Imagining ourselves otherwise
I’d like to practice something together. A little experiment. I’m going to ask a series of questions below so before you read ahead, I’ll invite you to really arrive here.
Let’s start with a breath.
Let the air out of your lungs, then take a slow, deep, belly breath in. Feel as oxygen sinks into your lungs, lifting your chest and abdomen. Notice if even a little bit of tension releases from your body with your exhale. Take another two or three breaths just like this. Slower. Deeper. Sink heavier into your seat.
Imagine as though you could push the busy world physically away from you for just a few moments as these words meet your eyes, transiting through your brain to spark thoughts and ideas.
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Nice.
Well done.
Now we can dive in.
Please allow the questions/prompts below to invite you to your journal if you have time, or you can simply pause with them briefly and allow information, memories, thoughts to surface as you scroll. You can also return to them later.
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Take a moment to reflect on the family and community in which you were raised that shaped your relationship to the world around you.
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Were you close to elders? What was their presence like? Did they teach you anything about where you and your family came from?
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Did you have extended family around you? What was that like?
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Did you all come together for holidays and events?
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Where did you gather with family? At your home? A relative’s home? A temple, mosque, church? A park? A community center?
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.What did it taste like? Did you have any special foods you shared on specific occasions?
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How were major milestones celebrated and/or honored? Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings? What about funerals?
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Were you brought into experiences of reverence for the cycles of life and death?
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Did you have any rituals? Traditions?
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Did you honor rites of passage, like the transition from childhood into adolescence? Or other moments of significance?
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What did it sound like? Do you remember any songs from family or community members?
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What did it look like? Do any textures, styles of dress, ceremonial clothes, decorations, objects, ornaments, sculptures come to mind?
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Was anything held like a treasure in your family of origin? Locked in a cabinet or safe, placed on a shelf, hung on a wall, protected behind glass…?
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Did you have a connection to the more-than-human world? Was it nourished by your family or something that distinguished you from them?
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Does or did it feel like culture to you?
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What comes to mind when you consider culture?
Take a moment to let that word activate associations for you. Does this take you to the broader cultures that exist out there beyond you and your life? Or does a particular culture spark? Other peoples’ cultures? Or does a connection to your own culture come into focus?
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What is your culture?
Does it feel intimate and embodied? Alive and expressed? Distant and abstract? Confusing and dissociated? Heavy and fraught? Empty and anemic? Something else? A mix of things?
Culture was not something I actively considered as a child, and it felt nebulous and disconnected from me for most of my adulthood. Culture felt both entirely place-based and held by others, for example the cultural overlay of geography – the foods and languages and activities enlivening the landscapes in which I lived or explored around the world and the people that embodied and exemplified them. It was held by others with distinctive, notable traditions and practices. It was life-defining and amplifying for them, but for me culture was just something to observe elsewhere and in others.
I felt culture-less.
I didn’t realize this at the time, but I had unintentionally spent my life distancing myself from access to an enriching, intimate, and authentic personal cultural experience. This was the inextricable consequence of separating from Judaism.
I didn’t equate Judaism to culture, only to religion, and that overpowering association alienated me from it. The only opportunities I found to even explore Judaism as an adult were in temples and synagogues surrounded by people who seemed to perceive me as a stranger. Judaism was cliquey, and I never fit in. This baffled me because it’s hard to imagine how I didn’t check all the boxes for admittance and acceptance. I attended a Jewish school from Kindergarten to 8th grade, I was Bat Mitzvah’d, both of my parents are Jewish, we celebrated every high holiday, I spoke Hebrew fluently for many years, I could read and chant the Torah… and yet, I felt like I didn’t belong. And though on the surface I felt no desire to belong to it, it grieved me that I didn’t have any kind of home in Jewish life, that it wasn’t easier to break in.
I didn’t embrace Judaism, I only wrestled with it.
