Everybody's Got Something, Nelson Mandela Included

While discussing an otherwise perfectly pleasant and wonderful mutual friend, someone said: "If she would only..." (fill in the blank) and I replied: "It's her Something. Everybody's got Something."

Today's Something on display in the world of Social Media is a world view that elevates a complete, unquestioning and limitless loyalty to everything remotely and/or specifically Israeli above ALL other values.

Not just SOME other values, or MOST other values - but ALL other values.

It's some people's Something. Everyone's got Something. This one just hits too close to home.

Nelson Mandela died yesterday, and the general reaction on Facebook was divided into two camps - those who expressed grief, and those who judged the grief of others as wrongful and misinformed.

The latter group brought both images and quotations of Nelson Mandela's support for the PLO and a photo-opp with Yasser Arafat (y'mach s'hmo) as proof-texts for their stance. A summary of the worst of the charges against Nelson Mandela's relationship with terrorists can be found at this link (click on it if you want to read).

I examined the charges and I can't disagree with the documented fact that Nelson Mandela did in fact meet with a number of world leaders who I personally wouldn't invite to my Shabbos table - people like Fidel Castro, Desmond Tutu, Arafat (y"s), and that those same leaders and the propaganda artists whose job it was/is to create symbolic alliances to strengthen their cause didn't hesitate to use Mandela's near-martyr status (deserving as it was) to bolster their own prestige. His presence both enobled and legitimized those who deserved neither nobility nor legitimization. Amongst other harms done - the truly illegitimate co-opting of the word "Apartheid" into the vocabulary of the PLO was a direct result of these associations.

With that being said (and I do believe it needs to be said, and there, I said it!) - Nelson Mandela WAS BIGGER THAN THAT.

Bigger than his political allies, who burned for revenge and hoped he would call for violence upon his release from prison.
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Bigger than those who hated and feared him, knowing when he emerged from prison he might have seized the opportunity to call down the hellfire of genocide upon the White population of an entire Continent, if not beyond.

Bigger than the ideologues who revered him, bigger than the celebrities that fawned over him, bigger than the posturing pundits who editorialized him.

A single man. A single moment in time. 27 years in prison at the hand of a racist oppressor. Millions of followers who, with only a word, would with rocks and knives and guns and their bare hands have torn to bits those whose skin color had dominated and oppressed every aspect of their lives for generations.

Instead ...

Instead of hatred, he chose love.
Instead of violence, he chose peace.
Instead of intragience, he chose dialogue.
Instead of rejection, he chose recondiliation.
Instead of polarization, he chose cooperation.

So, yes, everybody's got SOMETHING. Nelson Mandela's "Something" was a political association with the PLO, the sworn enemy of Israel. But his OTHER "Something" was the fact that he saved MILLIONS OF LIVES WORLD-WIDE, many of them JEWISH, when he emerged from 27 years in prison preaching peace instead of war, looking for cooperation instead of feeding conflict.

IT COULD HAVE GONE THE OTHER WAY. AND IT DIDN'T.

That's why Nelson Mandela's "Something" is, in my humble opinion, distasteful to me both as a Jew and an Israeli, but overlookable because of EVERYTHING ELSE.

Just the way I overlook the "Something" in so many people whom I know and love, because EVERYTHING ELSE tips the scales.

Probably just the way others overlook the "Something" in me as well.

Perhaps even this truth about me that might be uncomfortable: Although I do value complete, unquestioning and limitless loyalty to everything remotely and/or specifically Israeli VERY VERY VERY highly, I don't value it EXCLUSIVELY ABOVE ALL things. There's one thing I value above that - it's MY SOMETHING.

My "Something" is I can't stand to be told what to think by other people, and unless I've come to a conclusion for myself and by myself, I refuse to think (and do) something I don't believe in. It's my whole personal integrity thing - very annoying, but so much a part of who I am it can't be disabled, even when it comes to other things I hold dear, as dear as I hold my own life.

Everybody's got SOMETHING. What's your Something?

The Signature of All Things - Signed, Sealed and Delivered

I finished reading "The Signature of All Things" by Elizabeth Gilbert last night. I haven't been able to stop weeping. I wept until I fell asleep, I woke up at 1:40am to cry myself back to sleep, and all morning tears have watered my cheeks. I want to stop crying, but I can't.

