Many people are aware of traumas inflicted on themselves personally and on their people throughout history. Slavery, persecution, and other forms of oppression rear their ugly heads in small daily ways and in larger societal patterns.
Although it is crucial that people study, understand and acknowledge these traumas, it seems to me that many people fail to distinguish between who they are and what has been done to them. This problem came into focus for me over the course of a few months, beginning with the day I listened to a boy speak about the Holocaust.
He spoke in front of a small group of listeners after completing a series of classes at the synagogue. His teachers and parents were very proud of him for writing and delivering the speech, but as I listened to what he was actually saying, it began to strike me as wrong.
Basically what he was expressing was hopelessness about the never-ending persecution of the Jewish people. This seemed to be his takeaway from studying the Holocaust.
He was in 7th grade, the year that particular synagogue taught about the Holocaust. It’s also the year that many kids are old enough to have a bar or bat mitzvah.
The boy’s talk still rankled me months later, when I attended a few bar mitzvahs. Until then, I could not reconcile the contrast between the pride of teachers and parents at the fact that he wrote and delivered a speech, and his actual message of hopelessness.
The bar mitzvahs allowed me to realize what the problem was. The Holocaust was something that happened to the Jews. The bar mitzvah exemplifies what Judaism actually is. These two things are not even connected, and should remain separate. One is about nonJews and the ability of some of them to become insanely antisemitic. The other is about Judaism itself.
The bar/bat mitzvah is a chance for a boy or girl to become a responsible member of the Jewish community by, among other things, learning to sing from the Torah scroll, and researching and preparing a talk about that day’s Torah reading and its meaning and relevance. They have to wrestle with difficult truths and propose ways of understanding them. This is what Judaism is about — respect for community tradition combined with independent thinking, and expression through words and music.
The boy’s talk about persecution was based on facts, but its conclusions were unrelated to Judaism. He spoke about politics, oppression, persecution. That stuff has happened to Jews and continues to be a threat, but it is not what Judaism is about. Countless ideas have surfaced to deal with the persecution, including the creation of a Jewish state in Israel, but that too is just an issue to be wrestled with; it is not what Judaism is about.
African-Americans feel the impact of centuries of oppression on a daily basis. It is essential that they, and all of us, face what was done and the consequences. And yet this was something that was done to them. It is not who they are.
I once played in a string quartet at an African-American church service because our second violinist was a member of the church. Afterwards, we had lunch at the house of a church family. I still think fondly of the warmth, openness, and love of that service, and especially the lunch. There was, in that lunch, no hint of centuries of slavery. That’s not who our hosts were. Slavery tells us a great deal about what kind of people the oppressors are, not so much about the enslaved.
Oppression can be identified all too often and in too many places, between races, genders, among classes, between natives and immigrants, bosses and workers. It’s important to understand these truths and share stories about them to keep us aware and thinking and struggling for solutions.
But to conflate what’s been done to you with who you are may be a step too far. What is done to you can certainly shape your world view. But what others do to you is simply not the same as, and may be totally detached from, who you are.
Keeping these things separate can open up a much healthier approach to life, and can even lead to more meaningful ways to address the wrongdoings that have been suffered.
Thanks, Ed. Many of us struggle to make that distinction, and it is essential. I needed that today.
Thanks for this much-needed perspective, Ed. Yep, ironically, if we limit our vision of ourselves to only our group's trauma, then the oppressors win. I've noticed one way contemporary Judaism resists that "hopeless victim" identity is to take historical and biblical instances of oppression and use them as present points of connection. So the Jewish people were enslaved in Egypt and mass murdered in Europe. Who is enslaved and persecuted right now, and how can we help and support them?