Asking Hard Questions \-\- Learning from the Wind

Autumn's relentless winds have returned to Colorado, scouring the rocky saddles and saddle-colored hills of the Front Range. Once vibrant yellow, then dappled with amber and rust, the silver maples have become a lattice of barren branches, clacking in the wind. The battered cottonwoods near the creek stand like great windmills, whirling gnarled and fraying limbs in the blue-black half-light of dusk.

We often think of spring as a time to clean, but fall holds perhaps a more radical cleansing, rendering all that is imperfect visible, exposed.

Poet Matsuo Basho once wrote, "If you want to learn about the pine, then go to the pine. If you want to learn about the bamboo, then go to the bamboo. When you have become one with them, then your poetry will come by itself."¹ As I sat in my apartment contemplating Judith's work, watching the scalpel of the wind and witnessing the half-life remaining in its wake, I wondered if Judith had gone to the wind, had talked Wind into tutoring her.

In Judith's book The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, I noticed over and over this same incisiveness, this probing and exposing of what cannot sustain cover, indeed, of conflicts that ask to be broken, open. Just listen to some of the essay titles: "Jewish Anti-Paganism," "Facing the Ambiguity of God," "Beyond Egalitarianism," "Feminist Anti-Judaism and the Christian God." Judith leaves no stone unturned.

As these titles indicate, these are not personal essays. They deal with political, social, and religious realities beyond the realm of personal meaning or individual investment. And yet they are deeply personal. As Judith says, "I cannot separate my intellectual journey from my personal history" (5). This personal dimension of her essays took me to Phillip Lopate's edited book, The Art of the Personal Essay. In his wonderful introduction, Lopate describes the characteristics of the personal essay and the personal essayist. "There is a certain strictness, or even cruelty at times," he writes, "in the impulse of the personal essayist to scrape away illusions." "Often the rough handling begins with oneself," he adds.²

In "Intersections," Judith's introduction to The Coming of Lilith, she demonstrates such strictness. She writes that as a young person, for instance, she was fascinated with the Holocaust, reading extensively about it. Because of this intense interest, she came to associate her own Jewish identity with the status of being a victim, with the "moral privilege" of victimhood (6). She admits that she did not have to face knowing whether "the evil perpetrated by the Nazis was also inside of me" (6). In the 1980s, though, Judith realized that she had to "scrape away [some of her] illusions."³ She reflects,

Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 . . . forced me to reexamine my underlying beliefs about Jewish powerlessness on a deep existential level. I had been critical of Israeli policies before then, but my criticisms had not changed my internal sense of the meaning of my Jewishness. After 1982, I found myself compelled to explore the implications of Israel's power in the Middle East and to accept the fact that Jews could be victimizers as well as victims. Painfully relinquishing the sense of moral privilege that I had seen as adhering to suffering, I began to ask new questions about the responsibilities that come with wielding power. 

(4)

In her 1984 essay "Anti-Semitism: The Unacknowledged Racism," she puts it powerfully, "To be oppressed does not protect one from being an oppressor. . . . To be a Jew and not a Nazi . . . guarantees nothing about who the Jew will be when s/he comes to power" (98).

I admit that my interest in Judith's "rough handling" arises in part from how and when we came to know each other. We started to get to know each other in fall 2001. We were participants in the same fellowship program. As I dashed out of the apartment for the bus on the first day of orientation, I heard on the radio...