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I went on Encounter on Thursday and Friday (Encounter being a program to take Diaspora Jews to meet Palestinians interested in working for peace, non-violence, etc and to have a face-to-face encounter with Palestinian culture, people, space, etc), leaving Thursday morning and returning home about an hour before Shabbat on Friday. It was not quite what I was expecting (whatever that was), but it was quite fascinating. I'm still really not so sure of what to make of the experience, but writing never hurts, so here I go.
I think my biggest moment of "insight" was after hearing a panel of 3 Palestinian women talk about some of their experiences and thoughts. Several of the stories that they told about being Palestinian and interacting with the outside world hit precisely the tropes of diaspora Jewish experience and pain. The ones I heard and remembered were a story of an old woman who keeps the keys to her house in what is now Israel on a chain around her neck, another woman telling us that in one context she'd been asked if she had a tail or horns, and her protesting that she is just as human as anyone- and in an echo (perhaps conscious, perhaps not) of Shakespeare, "offering" to cut herself to show that she bleeds, just like anyone else. The former stories reminded me of dozens of the classic Jewish stories of exile and antisemitism, the stories that became pretty strongly entrenched in my own head just from growing up as a Jewish kid. There's something about that correspondence that made me think about cycles of abuse- that children who have been abused often grow up to be abusers, no matter how much they never wanted to. It made me think about the whole situation in terms of needing healing, rather than just a political thing, which is an entirely different framework, for me at least. I don't know where to go with it from there, especially since I think that the metaphor is, of course, far too simplistic to be able to model from exclusively. Still, it makes me wonder about the adaptation of therapeutic techniques for use in this situation or others like it.
It also gives messages about the experience of diaspora that in many ways clash inherently with the ways that I generally think about it. Diaspora for Jews today is not so painful, at least in the USA, or at least for me. I think that there is even a lot of good that it has done and a lot of good that Jews in the diaspora can do as well. And yet, this paradigm seems to make diaspora inherently a scarring experience, unless you're willing to read the metaphor as the experience of being exiled and being mistreated in that exile as the scarring experience, which I think is a fair read. After all, I did just say that the metaphor was pretty broad-brush-strokes, not specific.
I went from Encounter to a shabbat dinner where politics were discussed and the classic line of "they want to kill us, why shouldn't we kill them first" was uttered. It was quite the counterpoint to the Encounter experience. The thing is, there's a certain realism and undeniable power to that response. Encounter presented one basic viewpoint, but didn't try to pretend that the people we spoke with there were speaking from a majority perspective- it was pretty clear that they didn't.
It's all this question of how power is best handled, and how you recover from whatever use of power you make- because it seems like inherently any use of power is the wrong use, but not using it is also a wrong use. One of the speakers at Encounter talked about how if we can find a way to make peace, it will inherently be acceptable to G-d. That may be, but it seems like it's a game stacked against it in ways that I am finding more and more disturbing as I start to make myself actually pay attention.
It also is making me think a lot about loyalty, justice and mercy, but I don't really have words for that discussion yet, and it's coming up on bedtime (and this post is getting really long), so it will have to wait.
I think my biggest moment of "insight" was after hearing a panel of 3 Palestinian women talk about some of their experiences and thoughts. Several of the stories that they told about being Palestinian and interacting with the outside world hit precisely the tropes of diaspora Jewish experience and pain. The ones I heard and remembered were a story of an old woman who keeps the keys to her house in what is now Israel on a chain around her neck, another woman telling us that in one context she'd been asked if she had a tail or horns, and her protesting that she is just as human as anyone- and in an echo (perhaps conscious, perhaps not) of Shakespeare, "offering" to cut herself to show that she bleeds, just like anyone else. The former stories reminded me of dozens of the classic Jewish stories of exile and antisemitism, the stories that became pretty strongly entrenched in my own head just from growing up as a Jewish kid. There's something about that correspondence that made me think about cycles of abuse- that children who have been abused often grow up to be abusers, no matter how much they never wanted to. It made me think about the whole situation in terms of needing healing, rather than just a political thing, which is an entirely different framework, for me at least. I don't know where to go with it from there, especially since I think that the metaphor is, of course, far too simplistic to be able to model from exclusively. Still, it makes me wonder about the adaptation of therapeutic techniques for use in this situation or others like it.
It also gives messages about the experience of diaspora that in many ways clash inherently with the ways that I generally think about it. Diaspora for Jews today is not so painful, at least in the USA, or at least for me. I think that there is even a lot of good that it has done and a lot of good that Jews in the diaspora can do as well. And yet, this paradigm seems to make diaspora inherently a scarring experience, unless you're willing to read the metaphor as the experience of being exiled and being mistreated in that exile as the scarring experience, which I think is a fair read. After all, I did just say that the metaphor was pretty broad-brush-strokes, not specific.
I went from Encounter to a shabbat dinner where politics were discussed and the classic line of "they want to kill us, why shouldn't we kill them first" was uttered. It was quite the counterpoint to the Encounter experience. The thing is, there's a certain realism and undeniable power to that response. Encounter presented one basic viewpoint, but didn't try to pretend that the people we spoke with there were speaking from a majority perspective- it was pretty clear that they didn't.
It's all this question of how power is best handled, and how you recover from whatever use of power you make- because it seems like inherently any use of power is the wrong use, but not using it is also a wrong use. One of the speakers at Encounter talked about how if we can find a way to make peace, it will inherently be acceptable to G-d. That may be, but it seems like it's a game stacked against it in ways that I am finding more and more disturbing as I start to make myself actually pay attention.
It also is making me think a lot about loyalty, justice and mercy, but I don't really have words for that discussion yet, and it's coming up on bedtime (and this post is getting really long), so it will have to wait.