Members of WHICH tribe

I loved watching the film clip in class about the “Jews of Color” synagogue. It was like watching traditions with which I am familiar as they were spoken in a foreign language. Men were chanting from the Torah wearing tallitot (prayer shawls). A synagogue was full of Jews who all were familiar with the melodies and liturgy that was being recited during this Torah service. Everyone seemed as though they were familiar not only with the rituals but also with one another. I loved that I was watching a Jewish community, in America, that seemed so familiar yet so foreign.

For me this tension was initially exciting. This was all new to me. Not black Jews but black Jewish synagogues. And I do not use that terminology lightly. Rabbi Funnye (from the reading and the New York Times article that I had ironically read the day before this lecture) serves a Jewish community of around 200 Jews at Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in Chicago, Illinois. When I first learned the name of the congregation, I was taken back by the term “Ethiopian” in its title. There is an inherent discrepancy between the politically correct term “African American” and those “black” or “Jews of color” who belong to synagogues like Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethopian Hebrew Congregation. To me this discrepancy is obvious – not all the Jews we saw in the film or read about in the Wolfson article come from Africa.

But this leads me to consider another point we discussed in class – that Jews consider themselves a homogenous group, all sharing a common history and image. Terms like MOT, or “member of the tribe” completely support this idea but only from the outsider’s perspective. But this issue, again, does not solely relate to the Jewish people. We Americans look to our nation’s motto “E Pluribus Unum,” or “Of many, [we are] one” as indicative of our cultural identity. Jews and Americans alike therefore have this force leading them to identify with a larger group of people of whom they may not necessary relate in terms of histories, traditions, images, etc. I seriously wonder why this is. Perhaps it is what has kept us going for so long. We tell ourselves that we have are a strong people because we believe in ourselves and our right to exist as liberal democratic Americans and modern monotheistic Jews. But as we saw in the film I referenced above, we are incredibly different! We may share a few basic values that we have come to term as “Jewish” but what then holds us together when we simultaneously strive to differentiate ourselves from one another.