should we not make beauty

8 minutes… “worth watching” doesn’t even come close… I was so touched and so thrown by this, it relates so strongly to the processes and themes of this course I am participating in, and at the end gripped my heart by delivering to my ears what felt like the words of my own soul telling me “why I am doing this” — underlying and beyond “decolonizing”, why I am doing this. I sit here stunned and overwhelmed.

I have no Place.

I’ve been struggling and struggling in my attempt to connect back through my ancestry to any sort of “indigenous” roots. At first I discounted any kind of personal connection to any of my ethnic background. I lately came around to thinking, well, I can pick-and-choose rituals and stories, and discard the belief system and facets of the culture that simply to not work for me or, more often, actually repel me. Most recently, though, I’m realizing that to make peace with my forebears, to take care of them and myself, I can’t simply toss away those beliefs that others tried to instill in me — instead, I am in serious need of working this out with my ancestors. To talk with them enough that we at least agree to disagree. So I am inviting them in.

However, I still suspect I will never find “indigeneity” since Jewish religion and culture is founded on laws and religious practices, not grounded in Place. The very notion of lower gods, statues/idols, totemic connections to Earth and Weather etc., would be one of the gravest sins in Judaism. Even for Jewish atheists (since Jews will never say you’re not a Jew, even if you don’t Believe). And as for Place, there were two temples built in Jerusalem, which was a cosmopolitan (for the times) administrative center, not a tribal home. There were Jews who farmed in Israel and Judah in antiquity, but there were no gods or spirits they dealt with, even in the context of growing food or hunting or dealing with weather. Only their one abstract, invisible, God, Adonai a/k/a Yahweh, who did/does not have representations in our material world.

Were I to attempt to pursue my lineage farther back than when the Jewish religion was established and then codified a few thousand years ago, I’d have to just “make it up” based on the fact that 75% of Jews have DNA of Middle Eastern origin (mixed in with a lot of European DNA). How do I even know if I am one of the 75%? I don’t. And how do I know what indigenous peoples I might come from prior to whenever my forebears became Jews? And how do I know that my Jewishness is not the result of some conversion in some unknown locale a millenium or two ago? I DON’T.

Therefore, for me and for any other Jew, in my opinion the very notion of establishing one’s actual indigenous roots is a fool’s errand. You’d just be concocting your pre-Jewish story from your imagination supported by some clues from Wikipedia or somewhere, and chances are good any conclusion you draw will not reflect your actual lineage. I could say “Canaanite or Sumerian” but I REALLY DON’T KNOW.

So what to do? How to find indigenous roots when you really don’t have any that are legitimate?

I’ve decided to engage but re-make for myself some of the rituals from Judaism: lighting candles, honoring the light. Making sure I sit in gratitude when I eat and drink. I have my own little morning prayer involving opening the curtains and exclaiming, “Hello, Day! I’m so glad to have another one!”. But I will do all these things without saying the ritual prayers to the sort of God I do not believe in, the ritual prayers that are made to, literally translated, “the King of the Universe.” Bleh. And following the laws written by men about their male God, all the patriarchy and repression of it, all the subsequent Rabbis who further interpreted and made more laws … none of this is “mine” at all, I will not suddenly become an observant Jew because I just wasn’t born to it, regardless of what family I landed in.

I have decided, though, that I will start saying the Kaddish (mourner’s prayer) on the anniversaries of my parents’ deaths. Not because the prayers fit my own belief system, but because my mother and father want me to recite the Hebrew words for them.

Finally, perhaps I can capture some magick I’m looking for by tapping into Jewish mysticism – numerology, tarot, astrology. Tarot in particular as a tool for contemplation, reflection, delving deep.

But I have no place. (Don’t even talk to me about today’s state of Israel.) No place. This has been the legacy, fate, and I believe the future of the Jews. No place.

Daughter Hairs

Sometimes we live with the ghosts of the living.

For a good stretch of time after they leave home, you find your daughters’ hairs. One might be impaled in a blanket, or stuck to a bathroom tile, swept up out of a seldom-cleaned corner, or just float down from who-knows-where. Then you find another daughter hair for the first time in a long while. And you hold it, because it might be the last one. Then you toss it in the trash. That is the most difficult tossing.

attributed to Chief Crowfoot

“What is life? It is a flash of firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”

(dis)respect and atonement

On Friday night a week ago, for the first time in perhaps 45 years I attended a Yom Kippur service, and I both connected to, and confirmed my disconnection from, “my people,” those who came before me whose lives and actions led me to be born in Newark, New Jersey, United States of America, more than 60 years ago. While attending the service, I simultaneously had a living picture in front of my eyes showing a slice of the lives of my forebears, and underwent a suddenly deepened rift from them.

