So not only have I cross-linked to one brother’s blog, but I have installed a feature on this here blogging platform so that the other bro, who only communicates through his thumbs via Crackberry, can now read it without all the troublesome images.
You know I love you guys, I would only do this for you.
I may be a nice guy, a smart guy or a reasonably fun guy.
But I am no one without my causes. It’s clear from the moment I found my first cause — likely the defense of Judaism on the playgrounds of Nebraska and Texas — that I approach wholeness only through my passions.
Knowledge of an issue offers one power, and power begs responsibility, and responsibility takes your time, and time consumed to great degrees means that people always know you as the “[issue] guy.” In college I was the March of Dimes guy, in New York I’m the Israel guy. The very word “causes” is popularized by the Facebook application: a badge of membership, detailing who we’ve recruiting and how much we’ve raised. I define my facebook page by the things I care about. (And irony is not a cause, friends. Sorry, I don’t roll that way.)
I am defined by my causes because every day I wake up and existing just isn’t enough — it’s boring, even at its hedonistic moments — but there is more existential angst here than just an effort to find life meaningful.
I’m not a great person without my causes. My gregariousness, creativity, stories, and relationships I create all originate in how I proceed through life, working on a cause. Even my humor is laiden with a politican bent, a purpose of shifting the sensibilities about sex, race, religion and politics to a more healthy place. There isn’t a joke for the sake of joking! Every joke expresses a point of view that needs more air time. Even this one:
Q: What’s a frog say when it’s knee-deep in water?
A: Knee-deep!
I tell that joke also with a purpose — it’s context is to give people a G-rated joke they can tell in mixed company (or even an interview!) in order to do well in the world, to succeed, to get hired, so that our little movement of good people gets further in this world. I’m just teaching, but I want you to be better, funnier, whatever. Even this inane little joke is told from a place of great purpose: we progressives need to be more, bigger, better.
And this is nothing to say about my Holocaust jokes, occupation and Israeli-Palestinian jokes, and the black humor of racism around the world. “Brown people” is the punch line of so many good jokes, like a liberal “Yo, Mama” or “That’s what she said” joke. It’s a tired line, but that’s the point — brown people are tired of it all, too.
There are parts of me which are dead when I’m not on duty, so to speak. My sense of initiative and entrepreneurial excess are useless without the outcomes of it all. Are we building community, stitching great new people together and fostering right relationships at home and abroad, or no?
I tell both my friends and my dates that they’ll never know the true me until they witness me give a speech. The patient boy gives way for the righteous indignation, the poetry, and the volume which is secreted away and bottled up. We wouldn’t want to be overly dramatic everyday now, would we? I save it — and it’s a huge part of me only given space to vent by my causes. I might very well blow up without them.
My schedule, my friends, my prayer, my relationship to God, my job, my volunteering, my spending habits, my clothes, my food, my reading, my academic interests, my writing (of course), my dating preferences, my pride and my shame, my idea of success and pleasure.
Me.
…All of it wrapped up in my causes to the point that I may be little else than a framework for changing something about this world, every second, every day. And to even rest, to justify relaxing, is almost painful. To be less useful is painful. We all want to be wanted — and my causes leave so much to be wanted, they want my contributions terribly badly.
I am my causes. When the (majority of the) Middle East conflict is over, maybe I’ll be delightfully left without a self. An empty frame, bereft of content. Maybe that would be nice.
I am no one without my causes. Perhaps I’m in a race to be a nobody. After all, nobody should be free from doing this work. =-)
Maybe Jews are supposed to die off. Hasn’t anyone thought about that?
All this yapping over Jewish continuity begs a few assumptions. What is this obsession with quantity over quality? Ten million Jews is better than how many upstanding Jews? Nine million? One million? A thousand? One hundred? Fifty? A minyan? What’s the exchange rate here — I’m willing to cut a significant discount with the Lord. He offered Abraham a pretty steep one in Sdom and Gmorah.
Most assume that Jews should exist a priori, that is, just because, and a few posit the best way the Jewish people can make a contribution to the world is to stay alive.
Maybe that’s wrong.
Maybe, like authors and thinkers rediscovered long after their burials, the world of the Moshiach will burst upon the world stage when some long-future civilization stumbles upon the forgotten legacies of a people known as the “Jews,” centuries after the last one disappeared?
Legend says the Moshiach will appear when all the Jews obey the mitzvot, or when they’re all righteous, so perhaps rather than increase the number of Jews out there, we should allow ourselves to dwindle until finally, just one righteous Jew remains — so that the prophecy can be fulfilled.
Or maybe not in our quiet dwindling but in the fireworks of our fantastic exit we will teach the world a lesson? The Holocaust was halted the first time and maybe the long-heralded Second Coming of the Shoah will finish us all off and in the aftermath the world will in horror finally learn to stop genocide. It was also solve the Jewish problem, the Middle East conflict, and put anti-Semitism to bed. The Jews gone, the safety mechanisms of world governance exposed as paltry, and a rebuilding of life afterwards. That would be a powerful lesson.
What if, in marching towards annihilation, be it patiently or fiery, with our heads held high and our morality impeccable, we will finally be the Light Unto the Nations that we never became?
What if that was the true meaning of being “Chosen”?
Over at Jewschool, we get into heated battles over Israel, Arabs, the Israeli Arab minority, etc. We get visits from plenty of right-wingers and independent thinkers who say some pretty outrageous things. But one our more conservative fans (readers?) just dropped the Z-bomb as the r-bomb:
That part of the Declaration of Independence [guaranteeing equal rights for all Israeli citizens] has proven to be a mistake (along with the decision not to expel the entire Arab population before the end of the ‘48-49 war; and the annexation of the Wadi Area in 1950.)
