Strange things are happening. It's Rosh Hashana, which is the Jewish New Year, and that is excellent. My small and personal observance of the holiday may or may not have made me dream incessantly about Jewish things last night, including me telling a small hispanic boy who threatened to burn a Torah that "I dare you to, but you don't have the CHUTZPAH!" and then proceeded to tell him that this country's very fibers were woven by the immigrants of every country, and his liberties were paid for on the burdened backs of my untiring Jewish ancestors. So apparently, in my own subconscious, I am an 83 year old yiddish woman from upstate New York.
Actually, there is nothing surprising about that.
Then when I woke up this morning there was a text from my Harvard/Peace Corps/Students First friend (let's call her Wonderwoman) and Wonderwoman has sent me a picture on her phone from a book of a ravine filled with ousted Jews from an "unknown soviet state" which looks suspiciously like the ravine we saw in Moldova where a whole village of Jews were left to starve to death. Whether they are the same ravine or not is entirely irrelevant; this happened all over, to hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews. But it was weird to see it in front of me on a cell phone right then.
I have been so swept away in love and work and a new life that sometimes I forget there is an incremental fraction of powerful Jewish blood in my veins, and that I once promised myself I would do more to unearth their past. So while I am not a practicing Jew who can be freed of my sins today, I do plan and hope to observe the new Jewish year, and paradoxically, to make the world less about Jews and Gentiles, or Torahs and Qu'urans, and more about people. I won't contribute to a divided world. I won't contribute to collective negativity. I won't put anyone in the ravine.
Actually, there is nothing surprising about that.
Then when I woke up this morning there was a text from my Harvard/Peace Corps/Students First friend (let's call her Wonderwoman) and Wonderwoman has sent me a picture on her phone from a book of a ravine filled with ousted Jews from an "unknown soviet state" which looks suspiciously like the ravine we saw in Moldova where a whole village of Jews were left to starve to death. Whether they are the same ravine or not is entirely irrelevant; this happened all over, to hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews. But it was weird to see it in front of me on a cell phone right then.
I have been so swept away in love and work and a new life that sometimes I forget there is an incremental fraction of powerful Jewish blood in my veins, and that I once promised myself I would do more to unearth their past. So while I am not a practicing Jew who can be freed of my sins today, I do plan and hope to observe the new Jewish year, and paradoxically, to make the world less about Jews and Gentiles, or Torahs and Qu'urans, and more about people. I won't contribute to a divided world. I won't contribute to collective negativity. I won't put anyone in the ravine.
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