Gaaaaah.

I’ve been forced to postpone a performance scheduled for later in February due to the arthritis in my hands.

I’m going to an open mic tonight, and I’ll bring my guitar; but I’m reserving the right to sit out if my hands feel too painful to go on.

I’ve accepted an invite to be the Songleader at Camp Schechter in early March, but I don’t know if I need to line up a sub. It all depends on how my hands feel, and on what the orthopedist says next week.

The challenge is consistency. Things are changing every other day; some days my hands feel well enough to do things and other days (like today) they are hurting all day long. Maybe I can’t have consistency, but it would sure make things easier to forecast.

Frustrating.

How to be myself in the world?

 Since getting the news of my ADHD — a total mindfuck, honestly — I’ve had to come to terms with all the ways I’ve been ignored and invalidated, bullied and abandoned, since childhood.

It has been hard, draining and painful.

It has explained a lot, including my struggles with attachment to people and community, my propensity to leave uncomfortable situations rather than stay and work towards resolution (though to be fair, I’ve left some big situations not entirely by choice, or that were unresolvable). 

A great deal of my loneliness is connected to being neuro-spicy and being surrounded by folks who didn’t understand it, or me. 

So I’ve spent a lot of time this fall and winter feeling a lot of loss and grief, over what was and what might have been. And every time I think I’ve gained perspective, another long-buried memory pops up to remind me the well is deep and that I have a ways to go in my healing process.

Some days are easier. I have things to do and the weather let’s me get outside and those things help.

Other days are harder, as I learn how to live with unmasked ADHD and the rapidfire mood swings that seem to come with it, and I feel by turns anxious or depressed or scattered and don’t know what to do with myself. Today is one of those days.

Still, Sweetie woke me this morning with a snuggle and the coffee tasted just right, and I’m so grateful for every moment of reassurance and love during this very crazy time.

I played guitar today.

I played guitar today.

If I hang in there for more than ten minutes, some of the pain subsides and I can go for about thirty minutes before my hands get tired and stiff. That seems to bode well for possibilities going forward.

I have an appointment with an orthopedist in early February and hope to get useful info, including potential treatments that will give me some relief.

I still feel mentally and physically exhausted on the whole, and physical efforts are rewarded with slight Long Covid symptoms — shortness of breath, elevated heart rate — and I still struggle with fatigue. So I’m not back to any kind of “normal”, and I recognize that I may not return to the normal I enjoyed before the pandemic. So I’m not making plans for any big trips until I have more information.

I HAVE accepted an invitation to provide music and worship leadership for a women’s retreat in early March, at Camp Solomon Schechter in Washington State. It’s a beautiful place that I’m fond of, and I’ve been assured there will be time for me to relax as well. They’re providing my transpo, room and board and paying me a small stipend. It will be a mellow gig.

Next month, my Bremerton Rabbi is coming for a short visit. We’ll talk about next fall, of course, and also just hang out a little bit. It is my hope that I will be well enough to do at least one more High Holy Days for them, if not a few more.

I recognize that I’ve got a lot on my plate right now. AND I know that a fair amount about my health and day-to-day living has changed. But I would still like to feel connected through my ability to do things — to make music and hang out with people and be a part of the world around me. It’s just hard to see ahead to that right now when all I want to do is sleep a lot and keep my joints as pain-free as I can.

I’m in a holding pattern, a time of transition and letting go of old things that no longer serve me.

I’ll just need to sit tight, hang loose and take my time.

Inventory, part two.

Talking with my counselor today, I came across a graphs that shows the stages of emotional life — where one finds themselves psychologically and emotionally at each stage of life. Based on this graph, I am hovering on the cusp of leaving the stage of engaging with work and family and community on the most productive way, and entering a time of pondering my life’s lessons and my legacy as begin to consider my impermanence.

This is the bigger part of what I’ve been processing over the last couple of years, especially since Long Covid and other medical issues have begun to slow down my physicality.

