Our Jewishness resists norms and essentialism. It resists power, categories, and categorization. Jewishness resists linear time and definition. It resists the singular notion of history and of Dutchness.
We study ancient texts because they are ours. We keep ancient practices because we do. Then we defy those same practices, create new ones, and change, because we can.
Our Jewishness resists utilityWe usually think of the the desire to learn as a desire to use knowledge: making theory into practice. For many of us, the practice of study is simply for the purpose of study. Ritual for the purpose of ritual. Law for the purpose of law. When we make law/judgment/practice unrealizable, we stop the mechanism of oppression, efficiency, and productivity. In this sense we do Jewishness ‘for no reason’ because we don’t create a mechanism of causality: because of X, then Y. There is no justification or explanation. Things happen. We can’t or won’t impose order. And if this is so, there is no possibility of punishment for deviating either. More.
Jewishness challenges national borders and racial categorization.
We resist the urge to doe maar normaal, to fit in, to become invisible. We resist that comfort.
We resist the instrumentalization of Jews as a buffer to protect power and to justify discrimination.
We resist being used against others seeking refuge here, as we ourselves once did. We resist being the tools of discrimination against our Muslim neighbors.
We reject the false notion of Judeo-Christianity and refuse to allow our Jewishness to be weaponized as a means to target other minorities or erased as a way to appease the status quo.
We are the Jews who won’t stand in for power.
We don’t always succeed in our resistance. We have to continually remind ourselves that our identities and affiliations are dynamic and permeable, that we are more than how our societies categorize us. We have to remind ourselves of the multiple and intersecting struggles members of our own communities face when it comes to the color of our skin, our health, our access to education and opportunities. We have to remind ourselves that we are part of multiple communities, with individual struggles.
We have to remind ourselves that our struggles are tied up with those of others in our society and that solidarity is not always easy or comfortable or even productive.
We repudiate the notion of purity, resist the demands of conformity, acknowledging that we are imperfectly alive, disordered and disunified.
We are here and present.
Our paths are many.
