One of the rules I live by is that when people try to force me into an either/or situation, my first response is to ask why I can't have both/and.
I've been listening practically non-stop to the news on the war on Ukraine. I've never had a strong interest in Ukraine before, so I've got lots to learn here. On the other hand, I've felt for years a strong connection with things Russian - music, culture, literature and language. And when I see people, Ukrainian people and American media people both, speak of Russians as "the Enemy" I cringe. I can never see Russians as the enemy and I've said explicitly in a number of places that nothing makes my heart bleed like the thought of beautiful young men and women killing each other when their leaders put a gun in their hands and tell them to shoot. I struggle with a strong inclination toward pacifism and want very much to just insist that everybody must put down their guns now and refuse any and all calls to war. And at the same time, I don't know what else one can do when somebody marches into your country with guns and tries to kill you, other than fight back. One of life's most agonizing dilemmas.
For years I thought life consisted of being either gay or straight. I felt a strong affinity for other LGBT people, sought out gay companions, gay films, gay novels, and laughed at jokes directed at straight people as dumb "hets" (heteros...breeders...pick your epithet). But in time I realized I had more straight friends than gay ones, more chosen family among straights than among gays, and that line wasn't serving any profitable purpose.
The impetus for this commentary is a reflection on how Volodymyr Zelenskyy has risen so quickly to hero status. Here's a country being led by a comedian who once played being president and then made use of that role to become actual president. And now he has taken on the appearance of a man born for this time and place. Everybody, but everybody, seems to be singing his praises and I too find myself using the word hero when thinking and speaking of him.
He's a Jew. And a hero. And a Ukrainian. Not just one of these. All of these. For the anti-semites of the world, people who think like Hitler, who managed to persuade millions of his countrymen that one could not be both Jewish and German, Zelenskyy is the proof in the pudding that one can be both/and.
His grandfather was the only one of his generation of Zelenskyy men to survive the attack on the Soviet Union by the Nazis. Watching Putin try to brand his administration as neo-Nazi is a jaw-dropping absurdity of Trumpian proportions. Evidence for those who want us to believe the world is simply mad.
I became a Jew the moment I heard the cantor at Harvey Milk's funeral launch into the kaddish. (For an example of how it's done, listen to Ari Schwarz do it at a 9/11 memorial service which the pope attended). Doesn't mean the tears don't well up at the opening bars of Brahms' German Requiem. Both/And. Not either/or. And it doesn't mean that I stop identifying as a cultural Christian (as opposed to a religious one) and hang tight to my view that we need to see organized religion as a potential for blocking efforts at achieving progress in the here-and-now. It does mean that we need to make room for each other. Both religious Christians, Christians in culture only, and people for whom those categories don't apply.
That's all I want to say for now, that I love the fact that Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy is a Jew whose first language was Russian and who had to learn Ukrainian as a second language. And a hero to the Ukrainian people now.
Sounds like there's a contradiction in there somewhere. There's not. It's both/and.
No comments:
Post a Comment