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February 9, 2010 by Maya Bernstein
If I Only Had a Luge
The winter Olympics are approaching. Hooray! Something to watch on TV besides reality shows. I’m a product of the TV of the 80s. Fraggle Rock, Growing Pains, and MacGyver. Now, that’s TV. And the Olympics were always occasion for a good hot cup of cocoa, and wide-eyed dreams. Who knows, my eager ten year old self would think, unaware that even then I was too old and past my prime, that could be me one day.
In his interview with Deborah Solomon in this week’s New York Times Magazine, Vancouver-based author Douglas Coupland, speculates about his path in life. He says: “My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day like, ‘Mom, Dad, I really want to luge.’ And your parents are like: ‘O.K., I’ll quit my job. We’ll move to an Alpine community.’” And he concludes: “I could have been an Olympian if only my parents had bought me a luge.”
Ah. I should have known. Of course it’s our parents’ fault! Well, once we’re on the subject, if only my parents had nurtured my innate desires and abilities, I would definitely have been an Olympic swimmer. Or an actress. Or, perhaps, a concert pianist. Though yes, they bought me a piano, gave me swim lessons, and attended my school plays, they did not, negligent folk that they are, uproot our family and move to Vail. So as not to appear ungrateful, to their credit, I will concede that they did buy me a Golden Retriever, and, now, as a mother living in close quarters with messy kids, there is no way in the world I would ever consider living with a dog.
How much responsibility do parents have, especially in today’s highly specialized and competitive world, to notice and nudge their children towards a specific path in life? How do you nurture the innate talents of each child? Can you do that while attempting to also convey a system of shared values? And while providing them with the space and freedom to have a healthy childhood?
My husband, his brothers, and their wives (including me) are all in Jewish education. My mother, her sister, and her brother, her brother-in-law, her niece, nephew-in-law, daughter, son-in-law, and his mother, are all doctors. Is this good or bad? Or neutral? What does it mean? Maybe it is good to help carve your children’s career paths. Too much choice is overwhelming, and can leave you stranded, frozen, unable to choose. But how do we know if we are nurturing innate passions, or less-than-gently pushing our kids towards our own desires? And this begs the broader question: how much can parents be blamed, or credited, for the choices of their children?
Questions to ponder while watching young, lithe creatures, who have dedicated their childhoods to achieving one specific dream, fly through the air. Whose parents bought them a luge.
–Maya Bernstein
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February 8, 2010 by admin
Nancy Goodman
Soon after my move to Pocatello, Idaho from Chicago, Illinois, a “fallen Mormon” boyfriend who knew more about Judaism than I did inspired me to visit the nearest Barnes and Noble to stock up on Jewish reference materials. In the past, my sister Sara had been my Jewish reference material being a Jewish educator, but it was time to build up my own library.
Barely a few years out of graduate school at the time, my religious library consisted mainly of many feminist spirituality books and guides. Books like “Living Wicca,” and “The Once and Future Goddess” fueled my graduate school-era pagan phase, many tenets of which I still embrace (as well as I embrace any organized religious structure) today.
Other than that, I had my Gates of Prayer and the Book of Mormon, a copy of which, as a pious and ethical person, I stole from a hotel room in Salt Lake City. For residents of the Gate City area, the nearest Barnes and Noble is 50 miles away in Idaho Falls—a stretch of I-15 that in winter, is often covered in fun-for-the-entire-family black ice. Aside from the Book of Mormon replacing the King James Bible in hotel rooms across the Mormon Corridor, the Barnes and Noble in Idaho Falls reveals another subtle difference in this part of the country. In many of the urban big-box booksellers, the Judaica book section can span an entire row, and the books on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS–Mormons) are mixed into the smaller world religion categories. Here, the opposite is true—and alongside the many shelves of LDS books, I was happy to find my essential “The Jewish Book of Why,” and a book that strongly resonated with me called “Generation J,” by Lisa Schiffman.
