Highlights from the Jewish Men’s Workshop
I recently attended the International Jewish Men’s Workshop led by Billy Yalowitz. I’m Canadian born; currently living in Denver, Colorado, USA; sixty-two years old; of Ashkenazi heritage; and a husband, a father, and a rabbi. This was my first Jewish men’s workshop. We did some remarkable work together.
Some of my personal highlights were the following:
- Not being the only rabbi at the workshop—not even the only Reconstructionist rabbi
- Getting to robustly celebrate Shabbat
- Getting to daven (pray) with a group of Jewish men
- Getting to discharge with an Orthodox rabbi about my relationship with my Orthodox brother
- Getting to discharge about my minimal relationship with Yiddish (which my father spoke fluently)
- Getting to discharge about reaching out to working-class men
- Getting to discharge about how I, as a Jewish leader, can respond with more integrity to Jews of color
- Getting to be at a topic table about Jewish men and their daughters
I didn’t have previous Co-Counseling relationships with any of the other participants, so a big part of the workshop was getting close to other Jewish men and letting them get close to me. It turned out [as it happened] that was a big part of the workshop for everyone. We acknowledged all the ways we had lost our connection with each other due to assimilation, upward mobility, anti-Semitism, and male domination.
Among our losses were the Jewish ways of being male—of showing feelings, being warm (not “cool”), and seeking contact. To the extent that as boys we showed any of these unassimilated Jewish qualities, we were targeted. And the more Jewish we looked or acted, the more targeted we were. The result was that we became liabilities for each other in a social world dominated by Gentile boys. This undermined our connections and solidarity with each other. A powerful direction for me was “Who are you getting close to, and what do you like about him?”
We did a lot of work on male domination patterns in relationship to women. We began by remembering and discharging on the sweetness, kindness, and equality of our earliest relationships with girls before male domination and isolation patterns got downloaded onto us. It was through those patterns that we learned about sex. We need to go back in sessions and apologize to the girls and women.
Both male domination and anti-Semitism leave us as Jewish men with the message that we are bad. We come to suspect our motives for almost anything. We need to work on this with men who care about us and will remember our goodness. Because we were so isolated when the hurts landed on us, we each need a male Co-Counselor with whom we can take everything out of hiding.
We worked on the intersection of anti-Semitism with climate change and the collapsing society. We noticed the over-representation of Jewish perpetrators named by the #MeToo movement and how Alexander Vindman, a decorated Jewish Ukranian-born Lieutenant Colonel who came forward in the Trump impeachment hearings, was used and then turned against by the owning class. Billy observed that if we Jews haven’t yet been blamed for climate collapse, we will be.
He also suggested that we are less involved in climate and other environmental work than we might be because of the historical domination of the environmental movement by the Gentile owning class and because of the hurts we’ve inherited from our history of expulsions from European lands. Nonetheless, of the 106 Sustaining All Life delegates to last year’s climate conference, twelve were Jewish men.
The last direction I heard from Billy’s mouth was, “It’s everybody’s Holocaust this time, baby!”
Denver, Colorado, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of Jews
(Present Time 198, January 2020)