Arriving at this understanding helps make so much more sense of where I am right now, and the things I’ve been wrestling with.

Don’t watch this space for more angst about Israel-Palestine. It has never been a big enough deal in my life for me to focus deeply or heavily on in a prolonged way, and it feels like the best choice for me now is to lessen my focus and attention on it.

Don’t watch this space for upcoming cross-country tours. I think I’m done with those. I may make a trip to a conference if it promises personal and communal enrichment, but in terms of using such conferences to network for future out-of-state gigs — well, with very few exceptions, I feel fairly done with that. 

In fact, about the only conference I’d continue to attend if finances permit might be Women Cantors’ Network, which is the organization where I’ve found the most and best support personally and professionally. If I had a lot of money, I’d make a huge donation to them because they are an amazing community of women (and a couple men) who share their wisdom and friendship freely and with so much love. 

Other conferences I’ve attended have been instructional and helpful, but have not resonated quite as deeply.

***

I’ll still make music — I can’t not — but I expect it to be on a more local level going forward.

I’ll busk where I can get away with it, and I’ll play at Shaarie Torah for as long as they need me. Also, I hope to do at least one more High Holy Days trip to Bremerton if my physical health permits. I don’t yet know what all of the non-synagogue stuff will look like, but it’s in the mix.

If finances permit, I’d like to make a trip back east, either for a Percussive Arts Society convention or for a USARD convention. That’s not so high a priority, but I’ve never been able to travel solo for fun as an adult, only for work; and it would be fun to take myself to an event for fun at least once if I can.

The rest remains a work in progress, and subject to change at any time.

I’m amazed at how calm I feel putting this out there. 

Inventory.

Successful touring artists generally have help managing their inventory.
Whether it's a relative, a friend or a hired hand, someone is generally tasked with managing all the inventory -- CDs, plus other stuff generally lumped together as "merch" -- keeping track of what's in stock, what's been sold at each show, and moving piles from storage into stock for future shows and/or online sales. (Mostly future shows, as fewer and fewer artists are selling CDs at shows these days.

Here at Rancho Beth, It's just little ol' me. And that's okay, really.

Because here, "success" is measured in smiles, handshakes and hugs; in someone telling me after a show how much they enjoyed my music. The fact is that I'm dealing in much smaller numbers these days. I learned my lesson after City of Love, my first album in 2003. In a burst of optimism, I had five humdred CDs made of that album. It took me roughly fifteen years to run out of them. (I'm not completely out; I have maybe three or four copies here at home. They're not for sale and the album is official Out Of Print, or OOP. I don't plan to make additional copies.)

After a very hard winter in which I've performed out of town exactly once and led services once a month in town, I have had to come to terms with the fact that rapidly advancing arthritis is getting in the way of my playing guitar even for pleasure. I plan on hanging in there through the spring, and after that I'll see where things stand regarding my health.

I'm making no hard predictions about my touring in the future, but it is getting a lot harder for me to keep on plugging the meter -- practicing, trying to write new songs and continuing to hone my craft, and booking future trips -- when I can't play guitar without sharp pain in my hands after five minutes.

So I'm not planning any trips this spring. Forecasting anything beyond the end of this academic year is impossible until I know what my treatment options and their longevity are, which I hope to find out early next month.

Tonight, I took an inventory of the CDs I still have on hand.

City of Love (2003):                   OOP
Ten Miles (2013):                           35
A Sliver In The Sky (2017):           36
The Watchman's Chair (2019):       60
On The 45th Parallel (2022):        125

A few observations:

-- A Sliver In The Sky was, in terms of distribution, my most successful album, with 250 copies originally made. At one point, I was worried I'd run out completely so I made about thirty copies myself, burning them one at a time at home. I have eight of those copies left, included in the count above.

-- Ten Miles was my next successful run. I had 250 copies made, then had another 100 copies made when I misplaced the forty or so I had on hand at home. I'm down to about 35 copies between both runs.

