i don't know how to be a Jew anymore

sometimes you do that thing where you put on all the clothes you thought you wanted to wear then look at yourself in the mirror then change. Sometimes you do this another time, and sometimes maybe another. Not necessarily the whole outfit. maybe only the shirt. Maybe just the pants.

And i get the appeal of the cartoon character with one set of clothes. Or that anecdote about some famous genius who filled their closet with a bunch of the same stuff over and over, so they wouldn't waste time thinking about what to put on their bodies.

i get the appeal. even if you know your body isn't particularly famous or genius.

i do that thing sometimes. but now i also do that same thing with a tallit and a yarmulke.

i was wearing both pretty regularly for a few years. i was wearing them the time the kid shot all the Jews in that synagogue—the first time something like that ever happened in America, (so long as you omit that time in 1913 when a bunch of people lynched a Jewish guy in Atlanta after wrongly believing he murdered a little Christian girl).

But anyway i was wearing a tallit and a yarmulke when innocent American Jews were killed for the first or second time. And i posted something on social media about it because how else do you process feelings? i said something about how i obviously wasn't going to stop wearing those outward displays of Jewishiness and because that's obviously what they want. They want fear and shame and instinctual self-interest to get the better of you. So i was gonna keep on wearing that stuff. And then i did for a while. And everyone Liked it.

But then it became more sporadic, because i wasn't raised wearing them, so i felt disingenuou sometimes. and then i didn't know how to clean the three or four tallit i had. Every time i put them through the washer and dryer, the tzitzit knots would get tangled up and frayed and it'd look like shit. i even bought this little plastic screwtop thing to fix it. it looked like a sex toy. you wrapped the tzitzit in this sex toy thing, and you screwed the plastic cap on it, then you washed the sex toy normally.

And it worked alright but not great, and you could only wash them one at a time so it was A Whole Thing. Because i wasn't about to have four Jew sex toys knocking around in my washing machine. Then i gave that up, and bought one of those zip-up net bags for delicate clothes and it looked a lot less sex-related unless net bags was your kink, i guess. That worked okay for a bit, but the tallit still frayed pretty quickly. i went through a few tallit and tallit aren't the cheapest, by the way. Also all i could find online were tallit that came from Israel, which made me feel weird even back then for a whole bunch of obvious and not-obvious reasons.

Anyway. This struggle went on and off for a few years and now i have some ratty tallit in my closet and the yarmulkes in my drawer are faded and gross because also i have an oily scalp. And i've been feeling strange about not wearing them anymore for months –

like how much more of a fake Jew could i be? it's not like i could ever recite the morning prayers in Hebrew while wearing them anyway. Not like i keep kosher or go to synagogue or really do anything but Let People Know i'm Jewish. i even got paid to write words Letting People Know i'm Jewish Because Look At My Tallit. jesus. what a joke.

Anyway then a lot more kids and moms and pregnant moms and babies and dads and just People In General started getting killed. Like, getting killed even more than they were getting killed before. and i don't know what the fuck to do.

Because on the one hand:

it doesn't matter who conducts a massacre. It doesn't matter who determines who a Jew really is, and whether or not being a Jew does or doesn't grant you the right to continue being alive.

But on the other hand:

it absolutely matters in regards to massacre. And right now Jews are annihilating humans for reasons that don't and shouldn't make sense. And now the Jews are making me feel a fear and a shame and an instinctual self-interest that i never even felt when that little shit killed all those Jews that one time.

And you still usually have to buy at least the tallit from Israel. so that's great. But

i'm still a Jew and i should wear those signs of being a Jew if i want, because i am. whatever the hell that means anymore. whatever the hell that ever meant.

(((EC)))