Exile and the prophetic: Imagine there’s no prophetic, I wonder if you can

This post is part 39 of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

Those who are uprooted, the Europeans, still searching for an identity?  Amazing, spending so much time with the uprooted who are empowered.  As a collective that is.  Individually they are just gliding along, as if they are free-floaters, visiting those other cultures, lending a hand here and there through “development.”  Good people but lacking the imagination to know where they come from.  They don’t have a clue where they are going.

Too harsh for sure.Still, amazed at the Europeans.  Who don’t have an identity. Because they have left their history behind.  Are ashamed of it?

Speaking to a French student who is ashamed of her history.Guilt.  What France did and does.  Yet, to me, France has a fascinating history.  Though reading the biography of Marx and his family I was surprised at the violence in Paris.  What to do, she asks. 

My Jewishness is a problem to some here. It’s still gnawing at their imagined identity.  We can’t seem to get beyond the fact that I see the world as divided and united around particularities.  It isn’t an anti-Jewish thing from their side, it’s simply their hope that us versus them won’t appear on their unity horizon ever again.

Yet, it remains that “Jewish” is disturbing the surface unity.  As it should, I think.  How long such Jewishness can survive is a question.

The idea floating around from, even expressed by one of the students that I take “pride” in the Holocaust and take on a “victim” mentality since I side with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and now the Palestinian victims of Israel.  Strange comment – I had to discipline that kind language.  There are boundaries students shouldn’t cross.

On the Israeli, Palestinian student front, interesting interaction.  It is certainly difficult to be an Israeli student in an international forum  nowadays.  Hearing the Jewish and Israeli story put out there in another Jewish voice, it can only get worse. Is it better for the boycott to extend to bar Israeli students and professors from these international forums or to have the discourse spoken in front of them?A lingering question.

Also talking with a student from Spain.  Or rather from a part of Spain that has been colonized by Spain for centuries.  They retain their own language and culture.  Thus colonialism within Europe, in his mind it continues.  In my discussions, I speak of Europe, the Spanish and the French for example, yet there are a number of cultures that remain, sometimes becoming weaker, other times stronger.  He wanted to know if I thought identity was compatible with empathy.  Could a considered identity reach out to others?

My small group especially is fascinated with my mantra for the week that identity is constructed, built, imagined – maybe ninety percent – but “not only.”  The “not only” fascinates them because it posits some kind of essence or foundation that is not reducable but can evolve and expand.  So my Jewish identity is constructed, sure – but not only.

As a person, everything about me, is constructed or close to it.  If there isn’t any surplus, anything beyond construction, how would I draw close to others, to God, to myself?  How could I name what is important to me, explain it, move toward it?  Why would I ever consider suffering for some ideal or person?  Why would I commit myself to anything beyond my own imagined world if there wasn’t something more to me than construction and something more in the world than its construction? 

Committing myself to speaking the truth about Palestine, does it become more significant because I am Jewish?  My intense interactions with my German and Austrian students – doesn’t it take on a heightened significance because, among other things, we embody histories that clashed and now, after, seek some kind of reconciliation and healing?  More than imagined is our identity, otherwise the world becomes unreal.  Perhaps this is what is meant by the virtual world.  Imagined only.

Perhaps the images of atrocity are also imagined.

Strange, too, though with the young German and Austrian students, I feel like a father to them, like they could be my sons.  And this as we have strong exchanges on how there can be no real reconciliation between Jews, Germans and Austrians precisely because European Jewry was annihilated.  Their bridge out of that dilemma?  For years, Israeli Jews – how did that work out?  It can’t be American Jews either – it’s a bridge too far. 

Jews and Palestinians can reconcile in the future because such a program of annihilation hasn’t occurred.  The possibility remains because millions of Jews and millions of Palestinians, though deadlocked, remain alive and in proximity.  Us and them – the great European stumbling block, is exactly what makes a different Israel/Palestine future possible.

Showing the maps of Israel in the West Bank today.  That’s always the clincher.  But with my new conceptual framework of map and territory, the maps of Israel in the West Bank that I show are really the territory, that is the reality behind the map discourse of Israel that simply protects its own population with the Wall and settlements.  The misnomer of “settlements.”  Cities are more appropriate in the main.  They arehere to stay.

Before I show the “territory” maps, I use Adrienne Rich’s poetic statement from many years ago:  “Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images.  Whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters.  Whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult to come by.  Whatever is buried in memoryby the collapse of meaningunder an inadequate lying language – this will become, not merely unspokenbut unspeakable.”

Unspoken, unspeakable, it comes to this, when uprooting becomes the norm of protection and hiding the territory behind the maps of oppression.  This is why Israel in the West Bank is so important to depict, to correct the misnaming with a name.  The inadequate, lying language is exposed for what it is.

The depicted images that run against the grain are unlike the repeated images of atrocity that can numb.  The territory of Israel and Palestine when depicted and named, inside the 1967 borders of Israel and in the West Bank – with Gaza as well – show Palestinian population centers surrounded by Israeli power.  There isn’t a Palestinian population that is free of Israeli presence and control.   An inadequate and lying language cannot name this situation.  The challenge is how to name this reality without then presuming that the false maps and real territory – the division between what is said and what isn’t said – is only imagined.

Palestinians uprooted.  Those Palestinians remaining in the land surrounded by uprooted Jews.  Settler Jews. Settler Judaism. Empire Jews. Empire Judaism. All protected by helicopter gunships.  Trying to name the oppression isn’t pride – of ownership.  Or taking on the role of “victim.”  Rather it is our responsibility to speak of this even in the European territories where Jews were expelled and murdered.

The Holocaust can be analyzed.  It is not imagined.  Israel/Palestine can be argued.  The suffering of the Palestinians is not imagined.  That Jewish and Palestinian history – and German and Austrian history – is complex and evolving is true.  What happened, what is happening, in history is real. 

Depict the undepicted.  Name the unnamed.  Bringto light the censored.  Speak what cannot be spoken.  Where does the strength come from to do what needs to be done?  How is what needs to be done known?

I am repeating myself.  I’ve been advised.  Tell me, though, how are the words constructed, where does the strength come from, why go against the grain, why suffer for others when there is nothing to gain – if not for the prophetic?

The imagined prophetic.  Try that one on for size.  If there’s one thing in the world that isn’t imagined – only – it’s the prophetic. 

Reverse, the idea.  Imagine there’s no prophetic.  I wonder if you can.