I have tried several times to write what I want to write here.
I cannot do it. So I will write something else.
When I was a child, in my family being Jewish meant making a commitment to history, to this world here and not some nebulous afterlife that may or may not exist, to a sense that the great paradox of the unity of all existence and the particularity of any chain of existence is only really solved through humility—faith in the ineffable, the radical alterity of a non-anthropomorphic Being that could be in and of and outside of all that we know.
No saviors. Just the material, the social, and the ineffable.
I was a kid with a lot of faith—because I was embedded in a community full of love, mutual aid, independence, political debate, friendship, a common practice that we shaped together, and a sense that we didn’t need anyone’s permission to help each other out and make the community that we wanted to have.
I cannot talk about how I lost this community, because it is mostly a story of economic migration, shifting geopolitics, and my life choices, moreover it is a story that continues and deeply involves people that I love.
The drift to the right that has intensified over the past fifteen years throughout the world has left its marks here too.
I miss my heart.
I miss there being a strongly liberal/leftist Jewish community arguing actively and intensely for justice and human rights for all—one that puts tikkun olam at the heart of what we want to do in the world, one that knows that while questions of individual choice are an inescapable aspect of being individual people, nonetheless we are social, communal, and political creatures and we never ever stand alone but always within a social and material matrix that history shows can change and can be changed.
One that isn’t paralyzed by the fear that we could get it wrong, but knows that while our knowledge is limited and contingent and our plans are bound to go astray, nonetheless, we will try to advance the cause of justice, because that too is a demand of ethics.
And one that knows from our own history that as much as the world is something we’ve co-created, so too is our faith and our identity. If it belongs to us, as a result of our history, then it is ours to shape in the history being written today.
We do not shape it alone, we are not so dumb as to think that anti-Semitism is dead or that the actions and opinions of others do nothing to our reputation. But still it is ours. And our actions are still ours. If I claim this identity, it is not because I want credit for what you do or have done but because I don’t feel like I have a choice whether or not this identity applies to me, and I want to have a say in what it means.
My family minhag is relentless criticism tempered by really good parties, and food, community building, and friendship. Right now my world seems pretty far from our minhag.
If history makes me a Jew, and it does, then I want to at least get a community out of it that feels like my own.
200 years ago Israel Jacobson opened a little experimental Temple in Seesen, which worshipped in a new way. And this has been seen as the founding of Reform Judaism. In my heart, I broke with Reform Judaism over ten years ago, because the Pittsburgh Platform of 1999 left me cold. What I’ve never broken with is the idea that this religion of ours belongs to us and that whatever we do with it is it, so we ought to do with it what we want it to do.
Who knows what will happen? We may as well live and while we’re alive we may as well try.
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