Against Roots

On Jewish and not Jewish alternatives

Their roots are not wise.

That epigraph from Audre Lorde seems to lose its meaning when its pulled out from context—or to mean something that can’t possibly be right. We tend, after all, to believe that roots and wisdom are one and the same, growing around each other in the earth from which they both draw meaning and nutrients. To know where you’re going, you have to know where you came from. To grow towards the heavens, you need strong grounding in strong ground.

These seem like obvious, even cliché, truths. But roots and rootedness have always been complicated for Jewish people—especially at the moment, when the shibboleths of rootedness and homeland have been weaponized as part of a seemingly endless Zionist nightmare of genocide and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians. Roots, in the case of Jewish people, seem at the moment to have anchored us not in wisdom, but in violence and cruelty.

We need, perhaps, to find a way to recognize that one of the things that makes humans human is that they are not rooted in any one earth. And by “we” here I mean Jews—and, in line with an ideology of uprootedness, other people as well.

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The Necessity of Exile

I’m hardly the first Jewish person to argue for questioning the ontological primacy of staying put. Shaul Magid’s recent collection of essays, The Necessity of Exile is (among other things) an effort to recover and restate a Jewish identity that specifically rejects a connection to Israel/Palestine, or to any one place.

Magid criticizes the 2023 status quo in Israel (a status quo which he presciently notes was not sustainable) by arguing that a Zionist state exercising colonial “power and sovereignty over another population…creates a reality whereby a truly democratic, equitable, and just society has become all but impossible.”

Or, to put it another way, in prioritizing rootedness in the land, Israel has effectively had to abandon traditions of righteousness and wisdom. As such, Magid argues, while Israel may continue to exist, Zionism as an ideology which has as a proprietary first principle, “this land is ours” must vanish if true Judaism is to survive. Jewish people cannot be a light unto the nations if we are building our identity on extinguishing the lights of our neighbors.

Nor is it just the lights of our neighbors which Zionism would like to crush. Magid points out that Zionism, from its inception and still, is built on what he calls a “negation of exile.” Zionism creates a Jewish identity which is not just an alternate to diaspora, but which bitterly and sweepingly rejects diaspora as a potential for Jewish people.

As I’ve discussed before, early Zionists used antisemitic tropes to describe Jewish life in the diaspora as “sick,” “diseased” and “parasitic.” They also have embraced the antisemitic trope of inauthenticity, by claiming that Jews who are not Zionists are not real Jews, or “Un-Jews” as two Tablet contributors put it. In pushing the ethno-nationalist idea that the truth of a people is their land, Zionists have also pushed the invidious stereotypes of diaspora Jewish people as rootless cosmopolitans, with no true selves outside (a commitment to) Israel.

Magid references numerous important Jewish thinkers and theologians who have rejected this notion of Jewish rootedness. For example, he quotes philosopher and theologian Martin Buber, who argued that Palestine was “at no time in the history of Israel simply the property of the people; it was always at the same time a challenge to make of it what God intended to have made of it.” Magid also points to Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who argues Jewish spirituality would have been lost without exile. If Jews had remained in Israel, Singer suggests, “endless wars and ever-repeating occupations by stronger neighbors would eventually have transformed the Jews into an Arab tribe.”

I appreciate Singer’s skepticism re: Zionism. At the same time, though, I am a little leery of the way he, and Magid too, frame Jewish exile as validated by, and a validation of, Jewish particularity. Magid rejects rootedness in land not for its rootedness, per se, but rather because it contradicts his sense of a Jewish identity rooted in exile. Singer embraces Jewish exile as a way to avoid being Arab—a formulation that resonates queasily in the current climate of rampant anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism.

The Necessity of Exile is about the necessity of exile to Jewish identity in particular. But if exile is in fact a necessity, it seems like we should be thinking about, in part, the way that diaspora and exile make of identity a heterogenous thing. Singer, after all, spoke in Yiddish, a mixture of German and Hebrew. I’m writing in English (as Magid did.) Part of traveling is meeting other people, and learning from them, or even to some degree becoming them.

