I Will Not Surrender My Jewishness to a Protocol
For a moment, the prose stopped.
A new space opened.
And in that space, a question emerged — not political, but metaphysical:
What does it mean when Jewishness no longer belongs to us unless routed through the syntax of a state?
I do not write in disagreement.
I write because that sentence fractured the surface.
And beneath the surface, there is a wound in language itself.
As a Sephardic Jew never fully inscribed into the linguistic certainties of postwar American Jewish identity, I heard something in that sentence that perhaps even the writer did not intend: a refusal not merely of appropriation, but of the monopolization of the right to speak Jewishness itself.
Let us not misread:
Jennifer Moses’s blog post is neither a political manifesto nor an ideological dogma.
It is a human voice grappling with the impossibility of coherence in a landscape that now demands alignment or exile.
Her sentence emerges not from abstraction, but from the terrain of lived contradiction —
an inner geography of grief, irony, identity, loyalty, and rage.
Her blog reads like a postmodern Midrash walking a dog in upstate New York.
And yet, the philosophical weight of that single line cannot be ignored.
When she writes of surrendering Jewishness to a language,
what is she actually describing?
She is describing the colonization of utterance —
the theft not merely of territory,
but of the very capacity to speak without encoding.
A theft that unfolds not at borders, but in syllables.
In the framework I’ve developed — Possest–PQF, a model of filtration and accessibility — identity is never a possession, but a field of temporary availability.
Jewishness, in this sense, is not a fact,
but a filtering topography: something we pass through — and which passes through us.
It is a membrane of intensities, not a noun.
Zionism, then — at least in its linguistic operation — has become something else.
Not a movement.
Not even a state project.
But what I would call a semantic enclosure:
a narrowing of the possibilities through which Jewishness may appear.
Zionism no longer simply defends a people —
it has become the protocol through which utterance must be legitimized.
Moses’s sentence resists that protocol.
And in doing so, it opens a question that no political debate can resolve:
Can Jewishness be spoken outside the geopolitical structure that claims to protect it?
Can exile still be a legitimate modality of Jewish speech?
Can silence still carry Torah?
These are not rhetorical questions.
They are ontological detonations.
Moses is not attacking Israel.
She is naming the unbearable price of semantic submission.
What remains of Jewishness when every public expression is interpreted through the lens of Zionist allegiance — or betrayal?
In Kabbalah Antision, a work I co-author with Andityas Matos, we propose that the Zionist project — beyond its historical justifications — functions as a linguistic coup d’état.
It displaces the open, infinite grammar of Jewishness (אֵין סוֹף, ein sof) with a geopolitical syntax that governs access to utterance.
It replaces exile with policy.
It replaces dispersion with the language of security.
This is not merely linguistic analysis.
It is a diagnosis of symbolic compression.
וְנָתַתִּי לָכֶם לֵב בָּשָׂר
“And I will give you a heart of flesh.” — Yechezkel 36:26
But what happens when the heart is no longer flesh —
but protocol?
What Moses’s sentence marks — perhaps unwittingly — is the rupture in that binary.
She does not offer a solution.
She offers a wound.
And wounds, in Jewish mysticism,
are often the very places where light escapes.
בְּכָל דְּחִילוּ וּרְחִימוּ אִתְעֲבִיד קְשָׁטוּתָא
“Through awe and love, truth is made.”
But awe has become defense,
and love — alignment.
We owe her sentence the courtesy of staying open to its pain.
We owe Jewishness the possibility of breathing outside the enclosure.
We owe language the dignity of rupture.
Because if Jewishness is to survive — not institutionally, but existentially —
it must become sayable again outside the protocols that now demand submission.
Not in spite of Moses’s grief and confusion.
But through it.
— Y. Schimmelpfennig
