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More than Five Thousand Years
Apr. 9th, 2013 11:17 amIt turns out that I have more to say about Yom HaShoah, or about all of the days that are not Yom HaShoah, and it starts again with my preschool Torah students and the love I have for my people and my culture.
Since the Holocaust, it is no longer quite so acceptable to be openly anti-Semitic in the West. In many ways, the Holocaust was the pogrom to end all pogroms. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not dead here. I saw my fair share of swastikas and had Kike and Jew Bitch yelled at me more times than I can count. But in polite society, it’s no longer fashionable to be anti-Semitic. This has led to a new form of prejudice that I call the “I love the Jews!” phenomenon. I see it a lot especially with Evangelical Christians who treat us like the senile grandparents of their own faith. To them, we are a curiosity, a remnant of the world before Christianity, and somehow, they feel almost possessive of us and our culture. To them, we’re Christianity without Jesus. We are not Christianity without Jesus. We interpret our shared holy texts in ways absolutely foreign to the Christian understanding of those same texts. It’s ignorant and condescending, but at least they aren’t setting fire to our houses or rounding us up and shooting us, so I smile and grit my teeth.
A lot of the “I love the Jews” people only really know two things about the Jewish people, we aren’t Christian, and Hitler tried to kill us all off. As large as the Holocaust looms in the consciousness of the Jewish people, it looms larger in the perceptions of non-Jews when they look at us. When it’s the only thing they ever really learned about us, it becomes the One Fundamental Fact of Judaism in their minds. I remember, a few years ago, a friend of my mother’s from work took me to what she called the “Jewish museum”, which was of course the Holocaust museum. I’m not much of a crier, but I started crying and shaking as I tried to explain to her what was wrong. I never did manage to make her understand the distinction between a Jewish museum and a Holocaust museum. Never mind that millions of non-Jews died. Never mind that we were Jewish before the Nazis.
I’m sick of my people and my culture being reduced by well meaning outsiders to something done to us. We have more than five thousand years of history as a people, of stories, songs, poems, languages, and faith. There’s a reason I choose to live a Jewish life and pass our heritage down to the next generation. There’s a reason I love who and what we are so fiercely, and that reason can’t be found in the Holocaust. I find it in the stories I tell my students and the ones I don’t, in the songs and prayers I sing, in the hamsa around my neck and the menorahs my mother and I have made, in the literature, the plays and poetry my people have produced, in our distinctive humor, in the food I eat, in the way I’ve been taught to think.
It has been two thousand years since Christianity split away from Judaism, two thousand years during which we too as a people have grown and changed. We are no mere remnant of some historical Jewish people, untouched by change and time. In our own way, we’re as removed from the Judaism of two thousand years ago as modern Christians. In the last two thousand years, we have written the Talmuds (yes, there are more than one), spread throughout the world, seen our temple destroyed, and learned to live without it, been chased and hunted, built synagogues and taught rabbis. The Holocaust was a piece of Jewish history, not the sum of it.
And so, I’m going to share with my students my love for my people long before they ever hear about the Holocaust, and most of all, I will try to teach them that there is something to love, something different, and unique to us before they ever have to learn about what was done to us.
Since the Holocaust, it is no longer quite so acceptable to be openly anti-Semitic in the West. In many ways, the Holocaust was the pogrom to end all pogroms. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not dead here. I saw my fair share of swastikas and had Kike and Jew Bitch yelled at me more times than I can count. But in polite society, it’s no longer fashionable to be anti-Semitic. This has led to a new form of prejudice that I call the “I love the Jews!” phenomenon. I see it a lot especially with Evangelical Christians who treat us like the senile grandparents of their own faith. To them, we are a curiosity, a remnant of the world before Christianity, and somehow, they feel almost possessive of us and our culture. To them, we’re Christianity without Jesus. We are not Christianity without Jesus. We interpret our shared holy texts in ways absolutely foreign to the Christian understanding of those same texts. It’s ignorant and condescending, but at least they aren’t setting fire to our houses or rounding us up and shooting us, so I smile and grit my teeth.
A lot of the “I love the Jews” people only really know two things about the Jewish people, we aren’t Christian, and Hitler tried to kill us all off. As large as the Holocaust looms in the consciousness of the Jewish people, it looms larger in the perceptions of non-Jews when they look at us. When it’s the only thing they ever really learned about us, it becomes the One Fundamental Fact of Judaism in their minds. I remember, a few years ago, a friend of my mother’s from work took me to what she called the “Jewish museum”, which was of course the Holocaust museum. I’m not much of a crier, but I started crying and shaking as I tried to explain to her what was wrong. I never did manage to make her understand the distinction between a Jewish museum and a Holocaust museum. Never mind that millions of non-Jews died. Never mind that we were Jewish before the Nazis.
I’m sick of my people and my culture being reduced by well meaning outsiders to something done to us. We have more than five thousand years of history as a people, of stories, songs, poems, languages, and faith. There’s a reason I choose to live a Jewish life and pass our heritage down to the next generation. There’s a reason I love who and what we are so fiercely, and that reason can’t be found in the Holocaust. I find it in the stories I tell my students and the ones I don’t, in the songs and prayers I sing, in the hamsa around my neck and the menorahs my mother and I have made, in the literature, the plays and poetry my people have produced, in our distinctive humor, in the food I eat, in the way I’ve been taught to think.
It has been two thousand years since Christianity split away from Judaism, two thousand years during which we too as a people have grown and changed. We are no mere remnant of some historical Jewish people, untouched by change and time. In our own way, we’re as removed from the Judaism of two thousand years ago as modern Christians. In the last two thousand years, we have written the Talmuds (yes, there are more than one), spread throughout the world, seen our temple destroyed, and learned to live without it, been chased and hunted, built synagogues and taught rabbis. The Holocaust was a piece of Jewish history, not the sum of it.
And so, I’m going to share with my students my love for my people long before they ever hear about the Holocaust, and most of all, I will try to teach them that there is something to love, something different, and unique to us before they ever have to learn about what was done to us.
