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An exercise in letting things go [J Street 2012]

Monday, March 26th, 2012

Before the conference began, David blogged about “Israel-haters” at J-Street. He wrote that they’re here, and that’s okay. We have room to discuss their one-state solutions in the in-betweens, walking out from the plenaries and schmoozing. This place is the only place where “Israel-haters” can still feel like Jews.

So I asked a couple people what they thought about the open dialogue at this conference, what made them uncomfortable, and what they were letting go of. I got – not surprisingly — polar opposite reactions. One woman described a situation that made her uncomfortable earlier this morning: During one of the opening sessions, a person who was clearly new to J Street asked a “right-wingish” question was met with heckling and booing. She said that although her own politics align with that of J Street’s, our goal should be to open our arms to all perspectives, even those perspectives with which J Street openly disagrees.

On the other hand, during the J Street U student session this afternoon, I spoke with a young man who felt that most of the speakers were overly optimistic. He, unlike the woman I spoke with, was not convinced of the viability of a two-state solution.
But both of the people I spoke with realized that the only way to achieve a solution is to let go of their discomfort.

And there are all sorts of things that are making me uncomfortable. The “Israel-haters” are not the source of my discomfort. What makes my arm hairs stand on end are the religious folks. Back when I was studying for my Bat Mitzvah, I rejected religion outright. In fact, I was so disgusted with the whole idea of religion that I rejected Judaism outright.

JSTREET 31

Amos Oz at the conference | photo by flickr user jstreetdotorg (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

So when Amos Oz spoke, I was totally captivated. But even his speech made me squirm with anxiety. His metaphors had us all in the palm of his hand. When he made the comparison between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and marriage, we ate his words up like safta’s kugel. And he sealed the deal when he spoke of the tragedy of the conflict, arguing that we don’t want a Shakespearean ending in which everyone in the play is dead, but a Chekovian ending in which everyone is dissatisfied, but alive. But at the end of his speech, when he mumbled something about “God bless you, J Street,” I was immediately furious. I couldn’t believe my ears. For me, that comment undermined his earlier point, that “there is more than one way to be a good Jew.”

Why does it always have to be about God? And why is God always so well-received by the audience? It feels to me like even though non-religious Jews are totally welcome and encouraged to participate, we still make up the minority of our representation. If a speaker is religious, then they’re really important and what they have to say really matters.

And this overly-represented religiosity is a narrative we’re all swallowing. Even I myself applauded when Anat Hoffman asked J Street U students to purchase the Women of the Wall tallit. Why should I care whether or not women are allowed to say the sh’ma aloud near the Western Wall? I have absolutely no connection to the site, other than its historic value. But it’s remarkably effective, this integration of feminism and activism and religiosity. It’s a narrative that is extremely attractive, even for those of us who remain firmly on the secular end of the Jewish spectrum. But I’m not buying it.
And that’s okay. I don’t have to buy it. It makes me extremely uncomfortable, but that’s okay. Nobody’s forcing me come to shul. Nobody’s forcing me to cover my shoulders. Nobody’s forcing me to pray to God or follow halacha.

But there are other things besides the religious rhetoric that make me uncomfortable. I’ll admit it: as a die-hard practitioner of a social science (of the anthropological pedigree), I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to comparisons, especially metaphors. So I’ll be perfectly frank: there are a whole bunch of comparisons that are, to be polite, lacking.

For instance, even before Oz made that little remark about God at the end of his speech, I was really perturbed by his comparison between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and divorce. A divorce implies marriage, that at one time the two parties entered the contract willingly. To the best of my knowledge, this is not the case for many Israelis, and certainly not for Palestinians.
And I was hit again with the a similar repulsion for the rampant misuse of metaphors when Ilyse Hogue spoke at yesterday’s plenary. She compared the coming out of a non-heteronormative individual to coming out as a supporter of J Street. While this comparison offers much in the way of addressing the discomfort we will all inevitably feel when gather around the seder table and discuss the things we learned at this conference with our less critically-minded friends and family, it also does something pretty gross.