I can't stop crying, because the relationship between Alma and Ambrose hit the Mother of All Nerves. 

Upon first meeting of the character of Ambrose, I immediately began to cry. I knew what was coming, because I lived it in the weirdest and most painful way with the man to whom I was recently married,  and then suddenly divorced 11 months later, after a humiliating scandal.

The half-mad man-child, the one whose spiritual longing took him outside the norms, the one whose own G*d-given human longings became subsumed to the habit of polarizing extremes, the one whose horror of impurity extended to his own natural physicality. 

As I read the book, I was initially thrilled for Alma to have found a true friend, someone as extreme as she in both intellect and imagination, someone who demonstrated the highest excellence and originality in his own chosen (and extremely esoteric) work, someone who took delight in her presence and could soar with her and she with him.

I was hoping they'd be the best of friends forever, but alas, each their own frail humanity, unfulfilled passions and long-overdue urgent need for communion created a moment where both of them felt, indeed, SUPERNATURALLY ARTICULATED and understood that they were for each other.

In such a way, in such a time and culture (and how ironic that the society my ex-husband and I lived in, that of Orthodox Judaism in modern-day Israel, was and is in much ways identical to the 19th Century, wherein the story of Alma and Ambrose took place) they had no choice but to marry.
 
What happens next, dear readers, I shall not spoil for you, nor is this post meant as a book review, simply a jumping-off point to the fountain of grief that was triggered by reading how Alma and Ambrose alas, could not simply have left it at glorious friendship of two distinctly unique individuals.

Because of the impossibility of basic, honest communication between two people so completely caught up in their own internal worlds, a great misunderstanding occurred - one that would have life-altering repercussions.

Alma felt fundamentally rejected and socially humiliated, and banished her husband - who, like mine, was incapable of initiating his own destiny but instead reacted or adapted to what was put in front of him by those with stronger wills - to the other side of the world than herself.

As for me, feeling fundamentally betrayed, socially humiliated AND responsible for harm that came to others because I not only sanctioned but promoted him to the world, in the course of banishing my former husband to the outermost limits of the outermost limits, both socially and psychically, I've lost the friend I used to have - my weird, quirky and sweet friend who used to come over to my house every week for two years to record Torah programming for my Internet Radio Station that reflected how his original mind and my original mind could riff and soar together.

"Like Angels," Ambrose would have said with a dazzling smile. But my former husband alas, was no angel - although he desperately wanted to be. 

What happens to Ambrose, what happens to Alma subsequent to that, the role that sexual frustration, unexpressed desire, the subsuming of healthy human connectivity to the neo-pagan conceit that flesh and spirit are essentially incompatible, and the suffering that occurs when the natural progression of human relationships is thwarted by philosophies, fears and conventions - no, I shall not spoil for you, dear reader.

But, like the character of Alma, I MUST understand. I cannot rest until I KNOW, no matter the cost to my serenity, peace of mind, health or happiness. So my search to uncover and understand WHAT, WHY and HOW this bit of airy fluff caught me and swung me about and sent me flying in another direction altogether, when I find clues, I must follow them.

Because it's not the airy fluff, or the lost friend that I'm weeping for. It's the utter destruction of my dearest dream, the one I invested everything into, the one closest to my heart, that I waited a lifetime to realize - a marriage/partnership with a spiritual mate / mentor / partner / participant. Because the weight of mere airy fluff was enough to crush and destroy that for which I saved an entire lifetime.

Shall I continue to weep for what, at the end of all things, may simply have turned out to be a bit of airy fluff that passed through my life, nothing more? No, 'tis not that for which I weep, for I am in fact a woman of substance, and women of substance don't weep for fluff.

The tears come from the fundamental fear that after this last debacle, I may never rebuild enough trust in MYSELF, ever again, to be able to share an intimate relationship with another person, or to have a life-partner.  

Tears dry when dead dreams crumble into dust and blow away.

Light comes when that which casts a shadow is removed.

Dreams come when fear hibernates like a bear in his wintery cave.

Newness comes through the birth canal of hope, wet and squalling to be soothed.

Apparently, it is quite the biological and spiritual fact that one must die to the old to be born to the new. And since I'm not even halfway done with my life, I'm not ready to give up on the hope of newness.

Thanks Elizabeth Gilbert, for inadvertently writing the book that gave me the illumination I needed to take this battle for my life to a higher level.