Post #4048260

I don't think this is exactly some moment of deciding that I actually "am" Jewish, because there still feel like too many reasons I can't make that full leap of identification, but in reckoning with ancestor work during this extremely liminal existence, I find myself really overwhelmed by — of all things — the Fiddler on the Roof movie soundtrack coming up in my music collection, consuming me with visceral feelings about being partially descended from people who did not live on a Ukrainian shtetl, at least not to my knowledge, but who also would have been Yiddish speakers at some point & likely lived for centuries in either constant precarity or the close memory thereof. I am increasingly certain that some of my lifelong anxiety is flavored in a specific way that Jewish friends or political comrades have described — not just the generational trauma of landless Europeans but also having part of one's mind forever waiting on the threshold, bag already packed, eye watching the torches on the horizon. I keep struggling with how to integrate revelations like these into my ritual or mundane life. So far, an entire course on Jewish ancestral recovery work & then reading a well-intentioned book by a couple of progressive rabbis have not led me to really understand what is the right way to honor my Ashkenazi ancestors after their Jewishness was masked/ignored for several generations. I just do not relate well enough to most of the holidays or halakhic law or cosmology or languages — they are too grounded in things I just wasn't raised with & also don't feel any "call" toward. I am 100% certain that expressing a Jewish identity would still be performative on my part. Nevertheless... nevertheless... there is a specific history in my very body & psyche & it also feels wrong to treat Jewish ancestors like they don't deserve the same place of importance alongside my other ancestors just because I lack the tools to engage with them. This problem keeps rearing its head as the pregnancy progresses. The fact that my due date is Yom Kippur does not at all escape me.