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L'shanah Tovah, Daily KOS! Something to take into 5783... [1]

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Date: 2022-09-26

For those who aren’t familiar, today (26 September) and tomorrow (27 September) mark Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, in 2022. On the Jewish calendar, it’s now 5783. There’s a lot of religious, spiritual, and civic importance to the day, but you’re not here for a religion class, you’re here to know why I’m posting about it on a politics website, so if you have questions you can ask and I’ll answer but let’s get to the meat of things, shall we?

In this morning’s service, my rabbi absolutely went off about the fact that the word “religious” has been hijacked in the US by a single, actually-pretty-small group of extremists. As she pointed out, many aspects of various religions outside that group are things that are, well, normal parts of human life and history. Visiting the sick is considered a holy command in Judaism. Being respectful of others can be found in countless religions. In various Eastern religions, ancestor veneration is a very big deal—and what do we say here in the West? ‘Respect your elders.’

All of this got me thinking about something I see as a very big problem in modern American politics, and it’s that ‘religious’ isn’t the only word the right wing has managed to hijack and distort. Take a second and have some first impressions to these words: ‘patriot,’ ‘veteran,’ ‘American,’ ‘secure,’ ‘constitution,’ ‘freedom.’ There are no wrong answers here, just see whatever your knee-jerk reaction pulls up and sit with it a minute. If you’re anything like me, I’m betting at least one of these words made you cringe. You ended up with a mental image of some politician yelling through a red or blue filter on a screen while an out-of-context soundbite popped up in scare quotes, or you thought of wannabes and never-weres like the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys, or any one of a number of other things better not dwelled on. I can tell you my first set of reactions to those words are “Patriot Act” (ew), “underfunded VA hospitals scandal” (screw you, Bush II), “oh boy, I’m about to hear a conspiracy theory” (sigh), “can Arizona politics just shut up already” (seriously every single ad from both sides is about ‘secure borders’ and I’m so sick of it), “what did the Supreme Kangaroo Court do now” (oy), and Marjorie Taylor Green, who’s sort of my mental bookmark for that entire group. (Barf.) And some of these should be completely neutral words. I’m an American. The Constitution is a legal document. These aren’t words that should pull up negative thoughts and associations, but here we are.

The history of politics as I know it is one in which we tend to run away from words when they get taken over. The Republicans made ‘liberal’ a dirty word, so now we’re progressives. The Republicans made ‘universal healthcare’ a dirty word (well, phrase), so now it’s ‘Medicare for all.’ Hell, they’re doing it right now with ‘woke’! A word drawn directly from AAVE and meant to specifically highlight racial injustice, ‘stay woke’ meant “you’re awake to the problem now, don’t go back to sleep. Don’t turn away. Stay woke.” And we’re losing it to “this word just means the progressive platform, but a grossly distorted version of it.” And honestly, that’s a huge problem I have with a lot of the Democrats in power—they seem more interested in running and playing nice than they do in having a backbone. (Yes, yes, I know, not all Democrats. But many Democrats. Obama was pretty great, but I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive him for going on about ‘bipartisan cooperation’ long after it became clear that wasn’t going to be a thing.)

In 5783, I’ve been encouraged to reclaim the word ‘religious.’ To live proudly as a religious Jew, demonstrating my religiosity through means dear to me: protesting factory farming is a form of honoring the laws of kosher, visiting my dad even though he has dogs and I’m wildly allergic is honoring my living parent. Even being on DKos is a form of being Jewishly religious—we’re commanded to educate ourselves and work for the betterment of our communities, and, well, here I am, aren’t I, educating myself and connecting with others to help build a better future?

So in that vein, I’m asking for brainstorming, thoughts, suggestions, perhaps things already underway that I didn’t know about. Because we shouldn’t have to be ashamed to talk about patriotism, to worry about whether saying “American” will be taken as a neutral statement (I’m American, as in, I was born in the USA and am a citizen of it) or some kind of ultra-nationalist code (‘merica, hell yeah). The Constitution should be a living document we can point to and say “yeah, it’s flawed, the founding fathers knew that when they wrote it, let’s take a look and see what we can do’ rather than being treated as some kind of inerrant secular version of a holy text.

How do we take these words back, and turn the tide? How do we meet these distorted definitions with true ones? Because we’re only a breath away from ‘Democrat means traitor,’ and we can’t let that day come. The gloves have to come off.

I’m a religious Jew, an American, a patriot by the definition of Theodore Roosevelt:

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”

And I’m saying all of those words are mine to claim. Let’s stop running away, and do it together.

L’shanah tovah—may you have a good and sweet new year.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/26/2125498/-L-shanah-Tovah-Daily-KOS-Something-to-take-into-5783

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