-- The Watchman's Chair was released just before the Covid lockdown, meaning that the tours I'd booked to promote the release got canceled, as did everything else for the next 1 1/2 years. I tried to play out in summer of 2021, got Covid, then got Long Covid, which canceled everything further out still. I finally got back to touring on a limited basis last February. I have not been able to travel as much since then, due to both a slow reboot after the pandemic and an increase in some of my health symptoms since then. But I am amazed to find that I'm down to 60 copies of this release out of the original 200. I thought I'd have many more than that on hand.

-- On The 45th Parallel, released a year ago, has not done well. Neither, to be honest, have I. I had 200 copies made after recording the album at home and having it mixed and mastered by friends for peanuts. I simply did not have the same level of energy to hype and promote the album as I had in the past. I had 200 copies made, a hundred of which came with a 'Zine that I printed myself at Kinko's. I'm down to about 30 copies of the CD/Zine combo, and 100 CDs.

In the course of promoting an album, a number of copies are given away for free, to radio programmers and potential employers for Shabbatons and/or pub gigs. Over time, one learns how many it makes sense to give away, and to whom. So with every release I've given away fewer free CDs.

Here is what I do know:

When I run out of physical CDs of each of my releases, I will not make any more.

Making CDs is expensive out of pocket, especially if you're living on a fixed income, which I am now. And fewer people are buying CDs today. Folks in my demographic (55 and over) still like CDs, but they don't come to shows at night so much. So unless my appearances at synagogues have been very well-promoted, the audiences just aren't there like they used to be.

Getting into the pub scene is very, very hard, even if you're good. There are LOTS of good artists all competing for venue space. This is compounded by the fact that I will not play in a bar on a Friday night, or until sundown on a Saturday night -- the most popular nights for both artists and audiences -- because I'm either at home or at shul, observing Shabbat. I've been ironclad about that choice from the start, and I have no regrets, but it does factor into my marketability in secular venues. I just won't be as big a draw on a Wednesday or Sunday night.

I am bone-tired, I'm weary. I've spent 25 years hurling myself into the void, and while there have been wonderful people and experiences along the way, I will never be that deep into the creamy center of things enough to keep hurling myself for a whole lot longer. I'm too old, and too much myself, for it to be any other way.

I admit that, unless I can find meaningful relief for my arthritis, I'm probably on the down-slope of the arc of my singer-songwriter career. It hurts my hands like hell to play guitar for more than ten minutes now. And I just can't sustain the hustle anymore, mostly for health reasons.
I think that's okay.
I can continue to keep trying to make music on a very local level for as long as possible, but I think my touring days are winding down. Considering how far I got in this scene, I am pleased with how it's gone and I am mighty damn proud of what I've learned and achieved.

I am pondering what to do with all my manuscripts and stuff. I have some ideas, but those will be addressed later, in a separate post.

For the rest of the winter and into early spring, I am taking things slow. I am pondering what my next steps might be. But I'm not looking to build any new empires, and that's okay too.

(Below: one of my first out-of-state tours in 2006 -- and my most recent trip in late 2023)

In which I make ugly noises and throw things, because capitalism and everything else

A songwriter whose work I respect very much, and who has hosted numerous workshops online and in real time, is teaming up with another songwriter to offer a songwriting retreat in — sit down — France.

I’ve been looking back on my many years of songwriting and struggle and triumph lately. It’s hard not to do that when you’ve only recently understood that you’ve lived your whole life with a different brain, and that all your “normal”struggles were, in fact, compounded by that different brain and the culture’s lack of consideration for it.

Add to that my penchant for being a bit of a class warrior inside the beltways of privilege and, well, you get an angry little outburst now and then.

I’ve spent twenty-five years honing my craft, often while juggling day jobs and chronic illnesses. Never had I had the opportunity to get away and devote myself to my craft during an extended holiday from the rest of my life. What is that even like?

