Does history always repeat itself or can we disrupt it?
The energy of the Aquarius Age and an invitation into a deeper part of my life
Does history always repeat itself or can we disrupt it? I’ve been asking myself this question a lot over the past four months. Witnessing anti-semitism explode and experience a 738% rise in Australia post 7 October, it has felt as if the golden era of Jewish people living in Australia (and other western countries) with relative safety has gone.
I say relative safety because it has never really been safe. Most non-Jewish people wouldn’t realise that Jewish day schools have always had security, as have Jewish synagogues. You won’t see this outside mosques or churches or catholic or anglican private schools. We’ve always lived in some way looking behind us, or locked out of somewhere, but all in all I’ve had a mostly free and assimilated life.
My early education was at a Jewish day school but from 18 onwards I was on my own out in the big world of university campuses and later corporate Australia. Sometimes I was singled out, a few times I felt extremely uncomfortable and possibly unsafe, but usually I was welcomed and my friendship circle includes people from a variety of faiths and walks of life. I’ve always cherished the multicultural society I was born into.
So although I was Jewish, it’s probably not the first thing you learnt about me. Some of you may not have even known this until I started writing about it. I wouldn’t typically lead with my Judaism, and there is nothing about me that makes it stand out, although it certainly is a major part of what has shaped me as a person.
Yet when 7 October hit, this all changed. Suddenly it became clear to me — and my fellow Jewish community — that to some it would never matter that I was Australian or a woman or assimilated; I was still a Jew and that meant I could be a target of evil and vindictive anti-semitism.
As I lay awake at night thinking about this, I questioned my own potential naivety. Did I really believe that my generation would be spared the experience of the generations that came before me? Each prior generation having experienced their own pogroms, ours being the horrific massacre of 7 October in Israel.
But here’s the thing that happened for many of us. Instead of cowering from our attackers, we came together, we held tight to our Judaism and one another. We gathered as communities, in person and online, helping one another through the rising of ancestral trauma and the challenges of the current climate.
One of those communities I was part of has been the subject of a lot of media over the past week and I want to briefly address it here as it’s a really important aspect of living in a liberal democracy.
How many of you belong to Whats App or Telegram chat groups?
How many of you belong to online Facebook communities or on other platforms?
How many of you have signed a petition on platforms such as change. org?
I bet every single one of my readers has because that’s what 21st century life is about.
And as we enter the Age of Aquarius this is going to be more prevalent. It’s the age of community, of tribes of coming together to change and transform the world.
So our Australian community of Jewish creatives and academics came together due to escalation of anti-semitism in our respective industries, the arts and academia being some of the hardest hit. People were losing long-term gigs and jobs, being cast out and singled out. We were there to support one another, to share our experiences and our hearts about the conflict and racism taking hold in our professional areas and to participate in our liberal democratic rights of writing letters or signing petitions when anti-semitism was impacting our livelihoods, neighbourhoods and safety. We were trying to make a change to the world we found ourselves now in.
Simply put, this group was a collective of talented, intelligent, artistic, warm, beautiful, sensitive adults of all ages just wanting to get back to working life and life in general.
But no. According to some, Jews can’t do that. There seems to be a different rule for Jews than everyone else. Every other race or tribe can congregate, but not Jews. I mean I often ask people how they think the Pro-Palestine supporters organise all their events — telepathically?? Seriously, every group has groups and that’s just that.
So a collective of far left progressive Pro-Palestine social media influencers obtained a leaked 900+ page documentation of our group’s chat and proceeded to share on social media and the internet, doxing members, including creating a ‘Jew hit list’ of the top 100 including photos.
This was a private Whats App group. This was not a social media post. They took private details, addresses, social media profiles and put them on the internet with requests to their followers to intimidate, threaten or attack the members of the group. And they did, businesses have been vandalised and lives threatened including a family receiving a photo of their 5 year old saying we know where you are.
This is Australia today. And this is not only despicable immoral behaviour but illegal. In a democracy you can’t harass or vilify others based on religion, race or ethnicity.
Going back to my opening question, does history always repeat itself or can we disrupt it?
In Nazi Germany in the 30s similar lists were collated. This was the beginning of a three step plan. The Holocaust didn’t just happen in a minute. First there were lists and Jew were outcast from society, cultural and academic life, then they were put in ghettos before the final solution of the extermination of 6 million European Jews.
