So, just who are we?

[[BLISS NOTES] Philip Bliss]

I try not to put more than one article out a day but I thought the anti JNF  account very important and Julian's piece below well worth thinking about Shavuah Tov

Shalom,
A new piece from me after a long time.
Feel free to pass on.
Julian Resnick

So, just who are we?

This is a stream of consciousness morning. My head filled with images, thoughts and words. I am reminded of my days struggling to write an essay on Joyce’s Ulysses in my Modern Novel class for Dr John Coetzee, awful, depraved and cruel teacher, but wonderful writer. My mind filled with Virginia Woolf and Modigliani who somehow represented so much for me in terms of what attracted me to the struggles of this world.

Dr. Coetzee is not in my mind this morning and neither is Virginia or Modigliani (although I can see a Modigliani print across the room above Brianna’s desk [Young Girl, 1918]). The past day and a half has included a number of experiences, which is typical for the pace of experience gathering of these past eighteen months. Wednesday evening I spent at a concert in memory of Debbie Friedman, the extraordinary musician- songwriter who enabled thousands of Progressive Jews, and beyond, to find their voices over the past thirty years. An evening of great music with - and this is what I love and would appreciate at Leonard Cohen concerts (Leonard, if you are listening, please take note) - the words on a screen so we could all sing along including, unfortunately, the woman in front of me with the world’s worst voice. More than a concert, it was an over 50s lovefest, with all of us nodding knowingly when Pete (Seeger), Joan (Baez), Joni (Mitchell) and Peter, Paul and Mary were mentioned (and remembering our own nights around the camp fires of our youth and wondering whether we would be able to stand up without a helping hand if we were around a camp fire now). I loved it (and especially the feeling of camaraderie).

But it was last night really that is burned into my brain and is causing me to write now after such a long silence. Orly and I headed down to SoHo to a book reading where Shalom Auslander was reading from his new novel, Hope: A Tragedy. I am now the owner of a copy of this novel with the following inscription: “To Julian; see you in the camps”.  Now, we never talked about the camps. The word Auschwitz never crossed my lips, even though it often does. This was an evening to remember. Shalom Auslander, in a furious frontal attack on the Orthodox Jewish world he is a product of. The world he has rejected. But much more than this, an attack on Judaism, Jewish Ethnicity, Jewish Nationalism, Jewish Exclusivism. An attack on the Tribe and its identity.

And here is the strangest thing: He sounded so Jewish in everything he said. The question I came away with and which is the burning in my brain right now is this: Did I witness the essence of modern Jewish Identity last night? Put it down, trample on it, vomit it out, but it defines you in every way Mr Auslander. Even your name, for heaven’s sake. You could have chosen a literary nom de plume, but you keep your name as Midrash: you are a foreigner, an outlander, a Jew. I have heard many Jewish intellectuals talk over the years, but none as indignant in their identity, as challenging in their language, as provocative in their subject matter and none so totally Jewish in the way they express themselves. In here lies the wonderful irony of Jewish Identity. Can you be a Christian if you deny Jesus, if you laugh at the Church, if you deride all the values connected to Faith? Can you be a Muslim if you think Mohammed was a clown, if you make paper airplanes out of the Koran? I know not as I am neither. But, what is clear to me is that you can be a Jew if you do all of the above with our identity. Is it comfortable? No, it is very Jewishly uncomfortable, but then again, since when are we supposed to be comfortable?

So, Shalom, thank you for the inscription in my book and for Orly’s in her copy of your first novel, The Foreskin’s Lament: “God Bless you. I am just kidding”. One last thought from yesterday evening and something Shalom said. He mentioned that he was once asked to write something for a new Haggadah and he told the person who approached him he was not the right person because he would write just one word, “Run!” Perplexed, the questioner then asked whether he could do a thousand words on this: to which he replied that he would just write “Run” a thousand times. The question I would ask him this morning would be about directions. When we run, unless we are on a treadmill, we begin where we are and end up somewhere else (we could of course run in a circle, but his implication was that we were running from). So, each of us runs from where we are, but the question is where to? For me, in some way, my life has been defined by this question: Where are we running to? What are we running from? Can we run from certain things or do they always accompany us?  A final thank you: thank you for an evening where I was able to add another layer of complexity. I love this.

So, this final thought is now in my brain. We have an inverted form of archaeology as Jews; our archaeology is an archaeology of identity. To understand who we are, to reach the bedrock of identity, what we do is acquire additional layers: layer after layer of complex Jewish experiences. Bizarre.  To reach bedrock one usually strips away layer after layer; that is the science of archaeology and its methodology. But for us the only way to reach the bedrock of understanding who we are is to add on more and more complex experiences. Lovefests with those who enjoy being Jewish and express it by interacting with the liturgy of our People as free individuals, picking and choosing the words, shifting between the languages of the profane and the holy, challenging us to be with each other in community in ways Jews did not imagine a hundred years ago, but a gentle, loving forward movement, the language of the 60s. Irascible Jewish writer who has left the Tribe, but is so much of the Tribe and whose inscription talks of our anxiety -and then the person after me in the line at the book signing part is a black-kippah wearing Orthodox Jew who tells Shalom what a fan he is?!

I love it.

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