I simultaneously loved them and respected them for everything they went through, for how they survived and retained identity via family and education and the continuity of their religious and cultural practices that I was now witnessing, and loved their understanding of a unitary G-d force whose true name cannot be spoken …

… and also felt angry and disrespectful of them for having corrupted the beautiful purity of that vision, for having perpetrated such patriarchal laws, for idolizing a book written by men for men containing examples of some of the worst behavior and beliefs, for the juvenile relationship to a deity who they believe we need to look to for rules and regulations, for the way the laws and past/present culture denigrate women and other groups of people, for their exceptionalist belief that they are “God’s chosen people.”

The overlay of all these conflicting thoughts, while standing in a shul (Yiddish word meaning an Orthodox synagogue, from the German word for school), listening to a couple hundred congregants chant their ancient Hebrew and Aramaic prayers (none of which I knew nor understood, having not been raised as an Orthodox Jew), was just too much for me. Recognition and love and respect and disdain and, most of all, alienation just swirled inside me and grew and grew until I found tears pouring down my cheeks. I tried to shut them off but couldn’t.

I cried because I still did not belong. Because I had always been branded as a misfit, “different”, not fitting in, and not approved of yet told I am supposed to honor and continue the religion. Because no measure of “respect” and “understanding” on my part would bring me to accept the laws and customs and mythology. Because maybe (I truly don’t know) the culture and traditions should be continued, but I would play no part. Ironically, I was sad to contemplate the prospect of the traditions that are several thousands of years old just disappearing, yet I could find neither value nor place nor community nor meaning in what, by birth, was supposed to be my own cultural heritage — at least could not find enough to make it stick, to make it mine. I finally turned and walked out of the sanctuary (a word that could not have felt less accurate), said goodbye to the practices of my forebears, and sobbed out in the lobby. A nice woman gave me a tissue and patted me on the shoulder. “A lot of things can come up,” she said.

Yom Kippur is considered the most important of the Jewish holidays, the “Day of Atonement.” The purpose of the holiday is not to purge sins, for in most schools of thought within Judaism there is no “sin”. And there is no “hell”. There is only your own conscience, your own direct line of communication with an omnipotent (and, if you follow the Book, male) God. And your conscience and God might even be the same thing. If you displease one you displease the other. If you choose actions that feel right to one (presuming you have taken pause to make such an inward consultation) you have done right according to the other. The conscience of a Jew is an inescapable thing, even if you “don’t believe in God” — you have been told and your parents have been told and their parents and your ancestors going back several thousand years, that you need to consult your conscience. [Thus I think those Jews who act in hurtful ways towards others must be particularly dissociated and ill.]

The purpose of the Yom Kippur holiday is “to atone,” although not so much in the dictionary meaning of “to make amends,” but rather to recognize and contemplate and grieve for your own missteps mistakes misdeeds, and even more so to express “collective atonement” for the community of Jews and of humankind, for all our actions that contradict and defy and defile the values we just know in our heart we should be living by. This philosophy of the holiday holds much value to me, for I do feel that in our human interconnectedness, in this grand experiment called Life a/k/a being spirit in a mortal body, the joys of one are the joys of all, the pain of one is the pain of all, and the missteps mistakes misdeeds of one are also of all.

Perhaps when I have a word with my own conscience, when I atone for my own mistakes and those of my community, country, and fellow humans, when I sense a nameless unitary force coursing through everything in the world, when I feel awed and mystified by the mere fact of being alive, of sucking in my next breath — perhaps in these times I am extracting for myself the most important and beautiful bits of what it means to be a Jew. There are also several portions of the Torah (the “Old Testament” to Christendom) that I value highly — the stirring cosmology of Genesis, the existentialist dilemma of Koheleth in Ecclesiastes, the steamy love in the Song of Songs.

But this is the extent of my “buy-in.” I prefer to do without the laws that make women unclean, without the superior men who don’t count women when a minyan of 10 is needed for a service, without literal belief in a bible that has fathers trading their daughters for political gain and husbands raping slaves to ensure their progeny, without the angry Daddy In The Sky God — the “king of the universe” in the prayers — who punished and killed people, without the concept that only humans are “made in God’s image” and that we should “fill the earth with our people”, without the propaganda that Jews are “God’s chosen people” and without the way history and Word are perversely twisted (contrary to what I see as the best of Jewish values) to justify the formation of Israel and the subsequent oppression and even persecution and murder of other people.

