I am so messed up about identity these days.

I know that saying something like that out loud is risky in today’s climate.

But to be honest, I also don’t feel like I have as much at stake within the Jewish community as many of my friends and colleagues.

Living a life mostly on the Jewish margins has given me a different view of things. I understand, after getting to know other Jews, that many of my friends grew up in the comfortable center of Jewish life, with synagogue membership, religious school, Jewish summer camp and homes located on neighborhoods that were predominantly Jewish. Who wouldn’t feel clearer and more secure about their Jewish identity, and their place in the world, as a result of all that?

Growing up as I did in working class neighborhoods, in schools were I was often the only Jewish kid and, for a year in middle school, was bullied specifically for being Jewish, even as I felt removed from Jewish communal life and had little knowledge of Jewish history and no sense of Jewish connection. My parents did nothing to instill Jewish “pride” in me and my sister — indeed, the emotion of pride was reserved for one’s accomplishments, not for identity. There was some vague vibe connected to Zionism where my mother was concerned, but the only time I ever got a glimpse of it was when terrorists invaded the 1972 Munich Olympics and murdered Israeli athletes. Mom sat in front of our TV set and cried. She could not explain her tears to me, nor did she expect me to feel as she did. I was horrified that anyone would sully the Olympics that way, regardless of whom was a harmed or killed. I saw it universally. I would have been horrified no matter who had died. She took it personally, Jewishly, in a way I could not understand or claim for myself.

At age nine, I did not stop to ponder that she might feel lonely in her Jewish grief. We were, after all, uninvolved in Jewish community at the time.

It’s strange to find myself in a similar space, but on the opposite end of things.

I do not feel specifically Jewish grief. Growing up as I did, left to my own devices emotionally and philosophically by hands-off parents, how could I? I see this as a universal tragedy, as horrible as when the  Tutsis and Hutus were at war in Rwanda. My parents didn’t drill the Holocaust into me as some “special” kind of suffering or hardship; while it was specifically Jewish and horrible, it would have been worse for many more people, Jewish or not, if Hitler had won. 

I know that this sounds crazy to anyone who was raised Jewish, or who chose Judaism and embraced a love of Israel with the fervor of a convert. I get that. But I continue to feel a detachment from the whole thing, an overwhelming desire NOT to embrace this too personally. I was bullied for all sorts of reasons growing up and very often my Judaism had nothing to do with it. (Kids can smell weird a mile off, and they’ve always been able to.)

I feel weird, more than anything else.

Right now, I am equally repelled by the pro-Palestine crowd and the pro-Israel crowd. I feel I have no place among either. I feel repelled by the vehemence of the emotions at play, the violence of feeling, evident in the crowds on both sides. And I am not a violent human being. Having been bullied, I shy away from aggression.

So when I read, and reread, Frederick Foer’s cover article in the April issue of The Atlantic a couple of days ago about the decline of Jewish safety in America, I felt myself at something of a remove again. I understand the importance of Israel’s existence intellectually, but I do not feel strong emotions of connection and love for Israel on a personal level. 

I have held too many uncomfortable questions in my head about the origins of Israel statehood, and the displacement that was sadly necessary for it to come about. Was it really necessary? Did the world’s Jews have any other options, in a world where other nations did not want to take them in? 

At the same time, I can only shake my head at the repeated refusals of the Arab states that controlled the Palestinians to discuss sharing the land. Neither side has wanted to talk for a very long time, and far too many who are really invested in this endless conflict seem to want it to go on. 

All I know is that, when Jews in the United States stand together to sing “Hatikvah,” I am uncomfortable in my heart of hearts and almost always have been. Israel is someone’s, but it is not mine and has never been. If America is also not mine (for another set of reasons), it may well resonate with my discomfort at nationalism in general. It is hard enough to stand tall for a country that treats women like second-class citizens — still! — and came up with “don’t ask, don’t tell” as a workaround for queer equality. I can barely handle being tribal, let alone nationalist. The total stuff of who I am — my history, my brain, my orientation and my sex — have long pointed me towards another way. And while it has been a lonely way, at least it’s honest. I’m not sure how willing I am to trade that honesty for a community in which to belong, especially if the stakes for belonging are so fraught with assumptions on what makes a good this or that.

After reading this article, I feel like I’m lousy at being all sorts of individual, specific identities these days. I feel the separation that comes with clinging to an identity at the expense of being able to live in the whole world. I have loved living a Jewishly oriented life, but I also chafe at the constraints that it places on my ability to be fully in the rest of the world. I can pick and choose, like people often do. The result has been that I still don’t fully belong in — or fully relate with — any of them. 

Perhaps that’s normal for all human beings and I just feel it much more deeply. Perhaps my peripatetic youth laid the groundwork for a life where I would always question so much about the way we conduct ourselves in the world. In the end, it may not matter. I simply don’t know right now.

I have no more responses about Israel right now. Because fuck.

Iran fired missiles on Israel last night, supposedly as retaliation for Israel firing on the Iranian embassy in Syria, which may have been in retaliation for support Iran has lent to Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel.
Nearly all the missiles were intercepted by Israel, the US or Jordan.

