The pain of erasing our identity

And this is what kept our fathers and what keeps us surviving. For not only one has risen against us to destroy us, but in every single generation, they rise against us, and the Holy One, Blessed Be He, saves us from their hand.

I saw a student on campus today wearing a Magen David and a hostage dog tag. A brave thing to do. It was in fact both a surprise and a joy to see such bravery. It lifted my spirits. Yet so many of us, myself included, choose instead a form of erasure. This is perhaps a natural reaction to the pervasive sense of othering that we go through. The half forgotten, half remembered occasions when we felt the sting of being Jews – the comments – furtive or direct, the abusive calls echoing in the street from vans speeding past us, or worse – like the Steiner educated friend that I had in my twenties (or so I thought) who suddenly turned round and asked me if Jews have horns. They build up like a layered detritus in your mind. In every generation, they rise against us. And the more painful thing is when we see our children almost instinctively start to cower and hide themselves – the old British thing of not even thinking of telling a stranger that you are Jewish, becoming somehow part of their protective repertoire. The decision, and it still is a decision, to choose erasure. After all, if it upsets the non-Jewish world so much, perhaps it’s better not to cause all that fuss and to put on the baseball cap over your kippa as you get on the underground, or to tightly tuck your Magen David under your shirt so no one can see it. So we can pass.

In the conference hall just another secular Linkedin ready delegate more from anywhere than somewhere. In the park or playground, just another kid indistinguishable from the throng of other kids, In all these places the awful, uncomfortable specificity of the mark of a Jew hidden away. But the horror of passing is that although the immediate fear of rejection, or ostracization, or of violence is pacified, both for us as Jews, and so that those who cannot stand the idea of Jewish difference can have the tranquility of their minds undisturbed, the costs cannot be escaped. They weigh on your mind. The pain of seeing the furtive embarrassed glances from our sons and daughters as they see us cover our identity, as we see our shame streaked image reflected back to us by them. The cost of the pain of as Ben Freeman puts it of lost Jewish pride. Just like small children whose sandcastles are knocked down by bigger bullies, we are left looking at the ruins of our own identity, the loss of the chance to stand up for ourselves.

But the worst is victory of fear – the constant background thrum of the knowledge that we have to be scared of who we really are, and that our fear is of such little concern or consequence to those who would have us hide away. That they have won their campaign to make us invisible. In every generation they rise up against us, in the shadows, and on the streets. And yes we call to the Almighty to save us from their hands.