Jewish Culture, Storytelling, Creative Writing

Why the Jewish Voice Project Exists

I'll admit the embarrassing part first, because it's the honest way into this...

For most of my career, I wrote and taught writing as if the stakes were personal and only personal. I worked to find the truth of a character. Find the character's want. Then discover the character’s need. Cut the scene or the line that’s noise. Craft the dialogue so it's sharp. Say the thing that moves the story forward.

All good, useful, craft-level advice, the kind you can teach in a Stanford seminar ( I did!) but without ever tapping my deepest fears, my honest loves, my most vulnerable wants. I wrote without exposing my roiling anger beneath the surface. My despair at the cruelty of people.

I wrote well, but stayed up among the waves, without plumbing the deepest depths.

I can’t leave those things out anymore.

Writing is joy! Writing is connection. Writing is discovery.

Every People Tells Its Stories

Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons had their epic heroic tales. Greece had its Homer. Sumer and Assyria and Egypt, stories of conquering god-kings. The Tlingit and Haida tell tales of a whole different kind of "trans" - trans-species. Women turning into bears, men into seals. An intimate communion with the rich natural world of their Pacific coast. Americans have told stories of brave revolutionaries, pioneers, industrialists. Now, of course, we hear more about the shadow side of the story - slavers and slayers of native peoples.

How a people tells its story shapes that people's destiny.

And I don’t just mean how we tell stories in the schoolbooks. I mean the living story, the words that get spoken at the kitchen table, in a joke only your family finds funny, in recollections of shared childhood, in the specific way your grandmother said "eat something" like it meant "I love you and I'm terrified of losing you."

Every group that has survived anything has survived partly because someone kept telling the story. The Irish kept it in song. Black American culture kept it in testimony, in blues, in the pulpit.

The Jewish people? We have kept ours in song, in prayer, in humor but most comprehensively, in argument.

Argument, you may have noticed, doesn’t always make you popular.

It doesn’t make you “easy.”

But when the arguments are strong and meaningful, it makes you impossible to ignore.

1600 years of Talmud have shaped the contemporary Jewish mind, story - and you, even if you’re never opened a single book of it. What is the Talmud? Centuries of rabbis interrupting each other in the margins, not erasing a single voice from the page. It’s full of impressive linguistic gymnastics, tales remembered, illustrative stories of saints and sinners and flights of imaginative narratives of “fill-in-the-blanks.” All in service of trying to figure out what our inherited texts actually mean.

We are, as a people, constitutionally incapable of settling for one version of the story.

We are, at our best, deprived of the safe harbor of the absolute. But this way, we get to swim in the wide-open ocean of possibility.

Stories Preserve Identity — Right Up Until Someone Stops Telling Them

Stories don't just express individual or communal identity. They're the engine that keeps it alive at all. When you shut down and stop telling them, you lose a language. You lose a culture. You lose the richness of your humanity.

Despite the liberating individualism of America, which I cherish, neither I nor you popped out of someone’s head fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s noggin.

We carry DNA, RNA, hell, all kinds of NA that we then spend our entire lifetimes figuring out.

I went through a period in my twenties when I dove deeply into Holocaust literature because it mattered. How could people do these things? What could possibly be more important than this study? To write from these haunting truths?

But then I fell in love, discovered the joys of full adulthood and travel and children and my writing took me into other realms.

And besides… all that horror was in the past.

Right?

Why Jewish Voices Matter Now

Oh, how I wish I could swim in the innocent joys of happy tale-telling, penning sillly stories for kids, paeons to thenatural world. I could write rom-coms all day long.

But the horror is not in the past.

It’s here again, with fangs. And it is stalking the streets of Canada, the beaches of Australia, the feckless and dwindling civilization of Europe and all over America.

Amplified by tech, hoards of strangers are telling the Jewish story for us. Some of them are ignorant. Some are projecting their internalized guilt outward. Some are horrified by the reality of war and call it worse things. Some of the voices are malicious. And some are suffused by an evil ideology that will not retreat.

These voices are loud, blustering. They're confident, and increasingly, they're the only version that a lot of people — including a lot of young Jews — ever hear.

What’s the answer?

I had a teacher who said you can’t yell at a thunderstorm and expect it to retreat. Similarly, you can’t outshout mindless slogans meant to drown out reason. You cannot out-shout people who have made an entire identity out of shouting.

Besides, who wants to live as a shouter?

Now me.

The answer of who we respond, in my opinion, is twofold - what I call (1) guarding the fence and (2) drinking from the well.

Yes, we need to be guardians at the gate, calmly meeting hate and slogans with reason and truth, even if it means repeating it over and over and over again.

Which id does.

But there is a second path.

That path is to drink from the well of our tradition. To return to the sources of nourishment and drink up the joy. Drink up the love. Drink up then tell your own story, in your own words, drunk with the complexity and passion and heart of being live human being in a body.

Your words. Your version.

Creativity Is Life!

Creativity is not a hobby, a nice thing you do if you have spare time and a little talent.

It’s more. It sustains life and gives it texture, color, hope. Yiddish theater kept a culture laughing through catastrophe. Jewish comedians turned generations of grief into laughter. Memoir, poetry, story - these plant a flag of what it feels like to be alive on this complex earth.

It is a strategy of thriving, and surviving.

Which Brings Us Right......Here

I started The Jewish Voice Project in fits and starts.

I didn’t want to.

I wanted to continue living my relatively uninterrupted happy life, with my imaginative creative projects, mountain trails and buoyant children.

But I had to do this.

I needed it.

And I feel that thousand of my brothers and sisters need it.

We need to speak our truths. To find them, write them, share them.

We need to know them.

And we need to ground ourselves in our truths and listen closely amid the noise of the rabble at the gate.

I love my Jewish people. After all these years and all the travel and all the conventions and workshops and festivals, Jewish people are where I still feel most at home. I know us in our broad varieties. And I feel my blood in theirs.

And I see how the truths of who we are is getting swamped by waves of hate, vitriol, libels, old and new, in stupidity, hate and ignorance.

I happen to love exploratory writing. And I happen to love the literary inheritance of the Jewish people - from Genesis to Chabon.

I also happen to intimately know the healing and powerful role creative writing can play in a person’s life.

So I created The Jewish Voice project built on one belief: that Jewish people telling their own true, complicated, imperfect stories, in their own words, without asking, is not a nice-to-have cultural activity.

This is how a precious and gorgeous people stays a people. It is how the next generations inherit something more useful than historical facts.

I didn’t create it so you can write and win arguments with people who aren’t listening anyway. .

I created it because once you write down something that is your own true voice, from your gut, from your heart, from your lived experience - no one can take that way.

Truth will out.

Tell yours.

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