Flying Jewishness at Full Mast

Some rabbis ride bikes. Other rabbis, in fact, do not know how to ride a bike. I was a rollerblader all through my childhood and I never mastered a two-wheeler. This, to the horror of pretty much everyone I’ve ever told. The thing about bike-riding is that it is supposed to be a universally shared experience: that fully-mobile bipedal humans have figured out how to wobble around on our bipedal vehicles. This is not the case, not even for this southern Californian. When I need an idiom to convey how simple something is, I try out variations on that very non-inclusive bicycle-centric phrase, like: “It’s as easy as popping popcorn; or, “It’s as easy as blowing a bubble with your gum.”

You can imagine how proud I was that this past week on a family trip to San Diego, I rode a bike. We rode as a family. And when I say, “as a family,” I mean we rented a four-wheeled, double-benched surrey. Our littlest one rode in the front, a gleeful freeloader. As we circled around the waterfront ringing the bell with annoying abandon and singing the one song that we know about a surrey from Oklahoma, we got a lot of looks. It was probably the bell-ringing that did it. Twice on our circuit out towards the embarcadero, we heard Shalom Aleichem called our way. It was a warm and welcome signal. Jews, spotting us in the wild.

During my childhood in San Diego, I’m not sure that it ever happened, even once, that I was noticed for my Jewishness while walking down the street. There’s a gendered aspect to this, and my family’s level of religiosity also mattered. I wasn’t wearing a kippah, nor did I dress with a sense of customary Jewish modesty; the men in my family didn’t wear tzitziot or other Jewish religious garb out on the street. Where I was known, I was known to be Jewish: by my peers in school who looked my way during token Hanukkah numbers at the winter concert; by my soccer coaches who knew not to write me into the lineup on major holidays; by my friends’ parents, who made a loud and special point that this cheese pizza is for thoooose who don’t eat pepperoni. (Until my middle school years I did in fact eat pepperoni so this was particularly funny.)

I learned that I could reveal my Jewishness in conversation both intentionally and by mistake, just by the words I chose. Dr. Sarah Benor writes about this feature of Jewish American life as the Jewish English lexicon. There’s word-bleed, like dropping some Yiddishisms such as, “I’m such a klutz,” or, “What a mensch!” And there’s also borrowed syntax from Hebrew and Yiddish alike, “I’m going to dinner by them this weekend.” In San Diego, you’re much more likely to encounter a blend of the Mexican-English lexicons than Jewish English; the street names alone represent the pervasiveness of that cultural admixture: paseo, calle, via. So if I dropped an “Oy” instead of a “yikes,” I was outing myself. But I loved my “oy”. I knew how to use it. There’s so much flexibility in the way that “oy” can be wielded — a shout, a moan, a bewilderment. All of that is a part of prosody, the way melody and intonation shape the meaning of a word or phrase. Bernstein wrote it best in the iconic song from “West Side Story”:

Maria!

Say it loud and there’s music playing

Say it soft and it’s almost like praying

Oy. I’ll never stop saying Oy.

I could hide that Jewishness, too. As a teen I was uninterested in the weighty responsibility of representing an entire people. A teacher would prod: “Will you tell us why you’re eating crackers instead of bread this week, Hillary?” Now the Hanukkah song wasn’t the token; I was. And I hated matzah. Was I allowed to say that? I had the privilege, if and when I wished, to mask my identity for the sake of comfortable assimilation. Perhaps this comes hand in hand with the brainspace of adolescence. Isabelle Rosso writes about this shift in grey matter, wherein the prefrontal cortex of the teen brain can finally conceive of itself as truly independent and outside others–and that this very awareness trips the instinct to fit in.

The narrative of Moshe is one of wrestling with the need to fit in, in order to survive. We the readers know that this little unnamed boy at the start of chapter two is one of our people — the people who is first known as a “people” under the wicked and torturous decrees of the new Pharaoh. He is hidden, in a basket. But his identity is unobscured, from the first moment when he is discovered by the daughter of Pharaoh.

