Saya Yahudi

Saya Yahudi.

I do not know where to begin.

Every possible starting point for this story is both true and false.

There is no right way to tell this story, but it is the most important story I have ever had to tell.

A story so cosmic, and yet so personal, at the same time it makes me feel like I have fallen off the face of the planet.

And perhaps I have.

I will move from the microscopic to the cosmic, the only hope for my sanity lying in a gradual transition of scale that will not further destroy my balance and sense perception.

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Here are the few things I knew to be certain before tonight, as of 6 o’ clock this evening, when they were eclipsed:

1) I am an American Jewish woman who has been living with a Muslim Javanese family for a week.

2) In the first ten minutes of my arrival at their home, they asked me about my faith. I lied, saying I believed in God but had no official religion, instructed to do so by my program director who was concerned for my safety.

3) This family has done nothing but feed me and worry about my wellbeing the past week.

4) Two days ago, when I asked a Muslim cleric at an Islamic boarding school why Indonesia doesn’t recognize Judaism, his wife laughed about the destruction of one of Indonesia’s two existing synagogues by the government last year because “it was a waste of space.”

I give her the benefit of the doubt, knowing Indonesians usually laugh not out of cruelty, but in the face of awkward social situations.

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Here is what I now know, the immutable paradigm shift, my heart breaking, the world closing and opening, although to attempt to number these instances would be absurd:

My host sister was reading her history book.

I couldn’t resist asking her if Indonesian schools taught the Holocaust.

She said a little.

I asked her what they taught about it.

She said she didn’t remember what it was about, that she would have to look it up.

(And I’m thinking that if you don’t remember a lesson on the genocide of 6 million people less than a hundred years ago, that doesn’t count as teaching.)

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I run to my room to get my computer to pull up Google translate.

The whole family is in the kitchen and this is my chance.

After 150 hours of thinking non-stop about the minor but major detail of my Jewishness, I cannot resist this crack in the surface of our usual chats about showering, and food, and school, and my progress or lackthereof in Indonesian language.

I am already lucky in this moment, living in the house of a government worker who can afford the luxuries of wifi and a computer.

With the majority of other Indonesians, this alignment of opportunities would not have been possible, and we would have chatted more about my bathing and sleeping in the few words I know how to speak.

Thus begins 3 of the most painful hours of my life. The closest I have ever come to fighting for survival, with nothing but Google translate and the slowest wifi connection I have ever encountered to aid my uphill battle.

To recount what was said in full is a feat so overwhelming I will not bother to attempt it.

I will have to settle with telling you what is so imprinted on me that I will not be able to sleep if I do not write this here, to you, to this abyss of code and pixel, my friends and family and the strangers far away.

So, Basically, Um…..

What started off as Were you taught that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust? became Some of them were my family became That is why I am an American became I am a Jew.

Saya yahudi. Saya yadudi. Saya yahudi. Saya yahudi. Saya yahudi. Saya yahudi. Saya yahudi. Saya yahudi.

Their faces crackled, shrunk, contorted.

But you said you had no religion, was typed fervently, as was I was told not to tell you I’m Jewish because of anti-Semitism here.

And then the crack in the surface of mundane conversation about tea and crackers and baths split open irreparably, consuming any semblance of order, or sanity.

Saya yahudi.

The voracious typing exchanges between father orating and daughter typing and me typing back and mother listening began and did not stop until it was dark outside, and dinner had passed, and my Javanese dance lesson and the time to bathe had come and gone.

My host father, a kind man who has told me every morning to be careful -- hati-hati -- on the way to school, dictated these words among many others to his typist of a daughter for two hours:

Well, don’t worry. I know that not all Jews are evil. Not you.

You are not like them.

But it’s a real issue the Jews.

Have you read your people’s Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Jewish world domination is a real problem.

Why else do you think Indonesia is poor if not because of the Jews?

Your people control the media and the energy and the government of the USA.

But Bapak, I type back as if my life depends on it, which it does in some way more important than blood and flesh, there are only 6 million of us in the US. We are less than 0.02% of the world’s population. We are educated, yes, but for a group so educated, we have never had a president and no one can imagine when we ever will, there is still so much prejudice.

6 million people is more than enough with all the money and Nobel’s you have.

But Bapak the Protocols were proven as forgery and propaganda 90 years ago. And it led to the murder of 6 million of my people. This is why we Jews support Israel despite our moral qualms because even after 6 million dead, a government official with a degree from Indonesia’s best university believes this document to be the truth, I try to explain.

We discussed it at community meeting last Sunday (after we ate dinner together and you wished me a good sleep, I am now thinking).

And thus begins my descent down to madness, to trying to argue with ignorance, to prove through google translating Wikipedia summaries of 2000 years of Jewish and European history why the Protocols are dangerous, why he should not believe them.

I first attempt to use Indonesia’s Wikipedia to get him a history of anti-Semitism.

