeking

• test-taking anxiety

• gentrification and corruption

• hypothermia

• old photographs

• bubblegum

A lot goes on in this story!

Research is fun. You just have to take care it doesn’t pull you permanently down some very long rabbit holes.

Sliding down the rabbit hole