Never had I had an opportunity to collaborate in a mentoring partnership with another musician so that each of us can learn and grow. Either such opportunities did not exist at the time, or I didn’t qualify to apply for them. (See: lack of roots, etc.)

Sure, there’s a lot of sour grapes here. It’s not pretty, but neither is the gnawing realization of just how much I’ve missed out on — and how hard I’ve had to work on this craft, mostly alone — because of so many things beyond my control. 

While I greatly admire and respect this songwriter’s work, I’m lately tempted to snooze her posts on social media for awhile. I’m considering the same thing for several other musical friends in the Jewish scene. They’re all operating from places of privilege that I have never experienced, and I have grown tired of the struggle to keep up. I don’t think I can keep up. It’s possible that I began this journey several miles behind, and could never catch up.

Which begs the question: what am I trying to keep up with now?

I’m not certain I know anymore.

I’ve spent most of my life cultivating an attitude of optimism, grace and gratitude. And while I remain grateful for the gifts my life has presented to me, I’ve also come to realize just how isolation and pain I’ve waded through along the way, and right now it really hurts. I want to feel some grace towards my songwriting peers, but lately I cannot, because of how much of my struggle has become so clear to me, how much of my struggle I’ve spent a lifetime denying and can no longer outrun.

I’m tired. I can’t outrun anything right now. And i need to be able to say all that clearly and out loud without worrying about consequences or others’ opinions of me.

Gratitude can be hard to sustain when you open the Pandora’s box of history and sadness. Sometimes, you just need to take a day off from gratitude and look the pain in the eye. That’s what I’m doing for now. I can’t promise that a song will come from it, and that’s not the point. Sometimes you just have to look in the rear view mirror for a few minutes, or days, and call things as they really were. It’s a backhanded way of giving myself some credit for having survived, and of reminding me how much I’ve done in spite of my challenges.

I’m not arriving at any significant decisions regarding the future of my public music-making today; there are medical issues still to be worked out as well as social and emotional. But I definitely feel a widening of the space between me and everything I used to chase after so earnestly. I’m paying attention to that space, and will see what it has to tell me in the coming weeks and months. 

https://bethhamon.bandcamp.com/track/how-will-i-know

When tribalism is a suit of clothes.

 From a Facebook response:

1. Not every Jew can afford to flee to Israel, nor has the health and vitality to make a life there.

2. We’ve been praying for a lasting peace since before Israel became a state. But we continue to engage in war with surrounding Arab states, and we can’t not engage in that warring. Call it human nature, call it othering, call it whatever you want. I no longer dream that peace will come, because we keep showing ourselves that it won’t. There are too many factors beyond our control, too many strings being pulled by stupidly, *criminally* rich men, for lasting peace to come about.

3. For my own personal reasons — and my parents’ — I wasn’t raised to be insular and tribal. Becoming more tribal has been the hardest, most impossible part of my Jewish journey and such a sense of nationalism may well be unattainable in my lifetime. I may have already failed at developing and embracing a strong sense of tribal belonging out of the gate. Maybe it’s just too personal and individual.

If that’s so, then Judaism for me can only be a personal practice, a way of moving through the world. It can’t be cosmic or heavenly ordained, it can’t last beyond my death or supersede my humanity. And if that’s the case, I’ll own that. If that’s the case, I guess I’ll have to muddle through and do the best I can with what I have. 

4. I can’t just put on tribalism like a suit of clothes, no matter how hard I’ve tried. Some things have to be created and nurtured in the roots.

****

If you’re not raised in a tribe, if you’re never taught how to be in a tribe, then adopting that life as an adult is mighty hard, and maybe impossible.

Perhaps this is my greatest stumbling block. Not being tribal, but universal.

What does it mean for me to be Jewish in 2023? And how do I do it?

I came to Jewish communal life in my thirties after my mother died.
Typical, actually.

