Stuck in the Middle

The first time I was ever teased about being Jewish, I was 11 years old. I remember sitting in my history classroom, two weeks into a new year at a new school. The girl sitting across from me told me that when we chant Torah it sounds like screeching.

Recently, I was faced with a Nazi salute for the first time in my life. It was 12-year-old kids, in their second week at a new school. The gesture was directed past me, not at me, and they were joking.

They didn’t know I was Jewish. It still hurt.

It hurt because of the message a Nazi salute sends. It hurt because half of my family came to the states as Jewish refugees. It hurt because the country to which my family fled has now made the decision to close our borders to refugees of another race. It hurt because of the current unaddressed rise in anti-Semitic actions at home. It hurt because these kids simply didn’t understand the implications of what they had done.

And so I sat down with them and a teacher, and I told them. I told them no matter their gestures’ intent, they convey a serious message. I told them you never know who is around and what a gesture will mean to someone. I told them how my family fled the Holocaust. I told them there is a large Jewish community in Melbourne. I told them the reason they may not know they’ve met a Jew is because most of the community consists of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, and they do not advertise themselves. I told them a Nazi salute is racist and discriminatory. I told them there are things happening in the world right now that make a gesture like that even more sensitive than usual. I told them how much it hurt to see that gesture, and I could not keep from crying.

I’ve found such a disconnect here; a casual and systemic racism; an isolation from and ignorance toward other races and cultures. I think it stems partly from the fact that people are geographically just so far away from anything else in the world. News from home makes it to Australia: it gets spit out in headlines like the country is watching a freak show through a pane of glass. Kids take what they see and they run with it. They don’t comprehend that these are real people, races and cultures.

Big, beautiful, communally built sand sculptures morph into Trump’s Wall. “Mexican bomb!” I hear as sand is rained down onto the wall. “Dead Mexican!” It hurts, and it is absolutely infuriating, to watch the actions of my country’s leaders mold a generation halfway around the world through racism and discrimination, teaching exclusion and generalization and dehumanization and violence.

And here I stand, stuck half way through that damn glass portal to the freak show.

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I have this vivid memory from when I was 21 years old, in Ethiopia’s Simien Mountains, above the remote, ancient town of Lalibela. A man working the fields found out I was American and his face lit with excitement. “Look,” he told me. “Look!” He pointed to his belt buckle: a giant, shining rectangle emblazoned with President Obama’s face in front of an American flag. I can’t imagine how many days’ wages it had cost.

I’d been sick for a week, I’d been hiking all day, and I was tired. I brushed him off.

I’m not proud of that moment.

His pride in a president descended from African parentage; his joy, his hope, his excitement to meet an American– my pride to introduce myself as such? I took it for granted that day.

It’s easy to detect peoples’ hesitance these days when they ask where I come from. Introducing myself as American is not currently a source of pride for me.

I’ve never been a highly political person. I’ve voted in every election, but aside from fostering an understanding of and appreciation for the things I care about? I don’t like telling people how to live their lives.

However: When swastikas appear on train windows, when bomb threats are called into community centers and synagogues in waves, when the President of the United States refuses to address a rise in anti-Semitism; when he actually misinterprets and labels a request that he condemn anti-Semitism “revolting:” When our leadership’s hate and racism and “alternative facts” become commonplace rhetoric to be parroted from children’s mouths half way around the world? I may not be able to do anything at home, but I cannot simply stand by.

I have become the token Jewish American. If that means that every time a 13-year-old kid talks about building walls or killing Mexicans or throws up a salute, I’m the one who gets to impart the reality of what they’re doing through a first-hand perspective? Every time I have that conversation will become an opportunity to educate, and to open someone’s eyes to what racism and discrimination consist of and imply.

Conversations are objective. Personal opinions do not make appearances. But: to not have these conversations would go against the stories and lessons and teachings that formed the moral foundation of my upbringing. It would be an insult to my family, my people, my history and my culture.

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Yesterday I attended Shul for the first time in more than two years. “Shabbat Shalom,” strangers greeted as I walked through the door. They welcomed me as family. Everywhere in the world, even as melodies may change, we pray the same words. Though practices and interpretations vary, we share the same core. Music filled the sanctuary as cantors sang verses and prayers which have been in my bones since childhood. My heart lifted when the ark opened upon the Torahs, clothed and gilded and glinting. It felt like coming home.

The pages in my hand held a poem:

We oughtn’t pray for what we’ve never known,

and humanity has never known:

unbroken peace,

unmixed blessing.

No.

Better to pray for pity,

for indignation,

discontent,

the will to see and touch,

the power to do good and make new.

The young man being Bar Mitzvahed yesterday gave a Drash addressing leadership and refugees, sympathy and empathy, and the mitzvah of taking people in. He was 13 years old, in his third week at a new school. He was the same age as the girl who teased me when I was in middle school. He was the same age as the kids who threw up Nazi salutes two weeks ago. His name was Daniel, and he gave me hope.