This is a hasty rewrite of a much longer story I wrote, the first version of which started in Japan where a couple of us Jewboys were having dinner with a Christian-descended German who was post-religion and wondering why we cared about being Jewish. The obvious subtext was the genocide that happened a couple generations ago. We said some things and then ate fried chicken and drank beer together and had a good time.
Over the next two years I’ll be working on a lot of stuff that will take a long time to work on, but will be publishing some stuff that either is short and funny, or that pertains to things that are happening in the present and will go stale before it really has time to percolate (time and physics work funny in this particular coffee machine). For example, I’d like to finish something I’m writing that has to do with the presidential candidates in the next week or so, because they’re going to start voting soon. This thing, which has to do with being Jewish, feels timely because many things are happening: Jews are being killed and threatened, right-wing Jews are trying to seize a moment, right-wingers who aren’t Jewish are trying to use Jewish plight for their own ends. This isn’t about that, directly, but it isn’t not, and here it is:
A year and a half ago a fellow I organized with said “I have a complicated relationship with Judaism.” I said to him, “so, you’re Jewish?” Meaning, there’s nothing more Jewish than having a complicated relationship with Judaism. I say this because that’s the way I can love Jewishness – if it’s a messy collection of complicated people figuring their own shit out, who sometimes have use for Judaism and sometimes not, and if we all love each other regardless of this, that, while we love everyone, we have a special bond of recognition for our fellow messy Jews. Elsewhere, people who may or may not be Jewish are fighting for complex humanity and loving solidarity against the gatekeepers and authoritarians of their own cultures and identity groups and the bigotry pressed on those groups from the outside, and if I were to define “my kind of Jew,” it would be a person who sees that we’re all in this together, on different battlefields. There are stories of Jewish heroes who heroically help others in their parallel struggles, and I love these stories, too much, I think, because they make me feel like I’ve done something, something I care about, just for being born and raised with a certain label on me, when in fact, like most people anywhere, I haven’t done much of anything, and because they can make us feel like we’re special, when we are just another people. But still I love them, because there’s love in seeing someone who feels like some part of you doing something that you care about that feels big and important, and because while we’re not special in a sense that we deserve separate rules, we do have our own history and story and there is something special for anyone in knowing your history and story and making something of it.
One of these such heroes – the one who matters to my heart – is my grandfather, who grew up getting his ass kicked for being Jewish in Quebec, and also grew up following a lot of Orthodox rules that constricted his life, and escaped both to become a pro-integration, bacon-eating psychology professor in Texas who embodied love for the world and for other people and for life and language and messiness more than anyone else I knew. I can’t start telling stories about him because then it would be hard to stop, but I miss him all the time and I love that I got to be part of his family and still am in a family with people who knew and love him. The way he loved me – and everyone – was to want me to make my own way in the world and to have all the support that everyone deserves but to take all the responsibility that everyone needs to have, and while I haven’t done that I’ve tried and will keep trying. This love, this size and generosity of spirit, is what I care about more than any particular identity, but also, Ira Iscoe was always unapologetically Jewish, in that he wouldn’t make way for or be cowed by any bigot who thought Jewish was a bad thing or for any hidebound Jewish person who thought he wasn’t Jewish enough, and a big part of my love for Jewishness probably comes from this, from the way this man loved the world and shared this generously with me.
Walking around today in between fancy writing seminars that I’m attending while the world burns because language and expression matter deeply to me and I’m not the type of saint to save the world without first reaching out for what I want for myself, I had the thought that my Jewish practice is “rituals to affirm that the genocides did not work.” And that’s part of it, too, pure stubbornness against the Inquisitions and pogroms and Holocausts, that, try as you might, we’re still around, and there will be more of us to say that Kaddish after we’re gone. My mind is prone to these kind of pithy zingers. Yesterday during a writer exercise, I wrote something similar “tried to wipe us off the face of the earth and now they want our help, fuck the Nazis,” and I felt that too. It means something to be part of a big struggle, to speak with a people. But my motivations and causes and self are too small to speak for a people, and really, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I just throw some shit together.
I’m about to run off for dinner, something I’m more loyal to than any cause or faith. My body reminds me of it constantly. On Monday I ate dinner at a Kosher restaurant in Brooklyn. I was hungry on the way back from the library, that was what was around, and I thought why not? I had been feeling some kinship with my people, and some of the people working there were Jews of color, which spoke to the openness of the place. My waiters were kind and personable. The atmosphere was light. At a table in front of me, a woman came in with her kids, a mess, and asked for something on the menu, in a certain style, “what’s the [such and such], the way the kids all love to eat?” and I felt a joy at the cavalier and loud and open and folksy way of ordering. My food arrived and the waiter’s recommendation turned out great and he came by when I was eating and said “it’s good, right?” And then the mother at the next table toasted to “victory in Iran,” and I thought, right, fuck, I already knew it, why did I think I could come in here without seeing this? A few days ago a rabbi had been killed in his home in the area, and some time before or after the dinner was a solidarity march and Dov Hikind, a right-wing pro-Trump politician was – organizing it? joining it? banned from participating in it? I was tired and trying to get ready from my program and didn’t have energy to sort it out, so I stayed home and tried to make sure I was ready. On Wednesday I took to Amtrak up to Albany and on Thursday I drove my grandpa’s old pickup to this fancy school in Vermont and that’s where I’ve been ever since, thinking about all sorts of things and drawing no conclusions.
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