Holding complexity amidst catastrophe

I didn't want to write this.

I don't want to write this.

I feel like I need to write something.

I am writing this.

I am not good at writing about my Jewish experience.

I am still writing this, eight days after I started.

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All those sentences start with I.

And this isn't about me.

And it is about me.

I grew up in the Jewish community around Bondi.

I wasn't there, but friends were, and friends of friends have been injured and killed. And, in a different time, I could have been there.

And processing things that happen is always about finding the I in the we, isn't it? How do we fit ourselves into what happened? Do we try to simplify into an us vs a them, or do we try to see the interdependence and the nuance and the complexity?

--

Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time.

This is basic reality. And it's something the politics of the nation state cannot handle.

That's why I still wanted to write something brief, following the trauma of the horrific antisemitic shooting in Bondi a little over a week ago.

The Jewish community - here in Australia and around the world - has a crucial choice to make: simplicity or complexity.

We Jews like to argue. Debate and discourse is embedded in our culture - our core religious text after the Bible is the Talmud, which is a record of endless debates between rabbis about the meaning of the Bible, interpreting rules and practices in countless ways. There's a saying that, if you get five Jews in a room, you're guaranteed to have at least six different opinions.

But the majority of our community - and particularly its mainstream leadership - has erased that complexity when it comes to Israel. Debate is not allowed. It is punished severely, with excommunication and abuse.

While we were still just starting to process the shock and the fear and the grief, on Sunday night, the lateral violence began. The vicious attacks, the blame, the slurs, the challenges to our identity. I don't want to go into detail, because it's too ugly and offensive.

It felt wrong to say anything about it, in the "public space" of this blogletter. And it also felt wrong to simply let it go unchallenged. And now, a week later, it's so blatant, it's not as though I'm saying anything people don't already know. The crowd at the memorial booed the PM, for goodness sake. I'm no fan of his, but, really? How crass. How mortifying. A shanda far di goyim - a humiliation in front of non-Jews, exposing us before all.

I can hold compassion for traumatised people, and recognise why they would lash out.

I can also be angry about how that trauma has been so deliberately weaponised for the purposes of brute power. Not just in the last week, of course, but building on now several generations of effort, attacking the nuanced and complex tradition of Jewish diaspora thinking and replacing it with a simplistic narrative of state power.

There used to be a sophisticated and wide-ranging debate about Zionism in the Jewish community. From the 1880s through to after 1948, perspectives ranged widely from the Jewish Socialist Bund's concept of doykeit (Yiddish for "hereness"), expressing the idea that our safety is bound up with the safety of all and that our obligation is to work where we live for liberation for all, through a vision of a non-state, multi-ethnic Jewish homeland in Palestine, to the ethno-nationalist state Zionism that won. The victory of state Zionism is not only in bringing its vision into reality, but in erasing the debate from history.

Hannah Arendt, who, alongside Martin Buber and others, was working for the middle option - a multi-ethnic homeland in Palestine and doykeit in the diaspora - warned of this erasure coming to pass. Her essay, To Save the Jewish Homeland, published in May 1948, though obviously somewhat dated geopolitically, is nevertheless prescient. I just want to emphasise here what she writes about the dangers of erasing complexity and diversity of opinion:

"Unanimity of opinion is a very ominous phenomenon, and one characteristic of our modern mass age. It destroys social and personal life, which is based on the fact that we are different by nature and by conviction. To hold different opinions and to be aware that other people think differently on the same issue shields us from that god-like certainty which stops all discussion and reduces social relationships to those of an ant heap. A unanimous public opinion tends to eliminate bodily those who differ, for mass unanimity is not the result of agreement, but an expression of fanaticism and hysteria. In contrast to agreement, unanimity does not stop at certain well-defined objects, but spreads like an infection into every related issue."

This is why I am so grateful that, in the last couple of years, alternative Jewish voices have finally started to break through, here in Australia and around the world. We must revive the complexity and be willing again to debate our future, and how our future is irrevocable bound up in the future of all those we live with and among.

None of us will ever safe until all are safe. None of us will ever be free until all are free. Literally.

And, while I am expressing gratitude, can I thank all my dear friends and colleagues who have reached out over the last week, checking if I and my family are ok. Jewish family and friends I speak to are all overwhelmed by the feeling of being held and cared for by you. It means the world.

I could say more. But I don't want to now. There will be time later.

Let me just point you to three things that I think are worth looking at.

This beautiful and short piece by David Heilpern in The Guardian expresses the roiling emotions and the need to rise above hate and revenge.

Em Hilton writes powerfully in +972 Magazine on the need to speak when we don't want to, and the desire for safety in an inherently unsafe world.

And, finally, can I encourage you to sign this petition from the Jewish Council of Australia, calling for unity in a wonderfully interdependent way:

Jewish safety and the safety of every other marginalised group go hand in hand. 

Pitting Jewish safety against Palestinians, Muslims and migrant communities, and eroding all of our civil liberties, doesn't make Jews safer. It makes the real fight against antisemitism harder. 

Amen.

Happy and safe holidays to you all,

Tim