From the Editor
MOST OF US hold that there’s some elasticity in Jewish life and practice. What we consider Jewish
acts can vary from region to region, tribe to tribe. Sephardic or Ashkenazi or Mizrahi or Ethiopian rites. Customs and liturgies and ritual foods from North Africa, Italy, India or Surinam, and from synagogue to temple to shul to shtiebl to knis. From my Sabbath table to yours there will be plenty of differences, and maybe on some Shabbats no table at all.
There’s no single papal-like authority in Judaism. Reminding people of this is one of my favorite lines from the podium when explaining how Jewish beliefs and practices were available for the feminist shifts imagined and crafted by Jewish women.
Our Jewish tent was big—is big—and is growing bigger, but its expandable walls appear to be fraying. Readers share with Lilith how these past months have surfaced unprecedented anxieties for you and shaken some of your core beliefs about the State of Israel, its needs and its rights, flaws and challenges. Jews everywhere are experiencing a vulnerability new to many of us.
A couple of weeks ago I went out wearing a dog tag read-ing “Bring Them Home Now,” to lay claim to my unshakeable anguish about the hostages still held captive. Ten minutes later a young Jewish woman on the street asked me if I felt unsafe wearing it. Turned out she meant unsafe both from antisemitic attack in the New York City subway I was entering and unsafe also from the reactions even from some of the Jews who were
that day demonstrating and chanting for a ceasefire in Gaza. The sheltering walls of our tent, in which everyone present can stand under one giant metaphorical tallit, needs to stretch ever wider. Our undiminished horror over the torture the captives are experiencing and our passionate desire for their immediate release can exist alongside wanting an end to the deaths and suffering of innocent civilians in Gaza under the brutal rule of Hamas in this horrifying conflict. We can hold that both Israelis and Palestinians need peace and better government while understanding that politics alone don’t contain the entire truth of this moment.
Now, in addition to differences in the kinds of Judaism we practice or avoid practicing, hosting a meeting or a meet-up can feel like running a coalition government. Yet across these differences Lilith’s atypically diverse content and readership uniquely draws together multiple generations, from high school students to readers and thinkers in their 90s. You read Lilith in your college dorm, in your assisted living apartment, in every circumstance in between across race and gender and language and location. But no matter where you go to bed at night, I imagine that in your waking hours you’ve had an opinion, or more than one, about the best way to free the captives, return them home, bring peace and just policies and better leaders in Israel and in its surrounding nations.
What comes out in intergenerational Lilith spaces, like the Lilith salons where we’re face to face with one another in real time, is how our opinions are shaped—though not irrevocably—by generational experience in addition to our tribal forebears. Those who knew Israel as necessary, and precarious, after its creation in 1948; those who watched on television or experienced first-hand its power and vulnerabilities in wars
of 1967 and 1973 and in that era worked for gender and ethnic equity in Israel; those who were impressed by or employed by the high-tech Israeli startups that brought forth many of the delicate devices the world uses daily. Differences of perception about Israel, as with other issues too, can be driven as much by birth year as by political inclination. And there aren’t many opportunities to talk calmly about these differences.
Lilith salons remind us of the value of tuning into experiences different from our own. Participants say that these open-ended intergenerational real-time conversations are unique opportunities for meeting as equals with people they don’t typically encounter. Salons are good practice for listening to, and potentially even learning from, people unlike ourselves. This is incalculable valuable, even if our core opinions don’t budge much, or quickly. Every time I experience a Lilith salon I come away with small shifts in my understanding. I get it that talk doesn’t always lead to proper actions. But listening attentively—hearing as best we can—is a core Jewish tenet: “Sh’ma Yisrael,” right?
At an all-night community-wide Shavuot teach-in this year, Lilith hosted a 60-minute salon to talk about and listen to others talk about [Wait for it!] …closets. Actual rather than metaphorical closets. Even a topic so prosaic as what we do with our stuff generated reverence for the past—or rejection of it—and aspirational visions for the future. Our closets are packed with more than objects. They house humble identity clues too. (“How can I throw out my childhood drawings? What if a museum wants them someday?”) Despite the subject’s potential for harsh judgment, no one disparaged this one’s attachment to her decades-old journals or that one’s fealty to her empty jam jars. Salon participants recognized that with memory and hopefulness crowded in together, our closets are actually sacred space.
So too is the big tent of Jewish life.
And whatever news comes our way, we all share in it. This summer and in the seasons beyond, in community in the sacred space of our expanding tent, may the news we share be better.
