Once upon a time, a Jewish identity was something worth having. Being Jewish was about being part of a community of artists, scientists and philosophers, where an idea was a far greater unit of currency than a dollar.
Places like the Café New York in Budapest were where literature, art and films that fought and pleaded for a better world were born, and they were born of Jews. It is impossible to read Arthur Koestler and Primo Levy, or hear 19th century Klezmer music without feeling both the difficulties of the times and the hope and drive for a better tomorrow.
That was what being Jewish was about; Tikun Olam - working for a good bigger than the self.
Somewhere, and somehow, it all went wrong though. Jews started to vote Republican (to me, a drop-kickable offence for any self-respecting minority group) and communities fragmented. More types of Judaism cropped up in the space of a week than one could imagine possible; Reform, Liberal, Conservative, Chabad; the list is endless and convoluted.
Social entrepreneurship took a back seat to good-old fiscal entrepreneurship and the features of world Jewry that made it what was began to slip away. I’ve spoken to young people that think they’re socially conscious because they’re going to a fundraising dinner for they-don’t-know-what-charity, in a dress or suit that cost three times their donation to this mysterious cause. But, hey, it’s all to find a husband/wife anyway so who cares right?
The almighty dollar replaced the Almighty, and freedom, independence and justice took a back seat to BMWs, eating at the right restaurants and being seen at the right parties. Israel was just a place that you visited to get ‘in touch’ with your roots, in the same condescendingly dishonest way that black Americans spend two weeks on a beach in Cape Town, sit in Nelson Mandela’s old cell for five minutes and go home righteous and educated.
Synagogues lost their young people as membership fees shot through the roof, whilst out-dated Aish Rabbis preached too much dogma and not enough sense because, let’s face it, they’re mostly just kids from Brooklyn who went to Yeshiva because it sounded easier than real school, and it was.
Israel, the bastion of the Jewish people, wasn’t doing much better. Socialism and the “New Jew” had collapsed and Israel was a Start-Up Nation where most people had nothing. The government took $100 a month from people for years, like it was still socialist.
Israelis barely even identified themselves as Jewish anymore, and the identity was dying. Only a few people were left flying the Jewish flag, and this small sample was formed from the worst role-models - those who take satisfaction from the saddest fiction of scriptures written too long ago to be deployed without social modification, who either want women at the back of the bus or land that belongs to someone else.
Then everything changed. Fifty people put fifty tents on a street in hot and dusty Tel Aviv and reclaimed their identities. Thousands more joined. They said that they didn’t want to live like this anymore. They said it was about house prices, but we all knew that was only part of it. It was about social justice in the real sense, in the Jewish historical sense. It was about making our society a place fit for the custodianship of our history and the captaincy of our future. It was, as my father would say, pure Yiddishkeit.
The protests have run their course; we probably won’t see 300,000 people in the streets of Tel Aviv for social justice again anytime soon, with only the remnants of the core dealing with the logistics of actual fiscal change in Israel and the housing crisis remaining.
But we mustn’t forget that night, when those 300,000 people said, “We can do this, we can be worth something, not only to ourselves, but to each other as well. We can build a Jewish identity worth having again.”
We mustn’t forget it because it is our duty to the world over as Jews to make sure that it wasn’t just one night, but a permanent reality.
Josh Mintz is completing his degree in International Relations and Middle Eastern studies and is the communications director at Friend a Soldier, an NGO that encourages dialogue with IDF soldiers.