וַתִּפְתַּח֙ וַתִּרְאֵ֣הוּ אֶת־הַיֶּ֔לֶד וְהִנֵּה־נַ֖עַר בֹּכֶ֑ה וַתַּחְמֹ֣ל עָלָ֔יו וַתֹּ֕אמֶר מִיַּלְדֵ֥י הָֽעִבְרִ֖ים זֶֽה׃

When she opened it, she saw that it was a child, a boy crying. She took pity on it and said, “This must be a Hebrew child.”

How did she know he was Jewish? Rashi, the 11th to 13th century French commentator, writes about the collective rabbinic uncertainty on this matter, which befuddled our sages:

“AND SHE SAID, THIS IS ONE OF THE HEBREWS’ CHILDREN. [She came to this conclusion because] contemplating what happened, she said [that his mother had done it] in order to save him or that she had placed him there so that she might not look upon the death of her child, and why should an Egyptian do that? Some Rabbis say that [she knew he was a Hebrew because] she saw that he was circumcised. If so, [we must assume that] she removed his clothes and examined him. But there is no need for this.”

Did his circumstances give him away? His circumcision? A certain ineffable Jewishness that could not be erased? At first there is the literary tension that the daughter of the very Egyptian leader hellbent on destruction of the Israelites has discovered a Jew. Then relief, that she chooses to save him, to raise him. Then discomfort all over again, as he is raised with hidden roots and bereft of his connection with community, with God, with peoplehood–leading to a burst of violence and an identity crisis. Rabbinic voices hail Pharaoh’s daughter as righteous in saving even one life. Reading this through the perennial waves of antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in our time, I shudder at the reminder that too often, survival requires burying Jewishness.

There are a lot of reasons to reach for a mask, a baseball cap over the kippah, a simple “happy holidays”. Not just fitting in, but also fear. We are in a season of masking, or at least arguing internally about how outwardly we should identify ourselves as Jewish, which when you think about it, is very Jewish. Arielle Kaden wrote about her experiences as a German Jewish immigrant to the United States and the shift she’s undergone since October 7. This need to hide is hauntingly familiar, something she thought she had left behind in Germany.

“The other day, my non-Jewish roommate told me she was happy we didn’t have a mezuzah on our door because if we did she’d be afraid.

My Orthodox Jewish friends are afraid to wear their kippahs on the subway. But on Friday nights, we still all get together for dinner.

On the day [of local anti-Israel protests], I had dinner with my Jewish friends and we sang. In fact, we screamed the words of Ariana Grande, Adele and Taylor Swift so loud in our apartment that if an attacker came, they would know where to find us. We didn’t care, we just wanted to be loud. I hadn’t felt so exuberant in so many days. It had felt like the world around me was crashing down, but singing with my friends brought in so much light. We didn’t know whether we wanted to hide, but together, we could feel joy, rest, and maybe even be at peace.

These days, I’m still wearing my Jewish star necklace, sometimes. It depends how brave I’m feeling. I shouldn’t have to feel brave in America to show my Jewishness, but here we are.”

It is brave to be distinctive when the act itself is in defiance of fear. When Jewish pride pokes through the veil of substantiated worry, we are witnessing resistance. Gathering in greater numbers than ever for Shabbat minha and elevating Jewish observance, to spite those who would stoke antisemitism. That is defiance. Refusing to take down mezuzot. Defiance. Painting a mural of Jewish victims of violence on the side of a building in Culver City so that illustrated “kidnapped” posters cannot be torn down. These are macro-suggestions of distinctiveness, amplified versions of wearing a Jewish star necklace.