Schiffman defines Generation J as third-generation American Jews—Jews whose grandparents were born elsewhere and immigrated to the US. She describes this generation of Jews as often lost, rejecting Jewish rituals for similar ones in other cultures, or abandoning religion altogether. One paragraph has always struck me in particular:
“We were a generation of Jews who grew up with television, with Barbie, with rhinoplasty as a way of life. Assimilation wasn’t something we strove for; it was the condition into which we were born…When we used the word schlepp, it sounded American. Being Jewish was an activity: Today I’ll be Jewish. Tomorrow I’ll play Tennis. In secret, we sometimes wondered if being Jewish was even necessary. We could resist that part of ourselves, couldn’t we? To us, anything was possible.”
Schiffman charts her course as a Jewish wayfinder through intermarriage, through keeping kosher, through conversations with JUBU’s, (Jewish Buddhists) through participating in Mikvah. As a Jewish wayfinder myself, I followed her course in some respects, taking some time to explore my own Jewishness. I kept kosher for a while much to the amusement of my local friends, who liked to bait me with bacon and cheese-wrapped freshly hunted moose-kabobs and such. How many Jewish laws does that one meal break? After a short time, I began dating a Jewish man living in Montana, and I considered that my replacement Jewish activity. Then I married a non-Jew who insisted on a Jewish wedding, and I got married under a chuppah after all.
I feel “Generation J” gave me permission to explore my own unique sense of Jewish identity, and it has been as invaluable a resource as any book on Judaica I have read. “Call us a bunch of searchers, call us post-Holocaust Jews, call us Generation J,” Schiffman says. Ain’t that the truth—at least for me.
–Nancy Goodman
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February 1, 2010 by Amy Stone
Responding to Haiti
Yes, everyone seems to be jumping on the disaster bandwagon. You’d have to be living in a cave to escape the media debate over Israel’s rapid response setting up and staffing an Israeli army hospital in Port-au-Prince. My synagogue is having a (kosher) bake sale to encourage kids to get involved, and Thursday night (Jan. 28) a Yiddish concert was held to help that unluckiest of nations.
If the benefit got people to give who wouldn’t have given otherwise and if a large percentage of the money raised went to an effective
charity, then nice going.
But not so nice when charities rush to a disaster site just to get face time.
I don’t know if this applies to the list of Jewish charities getting involved in helping Haiti, but I would sure check out the most effective way to contribute.
Charity Navigator, one of the main charity watchdogs, makes a fine place to start. (Although nothing is ever simple. Starting next year, Charity Navigator will be replacing the traditional approach of measuring the ratio of money a charity spends on administration and money spent on programs with actually measuring the charity’s effectiveness. But, alas, when it comes to Haiti we can’t wait.)
The one Jewish organization that gets top Haiti billing from Charity Navigator is American Jewish World Service. For one thing, AJWS has been working with local partners on the ground in Haiti for years with programs that make sense.
The AJWS earthquake relief efforts are being carried out by their local partners, and their long-term projects – when world concern has turned to the next crisis – are just what the country desperately needs. The projects include agricultural development with training for women’s peasant organizations.
AJWS President Ruth Messinger is impressive. Back when I was working for Women’s American ORT, I got to see her response to disaster fund-raising projects up close. Our organizations were among the dozen or so Jewish organizations that would set up special campaigns to raise money responding to specific crises. Ruth was the one executive who would come with carefully researched projects that could be immediately implemented and would make a difference. And many of these were for women.
Back to Haiti.
Even without a horrific earthquake, Haiti desperately needs help now and into the future. In the coming year or two or 10, Charity Navigator can be expected to evaluate just how effective American Jewish World Service and all the competing philanthropic programs are. Meanwhile, if you want to give money through a Jewish organization, AJWS seems a worthy channel.
–Amy Stone.
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January 27, 2010 by Maya Bernstein
Fertile Chaos
When I was pregnant with my first daughter, I became prey to the endless array of children’s gear, clothing, and toys marketed to parents as if they would be negligent if they did not purchase it. One evening, while watching Saturday Night Live and realizing that the commercials, marketed at young parents like myself who were too tired to go out on a Saturday night, and too lazy to find a babysitter, were for Barbie Dolls and Transformers (has nothing changed???) , I took a stance, and made a definitive decision that I would never let “kids’ stuff” take over my house. Kids don’t need much, I told the magazines as I flipped through them, trying hard not to fold down the corners of pages with cute stuff I liked.
