‘Where you stay the night’
Bruce Hill reflects on Jewish identity in the wake of October 7.
Are you a Jew?
No, I don’t mean “are you Jewish”.
Jewish can be something conditional, an identity that’s a part of you up to a point like being vegetarian, or a Labor voter or a St Kilda fan.
It’s something that can be important to you or not depending on how you’re feeling at the time.
But try saying instead, “I am a Jew.”
Sounds much tougher in the mouth doesn’t it?
I think for many of us, October 7 has turned us from being Jewish to being Jews.
It hit me particularly hard for two very specific reasons.
One is around eight months old now, cute as a button, has a bit of a drooling issue and is starting to crawl.
On October 7 my wife and I were enjoying our last holiday we would have before our daughter would be born.
Seeing on television and the internet the things that were done to women, children and babies on that day; and then realising we were about to bring a Jewish child into this world was a shocking and sobering experience.
Our child, our precious, much longed-for daughter, would live her life with a target on her back for the crime of being a Jew.
If something happened to her because of this, how could we live with ourselves? Would she blame us?
Like most of you, I have been lucky enough to live in a golden age of freedom, prosperity and acceptance for Jews.
Is that about to change?
The second reason October 7 hit me hard is that I’m a convert.
What, the goyishe name didn’t give it away?
I remember one meeting with the rabbi at Wellington’s Temple Sinai, Ed Rosenthal during the conversion process way back in the 1980s.
He told me that I had to very seriously consider my decision, as becoming part of the Jewish people would come with a very real set of risks.
“Maybe antisemitism won’t affect you, but history shows us that eventually your children or their children will suffer as a result of what you’re doing,” he told me.
With all the insouciance of youth I airily informed him that antisemitism was dead and would never come back.
I told Rabbi Ed that the fact of the Holocaust was the stone rolled across the tomb of antisemitism.
I apologise for perhaps mixing my religious metaphors.
Ed, who wasn’t much older than me, looked at me with eyes that suddenly had three-and-a-half thousand years behind them and said flatly, “You’re wrong.”
I was wrong, and he was right.
Antisemitism is risen from its tomb and it’s clear it had never actually gone away.
Becoming part of this people means so much more than just a change of religion, and becoming a father to a Jewish child has reinforced that for me.
I cannot see photos of the Bibas children, Kfir and Ariel, held in captivity in Gaza all this time without thinking of my own daughter.
Her Hebrew name is Nechama.
There’s a tradition of naming babies born close to Tisha b’Av Nechama or Menachem, meaning “comforter”.
And every day this year past has felt like Tisha b’Av.
One of the figures in the Tanach most identified with converts is, of course, Ruth the Moabitess, an ancestor of King David.
She famously tells her mother-in-law Naomi: “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”
The word lodge is “לון” in Hebrew, and it means to stay the night.
We can read this as Ruth vowing to be part of the Jewish people not just in good times but also for the dark nights that have so often occurred for our people.
A dark night has now certainly fallen on us all, it’s not something theoretical, from an old book or a black-and-white newsreel or Lamentations being read out while we sit on the floor in the dark.
With the potential cost of being a Jew now extremely real, I have chosen not to back away from the decision I made in my 20s.
A decision which then made me Jewish.
A decision which now leads me to say, with real knowledge of the possible cost, “I am a Jew.”
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