Entering the Room

This week I went to see the new musical production of The Pianist at the Park Theatre, London.  For what it’s worth – I highly recommend it, although it is close to selling out its short run.  What has stayed with me is the way people continued with their lives as the ghetto grew around them. They had relationships, disagreements, work and music. They were occupied with the things that occupy people, even as the space in which they could live those lives became smaller. Knowing where the story leads makes that carrying on almost unbearable to watch.

I was also struck by the secular Jewishness portrayed. These were people whose Jewish identities existed alongside their professional, cultural and personal lives. Religious observance was not the measure of their belonging, and its absence offered no protection from persecution. They could understand themselves in all their complexity, but others had acquired the power to decide which part of their identity would determine their fate.

I came away thinking about what it means to enter a room and how much of ourselves we expect to be welcome there. It is a question I have been considering in different parts of my life, although the theatre brought its Jewish dimensions into sharper focus.

For someone carrying a difficult or publicly judged past, entering a Jewish space can involve a calculation that other people may never notice. There may be uncertainty about what others have heard, what they believe they know, and whether there will be an opportunity to become known more fully. A person can arrive hoping to participate, to contribute and to find community, while quietly wondering how much room there will be for the life they have built since.

That possibility raises a question about what Jewish belonging means in practice. My Judaism is part of how I understand responsibility, community and the possibility of change. In a tradition that asks us to take repentance seriously, I want to believe that a person can have a past and a meaningful place in the present. What interests me is how we put that belief into practice when the person concerned is standing in front of us, rather than appearing in a discussion about Jewish values.

Synagogue is somewhere people contribute as well as seek connection. We take on responsibilities, help and participate in the ordinary work through which a community functions. Those things matter because belonging develops through doing things together. A person becomes someone we know through repeated encounters, shared obligations and conversations that extend beyond a difficult chapter in their history. There has to be enough room, and enough time, for that knowledge to develop.

When I turn to the experience of entering the wider world as a Jewish woman, there is another calculation to consider. Against the backdrop of antisemitism, I find myself thinking about how my Jewishness will be received. How much explanation might it require? What assumptions might accompany it? Will I be encountered as an individual, or asked to account for matters far beyond my own life and choices?

The circumstances are different, but there is a connection in the apprehension. In each case, one aspect of a person’s identity can come to organise everything else somebody thinks they know. The person’s own understanding of who they are may carry less weight than a story that has already been accepted.

I do not want to spend my life assessing rooms before entering them. I want to be interested in the people I meet, the work being done, the conversation or performance I have come to hear. But anticipating other people’s reactions takes up space of its own. Sometimes it makes the familiar room more attractive before I have even tried the unfamiliar one.

This is where I have begun to think about the spaces we create for ourselves. Jewish gatherings offer friendship, pleasure and the ease of shared reference points. There is something lovely about being among people who understand a part of your life without needing an explanation. I enjoy making those spaces myself, bringing people together around a table and helping connections grow. That is a positive expression of Jewish life, with value entirely of its own.

Alongside that pleasure, however, I want to ask whether some of our choices are being shaped by a growing reluctance to be elsewhere. Are we gathering because this is where we want to be, or because other places have begun to feel uncomfortable? Often both may be true. The difficulty is recognising when the balance changes, when a welcome refuge begins to carry more of our social and cultural lives because we feel less able to take them outside.

Watching The Pianist, the word “ghettoisation” came uneasily to mind. It is a word with a history that demands care. The Warsaw ghetto was imposed through Nazi persecution and enforced confinement, within a process of dispossession and genocide. Our contemporary choices about where to socialise, worship or find support are profoundly different. I am asking about the pressures shaping those choices, and whether we are sufficiently attentive to their effect on the breadth of our lives.

What unsettled me in the production was the coexistence of ordinary living and a world becoming smaller. People still had things to do. Life required their attention even as the conditions of that life changed. I left wondering how readily any of us notices the gradual adjustments we make: the invitation we decline, the conversation we avoid, the place we decide will be too much effort. Each decision can be understandable in itself. Taken together, they may tell us something we ought to examine.

That examination also has to turn inward. If I want the wider world to make room for Jewish people in our complexity, I have to care about whether Jewish spaces make room for complexity too. We bring different histories, levels of observance, political views and experiences of belonging. We also bring mistakes, difficult chapters and things we may struggle to explain. A community’s capacity to offer refuge depends partly on how generously it recognises the people seeking it.

Thinking about what it means to carry a past into Jewish life makes me attentive to the terms of a welcome. Carrying Jewishness into the wider world makes me appreciate how precious an uncomplicated welcome can be. Together, those reflections make me want spaces in which people can gradually become known, with the possibility that knowing them will change an initial impression.

I will continue to make Jewish spaces, to gather people and to value the comfort and joy of being together. I also want a life that takes me into rooms beyond them, where my Jewishness can be an ordinary part of my presence. What I brought home from the theatre was a renewed concern for that freedom, and a question I want to keep asking of myself: are the spaces I am making helping me participate more fully in the world, and am I extending that same possibility to the people who enter mine?