Are we Australian Jews or Jewish Australians?

In 2021 I hosted Future Jews 2048, a monthly online series with this paper about where Jewish life here might be heading. In one of them I asked our panel whether, by 2048, we’d be Australian Jews or Jewish Australians.

Rabbi Yaakov Glasman hoped we’d be Australian Jews, with being Jewish our noun and Australian the adjective. I’d have said the same, as a Brunswick boy who went to Scopus and spoke Yiddish at home before English, free to be Jewish in my own way and in my own time.

Five years on I’ve been made to feel a Jewish Australian, as if Jewish is now a label other people pin in front of my Australian.

Some of that shift happened inside me, and plenty of it came from outside: the arson attacks on the Adass Israel and East Melbourne synagogues, the 15 people murdered at Chanukah by the Sea in Bondi last December, and the extra guards and police now at our shule doors.

All of that sits on top of something I’ve carried all my life, though it was never mine. My parents survived the Holocaust, and after the war they walked away from their home in Włocławek, in Poland, one night, my big sister in her pram, and came about as far from Europe as anyone could.

They kept much of it to themselves, and what reached me was the weight of somebody else’s trauma. It wasn’t lived, it was relived.

With it came the belief they brought here, that tomorrow couldn’t be what yesterday was, and that it could be whatever we chose to make it. It took me about 30 years to see that it’s the reason I became a foresight strategist.

My generation carried that weight in a country where antisemitism was quiet enough for us to flourish, find ourselves and say what we thought without first checking who was listening. I believed our kids would carry even less, and that with each generation the trauma would become less central.

Then October 7 and Bondi brought it home, to our kids and to us. For the first time since our parents, we’re not reliving somebody else’s story. We’re living our own.

None of this is the Holocaust, and nothing should be measured against it. But the root is the same, hatred of us for being Jews, and it still changes how we see ourselves, how we raise our kids, how we stand in the place we call home, and how the country around us sees us.

It’s changed the way our kids look at the past. They grew up safe and settled, hearing about a horror, and a world before it, that was almost impossible to picture.

Now they’re reaching back to their grandparents and great-grandparents to make sense of what they’re living. They’re asking questions they never thought they’d need to ask. How did you live through it? How did you make sense of it? How did you keep going?

You could see it in our trip to Poland in April. It started with a few of us and kept growing, as family of every age from around the world asked to come, until there were 12 of us, three generations from 18 to 80, each wanting to see where it all began, and where, for our family, that chapter ended.

In 2012, on an earlier trip, my sister and I had sat on the stoop of the home our parents walked away from. I was so full of a past I’d inherited but never lived that I had almost no room for my own future.

This time I made sure the younger ones saw it all, where our family lived and prayed and went to school, and how they lived in happy and ordinary times, the whole human, and not only the part the war tried to destroy.

Because after all of the horrors, my parents and their generation still made choices. They found good where they could, made their own paths through and around what was done to them, and built families of joy, possibility and hope. We’re living examples of that, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Those were choices, and we have them too. Communities make them as well, though in our history the response to each catastrophe was seldom one we sat down and chose. Mostly the whole community settled into it together, over years.

After the fall of the Temple we made a Judaism you could carry, in books and homes and around kitchen tables. After the expulsion from Spain, the mystics of Safed gave tikkun olam its deepest meaning: the world was broken, and our task was to mend it.

After the pogroms, millions moved, and alongside that grew Zionism, the great flowering of Yiddish life, and much of the Jewish world we know, Melbourne’s community as it is today included. After the Holocaust, the State of Israel, decades in the building, was born, “never again” became our vow, and here a survivor community built its schools and institutions around memory.

What’s different this time is that we can watch our response forming while it happens. We’ve rarely been able to do that. The history is in front of us, we’re talking about it in the open, and we have ways to look at a few futures before we’re living in them, which means we get to design it.

Left to itself, I can see where it might drift. We could become a fortress, with Jewish life behind guards, safer but smaller and defined by what’s done to us. I’m grateful for every one of those guards, and I think about the kid who walks past them every morning and what that teaches them about being Jewish.

Some of our young people might go quiet and keep their heads down until one day they’ve let go. Others will stay loud, speaking up for all of us as they have since October 7, which is proud and visible and exhausting to keep up.

After one of those 2021 episodes, once the recording stopped, I wondered aloud what our navigation tool would be when the Holocaust ceases to be it. I think that’s now the question for all of us.

In my work I start with the future and work back. So picture the Jew we’d want our grandchildren to be in 2048: proud without being afraid, connected without being fenced in, knowing the whole story, the lives as well as the deaths. Then ask what we need to build now to get there.

Part of the answer is to ask our kids, because they’re already asking the questions, and not decide it all for them. What Jewish life does the 18-year-old at the Shabbat table want to be living at 40? Part of it is to steer by what we’re for, and not only by what we fear.

There’s an old line that sums up most of our festivals: they tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat. We’ve become very good at telling the first two parts. Our future depends on how well we do the third.

Let’s eat is the table. It’s joy and ordinary life, the Shabbat dinners and the arguments and the jokes, and it’s the table we open to our neighbours, because people change their minds about us far more from knowing us than from any fact we can put in front of them.

In that series I said I was buoyed that our next generations were “not only going to pick up the mantle, they’re going to redesign it.” In Włocławek I watched the youngest of us add, in no time, to a story it had taken me most of my life to put together.

We may not have the future we thought we’d have in 2021, but we have a future, and it’s ours to design. There’s a tomorrow, we’re in control of shaping it, and we won’t let it shape us.

This is where we choose our forward from.

Morris Misel is a Melbourne foresight strategist and keynote speaker. In 2021 he created and hosted Future Jews 2048 with The AJN.