A Light Unto the Nations
A dear friend recently referred to me as “a beacon of light” relative to the present state of online discourse involving Jewishness, and my reaction to this completely well meant statement was complicated.
The entire @taalumot arc has surfaced very complicated feelings about what it means for non-Jews to perceive Jews. I was optimistic at first, but I’m not anymore.
The problems of tokenism are to some extent common to any minority. But in this particular case, the real number of Jews on the entire planet is smaller than the populations of many individual cities, and yet many non-Jewish cultures many times the size of all Jewish cultures combined place outsized significance on the Jewish character in their own mythologies, completely regardless of their level of contact with actual Jews. This situation makes it very dangerous to make any aspect of Jewishness legible to anyone else.
Being considered a “beacon of light” reminds me of how many non-Jews derive a substantial portion of their entire experience of Jews in the world from my actions, and my actions are exceedingly subtle and low-profile compared to those of the highly online dysregulated Jews by whom I feel surrounded — people online, by and large, being both highly online and dysregulated.
No one is sending their best.
But in the case of Jewish people, sheer statistics dictate that the ones we’re sending are the only ones many people will ever encounter in their lives. And since non-Jews are so obsessed with Jews in one way or another, the effects of these run-ins can spread far and wide and have horrific consequences. Very rarely do they have peaceful and beautiful consequences, as very rarely has the history of non-Jews perceiving Jews been peaceful or beautiful.
On some level, I’m glad it’s me when it’s me and not someone else, but on another, I have seen no evidence that the butterfly effects of people perceiving me are good for Jews, especially compared to the offline activities in my Jewish community on which I could always spend more of my time.
Like anyone online — probably? — I am online to find my people. And as I have said, I do not mean “Jewish people” by that. I don’t need to network with more Jewish people; I need to network with more non-Jewish people who want to live in the same world I (and my community) want to live in. But it’s so fraught, and it’s so exhausting, that sometimes I wonder whether this effort is helping bring that world about, or if it’s just getting people obsessed with Jews to think about Jews more. And I can’t help but notice how often in history the latter has resulted in worlds Jews literally cannot live in.