Another kid, ten dolls, a hundred books, and a billion Lego pieces later, I am often unable to find the living room carpet because of all the toys. Some were gifts, some were bought in moments of weakness at the toy store across the street on rainy days, and many were hand-me-downs, but, there’s no two ways about it; our house is bursting with kids’ stuff. And worse – it is bursting with stuff that refuses to be contained or maintained in any semblance of order.
So it is with little choice that I wage constant war. I am the general of a one-woman army fighting against a tireless team that wickedly employs the best of guerilla warfare. They’re good. They go after the tiny stuff. The Thumbelina-sized pieces of the Russian dolls. The little orange spoons from the tea-set. The littlest boot from the wooden doll’s dress-up doll. And their hiding spots are inspired. In the bowels beneath beds and cribs, inside the deep crevices between the pillows of the couch, in minuscule bags placed inside larger bags placed within boxes wrapped in blankets. How they test me!
After bed-time, I transform. If only I knew how to sew, I’d make myself a costume. Just call me “Super-Finder.” Or “Stuff-Buster.” Anyway, my days end under couches and tables, ear to the floor, on the war-path, obsessed with finding each toy and placing it in its proper location. I go through boxes and bags of toys, looking for missing pieces from other sets. Each night, I attempt to impose order, and each morning, they’re back at it, seemingly innocent, strewing chaos in their wake.
Is this the nature of mother and children? For them to be pushing, constantly, against whatever boundaries we have erected to define our lives? For them to endlessly challenge the structures we have imposed, until, one evening, in the midst of the chaos, exhausted, we lay ourselves down, and begin to question those very boundaries and structures? What would happen if, one evening, and perhaps the following, I left the mess? If I allowed chaos to sink its claws deeper into my skin? If I relinquished some control, and then some more, handing it over to them, so that, one day, I would have no choice but to say – it is beyond me, I cannot find it, I cannot reach it, and you must search for it yourself?
Children have a way of spreading into our corners, hiding little pieces in our deepest places. And when, on those weary evenings, we search ourselves, we often find that which we didn’t know belonged, and, in the process of striving to maintain our inner home, our very rooms expand.
–Maya Bernstein
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January 26, 2010 by admin
Digital Judaica
While there aren’t many Jews living in the hilly, sagebrush and juniper desert of Southeastern Idaho, something happened a few years ago that changed the way I was Jewish forever, and I really can no longer say I’m isolated from the greater Jewish community. That happening was Facebook.
Within six months of Facebook opening the gates to the non-college community, I had reconnected with probably 95% of my Jewish pals from the Olin Sang Ruby Union Institute Camp, Hebrew school, and the Chicago ‘burbs. One of my earliest observations of this unprecedented social access was “Jews love Facebook—and I am no exception.” Last year, I wrote a column in the Idaho State Journal on the subject of Facebook, if you’d like to learn more about my obsession with this social networking site.
So, take the “2 degrees of Jewish separation,” digitalize it in a format where we can post embarrassing summer camp photos for all to see, and there is Schmoozapalooza on-tap, any time of day or night. Merely a decade ago, our past was the stuff of old photographs and wisps of memory, as life filled in around us. Now, our past is at our fingertips, and it’s dizzying for me to ponder how that will resonate through humankind in the future.
For now, it’s a constant time-warp, seeing how people’s lives have unfolded over the last decades, one status update and sliver of new information at a time. And with every round of home page Shabbat Shaloms, holiday greetings, and celebratory mazal tovs, my inner Jewish life, on my own terms, grows richer and more complex.