I had a mobile childhood and adolescence owing to my father's employment at the time.
When you move every couple of years it's tough to put down roots or make lasting friends, so I gave up on that effort after awhile.
I didn't start really learning how to build longer term friendships until college and beyond. And even then, it wasn't easy. I transferred twice and didn't finish my Bachelor's degree until twenty years after high school.

But my connection with Judaism clicked, and stuck, and it's been a big part of my life for over two decades.

I have had to learn a lot about community along the way, and not all of it was fun. Jewish community is it's own special world, with lots of built-in expectations and mores that are hugely dependent on who your parents are and where you went to summer camp and who you married and how many kids you had. And how much money you earned. And what neighborhood you could afford to live in.

Yeah, it was all of that.

I was able to transcend a large part of that by having musical talent and ability, and by dedicating that ability to making Jewish music. I couldn't transcend all of it, or most of it, but I transcended enough of it to feel welcomed in Jewish circles and that felt good after being such a loner in childhood.

Today, I find myself at a crossroads of sorts.

Between my age and medical issues getting in the way of working, even of making music, and where and how I live (low income and in a place that is not densely populated with Jews), and the current anti-Jewish climate sweeping large parts of the country and the world, how do I do this thing called living Jewishly now?

I just left a community that treated me like a resource rather than a soul. If I affilite again it needs to be somewhere that I can be a soul first. It needs to be welcoming and kind and gentle, and it needs to be a place where I can ask hard, good questions and not be shouted down for doing so, or stared at for not toeing some party line that I didn't know about.

Maybe that's a lot to ask for in a city like Portland.
Maybe I'm asking for the wrong things.
Maybe it's time for me to not be Jewish first, but maybe second or third in my sense of identity.
I don't know.

But I don't know how to be Jewish right now, and it feels like I have no one to bring this to who isn't polarized in the current climate.

Can I be anything other than polarized?

I think I'd like to be.

I feel trapped between a huge wave of people who support ending the existence of a Jewish state and the establishment of a Palestinian-majority state in its place -- and a smaller but equally well-equipped group of people who insist that Israel must remain a Jewish state, a Jewish homeland, because the Holocaust will keep happening over and over until the Jewish people are safe or destroyed (there are no other options in this line of thinking).
Both of these groups demand a certain level of fighting, of aggression, to bring about their respective visions.

Is it possible to be Jewish and not be a flag-waver?
Can one be happily Jewish somewhere in the middle between exceptionalism and damnation?
Can one be Jewish -- and stay Jewish -- and also be a pacifist?

I don't know.
I haven't the faintest idea.

And if there is no middle ground, then what have I been doing with myself and with my abilities for the last 25 years? Has any of it been truly valid? Or real?

 I'd like to think so, but lately I'm not sure.

Because access to the beautiful center of Jewish community as I know it requires resources I don't have, and it is really hard to keep cheering it on from the cheap seats without wondering what I'm doing.

It's a pretty lonely winter for me just now, and perhaps it needs to be for a time.
Perhaps I need to spend some time off by myself figuring things out, without the security of "belonging."
Maybe I need to get back to where I was when I was young in order to get clear of all the noise; and to get clean of it, too, before I can decide what really makes sense.

So don't look for me to get all FOMO about Jewish music conferences and stuff in the next couple of months. Don't look for me to wave a flag, other than my own flag of Bethness, while I sort all this out. Things will be kind of quiet here for a little while.

Cheers.

I’m done with synagogue affiliation. For awhile, anyway.

I married into the synagogue where I’ve been a member for over twenty years.

We celebrated our aufruf (wedding blessing) there shortly after I joined, and for a number of years I provided music for services, sometimes with my wife and sometimes alone. It was a sweet, welcoming community, small enough that members could come up with new ideas and try them out on the fly. (Larger decisions about the well-being and solvency of the entire community still had to be run past the Steering Committee.)

