love letter to מרים of nazareth
appreciation post for מרים of nazareth, a jewish woman who lived in judea, the land of palestine, under the daily realities of violent roman occupation.
it's so rare that we see her imagined in her jewish beauty, adorned with the explicitly jewish garments & symbolisms of the time. her jewishness is erased just as so much of our history & our ability to belong anywhere is. it's sad. it's overwhelming, heartbreaking, & beyond isolating within the global struggle for decolonization. how do we locate belonging after millennia of violence, forced displacements, ethnic cleansings, genocides, & immeasurable loss?
taking a moment of pause to uplift @landpalestine, that
"being from nazareth [today], joseph & mary would have blue IDs. jesus woud need an israeli military permit
to visit his family or go to Jerusalem. this is israel's [modern] jim crow & tiered segregation."
cover image: "mary magdalene before her conversion," 1894, james tissot. this painting is of mary magdalene, not mary mother of jesus; i use this image because there are so few that imagine jewish women as JEWISH.
before getting into some dark histories of christmas, i want to pour some loveee on מרים and xtians in my life who knowingly or unknowingly have been helping me heal my relationship with her, other jewish figures, & so many of christianity's genuinely beautiful, spiritual rituals & traditions. growing up jewish in a yt, western christian society, i was so detached from figures like mary, or even jesus. yt christians had claimed them. the erasure of their jewish identities was seemingly neverending, unfolding from every end of the political & cultural spectrum. even growing up around xtian friends acting like ”prince of egypt” wasn't about jews (lol) was so easy to internalize, & therefore detach from. endlessly grateful for the loving christians in my life who show solidarity & beauty in their rituals and love of these figures without the erasure. let this also be a reminder that christianity is meaningful to so many globally colonized peoples, including palestinians. to simplify it to its yt, western expression is wrong.
i'm reminded of a mary oracle card message that pita once pulled for me about love, heartbreak, grief, & life. "in mary's wisdom, she knows that of which we are capable. she knows what our heart can handle, how much heartbreak we can bear, in order to grow our heart into a powerful vehicle for divine compassion, bliss and wisdom. she knows that sometimes the happier path will be of great benefit to us. she also knows that at other times, being granted all that we want, in the way that we think we want it, would actually prevent us from fulfilling our divine destiny and receiving our full spiritual inheritance." i still hold this reminder close to my heart. as we navigate our own love, grief, and the diving into the depths of our hearts this winter, it feels necessary to return to this.
to me it fits perfectly with maya angelou's:
"have enough courage to trust love one more time
and always one more time.”
loving reminder for other jews that we can reclaim the jewish ancestors that are so often stolen from us. we can learn from them. we are allowed to enjoy christmas if we want to. so many of us celebrate christmas because we've reclaimed it in different ways. for me, christmas eve has always been when my extended jewish family gets together for jam sessions to play music, drink, laugh, eat. besides!! never forget jews literally wrote all the good christmas music lmaoooo without us y'all would just be harking with the herald angels for the rest of eternity. all of your favorite christmas movies and musicals and most of what goyim love most about christmas is because of jews so we will take that as ours if we want to!! merry christmas <3
& another loving reminder... that there are endless reasons why some jewish people never have and never will want to reclaim christmas. this is especially true for ashkenazim who were forcibly taken to europe & had to live alongside yt xtians for centuries. so many christian holidays were feared & known only as moments of immense violence & death. part of celebrating christmas for yt europeans & americans who are descendants of the same christians who r*ped, tortured, killed, and drove out jewish communities that lived alongside them, needs to be a reckoning and reconciling of this history- of the deeply embedded violences and fears associated with, & inseparable from, these traditions. because jewish people have always been blamed for the death of jesus & various blood libels, one of the times of year that was most known for pogroms- the organized massacres of jewish people- was christmas. for jews, christmas has always been a day of mourning & grief. jews taught each other to stay inside, close the curtains, keep the lights low, hope not to be noticed or killed. celebrating christmas in spiritual & secular ways for those whose ancestors were perpetrators of that violence does not distance you from this history or its need to be recognized.
and the roots of these violences date beyond the most recent centuries in the old country, into the middle ages and even roman times. they are ancient. engrained. ashkenazim dealt with persecution & ceaseless violences for millennia. in the 15th c. CE, pope paul II revived some of the original traditions of the roman holiday of saturnalia, where jewish people were over-fed & forced to run naked through the streets while christians jeered or attacked them.* Jews in their many hometowns would hear the church bells before Christmas, & understood it as a veiled warning to go home, be quiet, & to avoid being on the street for any reason. many Jewish xmas traditions in the Old Country were just ways of expressing fear of anticipated deaths.
for some people the associations with christmas, easter, winter solstice, and countless other holidays tied to jewish hatred & death are not things that can be reconciled. it's much deeper than jewish people dipping to eat chinese food (shoutout to asian+jewish solidarity!!) and watching movies with their families. honestly the more i read and learn the history of christmastime for jews, the more i feel like, damn, even *that* tradition feels so rooted in staying indoors with family, out of sight, & in hiding. sharing all of this feels important because it is all so purposely withheld in the U.S., just as really any & all jewish education is. antisemitism is a foundational pillar of yt supremacy- this means getting uncomfortable & thinking about what jewish hatred looks like & how its been expressed in its many contexts for millennia.