Why did I decide to attend a Yom Kippur service to begin with? I am looking to decolonize myself. Thus I need to explore the ways that I am a colonizer, and the ways I am colonized. With regard to the latter, I have discovered that the key offenders in the Colonization Of Ilyse have been (1) patriarchy (with deep impacts from sexual assault to economic struggles to alienation from an ambition-driven society to the travails of raising two daughters on my own without aid, having been the one with the uterus) and (2) the dominant Euro-American Christian culture (with impacts ranging from having to tolerate hundreds of “Merry Christmases” every year, to truly painful prejudice [targeted at me or just overheard] and attacks on my person and horrifying ethnic history).

And my predecessors were “reverse-colonized” for two thousand years, in every European country and city they lived in for a while, and were then expelled from (or removed from for slavery and extermination). The persecution starts or the inquisition is declared — pack up your family, your books, the Torah, and flee to another country, another city and village, the next ghetto. Open the books, build a shul, continue your traditions. Rinse and repeat, surrounded by yet another culture that might tolerate you for a while but will then come for you.

So I attended a Yom Kippur service in a congregation that adheres to the practices of my great-grandparents 120 years ago — and of my progenitors for a couple thousand years before that, the practices of the Jews of the Roman/European diaspora — hoping to connect and understand more about their insularity and their survival through ages of flourishing and persecution and rebuilding lives and flourishing and persecution. And I did “connect” in that I could see and feel, viscerally, this experience through the assembly of people right in the room with me.

I had told myself that I would be visiting the East River to practice the Yom Kippur tradition of “throwing your ‘sins’ in the river” (in the form of breadcrumbs and prayers). Again, this is about collective as well as personal atonement. I have felt so raw since my experience on Yom Kippur, and have been ill for the past week, and have not made it to the river (a 5 minute bike ride from my apartment). I might still do this, though we are now outside the traditional window of time.

Perhaps through atonement for myself, for Jews, for Europeans and Christians and Americans and for men … perhaps I can forgive myself for rejecting the very beliefs and traditions that are the only reason there is still a Jewish community. Perhaps by tossing all this in the river, by letting go of what I reject, I can stanch the grief flowing from my ripped out heartstrings and find my footing.

And once I have my footing perhaps I can settle back into, reconnect with, my own roots, grown through six decades of experience and love and loss and struggle and joy and friendships and motherhood in this lifetime, and, yes, also (selectively) informed by the “city of ancestors” who reside invisibly yet almost tangibly Here With Me Now. For I do feel them. I do converse with them often. At times I even see them as an overlay on “Now.” There is another level of wisdom and healing available to me via all kinds of ancestors, perhaps particularly via my own, available regardless of cultural and religious practices. Perhaps I can bring healing to them, too.

And in spite of, and because of, all of the above, yet I am a Jew. Being a Jew is an inescapable thing.

 

Take Kazar to the River

I have decided I wish to embrace my struggle with my Jewish heritage, with my distate for — repulsion at — what I see as a childish relationship to deity and what I see as a misogynist religion (like most religions, like all recognized monotheistic religions I believe).

So I have registered to attend Yom Kippur services on Friday night and Saturday (something I’ve not done for perhaps 45 years), at a tiny local “tenement shul” in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, an orthodox congregation that still separates women in the back of the room behind a veil, and does not count women towards the required minion of 10 congregants, and does not offer Bat Mizvah (coming of age rite at 13 years old) to girls. Just the same, this is just the sweetest place with the nicest people, many of them quite old. I believe there are still a Holocaust survivor or two in the group. And I will be fasting.

Yom Kippur is the “day of atonement”. I believe in the beauty of the vision of the All-One that is attributed to the patriarch Abraham. Though, if Abraham was actually a real person in history, I think about the mother who raised him with enough love and spiritual depth to support such a gorgeous epiphany. From that point forward in the Five Books of the Torah, I take issue. Many issues!

Perhaps I will atone for being such a disappointing Jewish daughter. (Not that my sisters stayed in the religion, either.) Perhaps I will atone in collective tribal guilt for the creation and propagation of the patriarchy, the encoding of laws that are ridiculous to me, and the failure to stick with that beautiful All-One, having instead devolved into a male God Daddy who has expectations of worship (whatever that means, I have never felt nor understood “worship”) and who gets mad at people and punishes them. I will collectively atone for the fact that every Prophet, every single one of them, is male, leaving out of the Jewish recorded history any and every female who was pure and visionary and who elevated the people. I will atone for the Rabbis in most congregations being strictly male. For the laws that make women unclean.

I have a strong respect for what Jews have gone through, how they retained so much dignity and dedication to learning and sense of family, through ages and ages of expulsions, pogroms and mass killing. Reverse-colonized wherever they were able to find a new place to live for a while. Forcibly and by choice, too, ghettoized … thus insulating and preserving culture … yet raped and intermarried and adapting to the law of the land as a matter of ethics and as a matter of survival. But this is all intellectual thought on my part. So perhaps I will atone most of all for my own inability to love my people more than I scorn them.

