I hope that if human beings are born with anything it's a seed of dignity. Nobody's perfect, but it has been a personal endeavour of mine to grow that seed and have it flourish in spite of the human race. Sometimes life drowns out hope and so, we flounder. For me, all it takes is a storm to remind me that there is something greater than individual misfortune or fortune out there. Outside, it's storming. "When the rain comes, we run and hide our heads. We might as well be dead." (Beatles.) I have a tendency to walk outside, slowly, in the rain. Something about water from the sky always gives me the feeling of replenishing those intangible things, like dignity, that I have lost or been robbed of. Of course, the rain would give me these things. It has nothing to do with people.
Now, there's something to think about: people. Over the past few years, I have not changed or assimilated into the crowds. Rather, I have learned how to pretend up to a point. All things pass away and through in the end. The relevance of all of this? A shame that I am working through inside myself: shame because I am a fool, proven, once again. I trusted in the myth of community, of acceptance, of what-goes-around-comes-around, and of the sincerity in what some leaders preach. I am always foolish because I was born with hope and not dignity--dignity, if I possess any, came from elsewhere. I forever harbor hope even in the realm beyond despair.
What am I talking about? Hypocrisy at its greatest. A quintessential text-book case. Before I get into this I should make clear that I am a secularist Jew and my faith resides in the potential of humanity to transcend the animal human and to attain the Humane quality. I reiterate: the potential. My faith resides in the race's hybridity and our ability to rationalize and overcome our inherent fear of "Other" in order to attain new levels of social and individual evolution. But all of this is nothing but a pleasant and foolish dream. It is merely potential. Still, I dare to hope.
In the beginning (yes, let us begin in a biblical fashion), I was brought up with and taught Jewish values. It all boils down to standing on one leg and summing up the entire point of every tradition and every teaching with "Love your neighbor as you do yourself." Silly me, I take that to heart. Yes, I'll take in an absolute stranger for an indefinite amount of time, until they're family, because it's what is right. No questions asked. No favours. Because blood is not thicker than water. Intentions are. Actions are.
When you preach a doctrine, follow it. I'm not much of a preacher in that sense. I just do what I think is right and for no other reason other than the fact that I have faith in its correctness. I don't do anything for a prize. I do it for myself and for the Providence that tells me that it is the right thing to do.
But people are selfish and preach good (but often empty) words with bad intentions and the actions (or inactions) follow the intent. Sincerity is not in the formula for being accepted, but rather for being excluded. I must say, beforehand, that this is directed at a specific group of people. I must claim them as my own: the contemporary American Jewish community.
I have been thinking about this in depth for a long while: what went wrong? I'm about to attend a program in Berlin that has me reading the history of Jewish life in Germany over two centuries (1743-1933). The Jews of Europe, and particularly Germany, tried to assimilate; they were more German than Germans; more French than the French; etc. etc. Yet, everyone knows what happened in the end and anyone who denies it is proof of this incontrovertible fact: assimilation is impossible.
Except, possibly, right here in the United States. We are so well assimilated, if we choose to be, because we have been allowed, unceasingly to do so, that we have utterly forgotten, as a community, what it means to be Jewish. All the while we flaunt the jargon of Mitzvot and Tzedakah. This is all only rhetoric, a platform from which to jump and reach the ever-coveted status-quo. Fortunately, I refuse to jump. I even refuse to climb to the platform. And thus, I am a secular, well-assimilated, strong American patriot who realizes that I will never fit in to the communities into which I was born, because I choose to adhere to my dignity. I also realize that I will never be fully accepted into the American community, either, precisely because I am both an American Jew and a Jewish American.
Thus is my dilemma. I am not a neutral entity, but one who by my very nature walks the line between the two worlds of masked exclusion and feigned acceptance. For me, the line becomes an entirely new, third world. I will claim that all of us Jews who dwell in the midst of the American diaspora make up this third world. I will also acknowledge that most of us fail to recognize its existence and claim allegiance to one side of the line or the other, or disavow ourselves of the idea of Jewishness, assimilation, and what it means to be an American Jew or Jewish American. This disavowal is perhaps even worse than denial, for it resides in ignorance and the antithesis of Jewishness: amnesia. We have forgotten our roots.
Yet history will tell us that for all of our lofty dreams, we remain rooted, despite our forgetfulness. History reminds us that Jews are those deemed so by the general population and not by individuals or those who claim membership in the Jewish community.
And yet my friends range from Christian to Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, agnostic, and atheist, and from Jewish to outright confused, and to indifferent. I will not call this assimilation and I will not call this a "melting pot," but a tentative and cynical faith in that human potential to transcend the animalistic aspect of our selves.
I am a fish half-way out of water, and the water is my element. I am one who drowns in the air. Yet I am aware of my precarious position in this strange and ambiguous world. My tail is on the land and my eyes in the waves. I am half drowned in air and still, indecisive. Nevertheless, I suspect that has and always will be my position, for I can neither neglect the religious part of me nor abandon the secular. My comfort rests in the notion that I do not pretend to be one or the other, but somehow, a master of both. Thus, I must live in a curious brine of cynicism alongside hope, expecting nothing of the world but what I may make of it.
Of course, the idealist in me continues to seek out a dignified existence, a utopia of thought where we live in a world like "Imagine"--it's easy if you try...The idealist pulls back and sees the world from a distance, where dignity and hope can be derived from something as simple as rain, and where small children don't grow up only to die for some old man's esoteric agenda. But I'm not stupid. Idealist, I may be, but even more so: a Realist. On any plain, I am a fish half-way out of water and I drown in air, one eye above the surface and one below.
I cling to my roots.
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