Fast forward some ten years, and things changed as the community grew. More and more decisions, even smaller ones, were referred to committees. Ad hoc decisions became discouraged. Musicians had been paid a small amount of money for doing the planning and bringing in musicians to help lead services. In the early 2010s, all that was ended in an abrupt move by the Steering Committee, which stated that going forward, all members would be expected to “participate” as volunteers, performing all the work of the services and teaching and sitting on an increasing number of committees. The rabbi at the time, unhappy at the withdrawal of funding from music leaders, continued to pay lead musicians from his discretionary until orders to stop by the Steering Committee.

At this time, the leadership attempted several times to hire musical leadership, but with a tiny budget and little empowerment or trust; most major musical changes still had to be approved in committee. We went through two different Music Coordinators and now find ourselves with almost no musical leadership other than the rabbi. I tried multiple times to engage with individual members of Steering to discuss this and other issues around music at the shul, but was shut down every time. Sometimes I encountered blatant classism, other times I was told there were other, more important issues taking priority. Finally, I was told to “stop fighting the culture and get with the program.” After that, my participation fell off sharply and quickly, though I remained a member on paper.

The last time attended services there was to say Kaddish for my mom. I was stopped at the door by a couple members of steering and asked if I’d lead a large chunk of the service, as the guy who’d signed up flaked out. I said I wasn’t in a good head space and politely declined. They pressed me a few times, and I shook my head and took a seat near the back.

When we got to Shochein Ad, four Steering members turned around in their chairs and looked expectantly at me.

I got up, gathered my things, and walked out. I said Kaddish alone in a park a few blocks away, and went home. 

I suppose I was waiting for change, in myself or in the shul, or both. It never came.

What came instead was a new discussion on whether to create a Palestinian Justice Committee under the auspices of the synagogue. This action has been pushed for by a number of shul members who are also members of the local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that is admittedly anti-Zionist and which supports BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel.

I’m fine with the existence of JVP. We live in a country where freedom of thought and speech is enshrined in the Constitution. But I draw the line at a synagogue supporting a JVP-styled organization under its own roof. Synagogues ought to be places of absolute support and nurturing of Jewish communal life and activity, and because the State of Israel exists, they ought to be supportive of Israel’s existence to at least some extent. (Most synagogues have a much higher bar than I’ve set here, but I’m being generous.)

For a synagogue to consider hosting a Palestinian Justice Committee whose philosophy and practice runs along the lines of JVP or any other anti-Zionist group lies, in my humble opinion, outside the boundary of a Jewish religious organization, even in the Diaspora.

(UPDATE: The Steering Committee has unanimously vetoed the hosting of a Palestinian Justice Committee within the structure and auspices of the synagogue community. My guess is that this issue would drive members away in either case, and Steering chose the course that would presumably result in fewer people leaving.)

Do I think Israel should or shouldn’t exist?

Based on the history of its coming into being, and the fact that the world had just come out of a Second World War in which a third of world Jewry had been systematically murdered — and in which no other countries wanted to admit a high number of Jewish refugees — the establishment of Israel couldn’t NOT happen when and how it did. That it came at the expense of Arabs who lived and worked there is tragic, and must be addressed, but not at the price of the complete destruction of Israel. It may be unfashionable, but I think it’s a little late to dismantle the whole thing now.

I also think that a chunk of responsibility falls upon the surrounding Arab states which have used the Palestinians as pawns in their geopolitical games without offering them any meaningful Justice. 

But I am a woman and a lesbian and a Jew, living in America. And I know that those on both the hard right and the hard left harbor no love for me. I’m stuck somewhere in the middle, and that means I don’t have the luxury of jumping to either extreme without sacrificing or denying some major part of myself.

“War is the most impure, incorrect, unavoidable failure of civilization. How can people try to ascribe such purity to it that they imagine that all evil is permitted?”