Though I spoke the language and sang the prayers, they felt empty as they emerged from my lips as though I was reciting by memory something that was unintelligible and therefore meaningless. I found the Torah boringly irrelevant, I felt God was merciless and wrathful, and I worried that no matter how far from Orthodoxy my family and community situated ourselves, we were irrevocably connected to disturbing ideologies of anti-Palestinian propaganda, un-nuanced defense of Israel, and patriarchal entrenchment that forced women into long skirts, wigs, and positions in the audience or the kitchen, never on the stage (or bimah).
The lack of integrated, fulfilling cultural experiences in my personal life led me to seek richness elsewhere. As I wrote a little about here, I absorbed Mexican culture instead. I learned Hebrew because I had to, but I learned Spanish because I wanted to. I envied and yearned for what I witnessed with rosy lenses of Latinx culture - the familial closeness, the vibrancy, the food, the joy, the celebrations. In Judaism, we were mourning, grieving, fearing, and never forgetting. Over there, they were dancing! There were trumpets and guitars and accordions and big embroidered skirts donned by choice and fancy hats reflecting light shining from everyone’s gigantic smiles and so much laughter… sure I romanticized Latinx culture but only moreso because I felt supremely deprived by my own.
Judaism felt like huddling in a cave studying a scroll written in an obsolete language by candlelight, while just outside the fiesta was blaring.
Gradually fewer and fewer of my friends were Jewish and more of my friends represented everything else with passion, devotedly convicted to their cultural lifeways. I became so wildly divorced from Judaism that the casual antisemitism insidiously infusing everyday reality went unnoticed.
Only in recent conversations are my Jewish friends and I realizing how much antisemtism we deflected because we had nothing to defend, to protect. We were barely Jewish. We were Jewish mostly in a past tense. Judaism was genetic, nothing more.
I’ll have to skip an immense amount of history and context to keep this digestible for today and land us somewhere in 2018 where I sat beneath a solitary towering redwood tree in the backyard of my Oakland rental apartment, a constant companion in those times, and my late Omi (grandmother) joined me there in spirit.
“There is something here for you,” I felt her say. “There is more for you to know, more to learn, so much more for you to discover… don’t give up on it, don’t give up on us.”
It took two more years for me to even glimpse at the kind of possibility that could pull me back in to Judaism, to my lineage, to my culture. I was distrusting and uninterested. But a tear in the seams of time had opened.
Far before I found a thread to trace back to the tapestry of a sacred, femme-conscious, Earth-based, animate, juicy Judaism that felt like everything I wanted and could never even imagine… I began to sense that there was something important to coming back to our home/birth/ancestral cultures. At the time, the world was ablaze with overnight activists appropriately agonizing over police violence, exploding with George Floyd’s murder, yet en masse these efforts were also appropriately criticized. There was valid concern about their superficiality, there was serious harm caused by missteps, ignorance, and persistent self-centering of whiteness via saviorism and entitlement. Even if the desire to participate in societal transformation was real, most activist efforts were unrooted, unsustainable, and unfortunately ephemeral.
Antiracist books sold by the millions but their guidance was difficult to implement. It takes years of study, investment, practice, failure, experience to shift these patterns from an intellectual level. I felt like white-bodied folks needed desperately to better understand ourselves to move from a place of cell/soul knowing of what liberation means, to actually see ourselves humbly in solidarity, not as something apart that needs to ally with something other, but actually something painfully connected yet in ways that were buried, distorted, confused, and underexplored.
And this notion was validated everywhere, including by one of my favorite minds in human history:
“One of the things that most afflicts this country is that white people don't know who they are or where they come from.”
James Baldwin
Baldwin’s words struck me in a new way in the wake. Suddenly my disdain for Judaism, which had softened into dissociated disinterest, was ignited into devotion to a world free from whiteness. My rejection of my roots was alchemized into a radical imperative to reclaim them because if I didn’t, I would always be “white”.
And a world where whiteness reigns, let alone persists, is unsurvivable.
