I had lunch today with the other members of Ner Shalom’s LGBTQ+ organizing committee, and somehow we found our way into telling some of our old, hard stories. Those moments of childhood when someone said the anti-gay thing or the anti-Jewish thing, the cruel or ugly thing. And they said it at you or at someone else in front of you. And the moment became etched in stone and the stone became lodged in your gut. So that no matter how evolved and worldly and liberated you have become, anything that happens that is similar enough to that event can jar the stone so it cuts you again.
We all had these stories, as queer kids or as Jewish kids. And even though in most cases a half a century had passed, the collective throbbing pain was palpable at the table.
I have felt a lot of re-wounding of late. All sorts of things causing that sharp stone to twist or dig. Sometimes I feel it because I’ve witnessed or read about something anti-semitic. And sometimes because something has happened that makes me fear an anti-semitic backlash.
For instance yesterday, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie held a press conference to announce tax breaks for multi-million dollar real estate deals. Protesters began chanting “Tax the rich!” A passerby, known to some as a local loose cannon, began shouting “Tax the Jews.” Later in the day, the mayor’s office put out a press release denouncing the actual protesters for chanting this, and for deploying the old anti-semitic trope of the rich Jew. The protesters responded that it was not them, that they had tried to quiet her, and the video evidence bore them out, and the mayor ultimately retracted the accusation, sorta.
But by then, word of the anti-semitic chanting had spread like wildfire. And that’s how it arrived to me this morning, in a forwarded item from the Jerusalem Post that made it sound like, well you know. I was picturing torches and pitchforks. At least until I looked into what had actually happened. And meanwhile, the Jewish world got a report of the anti-semitism in San Francisco, which feeds the narrative of skyrocketing anti-semitism, which serves some people’s purposes. In fact, when I was in Israel last month, nearly every conversation with an Israeli friend or relative began with them asking me if I wasn’t afraid to live in America because the anti-semitism is so bad.
There is in fact anti-semitism about. And there is stuff that gets identified as anti-semitism that might or might not be. And there are claims of anti-semitism that are used to push us to line up behind positions or causes that maybe we wouldn’t otherwise do. And there are accusations of anti-semitism that get weaponized to suppress free speech at universities, or whatever. And some of us find that alarming and some maybe less so, because we all do want to feel safe, but truly feeling safe doesn’t clearly exist in the world.
For me it doesn’t matter whether the anti-semitism is real or whether it’s concocted or exaggerated or whether it’s my own imagination. I feel the panic rise in me. I feel the fear of anti-semitism, or the fear that even if it’s not, it will draw attention to us Jews and that will inevitably result in some anti-semitic something.
All these feelings – the fears, the desire for things to be quiet, for Jews to be quiet, this whole tangle of ancestral anxiety inside of me – it all comes into view at Purim time when we read the Book of Esther. This ancient book of ours is a symphony of anxiety. It is a story from the very first time that Jews lived as a people outside the land of Israel. Jews were a minority in Persia. So this is our oldest text documenting the fear that non-Jews, the ones in whose land we live, will turn on us. The story seems to be a work of fiction. Nonetheless, it introduces us to all the elements of Diaspora anxiety. The plot includes the rise of a villain who holds state power and personal wealth and is repulsed and outraged by the foreignness and the insubordination of Jews, and is willing to engineer our destruction.
We also meet Esther, who strategically passes as a non-Jew, introducing us to assimilation and maybe to Jewish shame. Then she becomes queen, and we are introduced to the idea of having insiders carefully placed to save us from danger. Then, when she heroically exposes Haman’s plot to the king, Haman is carted off to the gallows and his property is given to Mordecai who now becomes as powerful and wealthy as Haman was a couple verses before. And even though that is what we celebrate as a happy ending, Mordecai getting all of Haman’s considerable money starts agitating my anti-semitism edge, and suddenly I’m anxious about it. When he leaves the palace in royal white and blue robes, with a purple cloak and a golden crown, my palm goes to my forehead in worry. “Oh Mordecai, can’t you tone it down?”
So where does this wound come from? This wound in me that makes me fearful not only of anti-semitism itself, but of powerful or wealthy Jews drawing attention? What is the core wound in me that makes me so activated? Was it the time in junior high, riding the school bus, that someone dropped a penny next to me and I bent over to pick it up to be helpful, only to be met by a single meanly spoken word: “Jew.” It was so easy and effective – inflicting a lifelong burden of shame at such a low, low price. Or was it something else I witnessed? Or something I learned by the example of other anxious Jews? Achieve, but keep your head down. Be successful, but don’t look too successful.
Oy, the anxiety! And add onto that the epilogue of the story when Esther and Mordecai issue a decree that Jews may fight back against any who would intend them harm, and the Jews rack up a body count of 75,000 Persians. I know this is fiction, that it is an ancient Diaspora fantasy of power and security, that it is probably meant to be experienced like the cartoonish and unconsidered violence of any successful action film in Hollywood. But oy, violence by Jews! My mind takes in how this could be misused by others as saying something insidious about our nature, or by Jews ourselves as a justification for ruthless self-protection. I have hedged around this section for years, determining it to be too dark or too problematic or just too untangleable.
I can barely articulate all the anxiety! All the fear of anti-semitism! And I haven’t even said the word Epstein. I feel like I need to just keep struggling to breathe until Rabbi Caryn Aviv comes next month to talk about her book, Unlearning Jewish Anxiety: How to Live with More Joy and Suffer Less. I trust many of you will be joining me for that because maybe you also experience some little bit of the Jewish anxiety I am describing.
So how am I going through Purim this year? I think I will let my conflicting anxieties cancel each other out and instead I will let myself enjoy the reading of the megillah as I once did. It does have everything you could want: danger, palace intrigue, pomp, banquets, outfits, a brave heroine and an enemy undone. And a chance to feel, as it says in Chapter 8 of the Book of Esther, ora v’simchah v’sason vikar – light and gladness, happiness and honor.
I may not be quite feeling light and gladness in this moment, but the text invites me to let go of the fear and the worry, and to imagine afresh what happiness and honor feel like. So I will hold my head up this Purim and, as medicine for the jagged stone of anxiety inside me, I will entertain the pleasure of imagining, or remembering, that we are safe, and that there is joy, and that we descend from queens.
Between the presenting of this drash and its posting, new hostilities have broken out between Israel and the US on one side and Iran on the other. While adding another layer of angst to what I express above, may this drash serve as a prayer for all people to be free, whole, and safe.