By Hari Kumar and Alex Travelli. Visuals by Atul Loke.
Nearly half the community has already moved to Israel, piecemeal, since the 1990s. But on Thursday, with Operation ‘Wings of Dawn,’ Israel itself will fly about 250 more of the Menashe, via Delhi, to Tel Aviv. The rest are to follow soon after.
Some of the earliest groups made their homes in places like Hebron in the West Bank and in Israeli settlements in Gaza, before 2005. In November last year, the Israeli government agreed to help the remaining 5,800 or so immigrate en masse, including 1,200 this year, and is covering some of the cost.
Benjamin Haokip, another resident of the Manipuri kibbutz, said, “We follow Judaism, and here we cannot follow all our customs.”
Some prayers require a minyan or quorum, which is hard to find in the hills. Others require knowledge gained through cultural experience and foodstuffs that can’t be found locally. “We want to go to Israel for our religion,” he said.
The NYT suggests that Israel is largely motivated by the need to replenish its workforce, but like. This is 5,800 people.
It's not a number that will replenish a workforce or (as I am certain people will claim) colonize a territory.
I don't blame them for not understanding that sometimes, a community just wants to be together. This country is a melting pot of ethnic origins, on land that was already a salad of ethnic groups.
I'm grateful that for once, Israel isn't flying Jewish immigrants in because their lives are at risk where they are.
For once, it's just that they want to come home.
The main reason I wanted to share this post is that the quote I embiggened, above, hit me right in the feels.
People love to act like Jews would only "need Israel" if their lives were threatened elsewhere. (And that Jewish lives aren't threatened elsewhere, and never will be.)
I kind of understood it the same way at first, despite also understanding the craving to stand where your history and your people are.
The day that I found out Israel's weekend is Friday and Saturday, though? My entire perspective changed forever.
You don't know how hard it is for Jews to organize being Jewish around the Christian calendar until you've tried it yourself.
For months each year, it gets dark before the regular workday ends. That means Shabbat starts before you get off work.
If you work retail or some other job with irregular hours it's even worse, because they have no motivation to schedule you around your weekly holiday. If you're unlucky, they have plenty of motivation TO schedule you during that. Because they hate Jews, and/or because they hate workers.
Even if you just work regular office hours, you cannot observe Shabbat the way you normally would if it starts while you're at work. You aren't supposed to be working during Shabbat. You aren't supposed to be going home, carrying all your work things, during Shabbat.
You have to either have ordered your Shabbat dinner ahead of time, or started it in a slow cooker ahead of time. And have set the table ahead of time. Or continue not being observant.
You can't light the Shabbat candles.
All of that also makes it pretty hard to make it a nice celebratory dinner, and to have people over for it.
When it's light out after work, you can come home and make things nice and make food. It's just a race against time, most of the time. It requires executive function that I personally do not fucking have.
I don't really even have the executive function to do it WITHOUT a job, yet. But that's partly an autistic burnout problem.
And that's just Shabbat. That doesn't even start to address how hard it is for a lot of people to get time off for annual holidays. Or to get out of school without missing anything.
Or the fact that you have to tell your bosses/teachers, your workplace/school administration, that you're Jewish in order to get those accomodations: which is not always safe.
Then there's the fact that this is ultimately a lunar religion based on the agricultural and seasonal rituals of a place 7,000 miles away.
I need to source a lulav and etrog to shake every year. Etrogs don't really grow in most places.
Last year, I did research what kind of palm trees I could pick a lulav from, and how to fold it right and stuff. I didn't have the spoons to actually fold it, after that. And none of the stores that usually sell etrogs, or even Buddha's hand citrons which my friend swears are the same thing, had them. And my kid and I did not have the spoons to go to a second location after spending a week on that.
You might be thinking, damn, just be Reform, nobody cares about all that fuss!
This is WHY that's a thing. It's not that Jews wouldn't continue practicing their ethnoreligion, passing on layers and layers of history and culture through these practices, if it were easier. It's not that Jews don't want to do that.
It's that some of it becomes fucking impossible when you live in the diaspora. Different parts become impossible, depending on where and when you live and your own personal circumstances.
Like, if I could just go to shul, they'd have a kosher sukkah and we could all shake the lulav and the etrog, but my kid is agoraphobic and I went through years of autistic burnout. And there isn't much of a safety net for that.
If I sat down and wrote out all the things I want to do that I can't, at THIS point in my recovery I could reach out to people at my functional and organized synagogue, and ask them for help with each part. And I might even get it!
But that probably wouldn't be true if I didn't live in the third-Jewiest part of the US.
And it still wasn't true until recently, when I regained the spoons to do things like figure out what I needed and potentially ask for help.
My point is: people do not understand how difficult it is to maintain your own culture and practices within systems that are set up to exclude you.
Systems that are subtly hostile to your existence, because you're supposed to assimilate. No matter where you are, the system expects you to assimilate, and marks you as undesired other if you don't.
We KNOW this, Tumblr: we experience this as trans people, as queer people, as people with disabilities, as immigrants, as poor people, as all sorts of people of color and all sorts of unassimilated ethnic groups.
This is why the UN considers self-determination to be not only a core human right, but one at the core of what the UN does.
That's why it says that every people has the right of self-determination: the right to decide what political situation best lets them "freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development." Whether that's having a voice in a larger democracy, declaring independence from a country or empire, or something else entirely.
Sorry; I've been reading a lot of history and watching a LOT of Hamilton.
I also wanted to share this post because the pictures are great. I love the diversity of the Jewish diaspora.
(Also, as an American, it's genuinely so weird that we so often fail to understand that you can be a part of more than one ethnic group. That's practically the norm in our country.
I grew up thinking I was ¾ Italian, ¼ Irish, and that seemed pretty normal from where I stood.*
And yet, I know some people will look at this and be like, "see, Jews aren't an ethnic group, they're just a religion!"
Bruh. An ethnoreligion is how some ethnic groups pass their history, traditions, music, language, food, myths, etc - their culture - down from one generation to the next. Like the Hindus, Druze, Yazidi, and Roma. And the Jews.)
* (Turns out my mom was not kidding all those years, Grandma did lie about being Irish. Her heritage seems to have been pretty solidly English fundie Puritans, which explains her evangelical frenzy.)
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