“Why Are You So Political?”

I used to write different things. I used to tell people how much they mattered, and I’d want to inspire them. I’d write about my mental health struggles from the past in order to validate their own experiences. I’d tell them about the power of creativity, and how it can inspire us to tap into the depths of ourselves and see all the beauty that’s waiting to be tapped. I’d talk about how inspired I was by Judaism, and try to inspire them in turn.

And then the election happened, and I turned into something else. My writing turned into something else.

And a lot of them, a lot of the readers who had followed me until that moment, they felt betrayed. They felt hurt.

My first political article was comparing Trump to Hitler. That’s a way to start a discussion, I guess. And it got the reaction you’d expect.

I had spent the last few years before that telling people how dangerous it was to get political. Especially inspired by my newfound religious beliefs, I thought it was wrong to claim that one side had a monopoly on truth and morality. After all, they are only human, we are only human, and so to stick a flag on your side and declare it the territory of “rightness” was a desecration of truth. That’s what I said, and that’s what I believed.

Of course, I had moments of political writing. When I say that my Trump-Hitler article was my first political piece, what I mean is that it was the first one I acknowledged to myself was political.

I wrote about Israel. When there were wars on, I’d support them full-throatedly. I had come from there before moving to New York, and had worked as a sort of journalist/essayist. I’d get sent to places like Sderot as rockets rained down on it during the first Gaza war, and speak to the residents. I’d visit settlers as they protested the government and as the government sent soldiers and police to beat them into submission.

And so when I came to America, after doing that writing, and after transforming into an orthodox Jew from a secular upbringing, I had told myself that, well, some things are “beyond politics.”

It was less than six months before I wrote the Trump-Hitler piece that I had started a crowdfunding campaign to call out the New York Times for not properly covering the stabbings happening in Israel.

What I’m trying to tell you is that I was very political, but I didn’t know it. I was, maybe, obsessed with politics. At least when things got bad enough. When it felt personal to me.

Personal To Me

There was another stage in my writing I didn’t mention. It happened in Israel, when I was trying my hand at a blog I had called “Pop Chassid.” I called it that because I wanted to write articles that taught Hasidic lessons through movies.

I wrote pieces examining the depth of Bert in Mary Poppins, the way doing a mitzvah was like the totems in Inception, and a lot of other stuff.

But it was driving me crazy. I thought it had been unique, but it didn’t feel that different from the increasingly in-the-box writing the Jewish site I had been working for was demanding. It was all… boxy. Formulaic.

I spoke to my wife about a month before we left Israel, complaining, “I just feel like I’m not writing anything real. I want to be real. Honest.”

And that started my delving into personal writing. The writing which brought me to the place that I described above, where writing was about what was “personal to me.”

It was this writing that had attracted the audience I mentioned. It was the writing that finally felt like it was mine, and which gave my creativity meaning for the first time in my life.

I’d start off with a personal anecdote. Just as I did in this section. The idea was to bring people into my own experience so that we could move past the labels and other stuff that creates walls between people. We were both just people connecting, as if we were at a table and I was helping them get to know me. Then, I’d jump into my point, my message. Classic personal essay.

Looking back, I now see how this influenced my sincere belief that politics was shallow, was empty, was “lower.” And that was why I’d only write about politics if it felt deeply personal, deeply soulful, something that came from deep within and mattered as much as my writing about mental illness. At the time, that meant Israel. And then it meant Trump.

But either way, in my mind, until 2017 or so, all my writing was personal, even when it wasn’t.

Why So Political?

For years now, I’ve heard that refrain from people. Those who were fans of my personal writing, who had encouraged me, and who then felt betrayed.

At first, I tried to explain the danger I thought we were all in. That Trump was an existential danger to America. That this was “beyond politics.” That I was writing about things that mattered to all of us.

And for a while, that was the mythology that kept me going.

But the more I wrote this, the more I started to face other questions that I hadn’t until I became anti-Trump.

For example, what was making Republicans fold to Trump so easily, when they had once considered him detestable?

How did such a hateful, bigoted, abusive authoritarian even get to the point of being nominated, let alone winning? Was tribalism really the only answer?

Why were the people I had once seen as reasonable suddenly defending things like the Hollywood Access tape, barring all Muslims from entering the country, and the million other despicable things Trump had said and done? Things that all, individually, seemed to me to be “above politics.”

I read. I spoke to activist friends of mine. I tried putting aside my past assumptions, and looking at it all from a more open mind.

