War on Whatever

I try not to be bothered by this bullshit, but the fight over War on Christmas has returned. I like the part about "persecuted Christians". This isn't China. The "Jewish" part of this is tangential, barely attached, but I hold my civic American values at the highest level of secular life, and the fact that this is the nonsense on which we spend our energy and best intentions (and media time and tax dollars) makes me want to vomit. Has PCism run too rampant? I don't know. I do know that when people tell me that America was founded directly upon Judeo-Christian codes of morality, I want to ask them if they've ever heard of the Enlightenment. Smith? Locke? Voltaire? The movement that planted the seed of "We hold these truths to be self-evident" and engendered the rise of modern nationalism? Riiiiight. (By the way, for the Yidn out there: The movement which also spawned modern Zionism, albeit about a hundred years later because European Hasidim and Maskilim were busy beating the shit out of each other?)

On the other hand, speaking as an American Jew, I've been so bothered by the fact that this is the public face of dispute for Jewish identity and presence? For real? I grit my teeth and swallow the Christmansization, the materialism, the unwarranted popularity on this lesser of holidays, but I don't have to like yet another reminder or example of this.

And on the third hand (as my boss says), there's the gut instinct of disgust. I am just disgusted. Genug.

Speaking of both disgust and Judeo-Christian codes of morality, the Committee from the RA votes on the homos next week. I am very, very curious.

And hopeful, however tentatively.

Kol tov...

A Nation Among Nations

Recently, I spent one week traveling in Israel, and then a week thinking about having traveled in Israel. Both were instructive.

The first night I was there, slightly inebriated with jetlag, Eli took me to meet some of his friends and to see and hear the rally going on in Yitzchak Rabin Square. I have to say, for something that supposed to be apolitical, there was massive representation by pre-Army blue-shirted lefties. (If my first trip to Israel was spent in what I described to Ilana as a proto-Zionist fog ["I can't believe all these people are Jews "], than the first night of this second visit was spent agog at the fact that The Movement is alive as ever.)

Not that I understood a fraction of enough of what was said around it, but it was rather electrifying to hear David Grossman speak. (I did have the advantage of several Dorot-sponsored simultaneous translations.) I was most struck by what he referred to as a need to develop a civilian Israeli culture--a culture that has nothing to do with military might. In fact, just calling it a civilian culture keeps it tied into the dialectic, so let's call it a peace culture. I spent a lot of time before going to Israel reading David Grossman, and in retrospect I think he's really on a mission to do just that. His stories don't really deal with the conflict, but they do rely a lot on very Israeli language, I think. (I say this because I lucked into what I think is an excellent translation of Be My Knife. Vered Almog and Maya Gurantz did an excellent job of preserving what Dara Horn calls the levels of Jewish language--language that's evocative of Biblical phraseology and images, but used in an entirely secular context and without intention to evoke or subvert the meaning of the text in its original source.)

It also got me to thinking about an impromptu and impassioned little speech that my adorable Hebrew teacher gave a month or so ago. A secular Israeli who's been in New York long enough to know about Whole Foods, even though she still asks me about the silent "e" at the end of some words, Dganit believes fiercely in the need to bridge the glaring cultural gap between Israelis and American Jews. She has, I thinki, an excellent point, although I don't have enough satisfactory answers for her. It was something I thought about a lot in Tel Aviv with Eli, though. If there's a city that could possibly bridge the kind of gap Dganit wants to end, and to do it in a way that ultimately supports David Grossman's dream, it's going to be Tel Aviv--beautiful, secular, progressive, graffiti'ed, healthy-by-technical-sociological-definitions Tel Aviv--that's going to be the mainstay in forming the kind of urban Israeli culture that's going to fly with the secular kids of the Diaspora.

It's going to be a terrifying transition on both fronts--the loss of the military identity and the public acknowledgement among Diasporic Jews that Israel is indeed a country like other countries--neither founded in imperialistically-minded bloodlust nor really the Eretz Israel of messianic lore. I don't think I need to plumb the collective Jewish psyche for why those two things are so scary, nor do I know that they'll be pulled off successfully, nor that they are absolutely as their two disparate proponants make them seem. But I'll say one thing: I'll feel a lot better about Israel's chances of long-term survival when I see Jewish leaders and laity recognizing their need.

Thoughts?

Kol tov...