Allowing the shadow to see the light

The backbone gained through embracing my lineage

Last week I was at home unwell so to cheer me up I watched a couple of romcom movies. One of them was set in Cypress. My favourite scene was when the leading man, played by Harry Connick Junior, serenaded his beloved with a Greek love song. He was on the street and she was up on her balcony, classic romcom style.

The locals passing by stopped to join the singing. It was a heart-swelling moment witnessing the camaraderie experienced. It took me back to another recent moment when I felt the same opening of my heart. It was seeing a video taken in California at the Nova Music Festival Exhibition on the night they held a memorial for the six Israeli hostages executed in the tunnels of Rafah. LA is over 11,000 kms from where I live, but it felt like next door. The people there I only knew from Instagram or some other online medium. But it didn’t matter, because it was the songs that connected us. The same songs I sing here in my community. The same songs my parents, grandparents, great grandparents have sung in their communities. The language, the culture is what made us family, just like those stopping to sing on the cobbled street in Cypress.

Judaism, like the Greek ethnicity displayed in this movie, is rich in culture. We love our food, traditions, extended families, music, arts, holidays, history.

It’s so often mistaken for a religion only, but it is much broader than that. That’s why it’s more accurately defined as an ethno-religion. Actually, you can celebrate all that comes with Judaism without labelling yourself as religious.

I loved how in both incidents the thing that cracked my heart was the singing. Music represents it all, a symphony of it all, and, a symphony of the complexity of ethnicity.

Some days, in this crazy world I experience myself wandering through right now, I ask: what am I fighting for when I write about the Middle East Conflict, my heritage, my Judaism?

The answer is this. I’m fighting for the culture that has survived through so much. Nearly 4000 years. I’m fighting for a legacy, for all those who have come before me and risked their lives to remain faithful to who they were.

Yet, fighting is probably the wrong word, it’s more like standing up for.

A wonderful activist, by the name of Rudy Rochman, often describes Judaism as a suitcase we packed and took with us when we were expelled from Judea (the original Israel) over 2000 years ago. The suitcase contents what kept us together across the seas and through the various other expulsions and tragedies that has plagued us as a people for centuries. The candles women light every Friday night to welcome in the Shabbat Queen. The challah and wine that goes alongside it. The rite of passage of bar-mitzvah and bat-mitzvah. The high holidays. The death and mourning rituals. The Hebrew language; the songs and prayers recited across continents. The longing for Zion in all those years separated. And so on…

The very same things that have been hijacked in recent times by the anti-Israel/anti-Zionist movement.

I had a little laugh at some of the jokes about the exploding Hezbollah militant's pagers (link attached for those who don’t know what I’m talking about), just because the jokes were clever. But I didn’t particularly find the incident funny. I found it bloody ingenious though. And that ironically made me sad. Sad for the fact that Jewish people all over the world for the past year have had to take their attention off whatever they were doing before 7 October in lieu of now spending all our time defending ourselves. For some this is tougher than for others. For my cousins in Israel this includes fighting a physical war and risking their lives. For us here it means fighting a hate speech war, which has now also spilled out into streets as we find ourselves up against violent protests in nearly every Western country in the world. It’s exhausting, it’s depressing and it shouldn’t be necessary.

I thought to myself if only that brilliant brain/s who came up with that idea didn’t have to spend their time working out how to strategically blow up terrorists without harming innocents. And even so, still are wrongly accused. Israel can get NOTHING right according to her dissenters. There is no win. Yet her opponents — known terrorist organisations — even when they butcher, rape, execute…get empathy and support.

The recent strategic targeting in Lebanon that the media is making such a fuss about comes after 11 months of ongoing missile attacks. Over 11,000 rockets fired into northern Israel, 100,000 displaced people. The only reason the main destruction has been land and not the population is due to the Iron Dome intersecting most and the physical abandoning of homes. Not one word in the media about this until Israel dared to defend herself, yet again. Exactly what happened with Gaza. Why?

Yesterday I just viewed a clip of Israelis getting out of their vehicles on the highway overnight due to another red alert. They no longer know in which direction to look at to where the threat is coming from as they are being attacked from seven surrounding countries — seven — all proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. What other country would accept living like this without defending herself?

