“We want Jewish time, Jewish life, Jewish visibility for non-Jews too.”
We need spaces that are unguarded, yet secure, open, and curious.
We want to throw our doors open and welcome our neighbors and be publicly Jewish, interwoven with the community in hereness and solidarity. But we also need our intimacy. We need spaces just for ourselves that aren’t visible or transparent. We need closed doors for our rituals and conversations, where we can be together, learn together, and be our full selves together.
We need to exist in fluid and dynamic forms outside the gates of the institutions where we can practice our Jewishness, transgress from orthodoxies, make mistakes, and create new spaces of loving disagreement.
Perhaps one day the spaces we create will be their own institutions that new generations of Jews will challenge. Let’s hope so. This is how Jewishness survives: through challenge and orthodoxy, tradition and transgression, in a decidedly non-binary and non-linear manner.