I do not consider myself to be a quiet person. If you ask my parents or my brothers, they would remark about my stomping feet and ceaseless singing. But beyond the walls of my childhood home is a lingering shame that comes with being too loud. Out in the world, as a quiet Jewish woman, I like to break the mold of old stereotypes. “Speak up,” I’m often told.
“Are you okay? You’ve been quiet the whole night.”
“You’re so shy, you don’t have to be around us.”
Because the world is largely unfamiliar to me, it pays to observe in silence. When the world is largely silent to you, you often have no choice. But to verbalize something that is not yours alone because it is shared with others is dangerous when there is the possibility of misspeaking. The safest thing to do is speak on what you know — or better yet, what only you know. Which is to say, yourself.
I first began writing about my hearing loss when I was thirteen. My school had taken away my accommodations — justifying it with my grades being too high for a student with an IEP — and my mom suggested I write a letter to my school to explain why taking away my accommodations was harmful. I read it out loud to them. It didn’t feel like my own voice, in fact, I know it was my mother’s passionate words regurgitated in my 8th grade mouth. I don’t blame her; it is because of my mother that I felt empowered enough to write about what mattered to me and what I needed.
When I published my first piece on my hearing loss — my first ever journalistic endeavor — I tried convincing the world that I was brave for being denied accommodations and forcibly learning to do without them. “Now that I finally have access to [accommodations], I don’t need it,” I wrote at age eighteen. “I realize I’ve subconsciously trained myself not to rely on anyone else; it’s not that I don’t want to ask for help, or that I’m too embarrassed.” No, I was not embarrassed, just too proud. But within the span of two years, I would find myself waiting to talk to an accessibility advisor, preparing for my first semester in cold, snowy Montreal. What I had written at eighteen no longer applied; my hearing aids at the time were barely usable, and I knew I would not be able to learn without the accommodations I had rejected for so long.
***
Leonard Kriegel died this past September. Kriegel was a Jewish disabled writer from New York who wrote about his experience with and after having polio as a child. When I found out about his death, I resolved to show the world his legacy as a Jewish disabled writer while finally learning how to write meaningfully about my identities.
It was easier to find Kriegel’s essays, like “Synagogues: On Being a Believing Nonbeliever,” than his books. I neglected these essays as they sat in a folder on my laptop for months. When I did finally click on the folder, I was slapped in the face with reality: “For that is the baggage American men carry. We frame the self against the past in hopes of seeing the self honestly,” Kriegel boldly claims. In a way, this quote encompassed everything I had been struggling with: the ability to talk honestly about myself and my identities, which I had lost over the years. I understand what Kriegel meant, but it was his use of gendered language — speaking for a group of people while excluding others — that startled me. For the moment, I decided to look past the gendered language.
In the same essay, he writes that “If our senses define consciousness, memories of the body define what our senses do with that consciousness.” He connects spirituality to the body, tying his faith to how he experiences the physical world as a disabled man.
Spirituality, according to Kriegel, changes in the face of the disabled body. He explains how his childhood perception of God shifted when polio changed his physical self. Kriegel addresses the question of how spirituality, an aspect of the self, changes in the face of the disabled body. Judaism, he writes, is an obligation to the tribe, a “responsibility to the past.” Therefore, once you experience something that is yours alone — once you do not look, or experience the world, the same way as others in the tribe — then your faith and standing in the tribe can change. So when Kriegel writes that “faith was not a rock but a moated castle before polio deprived me of it,” I get it. Even when he writes about masculinity, or about a disability that is far more visible than my own, I see my own experiences, my isolation, in his words.
Could I write like him? Speak on my own experiences, which slashed me from the norm of the tribe? Could I, too, be someone who people turn to, to read themselves in my own experiences derived from the intersection of my identities? Instead of feeling fractured from my tribe, obligated to the past, an ancestry that never considered the possibility of my existence as a Jewish disabled woman, could I write my reality into being part of the whole?
***
Charles Taylor’s The Malaise of Modernity names the development of authenticity as a way to “cure” the malaises of modernity, one of which is “excessive individualism.” The authentic self, as he explains, is developed in relation to our “inescapable horizons” — the backgrounds of our lives that we do not create, such as gender, socioeconomic standing, or the language(s) we are raised with. If we do not open ourselves up to our horizons, Taylor claims, we exist in a vacuum and fall into narcissism.
A key way to open ourselves up to and derive meaning from these backgrounds is through articulation. While Taylor believes that the creative artist is the pinnacle of articulation, everyone has the ability to express themselves, and must do so to discover who they are.
***
It was the fall of 2020, and I was home in New Jersey, watching the movie I’m Thinking of Ending Things with my parents.
It was not long before this that I had decided to switch my major; after unabashedly seeking the Jewishness in everything I came across, I finally gave in and admitted that studying Judaism should be part of my academic path. During the first year of the pandemic, there was widespread conversation surrounding antisemitism, Jewish identity and diversity, and though I was not even a semester into my Jewish Studies major, I wanted to contribute to the conversation. I published an article about my Syrian Jewish identity, and because of that publication, I was invited to speak on Zoom for a Jewish food series.
That night, I sat and made ka’ak for an audience over Zoom, answering questions about Syrian Jewish history, cuisine, and culture. At the end of the hour I was covered in flour and sweat when the host asked a question: “If there was one thing that you would want us and the whole world to know about Syrian Jews, what would it be?”
One single thing.
Looking back at the article I wrote, I understand why the host felt the question was appropriate. I had originally wanted to write an article about myself — my experience as a Syrian Jew and a person with hearing loss. Instead, the published piece was about how the marginalization of my Syrian Jewish mother and myself, speaks to the marginalization of non-Ashkenazi Jews everywhere.
