My Only Prayer

We sat shiva when my mom died. She’d been sick for years, confined to her home for the better part of the last decade of her life. When she died, we sat with her lovely partner, Sandy and Sandy’s daughter, Betsy. Friends came and went. People from the temple my mom didn’t even know because she’d been too ill to attend. They came anyway. They brought rugelach because you can’t mourn without pastry.

Community.

Jewish community.

I don’t know how to speak about being Jewish right now. I don’t know how to reconcile what is being done by people who share my faith but not my values. I don’t know how to process the Jew-hate I’m seeing online from the right and left. How does a Jew like me look at Israel’s murderous regime and feel anything other than deep shame, even though I have nothing to do with Israel? These days, I have more than enough shame just being American.

My Judaism was informed by the generations that came just before mine. Survivors. Immigrants. People who chose to remember the horrors they’d been through and some who chose to forget. People who built new lives from the ashes of the old. I never learned to pray to God. “Never again” was the only prayer I needed.

Those two words shaped me. Now they feel like a condemnation, a slap across the face. This war criminal, this thug Netanyahu, shaped my prayer into his dark golem. “Never again” is meant for all. For the Palestinians. For the Iranians. For all who suffer under oppression, even if that oppression – especially if – comes from the hands of Jews.

I don’t know how to speak about being Jewish right now. I don’t want to be defensive because I have nothing to be defensive about. I don’t want to lash out because I understand the anger directed at Israel. I don’t want to stay silent because silence feels like cowardice. But nor do I want to draw too much attention to the problem because there are too many groups in America being hammered right now for me to worry too much about my own.

But I do worry. For the young Jews growing up in a world watching an aggressive Israel drag our weak-minded American president into a foolish war. I worry that people around the world will use Trump’s idiocy as a confirmation of Jewish perfidy.

Today, I saw a clip of Nick Fuentes calling Americans of every political persuasion and religion (minus one) to come together to resist the “occupying force” that has taken possession of our government.

“Call it what you want,” he said. “Israel. World Jewry. Organized Jewry. A Jewish fifth column. That is what is happening… I think it’s time for all of us to unite against this hostile force.”

My family and I are, apparently, the hostile force. Not the band of conmen at our nation’s helm. Not the warmongers. Not the power-hungry. Not the sycophants. Not the cowards. Not the white nationalists. And yes, some of those people are also Jews because some Jews are, indeed, terrible people. Just like some Christians and Muslims and atheists are terrible people. Because some people are terrible. One’s faith is no more determinative of your moral center than one’s hair color.

For years, I have carried around with me the haunting final words of Daniel Pearl, the Wall St. Journal writer kidnapped by jihadists in 2002. His abductors videotaped a final message from Pearl, who condemned American aggression in the region before stating: “My name is Daniel Pearl. My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish.”

His captors then slit his throat.

I don’t know how to speak about being Jewish right now. I could tell you that I feel deeply connected to millennia of history. Generation upon generation for thousands of years. Unbroken. That the people from whom I come were mostly gentle and mostly kind. That they made lives for themselves here, first in Chicago, and then branching out across the country. Some did well. Some did not. Some died defending this nation. One laundered money for the Mob. They were just people. Just Americans, trying to make their way in this maddening country where everybody was promised the freedom to worship their own God or no God at all.

If nothing else, this terrible war has strengthened my resolve to reclaim my prayer, the only prayer I have ever known. Never again. Never again to unending war. Never again to scapegoating. Not Jews. Not immigrants. Not trans people. Never again to mob rule. Never again to ignorance. Never again to sacrificing our own humanity by failing to see the humanity in others.