Intentional Joy: Fear, Worry, and the Reconception of Normal
I don’t know how to write this.
Well, first of all, I guess I should say that I don’t know what ‘this’ is. A statement of inherency? A historian’s description of current events as our future’s history unfurls around us? Perhaps it’s as simple and complex as a Purim d’var Torah, or a manifesto I haven’t figured out how to live yet. I don’t know.
What I do know is this:
A little over two weeks ago, Russia invaded Ukraine.
A little over two months ago, rising debates about Antisemitism dominated nearly every conversation I had with Jewish friends.
A little under two years ago, this country shut down because of Covid-19.
The internet has been full of discourse about what is happening and why it’s happening and who’s to blame and how it’s happening and all of the chatter gets to be deafening, so I’ll admit that I’ve stopped reading the news quite as closely. But one word consistently seems to rise above the muffled shouts:
“Normal.”
People want to get back to normal. They want a life without a war shadowing every thought. A day without masks and concern that loved ones will die for breathing the wrong way, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. They want a day or a week where they don’t have to worry about being a hate crime statistic.
I want all of that too. I don’t talk about how much I want it, because when I do, a tight feeling rises up in my chest and I get a little pinprick behind my eyes. It’s more of a yearn than a want—a deep, desperate urge linked to the knowledge that in some ways, you can’t go home again.
So when I say what I’m about to say, please know that it isn’t because I want it to be like this.
But the fact is—and I’m saying this as someone with three bachelor’s degrees and nearly a master’s in what amount to studies of human behavior—this is normal.
I don’t just mean that it’s our normal now, though I think that’s a factor too. We’re already seeing that: even though my campus and workplace have lifted mask mandates in the halls, everyone wears them anyway. We are all trained to trust the science, and to trust the scientists, and we do—but the fear is still there. The habit to mask, to sanitize, to feel the burn of alcohol in the dry cuts that form when we wash our hands too often, may not go away. We link it to security—we’re doing our part, we’re protecting ourselves, we’re protecting our loved ones. Even when things are closer to the way we were, I think that habit may be hard to shake.
But we have been sanitizing and masking plenty of things, for longer than most of us care to admit.
I mentioned Antisemitism. The past sixty years (I could make an argument for forty, but that’s a different conversation, and also the subject of half my master’s thesis) have been quiet on this front. A synagogue shooting here. A bomb threat there. A dog-whistle comment in a Twitter thread most folks ignore. But no mass genocidal events in Europe. No calls for all Jews to die. Between the end of the Holocaust and the start of the 2016 Presidential election cycle was an unprecedented time of peace and quiet.
And it only seems to have lasted sixty years.
I brought a non-Jewish friend with me once, to a synagogue. We weren’t there for long—I just needed to run inside and drop off an envelope; I think I was trying to secure transportation for a Hillel trip or a youth group program. As we left, my friend commented on how pretty the big brick planters were out front. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that those planters aren’t simply decorative, that they’re a well-dressed blockade designed to protect the sanctuary inside from a car driving straight through the doors.
I wrote a poem, back in 2019, called “To the Daughter I May Never Have, a Poem You Will Never Read.” That poem contained the line, “I will have to explain the Holocaust/I worry that I will explain it while we live in its revival.”
If I were to rewrite that poem, I would phrase it differently. I would say, “I worry that I won’t have to explain it because we live in its revival.”
We have all borne witness to the ease with which insurrection, terror, and fear can grow in the woodwork when left alone to fester. We have all seen the dangers of giving a dog-whistle a microphone.
And yet.
This is also a world that assumes Jews are white, and therefore protected in the eyes of white supremacism. This is a world that defines Judaism as a religious difference and not a people with a history of persecution, that forgets that Jews have been forced to “pass” since before race became the black/white binary that the Transatlantic slave trade enforced. Race, as a term, has evolved. But from its very beginnings, the point has been to exclude. This is a world that rejects solidarity, because one struggle must be longer or more painful or less resolved in order to yell the loudest and maybe, finally, be heard.
This is, I fear, “normal,” too.
Certainly I think it was normal before the Holocaust shocked everyone into paying attention. Find me a longer-than-sixty-year period without major Antisemitic incidents. Try, please. I have two degrees in this. I have access to some of the finest research institutions in the world. I looked, and I failed. I think in some ways, the denial and the infliction of further pain are a return to normal cycles.
President Zelenskyy of Ukraine is Jewish. He is descended from Holocaust survivors. He lost family in the Holocaust. He is also fighting a war against a man who insists that a free Ukraine harbors a neo-Nazi regime.
In some ways, this is the new form of Antisemitism: calling Jews Nazis because “Nazi” has become a buzzword for “evil,” divorcing the term from its historical and political context. This is a painful subject, and not one that I plan to dig into at the moment.
Instead, I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about joy.
Intentional joy, even when the world is crashing down.
It’s worth noting that Mr. Zelenskyy does not campaign on his Judaism, nor does he reify its impact on his presidency much at all. He calls it an ordinary upbringing. And that’s the point.
You see, Jewish people have existed in times of turmoil and intentional extinction and genocide and horror since our inception. I have family who fled pogroms. Many of my friends have family who survived the Holocaust. This is the standard Jewish experience. The norm. We have all had what the Ukrainian president has called an ordinary upbringing. And watching him pick up a gun and stand among his people, watching young couples get married at night and go to war the next day, something hit me:
This is what it means, to fight. And at the same time, this is why it matters, to be intentionally joyful, even when the sky is falling and the earth’s on fire, and there’s no way out.
We have been doing this since the beginning.
There’s an old joke (and a song, by the talented Dave Nachmanoff): pretty much every Jewish holiday can be summed up by the words “they tried to kill us, we won, so let’s eat.” That’s what it’s about. There have always been dangers. There will always be dangers. We assess, we cry, we fight, we mourn. And we celebrate our survival.
The holiday of Purim is in three days. While I like to joke about it, calling it “drunk Jewish feminist Halloween” among my friends, I’m taking it a little more seriously this year. Kind of like how I took Hanukkah significantly more seriously right after the Charlottesville riots in 2016. It feels different, to celebrate intentionally, with the knowledge that there is a very loud group out there that doesn’t want you to. It feels different, to connect to a long history of ancestors who fought to celebrate survival.
I’ve been finding it harder than usual, to root myself in joy and to ground myself in the things that make life worth living. I’ve been getting lost in my own anxiety cycles, finding myself frustrated with how very pointless my day-to-day life can feel when these events spiral out of control all around the world.
It is that lineage of celebration and survival that keeps me grounded, these days.
It is a revolutionary act to find moments of joy.
As a Jewish woman descended from Jewish women who fled the pogroms and kept their songs and religion alive, it is not only my right to celebrate that survival, it is my duty. I speak from a place of privilege on this issue. I have a roof over my head, I have family that I can call and who are probably reading this post. I have friends who will listen to me ramble. I don’t express gratitude for my own circumstances enough. And I know that I won’t manage to feel like this every minute of every day. In all probability, I’ll keep feeling anxious and useless for twenty-three hours and fifty-five minutes out of every day. But if I can ground myself in that joy for even five minutes, well.
I’ll consider those five minutes worthwhile, and I’ll give those moments of happiness everything I’ve got.
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More resources on these topics may be found at the following links. I’m not an expert, just looking for a way to process. If you’re looking for ways to help, I urge you to do your own research, avoid the misinformation as well as you can, and figure out your own positionality in relation to these issues.
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/25/1082992947/ukraine-support-help
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