But of course, we wrestle with our willingness to be distinct even in relative times of Jewish thriving, dips in the antisemitism sin wave. In an article from 2002, the former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary Rabbi Dr. Ismar Schorsch wrote about the power and import of distinctiveness when we perceive ourselves to be totally safe:

​​”It takes a measure of independence from the surrounding culture to perpetuate Judaism, all the more so in a friendly society. Our survival in exile amounts to a millennial campaign for the right to be different, individually and collectively. What a tragic irony, if having finally won recognition for that right, we would now divest ourselves of every iota of distinctiveness. As we anxiously await the results of the most recent National Jewish Population Survey, we ought to remind ourselves that the sovereign self is not a Jewish ideal and that diversity without continuity is but another name for anarchy. That which bears the residue of the ages enhances our sense of the holy and facilitates our quest for transcendence.”

His wisdom in an mini-epoch of perceived safety resounds in this moment of Jewish angst: We are the inheritors of a millenial campaign for the right to be different, individually and collectively. This is the source of our epic struggle — internal to each one of us, internal to our people: when and whether, in the moment of real danger, to step aside from threatening, rancorous campus debate; to tuck our chai necklaces into our shirts; to place our Hanukkiyot away from our windows; and when and whether to clutch tightly to distinctiveness, to raise a banner of Jewish pride, to be — as Arielle Kaden wrote — exuberant in the joy of Jewish togetherness.

A few weeks ago on my walk to services, a helicopter circled overhead. I walked by a Sikh neighbor in his front yard. As I passed him, he looked up from sweeping the walkway. “Be careful out there,” he said, gesturing at my kippah. Tears pricked my eyelids. From Jewish friends and neighbors and strangers, what I need is that Shalom Aleikhem. And from my non-Jewish friends and neighbors, “Be careful out there”. There are one and the same: a salve on the loneliness of being a Jew. An uncloaking of what it is to walk the streets as a Jew in 2024, steeped in pride and cognizant that we fight every day to safely walk through the world in the ways of Torah. And these phrases stoke kindness: a reminder that our humanity shines when we walk on our way looking out for others like us, and looking out for the other.

Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt published a poem to close out the year and welcome the book of Shemot in 5784. Here are her words:

“Poem written in my parked car outside the synagogue waiting for the bomb squad to sweep the building again

(January 04, 2024)

My first thought:

every single time

you craven cowards

hit us with

false bomb threats

I will become

more visibly Jewish

though on reflection

what more could

I even do?

I mean c’mon

I already wear

a knit kippah

and hamsa earrings.

Anyone in town

who doesn’t know

what I am

isn’t paying attention.

And more importantly

you don’t get

to influence me.

I let my

freak flag fly

and I won’t

lower my Jewishness

to half-mast.

If I listed

everything I love

about the Torah

the 613 mitzvot

our holy prayers

our holy days

our holy languages

we’d be here

all night long.

Four thousand years

won’t end now.

We’re still here.

We won’t stop.

You can’t quench

this eternal light.

It always shines.”

Bilaam, the sorcerer from the book of Numbers who is redeemed by God’s puppeteering speaks of the Jewish people as “am levadad yishkon,” (עם לבדד ישכון) a people that dwells apart. (Bemidbar 23:9) I have lived both possible connotations of this phrase: the loneliness of separation and the pride of uniqueness. Somewhere in the tumble and pain of these truths lies the experience that my children will remember of the days of this war. That their people fought with chin up against an unyielding tide that sometimes crashed with obliviousness and sometimes with accusation. They will remember the nights I fell asleep in bed next to them, dog-tired from treading that surf.

And like Rachel, I won’t lower my Jewishness to half-mast.

Rabbi Barenblatt’s poem: https://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/

Arielle Kaden’s article: https://forward.com/.../jewish-conceal-identity-germany.../

Rashi on Exodus/Shemot 2:6: https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.2.6?lang=bi&aliyot=0...

R’ Dr. Ismar Schorsch on being strangers in a foreign land: https://www.jtsa.edu/torah/stranger-in-a-foreign-land/