3 vertigos for the Jew

				

					

					

						
 (written for the now defunct grouping)
						

					

						
 New Media Jewish Arts 
						

				
			

About an ethnic group that is most often thought of
as invisible: the Jews. They pass, they are invisible
because they are too much like
the norm,
yet dangerously close in their silence,
as Jews,
to the norm's fear of conspirators.

I n v i s i b l e
unless as a joke here and there,
but hearing them as Jews, forget it.

When an (ex-Christian) atheist wants to berate his or her roots ,
the curse against the so-called "Judeo-Christian" heritage is often used,
bulldozing through any Jewish singularity.

The fact that the specificity of the split between the "Judeo" and the
Christian was the actual motive for centuries of Christian murders
is skipped over for the sake of a more grandiose argument.

We Jews live with two thousand years of negative P.R. campaigns claiming that, being connected to an antiquated religion,
we belong to the dustbins of history: everyone (majority rules!) should have made the transition to Christianity, or to Islam.
Or today, to Modernity or Post-Modernity - Sander Gilman in Inscribing the Other claims that
this is not the age of Post-Modernity,
it is the Post-Holocaust age.
So why hang onto the past?

Here are a few healthy reasons (vertigo included):

1st (Vertigo) - Th e right to d i f fer/the gap that the Jew offers is A difference however apparent (there might be sidelocks or again there might be none)------> that another point of view is possible.
Whenever the specter of conformity appears, think of our martyrs and of their willingness to stand out and, through the centuries, plead with the authorities for our right to exist, as DIFFERENT people ( you can add Yeshua Ben Miriam, a.k.a. Jesus as another fearless Jew).

Out of that gap,
that remarkable (sometimes invisible) difference...
a myriad of possibilities free us
from the tautologies of the status quo.

 

2nd (Vertigo) - The right to be all inclusive/engage with the future, as well as the past. The Age of Enlightenment (XVII & XVIII centuries) while satisfying an encyclopedic thirst in the sciences, and adding plenty of reasonable thinking to the humanities, brought along a furious desire to break with the past. That position* is still sold today as the modern way to be.
The Jew's discourse, on the other hand, is intrinsically based on a dialogue with a past. If a Jew exists as a Jew, it is always in reIationship to a past that beckons, like an 5000 year long hallway, to honor the wisdom of the past and one's history. The advantage of looking backwards is that, like the athlete who gains momentum by leaning back, the jump forward will be always much greater if you take a deeper breath, incorporating more of your heritage. Further, a true embrace of the future is encouraged as a necessary move towards repairing whatever awaits us in a broken state (Tikkun Olam).

 

3rd (Vertigo) - The right to wrestle with reality/a true engagement with the Other (cf. Levinas). Jacob (Yaakov)'s name is changed to Israel after having struggled with an angel through the night (Isra/El= Wrestle/G-d). Not only do we fight with "ourselves", but ("2 Jews, 3 opinions"), there is no monolithic way of knowing: learning is done as pilpul, a dialectics of examining texts with a partner and arguing. If Truth appears, she floats in between the two voices, held up by the intensity of the involvement.
Similarly, if you look at a page of the Talmud, Mikraot Gedolot, or many other texts you will see not one view presented, but multiple ones. Like a diamond with sparkling facets, some of the authors are conversing across centuries. Hypertexts before our time, each page of Talmud as a call for our openness.

 

* I call that position "novophiliac", loving of the new, but also, like a hemophiliac loosing blood, quite debilitating.