And the inescapable conclusion I came to was that, for all my fulmination, my definition of “politics” was inherently flawed.

After all, what made Trump’s politics less political than, say, the deep history of racism and bigotry on the right (and, for that matter, the left)? Why was a war in Gaza more important to me than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why was I willing to be outspoken about authoritarianism but not homelessness, inequality, and a million other social ills?

The answer was in my writing: I wrote what was personal. I wrote about what mattered to me. And thus, in reality, I wrote about what affected me.

I was an advocate for mental health, but not for health care. I spoke up about racism, but only in its most overt forms, and only when it wasn’t controversial. I got angry at people for not taking sides with Israel, but demanded people didn’t take sides in America.

It was all subjective. It was all about me. It wasn’t deep. It wasn’t religious. It wasn’t spiritual, or true, or smart. It was selfish.

Doing Penance

This realization broke open a dam that had been building pressure inside of me. At the point of the realization, I had probably been writing politically for a year, but I was having trouble answering the very question my readers had been asking me.

But realizing it was only the beginning of the battle. This wasn’t just about my writing. It was about how I looked at the world. It was about what I considered important, and what I was willing to fight for.

For example, it was one thing to ostensibly be against racism. It was quite another to start examining how racism as enacted by our government had benefited me throughout my life.

It was one thing to be against the Muslim ban. It would be another thing to fight alongside Muslims who had vastly different beliefs about Israel than me.

It was one thing to be against the president. It was quite another to be for an alternative that wasn’t just the negation of his existence and power.

Like so many people, Trump’s win was only the beginning of an awakening. One that may have never happened if we ourselves didn’t feel personally threatened by his rise.

We had been sold a message since we were young, one that may have been especially sold to middle class liberals: the world was progressing. We were living in the best time ever. More people were free every day. The previous generations had fought for us, and now we could enjoy the fruits of their labor.

That was Bill Clintonism in a nutshell, and it was what allowed so many of us to grow up on the lie that now all that was left was to sand down the edges and to take care of ourselves.

With the election of Obama, we had the confirmation. Everything was okay. Everything was moving forward. We just had to take the ride and cheer the right side.

Never mind that long before Trump, Republicans had long been erecting a structure to circumvent our voting system and out-flank the growing minority communities in America through a thing most of us hadn’t heard of until 2016 called gerrymandering. Never mind that if we had properly learned history, we would have learned what civil rights leaders had been trying to warn us for generations: there is always a backlash to civil rights progress, and the only way to withstand it is to be as determined as those fighting back.

These lessons and more were things many of us had to learn retroactively.

I wish we didn’t have to learn them, that the world really could just progress without us, and that we weren’t where we are now.

But reality is not built that way. Reality, rather, is built to teach us that it’s our job to fight for a better world, and if we don’t, we’ll get taught much more harshly.

Today, we live in a world in which people like myself were concerned with ourselves and our own. This is not about Republicans or Democrats. It’s about a culture in which those of us who haven’t had to live with the consequences of a culture that was already unjust weren’t concerned with justice for others.

This despite the growth of things like Black Lives Matter, which came to the fore before Trump, but which received minimal support from the mainstream world, left and right, and which even among those who were sympathetic, stayed home and believed in progress happening on its own, without their participation, as they had been trained to.

In other words, as I and others watch in horror as people seeking asylum are being turned away or put in abusive camps, we are also coming to grips with another reality: it was our political apathy that helped us arrive here.

Evil doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A government does not get away with what our government is getting away with without decades of a populace being taught to be complacent, taught to let things take their course, taught to sit back and wait for things to get better, and to take care of yourself in the meantime.

In other words: Why am I political?

Because if I had been political, if Americans had been more political, before all of this, then maybe we wouldn’t be here. Maybe we could have prevented this.

We stood by and we let it happen before it happened because we stood by and let police kill innocent young people. We stood by and let it happen before it happened because we stood by and let Islamophobia grow in front of us every day since 9/11 (I know, this I saw it in the pro-Israel world, and I didn’t do enough to stand up to it when I had their ears). We stood by and let it happen before it happened because we stood by and let mass incarceration build the groundwork for the incarceration of the innocent at the border.

We stood by and let it happen before it happened because we didn’t care enough about others, because our vision of a better world mainly involved us raising ourselves up while assuming everyone would be fine without us, because we thought a just world would create itself.

Now we’re doing penance.

Now we’re making up for our mistakes.

We aren’t political because of Trump.

We’re political because Trump forced us to face our faults, and to finally envision a world that is truly just. And more importantly: to fight for it.