Jewish people have added a lot of richness to the world; in academia, the arts, medicine, technology, government. The same very places that we are being forcibly removed from because of violent threat. Every person reading this post would’ve laughed and cried with, thanked and appreciated, a Jewish person for an experience in their life. I can absolutely count on that.

I sometimes feel as if I’m living in a virtual reality or that I’ve landed on another planet. All of a sudden we’ve turned back the clock 70+ years to the mid 20th century with the anti-semitic tropes that caused the Holocaust, and the beginning of WWII, being rebranded. Everyone’s built up shame and inner melting pot has been projected on to the Jews, the dumping ground of the world’s pain. It always has been and seems like always will be; each generation we think it’s gone and each generation it returns.

Whatever way, whatever it is, it all stems down to projected trauma. You can’t hate another unless you hate yourself. The same way as you can’t truly love another, unless you love yourself.

So I’ve also realised that one of the reasons I’ve decided to speak out is because I now know that what we don’t own and proudly stand for gets buried in the shadows and comes out in unwelcome ways, like the violent hate we are witnessing. I’ve always been Jewish but I haven’t always been vocally Jewish. It was easier to just fit in, not have to try and explain, but now I’m regretting that. What if I had explained and shared more? Maybe then more people would’ve understood what Judaism and Zionism really is before it got hijacked and blown up in flames by the anti-Israel/anti-semitism movement.

I’ve wondered a lot over the past year whether I was the grey Jew. The one that blended into a crowd, who was accepted for being Jewish only because she didn’t focus much on it.

Did I camouflage too well into my surroundings? That those who knew me could forget that I was different to them on that one singular front.

Did I sometimes camouflage so well I forgot to let some know I was Jewish? Probably, but really did that matter? Because if they liked me without knowing, why shouldn’t they continue to do so with knowing?

I never lied. I never said I was Catholic or Christian or Buddhist, or Greek or Italian, I just sometimes didn’t give away one singular part of me.

Amongst our circles we call it the… ‘oh I didn’t think he/she was that Jew’. That Jew meaning the visible Jew. Then recently I discovered a Spoken Word artist from NYC, Vanessa Hidary. I listened to two of her open mics and I found a kindred spirit within 10 minutes. I’ve included links to both of her clips as they may just help those who are unclear to understand a little more about our challenges.

The first clip, from 2008, has the classic line of “But you don’t look like a Jew”. Oh, how many times have I heard this one. What is it based on? Is it just based on stereotypes versus actual experiences of meeting a Jew?

The second clip, only recently filmed on a visit to Israel, refers to this concept of Good vs Bad Jew. ‘Bad Jew’ being Vanessa’s definition of ‘that Jew’. And this resonated too. If I tried to be the good Jewish girl then no one could call me a bad Jew. The good Jewish girl, for me, meaning the one that blended in. The grey Jew.

There has been much I’ve lost in the last year, including dear friends and business opportunities, and a feeling of safety in many environments, but I concur with what Vanessa declares in her second clip…"What I’ve lost in people I’ve gained in backbone”.

Being a Bad Jew, aka simply owning who I am in the public sphere, has given me backbone. Embracing this part of me has given me backbone. And this is where it all dovetails nicely into my own women’s work and life journey.

Which parts of us don’t we own? Which parts of us don’t we embrace? Because somehow when we own it all, the pieces fit together, the love arises, the exhale arrives.

I wholeheartedly believe every woman needs to take a journey back through her ancestry, it’s part of our womanhood reclamation process. My reconnection with the soul of Judaism began during my years healing from CFS, it was part of my healing. And this past year was kind of like the final coat of paint.

I’m sharing this now because it’s getting messy. Everywhere. Not just in Israel. I know not everyone hates Jewish people and not everyone is protesting, but those who keep quiet are actually helping to maintain the status quo. I hope though that those of you who continue to read my writing are doing so because you still have an open mind.

So I have an offer. Ask me any question you like and I’ll answer honestly and with historic truth. It doesn’t have to be here, send me a DM or email. I’m willing to have the conversation. I’m also willing to share more about our culture, so the truth of what Judaism is, and the land of Israel is, can shine through the tainted narratives. So that you can see that we essentially look the same because we are the same, just flavoured with different customs and traditions and heritage. We all sing the same way; just different songs.

With love and gratitude

Sharon