After the Revolution

I read on Wiki the other day that Audre Lorde was legally blind. And my first thought was, “Wow, it’s so amazing that she accomplished such precious and powerful things.” Immediately I realized how horrible it is that my default setting when learning some random, neutral bit of biographical information about someone was to go to this place of marginalizing them for a characteristic that’s part of them.

I think, on closer inspection, that my reaction is really about my own issues with my own sight. Or lack thereof. I got my first pair of glasses in 3^rd grade and began wearing contact lenses in 7^th grade. Sometimes I have these rushes of gratitude about living in a time and place where there is such incredible technology that allows me to see with 20/20 vision. I’m truly lucky and blessed that I have the privilege to access these wonders.

But usually I just hate hate hate having to wear corrective lenses. I hate it when my eye gets irritated by some speck of dirt and causes this drama about where/how I’m going to rinse out my contact lens. It can interrupt my activity at ANY MOMENT. I hate going camping with contacts. I hate how my eyes get hurty and dry and red when I spend the night in jail. I have to think ahead about the possibility of tear gas and pepper spray when I go to protests. I hate it when I run out of cleansing and conditioning solution and have to run to the drugstore in the middle of the night. Words cannot describe how ever-present these thoughts and worries are, rattling around in my brain!

It all leads to this fantasy of that magic balm, lasik eye surgery. I just know that if/when I do get it done, I will instantly become a completely different, totally carefree and spontaneous person. Really. Any day now. I can just almost taste my brand new, hassle-free existence.

The Time is Now

Time is such a complicated concept, maybe especially because a lot of people, myself included, think of it as so simple and straight-forward. But it’s so culturally influenced.

Like, who gets to decide what events are over and done with and which are still happening? As a Jew, I often notice how some people relate to the Nazi Shoah as distant past, others seem to feel that it’s a recent occurrence and still others understand it as a current reality. I’m not making a value judgment here about which is the correct lense. In fact, I think each has its usefulness, depending on the agenda at hand. But it does matter and these are very different assumptions with which to begin. Especially when you fold in issues about reparations and accountability.

My friend told me that the public elementary school her daughter attends makes a point of including in the curriculum the histories of indigenous people who lived in the geographic area. And while that’s right and good at face value, there are some problematic implications. Because the kids learn about Native American Indians as these fascinating People of the Past and not as folks whose traditions are alive and well. History has to be taught as connected to the people who are still living them, who are still causing them to evolve and deepen and branch out. And this isn’t just a problem with how our children are educated!

An anthropology professor I had in college taught me the term and concept ‘contemporary ancestor.’ She became an anthropologist in part because, as an indigenous person, she was tired of being studied and never being invited to be the expert on who she and her people were and are. She critiqued the white Western worldview by telling us that white culture fixates on indigenous histories as a way of communicating that indigenous people, customs and agendas are long conquered things of the past. This makes people from dominant locations see and experience and relate to indigenous people (and their movements and struggles) as if they are contemporary ancestors, alive but still in the past.

Mother Knows Best

An email from my mom came this morning:

First, I love the way you handled the food at the service. Makes sensitive sense to me.

Did your mother teach you that it's okay to write "crap" in your blog?

About the first installment of your blog, specifically where it says:

"For example, that there were transcontinental movements of peoples from the east of Africa to the west of Africa, or from the east of Muslim territories to the west is not something that is usually emphasized in contemporary studies of the histories of religions."

The East-West example is fine as long as it isn't used as a generalization, because some ignorant people think that Islam in West Africa and the grand culture surrounding it (the fantastic library in Timbuktu, the mosques, the ancient kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai...) weren't and aren't "really" black African, but Arabic (Arabian?) imports. They weren't imported--they were and are WEST African. This is important so that people see that Black Africa developed cultures with many social classes, armies, etc.--as well as societies that are "just" tribes. (That raises the other problem, the belief that city-based societies are better than tribal societies--what's wrong with tribes?--nothing!!).

I hope this is interesting and not a drag.

Thanks, Mother. That's all for now, folks.

Holy Day and Holy Day

For the first time in thirty years (more time than I’ve been on this planet) the Jewish Days of Awe and Muslim Ramadan coincided. I loved sitting in synagogue on Yom Kippur and hearing about how precious that overlap is, and how much we can learn from feeling connected in religious devotion to other people. Both holy times concentrate on themes of return. Union and reunion.