Let the state of Israel be the state of the Jewish people, and Palestine can become the homeland for the Palestinians…or one of the other 21 Arab countries.
If that is racism KFJ, then I am standing up as a racist. I want us to have our own place.
Meanwhile, the official voices of the Jewish institutional world — and plenty of well-meaning progressives — do their best to say that Zionism is not racism, and taking that fight into the halls of the United Nations and academic circles everywhere. But I think it’s pretty clear that this kind of Zionism is racism, and deplorable as such.
That’s the little line in the sand where the national aspirations of the Jewish people become something much more ugly. And this is my basic qualm with the Big Z: it’s an awfully slippery slope. Where do you stop? At what point does nation-building necessitate ethnic cleansing? Israeli historians like Benny Morris aren’t out to pretend; he says it was necessary.
Even if I were comfortable with nationalism, it would certainly stop right there.
Uzi Hitman’s 80’s children’s song about an angel promising peace to the children of the world is masterfully rewritten by Hadag Nachash and translated in this YouTube video. Original song here.
I don’t believe in nationalism.
I don’t believe in the abrogation of the Diaspora.
I don’t believe it’s a great idea to put all the world’s Jews in one, small easily-annihilated country.
I don’t believe a “Jewish people” exists in any way definable for the purposes of determining citizenship, only Jewish peoples.
I don’t believe the implementation of the State of Israel in the past century was ethical, righteous or honoring the legacy of Jewish historical experience.
I don’t believe that secular Jewish life offers the world much that other secular cultures don’t already offer — that our worth is in the moral voice of our faith, encounters and relationship with God.
And yet the country exists. It fights to exist. And the (lefty) fighters there I have met, I have fallen in love with their spirit.
And now what am I supposed to do?
What the US did right in Ireland which it’s not doing in Israel, from Common Ground News, by Marc Gopin:
Senator Mitchell once told me in person exactly how he managed to successfully outmaneuver the spoilers in the Irish/Protestant conflict. He explained to me: I had a pad of paper with my handwritten notes. I had the only copy. On it I placed what each side pledged to do, and exactly when and in what sequence they would do it. I let them know that if either side failed in the sequence, then the President of the United States would publicly lay the blame for the failure of the entire accord on the side that had broken their word.
These words were so simple, so remarkable, so pristine in their understanding of negotiation and arbitration. And this is precisely what has been missing from Palestinian/Israeli peace processes from the very beginning. It is not as if the American road to Irish peacemaking was easy. There were spoilers in America, just as there are now regarding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. There were people on both sides who thought they were pro-Irish. But were they pro-Irish all those decades or anti-Irish? In the end, it was Mitchell and Clinton who were the most pro-Irish, because they stopped the killing of Irish children once and for all.
When people ask what kind of support the American President should give negotiations, that exactly the kind of support we should want.
Fuck your American Jewish pride. Screw your “strong Israel” militancy. And to hell with you, Jewish spoilers. If American Jews need to kick Israel in the nuts to make it stop constructing settlements and strangulating Gaza, that’s also pro-Israel. The other option is another 40 years. Pick your side, pick your future.
Mobius is giving the blogosphere a reaming in the motherboard over the rightwingosphere’s dive tackling keffiyah-sporting Rachel Ray in the knees. Far be it from me to comment too much further than the grand-daddy of the topic has already done.
But since Mobes made me more aware of the keffiyah trend, I really did a double-take a couple times while in Israel two weeks ago: keffiyahs are for sale everywhere. And not by Arabs in the Christian and Muslim quarters of the Old City, or East Jerusalem, or Nazareth — but by Jews in Jewy places.
I first saw them in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, not too far from the Jaffe Gate. In particular, I stopped to photo and joke about the rainbow-colored keffiyah on sale with the red and black ones. “What is this?” we joked, “the gay-friendly Palestinian resistance?” After a couple jokes about the audacity of a “log cabin” Hamasnik, I moved on.
But what really made me stop and stare was the prominent display of a rack of brightly colored scarves in the windows of fashion boutiques in Tel Aviv’s trendy Shuk HaCarmel! The shop was called “Smash Wear” which nearly made me pee my pants at all the possible and incredibly inappropriate puns.
Mobius can say what he wants about American ignorant hipsters being duped into buying “peace scarves” (I’ve confronted a few friends myself who didn’t know any better), but now we’ve gone muddied the waters when Israelis either (a) wear them or (b) sell them to tourists. Is this irresponsible or have we actually managed to strip the keffiyah of it’s national symbolism?
I’m an advocate of cultural appropriation. Judaism is just a litany of appropriations of other people’s food, clothes, philosophy — latkes apparently are a Polish food, available year-round in Polish shops in Williamsburg, for example. With the exception of matzah, I think very few cultural trappings of Judaism are actually invented by a Jew. So this keffiyah thing doesn’t bother me that way.
But I’ve been considering a line of hipster wear with Chillul who? which smashes a few other borders: a Palestinian flag kipah, for example. Or let’s go all out and make a keffiyah out of little blue Magen Davids! How about a keffiyah-colored tallis? Let’s just say “fuck it” to the sacred cows and have an end to them. Fashion has killed the keffiyah and we can only wonder what other national symbol is next. Is any one taking bets?
