#Original U.S. Black Babylonian Christians | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

zamancollective · 6 years ago

Photo

The Spaces in My Togetherness

By Kayla Cohen

Papercut by Sophie Levy

Kayla originally submitted this essay to the Berkeley Hillel Prize.

Last year, my friends and I invited one of our visiting lecturers, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, to a Tu B’Shvat seder in the Charedi-turned-hippie neighborhood of Nachlaot.

The event’s Facebook page asked guests to bring wine for the four prayers. We had stopped at Mahane Yehuda on the way, curving through the shuk’s wet alleyways, passing its porous walls and the fruit stands closed for the night, weaving in and out of a few liquor stores to find a 20-shekel bottle of red wine. People’s heads turned as Geshe Damchoe trailed behind us in his long crimson robe.

The seder was in a small synagogue. The room was filled twice over capacity. A buzzing murmur hovered across the room. Talk drowned the rabbi’s voice. No one was listening. Everyone -- but us five -- was drunk. Heavily drunk. And everyone -- but Geshe Damchoe -- was Jewish.

Damchoe sat quietly in his seat, reading the pamphlet explaining the different mixtures of wine that only he abstained from drinking that night. Then a niggun erupted. People drummed on the tables. They hollered and clapped. They beat their chests, climbed onto their chairs (or fell if they lost their balance). The five of us stared, rose, and followed.

Yin/yang is what Taoists see in the world: duality. Buddhists see karma governing an interdependent unity. In the little synagogue, amidst the roaring and table-banging, I laughed to myself: the Jews only know disorder.

(You can’t remember ever feeling that self-conscious about Jewish practice before. There was something about being in the company of a spectator, someone with limited exposure to Judaism (and no predisposition to defend it) that made celebrating the holiday fully and without questioning difficult for you. So you too adopted the role of observer. And for the first time, a fuller understanding of your own culture came not from engaging with it- but distancing yourself from it.

You were self-conscious, but not necessarily conscious of yourself. You were conscious of an “other.”)

That night blurred the defined space between “other” and “self.” It forced me to consider how much other people have affected how I see my self.

I hold others’ habits, tastes, and opinions. I hold behaviors that were modeled for me (your bad habit of cracking your neck, which started only because you thought your desk partner in 8th grade looked cool when she popped the capsules of her joints in cascading sequence). I hold feelings that I learned (your fear of plastic bottles from the progressive people you met in college, or revulsion from the thought of once mixing meat with milk -- embodied most gloriously in BBQ-chicken-cheese pizza -- before you lived in Israel and decided to keep kosher). I hold ideas that I did not create (like what your legs or chest should look like). I hold expressions that I can’t explain (the spontaneous tears induced by a friend’s; the contagious yawn induced by your neighbor).

I am not the only one engaged in this interexchange. Judaism has interacted with other peoples (and absorbed some of their cultural practices) for over two millennia. Jews were conquered by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans; by the Christians, Ottomans and British; before they were exiled, they lived in Egypt, Spain, Portugal, France, and Yemen; they founded communities across eastern and central Europe; in ancient Persia and modern Iran; in Iraq and Syria; in Albania, Morocco, South Africa, Mexico, Argentina; Ethiopia, Canada, the U.S., China, and India.

Because of their diasporic history, Jews also stand as a collection of different peoples, and their cultures, tastes, and practices. Some Jews are blonde. Some Jews have black skin. Jews hold citizenship to different countries. They speak different languages. Communities in the mizrach sing their prayers to Muslim chants. Many western synagogues adopted pews from churches. The ancient Beit Alpha synagogue by the Galilee holds pagan gods on its mosaic floors.

Judaism is imbued with so much otherness.

(You, too, are imbued with so much otherness.)

From where, then, does the Jewish people’s sense of self arise?

(From where, then, does your sense of self arise?)

Navigating the fluid interexchange between rigid conceptions of “self” and “other” is daunting. At the same time, the strain that this challenge has placed on how I interact with the world, and the fragmented feelings it has left me with, best honor my experience as a Jew, and on a more basic level, as a person.

Nearly a year after the Tu B’Shvat seder in Nachlaot, one of my teachers introduced me to a book called The Prophet by Khalil Gibran) He quoted a line from the book: “Let there be spaces in your togetherness.” (The idea cleaves to the walls of your brain.)

