Let's Do More Than Play Defense
Hey, tribe!
I’m in our other homeland right now — which would be NYC, the city of my heart. No matter where I go or how long I stay away, I will always feel like a New Yorker first and last. I was born in Brooklyn and spent the first few years of my life here, and then at the age of 18, I came back to attend Columbia. Then after graduation, I stayed for 14 more years and only left because it felt too daunting and way too expensive to imagine raising children here.
I really like where we live now but I miss this place every day and I’m always overwhelmingly happy to come back. This time I came to attend ADL’s Never is Now conference, on the fight against anti-Semitism. And oh, do we have our work cut out for us.
At any rate, the moment I landed, I found a message in my inbox from a non-Jewish Facebook friend. What he’d written, and how I responded, made me realize that I’ve cultivated a very specific attitude for when I’m responding to overt and implied censure regarding my loyalty to Israel. That attitude has evolved over time, as I started to pay closer attention to what served me and what didn’t.
So the tone I like to take when someone’s on the accusatory spectrum is “matter-of-fact”. If someone asks me a question, I’m happy to engage, but if someone is just lobbing disapproval at me, I try to take it entirely in stride. I strive for equanimity, which is not meek or pleading but nor is it aggressive and in-your-face.
To show you what this might look like, I offer today’s exchange of messages:
Him: “I had no idea you were so off the wall on this [the I/P conflict].”
Me: “Well, now you do.”
And that was it! I felt no need to say anything else. If he wants to take it further, to ask me how and why I arrived where I am, he can do that, or not. It’s not for me to justify myself. I don’t need to know where he positions himself on the topic, or whether this has changed his opinion of me. If it has, that’s not my problem.
Another thing I like to do when deflecting censure is to go beyond defending against terrible charges and to actually highlight all the ways Israel is usually the precise opposite of the hater’s image.
For instance, when someone calls Israel a settler-colonial state, I like to do more than point out that Israelis were hardly an imperial entity — to be a colonizer, you need a mother country to enrich by exploiting a region’s natives and resources. Jews, on the other hand, are not only indisputably indigenous to Israel, but the ones who built the modern state as we know it were overwhelmingly refugees fleeing persecution.
These days, when someone tells me that Israel is a colonial project, I like to say that not only is it NOT a colonial project — it is literally the most successful indigenous and decolonial project in human history.
Because decolonizing doesn’t mean just throwing off colonial rule, as the Jews did when they successfully fought for independence from the British colonial rulers of the region from 1944-1948. It means reversing the damage and misery and wretchedness — and cultural erasure — of colonization, and rooting out the culture, language, customs, etc. of the colonizer.
For instance, reviving an absolutely dead ancestral language and making it the state’s official and primary one, as Israelis did with Hebrew.
Reviving absolutely dead indigenous species, killed by colonization, and bringing them back into widespread use, as Israelis did with the Judean date.
Vanquishing diseases and reversing the environmental damage brought on by colonizers raping the land for centuries, as Israel did when it eradicated malaria and made the desert bloom. And so on.
When you allow yourself to be put on trial and spend your energy trying to refute accusations, you’re on the defensive. You’re reacting. Trying to restore a negative balance to a baseline of zero. Something about that inherently feels to me like a losing proposition.
On the other hand, when you’re just living a beautifully Jewish life, happy to engage with anyone who has questions or qualms but not troubled by those qualms yourself, and not working any harder to win anyone’s approval than they deserve: this, I think, is the best argument of all. If possible, I always pivot directly from parrying someone’s anger to celebrating our people.
Here’s one more exchange that happened this week, in the comment section of that author I mentioned.
I actually laughed out loud at that final part (highlighted by me). And my response to her was:
“In fact, Jews are so resilient that we have survived many millienia of relentless persecution and destruction, perpetrated by an never-ending series of genocidal enemies, including several of the vastest empires this world has ever seen. Every single one of them has since crumbled into dust, and we’re still here.
Just look at this map:
That Arab world is in green. That tiny white speck inside the red square is Israel. But please, keep lecturing Jews about resilience.”
I didn’t hear from her again.
Let’s take strength and heart from that heritage of resilience, which is so undeniably a hallmark of who we are. This moment in our culture, as harrowing as it can feel, is far from the worst our people have seen.
In the words of one of our early Zionist leaders, Ze’ev Jabotinsky:
We do not have to apologize for anything… we do not have to account to anybody, we are not to sit for anybody’s examination and nobody is old enough to call on us to answer. We came before them and we will leave after them. We are what we are… we will not change, nor do we want to.
When your pride and joy in being a part of our people is unmistakable and irrepressible, it’s not that you’re bulletproof and nothing can hurt you. There is no end of hurtful things happening right now, and I’m sure none of us are immune to that. But it can only take us down so far before our love for ourselves and each other overrides their hate. It’s far more powerful.
The Never is Now conference starts on Wednesday for me, since I’m not affiliated with the ADL. I plan to bring you inspiration from the event, because it’s going to be filled with incredible people.
In the meantime, I hope your week is off to a good start. I love writing to you every day. Please pass Never Alone along to anyone you think might need or appreciate it.
As always, much love to you all. Am Yisrael Chai.