The Jewish Identity in Diaspora
Or
the Shaman-Health Agents in the Amazon forest among the Yanamomo? There is a
free app available for Intelligent Life. I urge you to download and read the
articles at your leisure.
There are reviews for theatre, films, concerts, exhibitions,
from all around the world. It was nice to read about Barry Humphries’ Dame Edna
getting ready to do the retirement tour, which will open in London soon. I
remember walking up the stairs at the Globe Theatre at Shaftesbury Street in
London to watch Dame Edna of Monee Ponds (Aussies would know) soon after my
arrival in London to study Medicine.
An article in the November/December issue of Intelligent
Life is of particular importance to many of us, whether Jewish or
Anthropologists. The article is by novelist Adam Foulds about his visit to the
Museum of Jewish People in Tel Aviv. Here is a museum where I could be one of
the exhibits, he muses.
A sentence in the article gives fire to my ruminations. He
quotes a line by Moses Herzog in the novel of the same name by the Nobel Prize
Winning North American Writer, Saul Bellow.
“The Children of the race, by a never failing miracle,
opened their eyes on one strange world after another, age after age, and uttered
the same prayers in each, eagerly loving what they found.” Foulds adds, “there
is an apt ambiguity here. Remembering Israel, the Jewish children love the
place they find themselves in.”
The very jewish Portenos from Buenos Aires, would live
nowhere but Argentina, the love of Australia and South Africa among the Jewish
citizens are well known. Exiled and booted out of their millennial homelands in
Europe, from shtetls, they were forced over the water to seek a safe home in faraway
Argentina, Southern Africa and Australia. There they flourished. I remember our
Rabbi telling us, We are not Jewish-Australians or Australian Jews but we are
both Jewish and Australian. And the visiting Shaliach of that era, an erudite
professor whose first name I remember, Ben Zion, said: Charles de Gaulle spoke
for all the Non Jews when he said: Jew is a person whom others think to be
Jewish. He taught us about the centrality of Israel in our lives. It is
something non jewish people have difficulty comprehending, how can you be loyal
to Israel when you are so proud to be Australian? Are you not being a traitor?
Many years later, working with American Indians and later
with other Indigenous people, the idea became clearer in my head. The writings of
Laurens van der Post also helped. He lovingly describes the hatred of the
Indigenous people by the new comers to their lands all over the world,
regardless of the race of the new comers, to the envy of loss of their
closeness to creation. And also envy of a way of thinking that maintains the
purity of an innocent mind of a child, even to this day.
As children we would be given prep talks by people, to make
us study hard, by telling us how many Jews, less than one half of one per cent
of the world’s population, have won Nobel Prizes in the Sciences. In fact the
week in which Nobel Prizes are announced are still an exciting time for me, to
learn about men and women who have contributed to the welfare of the world, and
as always nearly half the winners would turn out to be Jewish.
Our contributions to the welfare of the world is undeniable
but a fact that is less known to those who do not like us, or understand us is
the fact that we are perhaps the only group of people, who have strived and
have become successful in the eyes of the westerner that have maintained our
distinct cultural identity. In Cuba, I had to explain to great lengths that
being Jewish is much much more than being religious and in fact, if you look at
the well known Nobel Prize winners in Literature: Saul Bellow, Nelly Sachs,
Nadine Gordimer (interestingly enough of
Canadian/US, Swedish, South African Nationalities!) or the well-known portraits of
a Sigmund Freud, or a Franz Kafka or a Leonard Bernstein or even Mahler…the
great flourishing of assimilated, post Enlightenment Jewish life, they are
almost all of them are non-religious.
I would quote to my colleagues at the University of La
Habana, unlike Christians or Moslems or Hindus, where observing rituals
including attending Church/Mosques/temples are obligatory to your religious
identity, being Jewish envelops much more than the religion and involves an
understanding of the history of the Jewish people, practice of some core human
principles, such as Tzadeka, and a feeling of unity that transcends national
and geographical boundaries.
On my very first journey out of Australia into the wide
world, I was attending a conference of the World Union of Jewish Students and I
was amazed to meet a Bruno Levi from Milano, who was just like the Italians
along Lygon street in Melbourne and how can a young, unexposed mind from the
jewish suburbs of Melbourne to place a Jose Goldstein from Costa Rica! I told
Levi, a student like me at that time, who was complaining that his radio spoke
only Italian when he was at home and now it speaks a language he cannot
understand! We were not in Italy! ,” I
know a John Levy, a William Levy but I never thought of Bruno Levi”.
To survive in the new lands, as did my professor of
Radiology, Dr Manuel Viamonte at Jackson Memorial Hospial in Miami said, even
the dogs in Miami have to speak two languages, to survive.
It is the centuries old tale, Survival. But survival not
just becoming austrlian or Canadian or south African but also maintaining the
long link that stretches back in time and making sure that you are not the link
that is the first one to break. To do that a Cultural Identity as a Jew is
important, also it connects you with Bruno Levi or Jose Goldstein or even black
robbed rabbis who preserve our evolving religious traditions. Recently at the
Zurich Airport, my heart felt good seeing the Star of David on an El Al plane
parked at the gates and when I was near a long frocked, hatted gentleman, I
gently said to him, Shalom, may Peace be with you.
Thank you for making sure that our written traditions
continue by studying them, when some of us have are going to the Amazon to
learn about Yanamomo or to Cambodia to decipher the origins of Diabetes there !
It is nice to think that I could be an exhibit, like many of
us, at the Museum of the Jewish People!
Rita Levi Montalcini, expelled by the fascists for being Jewish Woman Scientist, worked in the USA and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for her discovery of Nerve Growth Factor
Sitting at the Woodlands Resto near Leicester Square in London recently enjoying my Masala Dosai, was happy to see the theatre across renamed as Harold Pinter Theatre. A deeply disturbing social commentator who plays were admired, Harold Pinter was one of the only playwrights to be awarded Nobel Prize in Literature.
You can guess who they are, above.
and from me, Shabbat Shalom from Miami..
