Stories, they do clarify everything!
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This is where I stand in life. I don’t *believe* in “God.” Anyone who has to believe in something knows nothing. I *know* that our ancestral YHWH god exists. How do I know this? Our ancestral YHWH god exists in our Jewish people’s Torah. Is this not enough? Jews don’t need physical or historical proof to know what we *inherit* to believe! As an indigenous ethno-religious Jew this is enough, whether I engage in modern “prayer Judaism” to this inherited YHWH god or not (which, full disclosure, as much as I’ve tried, prayer rituals has never been my personal thing, to my dismay – too much I am the rationalist, scientific minded Misnagid!).
What brings out, for me, my deepest Jewish spirituality is my *love* for our Jewish people’s stories! *Yes*, our indigenous ethno-religious people’s stories! The stories that teach who we really are as a people. Whether they be written in our TaNaKh and our Talmud, or whether they be orally expressed as is common among Chassidim. I would love to say our Ladino stories, too. But, I am a Sephardi-Ashkenazi “half-breed” full Jew (by Farkas-Gancz marriages in a troubled time, thus a tinok she’nishba wayward pintele yid descendant of Szatmár families – who couldn’t *not* teshuva!). All my life has been repentance for my father before me, and his broken father before him. The Shoah took its cost around this world, before it had even physically occured! I know, for I have studied Jewish history as much as I’ve studied Jewish “theologies.”
So, what am I trying to say? Despite *all* my inherited struggles in this life, my heart is devotedly Chasid, but my mind is devotedly halacha focused and equally challenged by this. I struggle for our Jewish people over our ethno-religious identity as a people, and how to preserve this for the future generations. Add to this, I love the daily lessons of Ladino Jewish story culture. Because, who doesn’t love a good story about our indigenous people when you’re Jewish?! Put simply, I love and embrace all members of our Jewish people, full stop.
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My fellow Jews, let’s make something very clear here! Like anti-Black racism, which is a non-Black created problem, anti-Jewish racism is a non-Jewish created problem – that has been built systemically into near all non-Jewish cultures. Just as individuals can strongly believe that they are not “racist,” they can still be thinking and acting like racists, at the same time. Even some Jews, for having integrated into non-Jewish societies, have internalized anti-Jewish racism. And, this here, is an excellent example of how one can be racist (and, if a racialized minority oneself, even towards one’s own) and *not* even realize it.
I have had many encounters with colonized Jews who are clearly proudly and openly Jewish, but are equally bought into non-Jewish anti-Jewish racism over the existence of a sovereign nation-State of Israel. So, their internalized anti-Zionism (which is Jew-hate, full stop!) leads them to say to fellow Jews (especially, if of a different skin color) that “we are just co-religionists, nothing more” and, further, that anti-Zionist rhetoric and revisionist propaganda is just “criticizing Israeli policies” (no, it is not, full stop!). This is Colonizer talk echoed in the mouths of the systemically oppressed and marginalized, aka internalized racism.
There are 42 million Black citizens in the USA, instantly and unconsciously stereotyped on sight, out of 329.5 million citizens of this USA nation. In this entire world of human beings, there are only 15.2 million members of the Jewish people, an ethno-religious indigenous people of, Judea-Samaria, who are instantly and unconsciously stereotyped on sight once their Jewishness is revealed (regardless the skin color of the Jew). Think carefully about this! How should the oppressed behave in order to survive as a people in this world? Will even compliance to this be allowed by those who’ve inherited systemic racism towards minorities from birth?
In other words, the privileged majorities – those who get to set the social narratives and marginalize undesired narratives – how do you know that you are not racist, until a minority calls you out on your unaddressed inherited racism?!
Israeli Zionism is the only successful Indigenous Sovereignty restoration project, so far, in the history of this world. Jewish Zionism is the most successful decolonizing project ever achieved by an Indigenous People to date. We have every reason to be proud of our Jewish achievement. May we not be the *only* Indigenous People to achieve this in this world!
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