In context, the point of the quote was to remind people engaged in any relationship with another person of their own individuality. To separate the self from another, and sanctify the self-contained.

But maybe Gibran’s words can also be interpreted to question the self-sufficiency of the individual altogether. Maybe seeing spaces in one’s togetherness is the recognition of voids in a whole bigger than its acting parts; separation in what appears singular; other influences in the self; a network of people in one’s personhood.

Judaism hollows spaces -- spaces not just between Diaspora communities in different parts of the world, but within an individual’s consciousness.

These spaces are deeply embedded in my consciousness. I occupy different spaces: the space my body takes, the space between my body and another’s; and the emotional space that bleeds into another’s and sometimes encompasses the two. I jump between my selfhood and my otherness, “I” and (you). I occupy the space to both write about and to myself, to be and ultimately, to ask: “who are you, Kayla? How do you assert yourself? How do you assert your self?”

#nonfiction & opinion #kayla cohen #sophie levy

1 note · View note

stopkingobama · 7 years ago

Text

Here's what the Left doesn't want you to know about slavery

Photo credit: Walter E. Williams

Too many people believe that slavery is a “peculiar institution.”

That’s what Kenneth Stampp called slavery in his book, “Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South.”

But slavery is by no means peculiar, odd, or unusual. It was common among ancient peoples such as the Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Greeks, Persians, Armenians, and many others.

Large numbers of Christians were enslaved during the Ottoman wars in Europe. White slaves were common in Europe from the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages. It was only after A.D. 1600 that Europeans joined with Arabs and Africans and started the Atlantic slave trade.

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. But this can’t be done alone. Find out more >>

As David P. Forsythe wrote in his book, “The Globalist,” “The fact remained that at the beginning of the 19th century an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will either in some form of slavery or serfdom.”

While slavery constitutes one of the grossest encroachments on human liberty, it is by no means unique or restricted to the Western world or United States, as many liberal academics would have us believe.

Much of their indoctrination of our young people, at all levels of education, paints our nation’s Founders as racist adherents to slavery, but the story is not so simple.

At the time of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, slaves were about 40 percent of the population of the Southern colonies. Apportionment in the House of Representatives and the number of electoral votes each state would have in presidential elections would be based upon population.

Southern delegates to the convention wanted slaves to be counted as one person. Northern delegates to the convention, and those opposed to slavery, wanted only free persons of each state to be counted for the purposes of apportionment in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College.

The compromise reached was that each slave would be counted as only three-fifths of a person.

Many criticize this compromise as proof of racism. My question to these grossly uninformed critics is whether they would have found it more preferable for slaves to be counted as whole persons. Slaves counted as whole persons would have given slaveholding Southern states much more political power.

Or, would the critics of the Founders prefer that the Northern delegates not compromise and not allow slaves to be counted at all. If they hadn’t, it is likely that the Constitution would have not been ratified.

Thus, the question that emerges is whether blacks would be better off with Northern states having gone their way and Southern states having gone theirs, resulting in no U.S. Constitution and no Union?

Unlike today’s pseudointellectuals, black abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood the compromise, saying that the three-fifths clause was “a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding states” that deprived them of “two-fifths of their natural basis of representation.”

Douglass’ vision was shared by Patrick Henry and others. Henry said, expressing the reality of the three-fifths compromise, “As much as I deplore slavery, I see that prudence forbids its abolition.”

With this union, Congress at least had the power to abolish slave trade by 1808. According to Delegate James Wilson, many believed the anti-slave trade clause laid “the foundation for banishing slavery out of this country.”

Many of the Founders abhorred slavery. Their statements can be read on my website, walterewilliams.com.

The most unique aspect of slavery in the Western world was the moral outrage against it, which began to emerge in the 18th century and led to massive elimination efforts.

It was Britain’s military sea power that put an end to the slave trade. And our country fought a costly war that brought an end to slavery.

Unfortunately, these facts about slavery are not in the lessons taught in our schools and colleges. Instead, there is gross misrepresentation and suggestion that slavery was a uniquely American practice.

Commentary by Walter E. Williams. Originally published at The Daily Signal.

#slavery #three fifths compromise #US History

0 notes

americanlibertypac · 7 years ago