How can we ever come close to understanding the oppression queer folks endure on a daily basis? How dare we compare our own discomfort to the challenging task transgender individuals must face every moment? And what about the queer Jews in our midst? How did they feel when Hogue made this comparison? I’m not trying to play the oppression Olympics here, but I felt that Hogue would have done well to at least mention the holes in the metaphor.

But as I keep reminding myself, it’s okay. Just like I can let go of my distaste for religious Judaism, I can let go of my distaste for faulty comparisons. At J Street, I’m accepted even if I don’t make the minyan. Whether or not a speaker’s comparisons are totally sound is kind of irrelevant. When a speaker thanks God or blesses us, I don’t have to get mad.

They’re just words. They’re words that, for me, evoke an old feeling of radical resentment. But it’s time to let go of that story. This place is an exercise in letting things go, in acknowledging that maybe what you feel really, really strongly about should be set aside for a moment in order to work towards a larger goal. That’s really freaking hard, but when you’re fighting for a better future… if the work isn’t hard, you’re probably not doing it right.

Posted in activism, Daily Recap, Israel, j street conference | 4 Comments »

Women & the RA; five days with controversial Chasids; a welcoming table; and more. [Required Reading]

Monday, March 12th, 2012

What does sharing Shabbat have to do with atonement? | Photo by Flickr user slgckgc (CC BY 2.0)

Rabbinical Assembly’s May conference sparks discussion about female speakers [Forward]

After information regarding an upcoming conference hosted by the Rabbinical Assembly (Conservative Judaism) was released, debate has been sparked as to whether or not enough women speakers will be present at the event. Since the initial report, the RA has released a statement stating that the event’s line-up has yet to be finalized. But will the discussion continue? Head on over to the Jewish Daily Forward to read more (including the RA’s response to the report).

Five days in Lev Tahor [Haaretz]

In the first of a two-part report, Shay Fogelman shares his experiences over five days with Rabbi Shlomo Helbrans, leader of a hotly-debated Chasidic community in Canada. In this introduction to the ways of a highly structured, yet small religious community, Fogelman writes:

“Lev Tahor came into being in the mid-1980s in Jerusalem. In the early 1990s it followed Rabbi Helbrans to the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and from there to the town of Monsey, upstate in Rockland County. About a decade ago, the community settled permanently in the Canadian town of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Quebec. Throughout this time, the name of the community – and especially that of its leader – was associated with various scandals, including some that reached the courts or were the subject of police investigations in the United States and Israel.”

Keeping a welcoming table: a kind of atonement? [Sh'ma]

In this article from the Sh’ma Journal of Jewish Ideas, Rachel Troster explores the connection between hospitality at the table, and personal spirituality. Can we better achieve spiritual growth through our learned appreciation for, and attention to, welcoming others?

“I’ve often thought about how lucky I am that I live in a community where we all host each other for Shabbat meals. For many of us struggling to balance work and small children, if we didn’t spend Shabbat meals with together, we might never make connections with other adults that had nothing to do with our jobs. Hachnasat orchim helps us atone for a world in which our working identities threaten to overwhelm everything else we do.”

Painter visualizes Jewish history in vivid colors [Tablet]

Though he has been known for his attention to detail in the past, visually capturing an obsessively specific timeline of events for various historical figures and even popular ideas, painter Ward Shelley has now captured an exhaustive history of the Jewish faith in one of his colorful, evocative timelines. Tablet Magazine writes:

“The People of the Book was inspired, the artist says, by Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, obsessively researched online, and vetted by a rabbi. Starting in Ur and Canaan, the painting traverses through Samaritans, Gnostics, Kazars, crypto-Jews, Karaites, the Bobov, and Jabotinsky, arriving in the present with the ba’al t’shuva renewal, Israel’s Meretz party, and the Kabbalah Center. Hanging on the wall of Pierogi Gallery’s stand at the Armory Fair in New York through this weekend, surrounded by a profusion of trompe-l’oeil people and stuffed animals by other artists, the orange-hued picture has yet to spark too much debate, though it did find a buyer.”