Unlike the thousands of words of the English entry, it has five sentences.

(And thus, I’m thinking, why the Internet does not liberate or educate us, but inevitably perpetuates our biases in that the sources we are drawn to only confirm our reality)

I write about my family, and how Holocaust denial in the Muslim world and the widespread belief in anti-Semitic propaganda (i.e. educated upper middle class government workers) scares American Jews into pardoning Israel of its PTSD excessive sins of retribution and force, believing more than ever in the necessity of a backup solution because not much has changed, which justifies and enables more Israeli force, which fuels more anger and anti-Semitism, and so on, and so on, and so on.

I write about how stereotypes of Jews as bankers come out of us being allowed to do that one ‘dirty’ job in Medieval Europe.

I write about how there is a lot to criticize Israel for, but that much of the Muslim world shoots itself in the foot by focusing on paranoid lies as opposed to the condemning truths, pushing the West away.

I write about how really the Jews and the Palestinians were both fucked by the British, who have now conveniently wiped their hands clean of the mess and point anti-Semitic fingers at Israelis from the safety of their academic institutions, blacklisting them for their own destruction, their own guilt, how colonialism of different kinds exported a European millennia of hatred on to the middle east and ran fast and far away, how Palestinians and Israelis, Muslims and Jews, get caught up hating each other when they were fucked over by the same people.

I write about the power of keeping criticism to the truth, about how many Westerners and Jews would respond differently if lies weren’t perpetuated.

I write about all the evidence to the contrary of the protocols.

My host father says he agrees. But then he pulls out a book on how the Star of David is the symbol of Satan, and thus begins round 2 of why this scares me, why this is why I lied, why this is why American Jews give Israel a carte blanche.

He opens a slideshow on how America caused the earthquake in Haiti with submarines, how the tsunami here was a nuclear war crime pulled off by a country which he insists is run by Jews.

I tell him that he overestimates America’s capabilities, that we may have bombs but that we are not God, that we do not control the laws of geology.

I tell him that I understand the paranoia because my country has done horrific things, but that this goes too far.

Have I made it clear that this is a man who has welcomed me into his home, a stranger, a man who told me to be careful this morning, a man who works for his government as a social worker, who has it good here, a man with a degree from the best university?

And so my heart is breaking.

And so my lungs are closing.

I am free, and yet I am not.

I do not have to lie, but I do not think it is in my head that they turn on the TV at dinner instead of attempting to talk to me this time.

Even though he now tells me he understands why the Protocols are scary.

Even though he tells me he sees how they are just the same as the all-Muslims-are-terrorists lies in the US.

Even though he tells me he sees why American Jews are afraid.

Even though he tells me he understands what I mean when I say that it is easier for the government to control you through hatred than the complicated truth that fosters compassion.

Even though he promises he will take this back to his Muslim discussion group.

Even though he passes me the rice.

But I am just one man, he says, and my community is small. And Indonesia is big.

I know, I tell him, but at least you are someone and that is more than nothing.

We eat a very late dinner in the light of the television.

Ibu boils me water to bathe in as usual.

But unlike the seven nights before this one, as I write this to you now so that I won’t be alone in my heart breaking, no one has come to knock on my door, and ask about waking me up, and say goodnight.

Unlike the seven nights before this one, the door to the bathroom and kitchen and the bedroom of Ibu and Bapak is bolted.

I am alone.

It is true I wished earlier this week, never having a minute to myself here, food always being stuffed on my plate against my wishes by Ibu and Bapak, to be left alone in peace.

But not like this.

This is alone-alone, alone in my aloneness, not the quiet camaraderie of being by oneself in a house with people who have your back.

I have learned many things in this void of a night, but this one stands out now as I prepare to face a dark room and my dreams:

Aloneness and peace are not the same thing.

Before in my life, peace and alone meant the same thing. But this is a new kind of alone, in an island on an island in an island on an island, and so on, until the nothingness threatens to crack onto itself.

 I sit here typing, this clattering of keys a pathetic rendering of this ferocious night, thinking that perhaps stories might be able to save humanity, that I should hit the road telling the story of my people to the whole world, not to justify Israel but so that it and we can be understood, so that compassion can be created to tear down the cowardly structures of absolutes and lies, how we need a collective democratic timeline of the conflict starting with Adam, how I want to kick the Brits in the nuts for their hypocrisy and still-infamous anti-Semitism, how many double standards regarding my people there are, how the hateful paranoia about us is the only form of minority prejudice I can think of that is twistedly flattering while fatal while insulting, how the treatment of the conflict insults the intelligence and ability of Arabs as equally capable agents, whether or not Ibu will wake me up tomorrow, whether the subtle differences in body language and eye contact might be in my head, how I hope they are in my head, how I hope I am wrong.

I am no longer just a girl in a house of a kind stranger telling me to be careful each morning on the way to school.

And perhaps I never was.