As part of my feminist (also on my own terms) streak, I enjoy the opportunity that Facebook has provided to reconnect with the many Jewish (and non-Jewish, of course) girls and women of my past. As I look back on my emotional development, there was clearly a long period of time when my insecure quest for boyfriendship shadowed out other potentially-fulfilling social relationships. It’s not that I have any deep regrets—I love my memories, I love where life has taken me. I am simply overjoyed that the digital era lets me connect with the amazing women of my past, now that I can fully appreciate them. It has been such a deep blessing.
Facebook has also allowed me to peek into the windows of Jewish motherhood. I never intended to be single until I was 35 and lose my job ten seconds before I got married at age 37, so while I still ponder the question “to breed or not to breed,” I currently can only appreciate motherhood-by-proxy. And what Facebook motherhood-by-proxy it is. Challah recipes, parental groans about Sunday school, sending the next generation of kids down Lac La Belle Drive. I am excited that, should motherhood in some form be my destiny, I will be able to swim in a vast digital lake of deep Jewish female wisdom—until these women who have gone through diaper-changing before me stop responding to my neurotic rookie questions.
I am reminded of a Doors lyric when I think of those earlier days in my teens and 20’s, before the Jewish hippies became rabbis and Jewish partiers became professionals, scholars, and parents. “I love the friends I have gathered together on this thin raft,” Morrison recites. Sometimes this digital feast of friends is empowering, sometimes it’s inspiring, sometimes it’s amusing, and sometimes it’s intimidating.
And it’s always so fun to be a participant. Thanks to Facebook, the raft can be as vast and as sturdy as I want it to be.
–Nancy Goodman
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January 22, 2010 by admin
Giving to Haiti: Some Suggestions
Click through the links below to donate to Haitian relief efforts:
American Jewish Committee in partnership with IsrAID
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief
Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger
If you have other donation ideas, please leave them in the comments section below!
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January 21, 2010 by admin
Interview with Senior Editor Susan Schnur
Associate Editor Melanie Weiss had an opportunity to sit down with Senior Editor Susan Schnur to discuss the Winter 2009-10 issue and its compelling theme, Our Bodies: It’s Complicated.
Listen in on Susan Schnur’s thoughts and meditations about the articles in this issue and how it came together as a whole.
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Don’t forget–you can find Lilith podcasts in the iTunes store, as well–download them for free!
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January 21, 2010 by admin
Breast Cancer Advice Refusenik
In the wake of the recent controversy and confusion over proposed new guidelines cutting down on how often one should have a mammogram to screen for breast cancer, “Be Vigilant!” seems to be the rallying cry for women. Here, in a Lilith web exclusive, is one contrarian view of some commonly held wisdom. The opinions reflect the experience of this writer only, so… be vigilant and question even what you are about to read! It’s good practice for dealing with other medical matters, too.
Jewish women, as a group the best-educated females in the western world, are also among the most sophisticated medical consumers. We represent a pretty privileged cohort, with access to information and (because we tend to live in urban areas with many specialists) often access to the best medical care as well. We have to remember to use our smarts, be attentive to our own bodies and ask a lot of questions.
Breast-Cancer-Advice Refusenik
Judith Beth Cohen
I had four maternal aunts who died of breast cancer before age 50, so it’s not surprising that I began obsessing about cancer at an early age. When a friend was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 26, I decided it was time to start having yearly mammograms and to examine my breasts diligently every month. At 30, a doctor told me, “You have lumpy breasts,” and my fears skyrocketed. I consulted with specialists with comforting names like Dr. Cope and Dr. Love. Dr. Cope assured me that I did not have breast cancer, but he could not promise that I never would. “Maybe when you’re 80,” he said. I felt reassured. Dr. Love extracted fluid from my breasts and the lumps disappeared like magic; I left her office in a happy, lump-free daze. The years passed; my luck seemed to be holding. In November of 2006, it finally happened: I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was 63, a long way from 30; not as old as 80.
I had a mastectomy in December. Since I’d spent years fastidiously monitoring my breasts and had helped three close friends through breast cancer, I thought I knew all about this disease. But when personally confronted with breast cancer’s complexities, I was shocked to feel very much at sea. I found that much of what I was told, and read about, was wrong for me. I needed to summon my own voice, trusting it above the flood of institutional givens that so often were presented as the One True Way. I feel called upon to challenge the following “truths” that I heartily disagree with. You can disagree too. Use your strengths, trust yourself, and figure out what’s right for YOU.