It's new because it's the first time Iran has ever fired on Israel directly.
It's old because Iran has funded other anti-Israel groups for years, and will continue to do so going forward.
It's really, really old because Israel was established in the midst of an otherwise hostile, Arab Middle East.
I know it probably had to be at the time. A third of the world's Jews had been murdered in WW2, and almost no other country wanted the remaining Jews to settle within their borders, so they had to go somewhere. Why not the land of Jewish biblical history? It made sense. A lot more sense than, say, Uganda. (Really, Herzl? Uganda?)

Unless you already lived there, and had to be moved aside to make room for so many refugees.

And this conundrum, this unbreakable Gordian knot, is why there will never be peace in the Middle East. Not in my lifetime, or in yours, or in your children's.

Sorry.

Forgive me while I struggle to find the purpose of praying for something that will never come about.

Forgive me for a lifetime of detachment that has effectively prevented me from buying into the whole story.

Forgive me for going small and inward just now. I am one of zillions who is fully aware of just how fucked we are, and how little any of us little people can realistically change the outcome.

All I can do is right here in my little corner of the world.

And God? What, even?
God didn't save the six million.
I am not convinced that God can save us now.
Is that because God isn't real, or because we didn't live up to the image of Godliness we've sold ourselves for millennia?
I don't know.
But right now, all I can really trust is other people close to me.
And whether or not that will be enough may not matter in the end.
It just has to be enough to keep me sane, that's all.
So I will love my people, my beloveds.
Not all of them are Jewish, and in the end that doesn't matter.

Love your people. Do it.

It won't save any of us from death, and it won't make the world more peaceful in the long run; but it will make our lives more tolerable in the times of despair and more beautiful in the moments of grace.

And at this point, that will have to be enough.

What IS Judaism to me in this moment? What is IDENTITY?

Why am I Jewish? 

What IS Judaism to me in this moment?

What am I here for right now?

I wish I knew.

Hamas attacked Israel and I got my ADHD diagnosis the same day, last October 7.

And everything — I mean absolutely EVERYTHING — has been called into question ever since.

Is Israel “my” place, any more than New York supposedly once was? Do I have a soul, or is that something humans made up because dying scares us shitless? Is there actually a God, or is that made up too? Do Jewish people have a special “task” or “mission” in this life, or is that part and parcel of the exceptionalist myth that’s been used to prop up Jewish life, perhaps beyond the point of common sense? Is everything Jewish that I’ve done in my life colored by a layer of fear and marginalization that renders it all less than fully authentic now? 

Should the State of Israel have been established when, where and how it was? Could it have come about any other way, or were we backed into a corner, forced to choose between survival and destruction? What about the people who were already living there? Why couldn’t they have stayed, either in a state of their own or in a new shared state of coexistence? Was it ever going to be possible to crawl out from under the thumbs of control on both sides? Should Israel exist where and how it does today? Is there any alternative?

We’re all going to die someday. Does being Jewish just mean I risk dying sooner and more violently? If we’re all going to die anyway, does it even matter? And if we’re all going to die anyway, why should any of us see ourselves as exceptional? Does that make us somehow more worthy of consideration, of favor, of saving? Saving from what? And who gets to be saved? Only the ones with the means to travel and the passports to go where they want to go? And should it matter when the whole world feels like it’s on fire anyway?

I honestly don’t know anymore. 

Learning that I have not just a different brain chemistry, but a different brain construction, a different brain design, has forced me to reexamine almost everything I’ve held dear. It has compelled me to wonder how legitimate everything I’ve done up to now has really been. And it forces me to ask, what am I here for?

One thing that I have learned is that our exceptionalism won’t save us. And I fear that we cling to that exceptionalism at the expense of our humanity. 

And if all of that doesn’t mess a human being up, nothing else will.

I have largely avoided getting too deep into the fray, the pointed argument of who deserves to exist more. I made some missteps early on, then realized my error and basically extricated myself from the argument. Because on the one hand, I’m a pacifist, committed to doing as little harm to others and to the earth as I possibly can. And on the other hand, I have no control over how the argument will be resolved. And on the other hand after that, humans are still animals, with a compulsion toward strife and an impulse toward survival that will never be fully bred out of us. 

Along with the rest of the natural world, we human possess tooth and claw; and what sets us apart from other animals is our willingness to get carried away with using those weapons. 

The best anyone can do is to reduce one’s own compulsion to a more neutral level, and in so doing harm fewer people and other animals along the way.

Fighting for the survival of a specific identity seems to miss the point. Evolution takes care of a lot of that survival without my help. 

So in the end. I am left wondering what my life is for. And before anyone offers words of comfort or a persuasion that I’m already doing what I’m here to do, a great deal of what I’ve been done has been halted by my current medical conditions. I cannot do most of what I’ve been doing up til now. So, while I watch so many quarters of humanity scream and claw and kill each other to prolong their own survival, I’m left wondering what my task is now. And if I can figure it out, how do I implement it with the tools available to me?

I honestly don’t know. And while I am still deep in my time of grief, grief over all that has transpired in my life without sufficient self-knowledge to cushion the blows, it will be quite some time before I can arrive at an answer.

For now, all I can do is feel my feelings whenever they arise, and give myself time and space while I do it.