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Posted in community, Conservative, Culture, Daily Recap, Diaspora, Food, Israel, journalism, New Voices Magazine, Orthodoxy, Reading List, Religion | No Comments »

OWS and NYPD are #OccupyingMyCommute

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

One of many permanent signs near Wall Street detailing subway stops that one can usually use | via flickr user Aimante (CC BY-NC 2.0)

I don’t mind Occupy Wall Street. I don’t mind civil disobedience. I don’t even mind police officers trying to do their jobs.

Here’s what I do mind: People getting between me and taking that first look at my work email in the morning. I’m getting a little weary of OWS at this point. I’m not tired of their message, but the tactics have gotten a little odd. There are rumors today that they will attempt to occupy some subway stations. The purpose of this is entirely unclear to me. At best, it’ll cause a royal pain in the ass for people attempting to move about New York. At worst, someone is gonna get trampled to death.

To get to work, I take the 2/3 express downtown to the Wall Street stop. This stop has three entrances/exits, two of which I use regularly:

1. Pine Street: This is the one I use most often. It’s two very short blocks west of the New Voices office. Leaving the subway this way, after passing through the turnstile, you go down a short hallway and then up, either via a stairway that leads directly out onto Pine Street or up a stairway into a large indoor public-private space on the ground floor of an office building. (Like Zuccotti Park, this public-private space has been used as a meeting place for some of the OWS General Assembly’s various subcommittees.) On Tuesday, the day they cleared the occupiers from Zuccotti, the stairway up to the indoor space was blocked off by security guards and police. Yesterday, it was open, but there were new signs upstairs, saying that there was to be no sitting or lying on the ground and no signs or posters. Today, the entire Pine Street exit was closed off. Police, some in riot gear, were stopping people from using the turnstiles at all.

2. One Chase Manhattan Plaza: I use this exit whenever I need to do some New Voices business at the bank. Using this exit, you pass through a turnstile and then up into the lobby of One Chase Manhattan Plaza. It’s only a little further from the office than the Pine Street exit. Today there was a metal gate shutting off this exit.

3. The one I never use! I have actually never used this exit–not once. So naturally, this was the only one that was open. My guess is that it was open because it only leads to the street, rather into the interior of an office building. It turns out that this exit leads directly out onto Wall Street.

Upon emerging, there was only one way to go. If you turned right, there was a barricaded intersection. (It was either Wall Street and Hanover Street or Wall Street and William Street–I’m looking at Google Maps right now, trying to figure out how I got to work and it’s not clear to me exactly what path I took). At this intersection, they were checking work IDs, so that direction was no go. So I went left.

Now heading south on Wall Street, barricades and riot gear-encrusted police officers kept pedestrians from straying off of a narrow path down the sidewalk of one side of the street. Then I came to Pearl Street and Wall Street, the first of two intersections that featured a lot of people milling about and doing not much of anything. One corner of Pearl and Wall had some protesters with some signs.

I turned left onto Pearl and then had to get past some riot cops, standing shoulder-to-shoulder facing in the direction that I was headed, meaning I would approach them from behind. They were coming from my direction through without much trouble, but were harassing some protesters with signs heading toward them. Being the thorough NYPD officers that they are, they were also harassing an old lady–I overheard her say something about a dry cleaner.

Still heading east on, I came to Pearl and Pine Street, where absolutely no cops at all were completely failing to harass a much larger group of protesters than there were at the previous intersection. The protesters were discussing which way to go as I passed them. Unlike the police, they politely stepped out of my way so I could get through.

The notion that clearing Zuccotti Park would make life easier for those of us who work downtown doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. They said there would be fewer barricades in the neighborhood and that it would be simpler for commuters to move around the area.

On the contrary, I never had any trouble moving around before this morning.

Posted in activism, community, Daily Recap, New Voices Magazine | 1 Comment »