1. Your annual mammograms will diagnose breast cancer. Mine didn’t. Don’t be lured into feeling safe; screening mammograms never claimed 100% certainty, even though I always wanted to walk out of my annual mammogram and think, “Phew! Safe for another year!” Despite the current controversy about the usefulness of annual mammograms, I would never forgo this annual procedure. You have to be in touch with your body—literally. Mid-year I felt a very vague, tingling sensation and insisted (it wasn’t easy!) on an ultra-sound. My primary-care physician said she felt nothing. On the ultra-sound, though, a tiny black dot showed itself. The radiologist did a needle biopsy and said, “Don’t worry. It’s tiny, just .03 centimeters. It’s just a nuisance.” I will never forget those words. It turned out to be 1.3 centimeters, it was invasive and it had begun to move. (!) Given that we do not know the biology of my cancer, I don’t know if it was there at the time of the screening mammogram—but you need to be aware even if the doctor is blowing you off!
2. A mastectomy is devastating. Not for me, though Paid clinical trials show that the majority of women find the prospect of having a body part surgically removed can be psychologically traumatic. The only hard part for me was the one night I spent in the hospital. A week later I went to Mexico for a winter vacation. For me, at least, a prosthesis is fine! You stick it in the pocket of your bra and it feels like real flesh; it even has a nipple. Many of us stuffed socks or tissue into our bras when we were young, and today it’s impossible to find bras that aren’t padded, so why is having a fake breast such a horror show? Having one breast has not spoiled my sex life, nor has it affected my exercise or activity level. My husband’s comment: “It doesn’t matter to me at all—I’ve never cared that much for breasts.”
3. Breast reconstruction is the way to go. My (wonderful female) surgeon automatically scheduled me to see a plastic surgeon even before the mastectomy, so that both procedures could be done at the same time; this is very common. Breast reconstruction is viewed as a huge advance for women, especially in light of how devastating it can be for women who are undergoing prophylactic mastectomy because they are carriers of the BRCA gene; who would decline it? Well, I did decline it, and felt like a very bad patient. I’m athletic; athletic women can give up more than they think, though mastectomy is very different now than it was for friends of my mother who had radical mastectomies in the 1950; the same with changes in reconstruction.
[Editor’s note: The American Cancer Society website, www.cancer.org, discusses risks and benefits of different kinds of breast reconstruction.]
4. Chemotherapy makes you sick. The day after chemo I felt fine, because I’d been pumped full of steroids. The anti-nausea drugs worked, and I never vomited. I got mouth sores, but there was an easy remedy. I was even able to give myself the injections – at home – to raise my white cell count, something I’d been told I couldn’t do. Six months after chemo I was trekking the hills of northern Thailand.
5. Join a cancer support group. I felt pressure to see a social worker at the hospital for individual counseling and to join an ongoing support group. And then I thought, duh, I have four close friends who have had breast cancer – that IS a support group….
6. Don’t hide your disease. I got a lot of advice of the Alcoholics Anonymous genre: Be out there! Tell people what you’re going through! And this fits with my natural temperament. But I wish someone had told me that not going public might also be a good idea. I hated having everyone treat me like an invalid. I hated that everyone at work knew. I do not call myself a “breast cancer survivor.” I feel it trivializes survivorship. Plus, who knows if I’m a survivor?
7. Jewish genes are the worst. Man oh man, everyone told me this, and I believed it. When I did get cancer, it turned out not to be the genetic kind, despite my four dead aunts. Late in the game, my oncologist told me that new studies have shown that the highest percentage of BRCA mutation is found in non-Jewish Hispanic women. (Geneticists think that Jews expelled from Spain who landed in Latin America tended to marry within particularly tiny, hermetic communities, deeply narrowing the gene pool.) So, okay, these women descend from Jewish stock, but they don’t know it. When I learned about other groups with bad genes, it lightened my load.