Recently, I read somewhere that in Morocco, Jews and Muslims had a practice of hospitality. For hundreds of years, Jewish people would bring to their Muslim neighbors and friends the "first bread" with which to break their final Ramadan fast. And, in turn, the Muslims would bring to their Jewish neighbors and friends their first taste of leavened bread when the Passover festival was over. Does that still happen?

Last week, two fellow students and I led a worship service at the Unitarian Universalist seminary we attend about the Jewish High Holy Days. We all three are Jewish and Unitarian Universalist. As tradition dictates, we planned to put out a generous spread of challah, apples and honey. We do this to assure sweetness in the coming year. We don’t fast on Rosh HaShana, although Yom Kippur is traditionally a day of fasting.

After divvying up who would get and prepare what, we realized that since Ramadan was also happening, Islamic folks in our community would be fasting. Crap! What to do?

We posted the following note to the student email list:

Dear friends, particularly those who are fasting for Ramadan,

Special foods are one way that Jews celebrate Rosh Hashanah and we
will be providing apples, challah, and honey before and after
Tuesday's chapel service. For those of you who are fasting, please
know that the food will be at the reception desk and will NOT be part
of the service itself (except for throwing a small piece of stale
bread into the fountain at the end of the service). We hope that the
presence of food will not prevent you from worshipping with us next
Tuesday and wish you Ramadan Mubarak.

Our best wishes in this time of multiple holidays,

X, X and X

On one hand, I think it important to name what’s happening and I hope and trust that we did that in a way that rendered no one invisible. Given the context of Christian supremacy in our world culture, it’s crucial to always be a voice of education, information and explanation. Especially about Judaism and Islam!

But when does the naming fall short of challenging what has potentially problematic implications, instead emphasizing it in a way that allows people (me) to feel that it’s been satisfactorily addressed?

How would you have handled this situation, a lovely ‘problem’ to have?

Hello and Welcome!

Fall 2007

Good evening! Welcome and welcome to my FIRST EVER blog effort.

I'm a Jewish and Unitarian Universalism student in the Master of Divinity program at Starr King School for Ministry in Berkeley, CA. This term, I'm taking a class called Andalusia: Judaism, Islam and Christianity, which is taught by Dr. Ibrahim Farajajé.

According to the class description:

This course invites us to a thorough, profound, and exciting interrogation of the ways in which we have traditionally approached the study of the interconnections and intersections between Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. The broad container for doing this will be through looking at the patterns and practices of co-existence in al-Andalus, from the early 8th century until the end of the 15th century, as well as what the consequences of this period were for the Spanish conquest and colonisation of the Americas and the post-Andalusian Jewish and Muslim dispersions.

To study religions and to study their intersectionalities is also to study people, borders, notions of ethnicities, languages, geographies and all that those things entail and embrace. And this usually entails subverting some of our own dearly-held ideas! For example, in this course, we will be challenged to look at the Africa-Europe axis in different ways; to understand all three religions, we will have to grapple with issues of vast geographical contexts. Often our contemporary notions of nationstates/countries/empires, are based on geographies that reinforce notions of primacy. To put it more simply, we tend to think of the world as being divided into discrete groups which are neatly separated by borders. Of course, the notions of porosity of borders and transnational identities and fluidities come more and more into our consciousness, but when we think of the past, we think of some areas of the world and their populations as being pretty static. For example, that there were transcontinental movements of peoples from the east of Africa to the west of Africa, or from the east of Muslim territories to the west is not something that is usually emphasised in contemporary studies of the histories of religions.

Given the current situation in the world, it is difficult to imagine relations between Jews, Muslims, and Christians that were not relations of constant violence and annihilation. We have come to think of those ways of relating as being almost "just the way things are". This course invites us to enter a space where ways of being that were based on living-in-the-differences grew creatively. How do food, music, spiritual practice, sacred space/architecture, environmental sciences, gender, class, sexualities, embodiment/disabilities, language, notion of community express the intersectional cultures that grew out of la convivencia, the coexistence of these religions? Come, enter into the space that was al-Andalus!

Cool, huh? Stay tuned. . .I'll be posting my reflections soon. Whew, my FIRST EVER POST wasn't as arduous as anticipated. Just as Ibrahim promised. Amen.