I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t think it’s possible to say one thing, I can’t think of a single thing that is more important than the rest,” I said.
I closed the Zoom call. I felt ashamed, like I had done something wrong.
In I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the protagonist, Lucy, recites a poem she wrote that is actually a poem called “Bonedog” by Eva H.D. The response she gets from her boyfriend is that he feels like the poem is about him. “Well thanks, I guess,” she says. “That’s the thing one hopes for when writing a poem (…) Some universality in the specific.”
When I had written that article, I only ever wanted my particular self to be a universal self that anyone can see themselves in. In doing so, I had created a narrative that allowed for the particularities of Syrian Judaism — my own Syrian Judaism — to be lost in a catchy byline, a snappy quote about the importance of Jewish diversity.
Soon, it dawned on me that making an integral part of my identity an aspect of my academic, and professional life would be exhausting. Being a Syrian Jew in an Ashkenazi-oriented program, I brace myself whenever Mizrahim or Sephardim are mentioned, if ever. Sometimes, I admit, I am relieved when we are omitted from lectures and whole courses. It is better to be unrepresented than misrepresented.
As I continued in my studies, I realized that my experience as a Syrian Jew in an Ashkenazi-oriented program can be considered a microcosm of the larger Jewish academic world.
I am finally able to find Jewishness in everything I come across, but rarely is it my own Judaism.
***
My mom still brings up the ripped out pages she would find in my garbage can. My young self, inspired by an Avril Lavigne music video, an episode of Hannah Montana, or my father jamming on his guitar, would open my sparkly, flowery journal and begin to write.
“I’m in awe of how deep you were at such a young age,” my mom often says. It’s a depth that, when I come across old notebooks, is puzzling in its persistence. I wanted to break free, dance around, “get out” — from where, I’m not sure.
As a child, I felt bigger than my surroundings, fit for a world beyond Hebrew day school, soccer games, audiology appointments, Saturday art projects. Those notebooks were filled from start to finish with poems, drawings, and songs — though my perfectionist tendencies led to many of these pages being thrown out — of a young girl who wanted to be a pop star, and then an author, and also an artist. Even with these bright dreams, I wrote for myself, not for an audience.
***
Identity is never straightforward, and the identities we hold can shift, avoiding one another, crashing unexpectedly. Why can’t I write about myself in one moment without it being weighed against who I was in the past and who I will be in the future?
Even if I try to ignore my identities, they will still exist, impacting myself and others. It’s all the more frustrating when the thing I struggle to articulate is contested, misunderstood, marginalized. An overwhelming sense of responsibility — the pressure to speak up — silences me. What if I mess up again?
I wonder if there will ever be a time when all the parts of me can be articulated, when I can see the parts of myself as expansive, rather than decided for me. I wonder if I can look past my identities and write about the other ideas that matter to me.
In a manner that is certainly outdated, in “Wheelchairs,” Kriegel compares his desire to prove himself to the world to that of a gay man coming out; “I remember the empathy I felt for his need to declare his right to become what he probably had been destined to be from birth. In his eyes, one somehow needed to ‘earn’ one’s condition through public confession,” he writes.
Maybe a similar need to prove myself holds me back from writing about what matters to me beyond the innate identities I hold.
I must prove my worth before you can listen to anything else I have to say.
I must prove myself as a Jewish person — one with a marginalized identity — and a disabled person — one with an invisible disability — and a woman, with these other identities.
I must do this before I do anything else, but the weight of its importance, its permanence impedes me.
This weight is older than my journalistic self. My mom used to tell me that because of my hearing loss, I worked twice as hard to keep up with my classmates; an eight hour school day was double for me. Somewhere along the way, I felt I had to prove myself, to show that I could do what they could do without the help. In high school and at the start of university, I rejected all accommodations, essentially mainstreaming myself. Then, I wrote an article about it.
“When you hunger after what others assume as a right, you make yourself over in the image of those others—no matter how poorly the suit fits or how twisted the tie knots,” Kriegel writes in “Wheelchairs.”
My effort to be perceived as normal only pressed me deeper into my disability, in a way that Kriegel might refer to as violent. But like him, “I had embraced it.”
***
Charles Taylor highlights another key aspect in the development of an authentic self, that of the dialogical self. This is related to our “inescapable horizons”; we must engage in dialogue with our surroundings, with our significant others, internally and externally with language. The self cannot exist alone. It must be expressed within various contexts. So we express ourselves and find ourselves within others, in order to find what matters to us.
I wonder if there is a way to balance self-discovery with the cultivation of a whole identity or tribe, especially for those of us whose identities are more complicated, intersectional, or marginalized.
After that incident over the Zoom call, I felt stifled by both the pressure to speak up and the fear of misspeaking. It was infuriating because I felt as though I could not talk about the important parts of me. If it is not safe to talk about the self, then what use is there in speaking about anything else? If I can’t write about who I am, then how will I be able to cultivate an authentic self? If I can’t be my authentic self, then how can I truthfully care about and advocate for Jewish diversity and inclusion?
I am trying to do what my seven, thirteen, eighteen and twenty year old self did. I am writing, primarily for myself, but now I have the audience I had always hoped for as a child. This time, though, I know I can’t crumple and toss out these feelings.
It is no longer sustainable for me to try and say what people want to hear. While I’m not sure if others will find themselves in my experiences, I know that they speak to something larger. If I don’t share them — if you don’t share yours, either — then we can never really know.
Maybe words can be the bridge between our moated castles.
Image: Ross Lake House, by Rudy Photography