8. Cancer makes you a better person. The ubiquitous Think Positive movement doesn’t work for me. I totally agree with Barbara Ehrenreich here (author of Bright-Sided:How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America). I need to hear the truth: Cancer is a pain, it required a ton of my time, resources and energy. And it may shorten my life. If anything, cancer has made me a worse person. I suffer fools less, and I’m less tolerant of bullshit. Those things aside, I’m pretty much the same as I was pre-cancer. Aging has made me a better person, maybe, but not cancer.
Bio: Judith Beth Cohen has written a novel, Seasons (The Permanent Press). Her short stories and articles have appeared in The Women’s Review of Books and in numerous literary publications.
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January 18, 2010 by admin
Accidental Maverick
A few people who read my last post, “Jews as Gentiles?”, referred to the content as “edgy.” And here I was, hoping I was being nice enough. So maybe I’m a Jewish bad-ass in spite of my peacefrog nature–and I haven’t worn my motorcycle jacket in over 10 years (what were we thinking buying things 10X too big for us back in the 80’s/90’s?). Interesting.
I’ve never been uber-knowledgeable about politics-in-general; and the politics I do know mostly occur within the state of Idaho (or should I say Planet Idaho.) And WOW, are there politics. Politics, to me, gets more confusing by the minute. I’m not even sure I know what the difference is between liberal and conservative ideology any more—and I wonder if I have a little of both. Thank heavens for my Jewish political adviser, Jon Stewart.
One thing I have learned a lot about is religion. Everyone knows about spirituality; they just don’t know it yet. One of my initial entry-points into feminist thought was a Woman’s Studies course about women and spirituality in graduate school—which blew my mind, permanently. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with the global patterns and behaviors of religion since religion began. I believe the proper term for this line of inquest is “heresy,” so it’s a good thing I’m not Christian.
How do I, this spiritual schizophrenic, see Jews, the tiny little yellow dot jumping over the globe for the last 5770 years, mostly while being chased? I think we’re pretty bad-ass in general. One of my favorite reference guides is “The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets” by Barbara Walker. Thousands of religions around the planet referenced in Walker’s books have, throughout time, morphed into the Big Five (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism)–with Jews, and women, the underdogs out. Now, most religions see a purpose to women, with our exclusive ability to breed and all, so long as we are kept squarely in our place. And while so many older religions have succumbed by sword or stake, or been otherwise absorbed by predominant religious cultures, Judaism has survived. One of the mythological themes I try to keep in mind for my personal sanity is “it’s better to be smarter than to be stronger.” The story of David and Goliath has served me well, and it has served Jews well.
Women and modern religion is particularly tricky business, what with all the religious dogma being re-written and manipulated by men. It makes our quest for spiritual and religious “truth” that much harder because, in order to be educated consumers, we need to figure out what everything said originally, and decide how well the product has held up over the years. What amazing, powerful woman has the time for that? It doesn’t take that much time, however, to get an understanding of the basics—such as women are the original vessels of divinity, as servants of the earth and keeper of the species. I can see how that might make some guys jealous.
When I moved to Pocatello, Idaho, my life’s rule book got tossed out the window, and I have completely lost track of what is edgy, or what is commonplace. I can barely watch “High Fidelity” starring John Cusack without thinking how lame, boring, and out-of-touch I’ve become, but somehow in the spiritual dimension I am a hopeless maverick. Funny how we can evolve—as Jews, as women, as people—when we give chase down whatever rabbit hole captures our own, individual, attention.
–Nancy Goodman
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January 12, 2010 by admin
Etz Chayim: Stepping off the Party Line
This week I have been thinking about what we choose to reveal and conceal about ourselves when we do political work. We’ve all heard the endless debates about “political correctness.” On one side there are the people who insist on the use of certain terminology. On the other side are those who say “What’s in a name?” Then there are those who point out that some people and institutions hide behind the “correct” language in order to mask oppressive realities (for example, “workplace diversity initiatives” that merely attempt to paper over deep-seated racism in hiring practices).