— Rabbi Emily Katcher

And that is why I’ve chosen to resign my membership in the synagogue community that I’ve affiliated with for over twenty years. Cheerleading war is a symptom of that failure of civilization. And guilt-tripping people into action is a symptom of a community that doesn’t really believe what it espouses, beyond saving a buck or two.

I need to be true to myself, and I may need to be independent and unaffiliated for awhile.

Who am I?

I shared this on FB yesterday after these two separate posts appeared on Instagram within minutes of each other. Friends’ responses were largely far more understanding of the situation than mine, and most said they’d let their kids go to Israel right now or would go themselves. They said they felt safe there. They spoke of their devotion to Israel and their desire to participate in its survival.

***

I remain completely stymied by the juxtaposition of war and tourism, and I guess that’s on me and my upbringing and conditioning.

If I I had a spirit animal, it would be an opossum. 

Divert and hide.

Avoid violent situations.

There are no trusted adults nearby with their shit together enough to be of meaningful use.

There is no safe place to run to, so develop opossum skills and stay away from chaos when possible.

It has been an interesting time of renewed self-discovery, and increased understanding about why I am who I am, with attachment issues and a queasiness about nationalism that has not ncreasingly pervaded my sense of being in the world.

If I don’t feel a strong allegiance to anything, then who and what am I?

Say nothing, risk nothing. Say something, risk everything.

 I’m a Jew in the United States.

And I’m positively fucked.

Israel touts itself as a real democracy where all of its citizens have the same rights.

Arab citizens of Israel say that’s not true, that they have been singled out for discrimination all along and that it’s grown worse since October 7.

The Palestinians under Hamas’ rule in Gaza say that they are innocents caught in the line of fire.

Israelis who survived the attack and those who were able to escape captivity say that Palestinians working in the border area in southern Israel, people they’d been on good terms with for years, had in fact fed Hamas with information about businesses and homes in the region to facilitate the Hamas attack and the capture of Israelis living there on October 7.

Israel shows video that they say is of tunnels beneath hospitals and schools in Gaza. Gaza doctors and teachers categorically deny that tunnels exist (though one doctor purportedly admitted to a tunnel under his hospital after he was caught by Israeli troops.)

Not being there, I cannot know what is real.

The only thing that is real to me is the mountain of hatred that stands between Israelis and Arabs, a mountain that has existed since before I was born, and which I fear will exist long after I’m gone.

I’m a Jew who was born and raised in the United States. 

I’m an American Jew. 

Can I also be a Jewish American? 

Am I white? 

Am I not white?

More and more it seems that the answers depend on whom I ask.

No one seems in agreement.

Just as everything is about race in the United States, and probably will always be because of the great stain of slavery that spills over our entire nation’s history and our national mindset,   It would seem that Jews and Arabs keep nurturing a mountain of fear and hatred so tall and wide and deep that it probably can never be mowed down. Is the establishment of Israel the reason? Or are there reasons older than that, as old as the hatreds that keep feeding the fire of war today.

If I am to believe what my pro-Palestinian friends tell me, I can atone for my Jewishness by renouncing Israel as a Jewish state and working towards Palestinian sovereignty.

If I am to believe what my pro-Israel friends tell me, I can be the truest kind of Jew by “standing for Israel”. But what does that even mean?

How do I live in this world and maintain any shred of hope?

How do I live in this world and hope to maintain any shred of meaningful Jewish identity and communal connection?

Is it even possible to maintain both and still be who I am?

I feel more and more like I’m on the margins, both as an American AND as a Jew. Its an authentic place to be, and it feels like a damning place to be as well.

The more this goes on, the more alone I feel.

How can I choose where and how to be without betraying myself?

And how much of those choices have been made by others anyway?

Do I die alone, or do I die in the bosom of community?

Either way, I eventually die.

As we all do.

In the end, will it matter how or why?

I don’t know.

But how I LIVE has got to count for something, and that’s why I’m putting this out here, in spite of the risks.

I won’t even duck.

I’ve grown tired of ducking.