The really great thing about participating in this solemn day, though, is that as one of the Yom Kippur rituals I get the chance to TAKE ALL THESE “SINS” AND THROW THEM IN THE EAST RIVER.

Hair and Rags

On Wednesday evening Rosh Hashanah would begin.
She awoke early as always,
said morning prayers to the god
they call Melech Ha’Olam —
King of the Universe.
She noticed her blood had come,
again and again there would be no baby.
Tucked rags in her crotch,
washed her hands with another prayer
for Melech Ha’Olam.
She heated the iron on the stove,
pressed her husband’s shirt, cleaned his shoes,
prepared his breakfast, washed the floor,
served his breakfast, saw him out the door —
no forbidden kiss or hug —
to his very important work in the world.
Melech Ha’Beit — King of the Home.

She covered her sinful seductive hair, took up her basket,
walked to the market square for eggs and honey
and returned to her kitchen.
Mixed and kneaded the dough, set it to rise.
She covered her sinful seductive hair, walked out to the pump,
And hauled the tub of water back inside.
Lit the wood in the stove,
Heated water.
Shaved some soap off the block.
Dipped her hands in the caustic mix.
Scrubbed every wall, shelf, table, chair.
She punched down the dough and kneaded again.
Heated more water, shaved off more soap,
scrubbed the laundry, hung to dry.
She set up the roast for Yom Tov dinner,
Scraped the potatoes,
Took out the cloth for the Yom Tov table,
Took down the laundry
Set the loaves out to cool
Set out the candles for Yom Tov blessings,
Stopped to eat her lunch and
Said the prayer to Melech Ha’Olam.

She changed her rags
Washed her hands
Said the prayer to Melech Ha’Olam.
Again and again there would be no baby.
She took off her apron,
Examined her work which must honor
Melech Ha’Olam and Melech Ha’Beit.

She changed to her Yom Tov outfit,
Greeted Melech Ha’Beit at the door,
No forbidden kiss or hug.
She lit the candles and said the prayer to
Melech Ha’Olam.
Melech Ha’Beit poured the wine and said his thanks to
Melech Ha’Olam.
At the table, she told her husband the guilty news,
again and again there would be no baby.
She joked that they should take an Egyptian slave
For him to make his baby with,
If it was good enough for Abraham and Sarah …
She turned her head, concealing the shame
And the grief for Sarah, for Hagar.

She covered her sinful seductive hair and followed
Melech Ha’Beit to shul,
for the Rosh Hashanah service
and sat upstairs with eight others of sinful seductive hair
and rags.
The village Jews had seen troubles.
Those with young children had left for other shores.
Downstairs the husbands counted themselves.
Nine husbands awaited the required tenth.
The Torah awaited its tenth man.
Those of sinful seductive hair, those of rags did not count themselves.
They did not count because
one plus one plus one plus
one plus one plus one plus
one plus one plus one women
equaled zero.

Sadly the Jews left the temple
Forcing Yom Tov cheer.
And the women followed their husbands home.
She sat alone next to a candle and read in Proverbs:

10 A woman of valour who can find? for her price is far above rubies.
11 The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, and he hath no lack of gain.
12 She doeth him good and not evil all the days of her life.
13 She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
14 She is like the merchant-ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
15 She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth food to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
16 She considereth a field, and buyeth it; with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
17 She girdeth her loins with strength, and maketh strong her arms.
18 She perceiveth that her merchandise is good; her lamp goeth not out by night.
19 She layeth her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle.
20 She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy.
21 She is not afraid of the snow for her household; for all her household are clothed with scarlet.
22 She maketh for herself coverlets; her clothing is fine linen and purple.
23 Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land.
24 She maketh linen garments and selleth them; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.
25 Strength and dignity are her clothing; and she laugheth at the time to come.
26 She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and the law of kindness is on her tongue.
27 She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.
28 Her children rise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her:
29 ‘Many daughters have done valiantly, but thou excellest them all.’
30 Grace is deceitful, and beauty is vain; but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised.
31 Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her works praise her in the gates.

She did not excelleth them all.
Again and again there would be no baby.
She changed her dirty rags.
covered her body in her night clothes.
covered her sinful seductive hair with her night cap.
said night prayers to Melech Ha’Olam.
wrapped her unclean self in a sheet
so as not to sully Melech Ha’Beit.
No forbidden kiss or hug.
Zero.

Song of Myself, Parts 51-52

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab
and my loitering.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow’d wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.
I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

I have always been astounded, moved and inspired by Whitman’s direct speech to those in the past, and those in the future, those of us sitting here right now. I find myself wondering if, after I spend more time burrowing back into the past of my ethnic roots, my forebears, I might burrow forwards, passing along any healing to those yet to come.