Language is obviously extremely important to political work. I constantly identify potential allies by the language they use — even when I’ve met someone minutes ago, I feel camaraderie with them once they indicate through a few key words that they’re tuned in to a particular political community. (For example, a potential new housemate came to check out my apartment yesterday. Once she said “CUNY,” “structural violence,” “locality,” and “anthology,” I started grinning and said “You should move in.”) And this is not about prejudice or stereotyping — when someone can converse freely in a particular jargon, it does indicate that they have substantial experience with a certain political milieu. This shared experience makes a certain level of intimacy possible — the same way that certain conversations become possible when you find out that the person you’ve just met is a Reconstructionist Jew just like you.
On the other hand, classifying people based on their language usage can oversimplify things. Some people share the same vocabulary but use it in different ways — and some people have entirely different vocabularies but the same — or at least compatible — values. (To continue the Reconstructionist analogy, different Reconstructionists can have different theologies, and one Reconstructionist may find that her theology has a lot in common with the theology of a particular Orthodox Jew that she meets.) Once the initial “Oh, you are? I am too!” passes, we may learn many things about each other that surprise us or contradict our assumptions. I’ve learned the hard way to be flexible about language — just because someone uses language in a different way than I do doesn’t mean that “they’ve gone over to the side of evil.” It might mean that they aren’t aware of something, and would be happy to be informed. It might also mean that I’m not aware of something, and if I ask them to clarify, I’ll learn something new. Or, it might just mean that there are different ways to say the same thing, each of which is grounded in a particular set of experiences. (Or that multiple things are all true, even if they seem to contradict at first glance!)
And sometimes, knowing all the “right language” can be a way to avoid engaging with the honest reality of doing political work. We’ve all known the people who say all the right things but don’t apparently know why they’re doing the work they’re doing, or who appear passionate and committed but then suddenly drop out and disappear. I’ve been that person in the past, easily able to rattle off a well-cited explanation for a certain phenomenon or political strategy, but struck dumb when asked a question like “Do you enjoy being part of this community?”
What I’ve noticed is that I’ve been able to develop my political self-awareness and integrity by paying attention to those moments in which language becomes messy. After all, I can’t stop feeling certain things just because I believe that I “shouldn’t” — I learn a lot more when, rather than denying or ignoring my experience, I observe and explore it. If I ask questions about why I might feel that way, I sometimes learn something new. For example, I’m all for gender egalitarianism in Judaism, and I dislike the gender binary (so much so that I prefer gender-neutral pronouns), and yet I sometimes enjoy being in a synagogue with a women’s section! What’s going on here?
My housemate told me another relevant story the other day. He used to be heavily involved in the politically conscious hip-hop scene. He told me that he met another artist who had a reputation for being somewhat self-righteous. The guy was putting on some brand-new Nikes (Nikes has been notorious for paying sweatshop workers next to nothing and then turning around and marketing exorbitantly-priced sneakers to impoverished urban youth). My housemate commented on the shoes, and the artist laughed and acknowledged that despite everything he stood for, he still liked to wear some nice Nikes. My housemate thought to himself, “Hey, this guy is human after all.” After some more conversation, the artist explained that as a biracial man, it was important to him to wear nice, styling sneakers (an important signifier of black masculinity) in order to publicly establish his black identity.
In my experience, it is important to create space for this type of conversation when engaging in political work. (And yes, a certain degree of trust needs to be established in order for such conversations to become possible — if someone says something I disagree with, I’m much more likely to believe that they’re wrestling with the complexity of the issue in a serious way if they are someone I know and trust.) I see this as one of the places in which spirituality is valuable in political work. To me, it is a spiritual process to cultivate enough self-awareness to know how we really feel about things, and to develop relationships in which we can explore those feelings honestly, no matter how surprising or shameful they seem to us at first glance. And it is through this process that we develop new insights about what we should be working towards. What does justice look like? What role does each of us have in bringing about a just world? Finding our place in the work becomes possible when we honestly assess what we, ourselves, want and need to build, and what we personally find exhausting or fulfilling.
–Ri J. Turner
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