In May 2021, I wrote this on Instagram:
“Part of my personal decolonization effort has meant a critical and painful reckoning with the ways my ancestors and pale-skinned members of my lineage fled white supremacy over and over again, from pogroms to the Holocaust, only to inevitably choose whiteness to ensure their survival. For some, whiteness was forced upon them by demanding assimilation. For others, the toxic manipulation of “supremacy” seeped into their hearts and minds and made them believe they were better, that they were righteous, that “colonizer” didn’t apply to them. There is no separation between white supremacist and Jew in the second scenario, there is no separation between whiteness and Jew in either, despite the disgusting truth that choosing whiteness facilitates self-destruction and the demise of their/our own kin. There is no escaping white supremacy as long as it persists, it is only a temporary comfort, at a profound, soul-sucking expense.”
I was deep in my tumbling with the thin line pale-skinned Jews traverse between being victims of white supremacy and beneficiaries of white privilege. And I fell completely off that tightrope into a more spacious and creative true safety net of honest confrontation and illuminated creativity. How could I detoxify myself from white supremacy meticulously through the entire length of my descending roots through history to fundamentally eradicate it from my lineage? What about me was white? What about me wasn’t? How could I compost the former and water the latter? And the deeper and wider I went on this journey, the more magical, mystical, sensual, strong, vibrant my life has become.
It is not an effort riddled with guilt and shame, it is an endeavor enriched by responsible reckoning of the impact of whiteness on a personal and collective level and a rejuvenating reclamation of what’s possible before and beyond this oppressive force.
This is my story, and it is yours too.
“James Baldwin insisted on us being honest with ourselves and that this honesty will open up space to imagine ourselves otherwise.”
- Eddie Glaude Jr., chairman of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University
For so many of us, the possibility that culture can be vibrant, generative, playful, beneficial, empowering, generous, connected, integrated, embodied feels unreachable. For us white-bodied folks in particular, the truth that we actually connect back to cultures that represent all of those things, and that our ancestral wisdom traditions can be supportive to the collective now, in 2023, can feel impossible.
In fact, it is revolutionary.
And it is through honesty that we can reimagine ourselves as something other than what this dominant paradigm has forced us to be through centuries-long, pervasive, intractable conditions of white supremacy. The death of our cultures is the death of our souls. All of us have roots to a time before we were white and we can heal from the displacement, dispossession, displacement, erasure, and genocide that left us with only whiteness to know ourselves as.
It is time to imagine ourselves otherwise.
My course, Cultivating Culture, launches for the fourth time on October 8th. It is open to anyone that carries threads of whiteness in their lineage. I speak more to this idea of “culture” in the video below - just click directly on the post and it’ll open for you in a new tab.
You can also learn more here. Please don’t hesitate to respond to this email with questions, comments, ideas, contemplations, and if you’re even remotely sparked by participating in the course but you’re running into resistance from logistical to psychological to financial, let’s chat and explore together.
Til next week, with huge love,
Rachel
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Beautiful
Rachel, what a beautiful post. It is not easy to find words for what you are describing about the lines between white supremacy, whiteness, fair skin, etc. It seems like all of this can sometimes be downstream of a larger effort to consolidate power. Who is defined as white can and has adjusted over time (as it formerly did not include Italians, Germans, Jews, and more). These are complex inquiries, and I also find there is a lot of wisdom from people like Tyson Yunkaporta, the author of Sand Talk and a member of an Indigenous tribe from Australia:
“I find that ‘whiteness’ is no longer a useful term in my vocabulary. In my community, we use the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ every day as a convenient shorthand to describe relationships between occupiers and the occupied, but those terms are horribly inadequate for describing our reality today, particularly in multicultural and international contexts.
In a world where black African colonists are annexing the traditional lands of fair-skinned Nemadi hunters, where Celts struggle against English domination while Basques in Spain and Koryaks in Russia fight to retain their ancient lands and languages, where diasporic peoples of various skin tones have been making babies together for generations in every country, black and white is a limiting paradigm for understanding Indigenous experience.”
My ancestors and relatives in India have hard dark skin, but have and still do participate in the oppression of others who are "lower castes" and I continue to wrestle with my heritage as a "high-caste" Brahmin from India, even though such distinctions don't mean as much here in the United States except for in Indian / South Asian sub-cultures / communities here.
Wonderful and courageous writing. Thank you for sharing!