Close to Home: A postcard from YiddishLand

Last weekend in Cotati, more than 250 people squeezed (most of them successfully) into Congregation Ner Shalom, which was hosting YiddishLand, Sonoma County’s First Annual Festival of Yiddish Culture.

That Saturday evening featured a glowing roster of bands, singers, performance artists and jugglers. This was followed Sunday by workshops on Yiddish language, poetry, music, farming and radical politics. The joy in the building was palpable.

The truth is that we Jews in America have become disconnected from our roots. Many of our ancestors, fleeing centuries of European persecution, tossed their histories overboard upon spotting the Statue of Liberty. A century later, how to be Jews in this land of freedom is something we’re still inventing.

As our particularity dissolves into the melting pot, so does our sense of belonging. The people who showed up last weekend wanted to feel part of a tribe - a tribe that made no particular theological or ideological demands, but instead honored a shared history of suffering, longing and migration. A hard history, often sweetened by the sound of our grandmothers’ Yiddish words.

YiddishLand is timely medicine. Because we live in an era where those grandmothers’ words have become sitcom punchlines . They are orphaned words, like pretty relics one might bring back from exotic travel without having a clear sense of the meaning they held in their native culture.

And that is a shame, because this language carries with it a history, an ethic and a world view. People have prayed in this language, sung children to sleep in this language, organized labor unions in this language. And now, so often, Yiddish words and phrases are simply kitsch. I sometimes find myself speechless when I mention Yiddish and am met by a jaunty “oy vey” from some well-meaning person, as if it should make me nod and laugh; as if those words, which mean “oh, woe,” were not a deep lament spurred by centuries of persecution and wandering.

So why is it important to celebrate Yiddish? It is, by all accounts, a dying language. Why bother? It is important because America needs it.

We have, in this country, agreed to a culture that is consumer driven and paper thin. Our way of dealing with difference is pretending it doesn’t exist. We dumb down our legacies so as not to offend one another with our uniqueness. We argue for equal rights by saying, for instance, that gay people (or blacks or Muslims or immigrants or people with disabilities) are just like everyone else. As if the long struggles and dreams of our ancestors, or our deep personal histories, could do anything but enrich our collective experience.

Our stories, our experiences, our legacies - these are what make us thinking, feeling, grounded, ethical people. These are what we need to activate if we intend to solve this world’s problems.

In Yiddish, we encourage one another in challenging situations, saying, “zay a mentsh.” It literally means “be a person,” but it connotes being a just person, an honorable person, a person of substance. And that’s what YiddishLand tried to do in this inaugural year: to remind us not just of our beautiful words but of our substance.

Irwin Keller is the spiritual leader of Congregation Ner Shalom and an organizer of YiddishLand.