It’s Purim, there’s a war on, and antisemitism is shifting and… I need a break. My Purim is splendid, full of friends and food, but it’s not traditional. We meant it to be traditional, but last night my friends and I needed to talk and to understand. So much of our everyday is unsafe and difficult and last night the Purim meal brought people together who’d seen different sides of similar problems. There was comfort in knowing that healing can happen, but the Megillat Esther and getting drunk didn’t happen. We drank, but the issues we talked about were so intense that the drinks weren’t refreshed more than twice.
Tonight will be more traditional, but still, the comfort is in the friends this year, not the tradition. The left in Australia sill blames Jewish Australians for anything they think is wrong with the world. I’ve taken to calling this a cultural form of colourblindedness, because those who don’t choose hate but accept it may not be doing it intentionally. If they do it intentionally, I will criticise that, but who does it help when you point to a wall and say, “Do you love the colours?” and all they see is grey. My resolution for this year was to see humans for their humanity and only place blame when a given person has earned it.
I need a book or TV show to back up my new metaphor and of course I have one. The Stargate series manages to incorporate an astonishing amount of (admittedly mostly half-baked and often wildly stereotyped) mythology and history and culture. There’s no Australia, and there are only modern US Jews. Even rebellion in Ancient Egypt is Jew-free. It’s not one of the shows that intentionally shares hate. It draws on all the normal cultural stereotypes and has an archaeologist with three PhDs to explain them. I suspect the Jewfree ancient world was a matter of cultural safety, because explaining early Christianity as alien might not go down well, but when I watch it back a quarter of a century or so later, All I see are vast gaps in logic and common sense and history. So much of who we are is because groups interconnect. Cultures seldom operate in isolation. The Jews of history are some of the great connectors, whether in the Ancient World, the Medieval, or right now. It’s what happens when you combine diasporic culture with a high level of literacy.
Leave any culture out and there is a hole. Leave the cultures and people who connect with others, or are foundational for modern culture and things fall to pieces f you look too closely. That colourblindedness is a problem when the colours are critical to history as we know it. In Australia, many in the 19th century saw a Terra Nullius and destroyed so much. With Jewish history and Jews… I could talk for days about what people think they see when they don’t see us. Or people who want Jews dead to get rid of the annoying discrepancy between what they see and how the world works.
And this is why Stargate is comfort food. It doesn’t work at all if you look too closely. This is a good reason to sit down with some popcorn and let reality do its own thing for a couple of hours. I can’t save the world, but I can rest from it in a world that cannot exist.
PS I used a German sour cherry jam for Hamentaschen. I can’t buy it locally but, in case you’re wondering, if you use puff pastry for hamentaschen (some years I do and some years I don’t) it’s the best filling.