I sometimes imagine talking to my now deceased grandparents and asking them what should I do. Do I stay quiet or stay proud? Being a few of the 10% of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, I really don’t need to even ask them that question. The answer is right here in the fact I’m writing this post and I’ve been writing about it since October.
I must be proud of my heritage. I must remain courageous in the face of hostility. I must continue to share the love for my faith and ensure ‘never again’ means never again.
90% of the Polish Jewry were exterminated by the Nazis during the Holocaust over the years of 1941-1945. 90% of bloodlines gone from humanity. 90% of my ancestry — my great grandparents, my grandparents siblings, murdered for no other reason than being Jewish.
Certainly it’s not only the Jewish people who have suffered from racism or been targeted for hate crime. Actually it’s happening all over the world today. But anti-semitism is the oldest trope. Perhaps it feels like we’ve experienced the most because we’ve been around for such a long time and there was really never a time in history when a form of anti-semitism didn’t exist.
There is an awful war going on in the Middle East right now, a war no one wanted, including the Israelis. Lives have been lost on both sides, all sides. But it is not a justification for the hate of Jewish people and the rise of anti-semitism in the diaspora.
Neither is it a one-sided war. Israel gets hit by rockets daily. From the north and the south. There are 750,000 displaced Israelis. There are still over 100 hostages still in Gaza, plus dead bodies yet to be released. And the collective trauma from 7 October has seeped its way into the population. Everyone has been impacted.
So all of these Jew haters justifying their ‘Jew lists’ or shouting ‘where are the jews?’ in public places based on a belief that we are all ‘zionist fundamentalists promoting genocide’ (their words not mine) are not only mistaken and misleading but doing what every other group has done before them in history — finding something to prove Jews are responsible for all the bad in the world. This past week probably the most disgraceful and racist thing an Australian politician has said was uttered by a Sydney MP. Jenny Leong saying that Jewish people meddle in everything because they want their ‘tentacles’ to reach into every nook of society in order that they might influence power. This a direct echo of Nazi cartoons.
What can I do?
I write. I share. And that’s why you’re reading this now.
I write about it here because there aren’t many of us. The Jewish people that many feel rule the world in a global cabal conspiracy theory are the tiniest of populations, 16 million in total, with half living in Israel. So I have to use my voice, it feels not only obvious but necessary.
I write as this is still about womanhood, about being a woman, because expressing all of me is central to what I offer the world and my community.
I write about it because I’ve decided to tell more of my story. Judaism isn’t a typical western religion, it’s more of an ethno-religion because it has its own culture, tradition, customs, language, arts, food and yes, homeland. You can be Jewish and not religious which is how I would consider myself.
This weekend marks the Aquarius new moon and a moon where we’re encouraged to set our intentions for the Aquarius Age. Aquarians are change makers, transformers, the ones who lead the way to make a difference. I myself have an Aquarian rising so I get the energy.
How do we wish to see the world change? How do we wish to disrupt the old ways?
Again coming back to my opening question, one of the new moon intentions I set is to share my heritage with the women I come in to contact with so maybe the gap can be bridged, so maybe finally the true essence of Judaism (and Zionism) may be revealed. I wish to share a bit more of me because that’s all we can each do — bring our individual piece to the greater puzzle.
Aquarius is about coming together and in many ways this far left progressive woke culture is driving us further apart. Identity politics is destroying us. A binary view of the world is taking away our nuance, the beauty of our differences that make us exactly like a field of flowers — same source with our own uniqueness.
Considering it’s a new moon I wish to share my first insight into something you may not know about Judaism — we follow a lunar calendar. So that means we are more in sync with the natural lunar cycles than the western calendar. The new moon is the first day of the new month in the Jewish calendar. Judaism is not unlike paganism and shamanism in some ways in that its traditions and customs are centred around nature’s seasons. This is the root of my work in the feminine so bringing it to you just feels part of what I’m meant to do. And maybe just maybe through this I can disrupt the patterning of history and help create a different future for Jewish people.
Bring on the Aquarian age.
New moon blessings
Sharon
PS: I’d love to hear your thoughts…