The Young and Young Adult Jews’ Workshop
I had a great time at the recent Young and Young Adult Jews’ Workshop led by Erin Huang-Schaffer (International Liberation Reference Person for Young Adults) and Cherie Brown (International Liberation Reference Person for Jews).
It was useful to hear the following:
Younger Jews have the same awful feelings as older Jews, because of anti-Jewish oppression, but we understand less about why we have the feelings.
Both Jews and younger people are put in a tight box. We are told what to do with our lives if we want to survive. We need the space to make mistakes and not have to be perfect, cool [fashionable], or the smartest.
There is something so pro-human about Judaism that we have survived being hated for two thousand years.
I loved being at the Young and Young Adult Jews’ Workshop.
Erin said that we can get caught up [involved] in working on deciding what we should do with our lives—what jobs we should have, where we should live, whether we should go to graduate school, and so on. She said that these can be important things to decide in the present but that the feelings about our survival are old. All human beings carry hurts about survival that go back many generations. Young adults’ oppression and anti-Jewish oppression restimulate our hurts about survival.
I definitely get caught up in Co-Counseling sessions trying to make the perfect life decisions, and this piece of theory from Erin opened up a lot more space in sessions to work on early distress.
Erin also said that our people survived the Holocaust and that we get to do more than survive in our lives—we get to enjoy our lives. I think this is a contradiction to distress for all Jews, especially young and young adult Jews.
I attended the Young and Young Adult Jews’ Workshop as an adult ally to the young people. Sharing my thoughts about it contradicts my fear of doing it wrong (if there were such a thing) and of what might come at me for any mistakes. I am growing in my understanding of how anti-Jewish oppression is the root cause of these and many other feelings.
It was useful to hear about the external causes of our material [distress] and the harm of having those causes obscured. This happens in a particular way with anti-Jewish oppression—the minimizing, obfuscation [making it obscure], and denial of it, even as it’s happening. This can lead us to feel “crazy” and to turn the blame for what’s happening inside and around us toward ourselves and each other.
Recognizing together the very real history (and present-day experience) of anti-Jewish oppression can help us see that the distress from it is shared and is not our fault. This makes it possible to combat our undeserved feelings of isolation and tendencies toward self-blame and blaming of each other.
Middletown, Connecticut, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of Jews
(Present Time 209, October 2022)