Negative Space

Negative Space

I had been entertaining vague notions of 'researching' Judaism while I was in Europe and now that I am here, in Galicia, for a shortened mere month more, I have dove headfirst into as much Judaism as I can find. I currently have stake in all of the library books about Jews in Spain, which is to say two. I am excited to find out things. I have also been reading more bible than normal, which is to say more than the parsha. Now I am reading it just for fun. Trying to get my kicks in. I might be addicted to Judaism.

It strikes me as odd, that this summer (graduating plus moving to a warmer clime means that summer has not ended), I have crossed the Atlantic Ocean twice. One trip was to a hardworking Jew-filled place and the other, well, they take a nap in the middle of the day and I am the first Jew they have ever met. EVER MET.

So the librarian knows what things I am into because she sees what I read—the power of the library and the books it holds. Tonight she was explaining to me that the library closes early because of the book club. Then her eyes light up. They are about to discuss Adress Unknown; it has an American Jew in it. I was invited to stay and practice my Spanish. She is a sweetheart, really.

They get to discussing, already the older man looks like he dislikes me because I do not speak the regional dialect, gallego/Galician, and the group feels compelled to include me by speaking Spanish. I also have read the book and their accents are thick. For a while it sounded like he was defending Hitler because Germany was poor and the Jews had all the money. He was not justifying genocide but simply explaining the rational connection of Hitler's success and it is true that the poverty of post WWI Germany was a huge contributing factor to the rise of Hitler's Third Reich. Then the woman next to me nodded in agreement about how the Jews always have money. [I would have some money, to eat and pay rent if this stupid government would pay me like they promised...]

They continued to discuss gender roles and WWII and Hitler and neo-Nazism and some of the guilt and vengeance roles in the book which I now have a copy of. The mother, so defined because she brought her daughter with her, talked about how horrific and unbelievable it was that young Spanish men walk around with swastika armbands and how could people not have learned. Horrific both at hate and at the fact that those misinformed young White Supremacists, were not in fact, Aryan in any way.

Then they each went around and said if they liked the book. Then we had a rousing session of “Ask the Jew”. My verbal skills are way below my reading and writing skills in Spanish and that was with my Native English Speaking (NES) teachers. The first question: “How do Jews justify the treatment of Palestinians in Israel?” Really? What does this have to do with your book, sir. And you can guess which sir it is too. The old guy, who seemed pained to have to ask me this in Spanish. I explained that some Jews justify it based on a need to have someplace after every other place in the world has beaten us to pulp...including Spain, several times. I may taken a little tangent to explain the Napoleonic-era change in citizenship status because it was central to the desire for a Jewish nation but he did not understand that and thought I was evading his question.

Eventually I clarified that some Jews think we should kill all the Palestinians and some Jews think we should give up Israel entirely and that Palestinians of the era that really began all this territorial madness included the Jews. When the biblical forefathers kill all the Canaanites off, that's genocide for conquest (which I think he justified in the name of the Spanish South American colonies), when the British abandon the desert and just drop the keys and the guns where they lie...that's Israel. Yes, some conquest happened and yes, sometimes it seems like the IDF are overzealous to a parallelism of early Third Reich....or of Spain from the year 100 common era until 1492 with the exception of about three hundred years of Muslim rule in the middle.

After the new book was passed around and we were leaving, the old guy explained to me that he was not attacking me or my people but that apparently the Spanish press is VERY biased and in the opposite manner of the US media. All he ever sees is Israelis taking land and killing innocent Palestinians. I explained that I have to put Israel in the context of me and how I justify it because I am a Jew. If you ask me what Jews think about Israel, you ask me what I think about Israel.

So as I search out Judaism, partly to try and compensate for the lack of it in my life and partly because I am an addict, I find myself like the painter, more intrigued with the negative space than the positive space. Spain has produced a few of the finest Jewish poets and philosophers and preserved Judaism when the Ashkenazim were bumbling idiots trapped in antiquated Middle Age Europe. Much like the Jews have been different throughout history so has Spain. Not quite part of Europe but not part of Africa. Spain was too fascist for WWII. Franco would have had to give up siesta to join the Third Reich and Spain did not have Jews anyway.

I watched 12 Galician (would I dare to call them Spaniards?) adults argue over Americans and Jews and Nazism. And the only one of those they have any contact with on any frequency is America and that remains the thing they discussed the least! To me, their discussion sounded so distant and theoretical especially when for me, these things are so close and so real. It also strikes me that most of this conversation would have happened anyway, regardless of my presence. This distance is why that mother has seen the jovenes with the Nazi regalia. She asked me why I would ever consider being a rabbi (after we got over the whole Reform, yes I am a woman, yes there are girl rabbis debacle). I told her I was enamored with the way that Jews argue, which looks exactly like the discussion I saw tonight: concomitant voices, tables being pounded, pages being quoted, general disagreement.

This place and its old, stone walls are covered in graffiti. I have seen swastikas, many of which had half-hearted NO circles through them, to complement a couple of stars of David with much more stark NO circles through them. I asked the principle of my school the first day and she assured me that they have no antisemitism nor neo-Nazism here. Some of the graffiti in question is on the school.

I would not say that what is happening here is antisemitism; the old guy seemed very concerned with our treatment of our Semitic, Palestinian brothers. I think what is happening here is worse and that is the distance and ignorance which leads to much worse things than a few misinformed young men who will realize someday that they are not white enough to dress that way and do not really like Germany and are completely indifferent to Jews.

I am extremely glad I decided to stay there and let them gauntlet me. Now they HAVE met a Jew. My Spanish was not great nor local but I was polite and moderately informative. This is what Judaism needs. To be out in the world (Derekh ha-eretz), because the Holocaust did not happen because of the Jews or whether or not they had money but because no one knew the Jews as people sharing human life with them.