A discussion of exile which is focused on Jewish exile alone is, in this sense, not exactly a discussion of exile, but is another way of constructing an identity of rootedness, even in the roots go backwards in time rather than into the ground.

Lose Your Mother

What might it mean to be an exile in time as well as place—to have one’s roots cut loose altogether? Saidiya Hartman provides one plausible answer in her incisive, painful memoir/treatise, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.

Hartman is obviously not the first Black writer to travel to Africa to examine the history and the injustices that brought their families to the Americas. Hartman, though, is deliberately undermining and critiquing the idea that this sort of investigation is, or can be, a Roots exploration, per the television mini-series. Hartman doesn’t visit Ghana to find herself and her land. Rather, she visits Ghana to reiterate that she does not have a land—and that, if she has a self, she needs to create it despite Ghana’s indifference, and even hostility.

In the US, the ruling class sees people like Hartman as an irritating, stigmatized reminder of a past of exploitation and violence that they would rather forget. And in Ghana—the ruling class also sees people like Hartman as an irritating, stigmatized reminder of a past of exploitation and violence that they would rather forget.

People who were enslaved in Ghana, Hartman points out, tended to be the unfortunate—they were members of defeated tribes. They were criminals, the deviant, the undesirable, or just the unlucky. They were usually captured by Black people, and sold as a way to increase the power of the already powerful. People who were enslaved were, to some degree, by someone, unwanted. Their descendants are a source of tourist dollars, but they are not exactly welcomed.

Instead, Hartman argues, returned exiles are an uncomfortable reminder of how those exiles got exiled.

…those who stayed behind told different stories than the children of the captives dragged across the sea. Theirs wasn’t a memory of loss or of captivity, but of survival and good fortune. After all, they had eluded the barracoon, unlike my ancestors. They had been able to reconstruct shattered communities. Despite their present destitution, they had fashioned a narrative of liberation in which the glory of the past was the entry to a redeemed future. My narrative was a history of defeat, which at best was the precondition for a victory, long awaited, but that hadn’t yet arrived….

…things were different here [in Ghana]; everyone spoke of fighting slavery, but no one spoke of slaves. Their story of slavery was a narrative of victory, a tale of resistance and overcoming, in which the captives had been banished.

Zionists show their authenticity and rootedness by pillorying the diaspora. In Ghana, Hartman found, the survivors of those who escaped the slavers define themselves by that victory, which leaves little place for solidarity with those who did not escape. Strength; empowerment; a wide stance presiding over the land; injustice overcome and squashed—these are the stories that constitute the rootedness of national strength and national narrative. People and stories that can’t be easily affixed to those roots and triumphs are either erased or denigrated.

No one wants to see themselves as enslaved; no one wants to see themselves as an enslaver. Roots—carefully created, carefully nourished—tell you who you are and, even more importantly, tell you who you aren’t, or who you don’t want to be.

Be Who You Aren’t

Magid argues that exile is at the center of Jewish identity, and faith; for him exile is an experience of community. Hartman’s description of exile is substantially less valedictory. “I had been alienated from my peers as far back as I could remember,” she writes. “Even in first grade, I had played alone in the schoolyard, wrapping my head in my red sweater, pretending it was a nun’s habit and that I was Sister Madonna. In whatever group I found myself, I usually felt like an outsider.”

Magid puts himself in a tradition extending back generations. Hartman systematically lists the groups and traditions from which she is alienated: Black nationalists who saw Africa as a potential refuge; the current expatriate community; her own family, her own given name. Exile for Hartman is not a necessity; it’s an often bleak fact. People who have been enslaved are uprooted, and the roots can’t be reconnected.

Jewish tradition specifically rejects that argument or insight. Jewish people’s enslavement is part of a narrative of belonging to God; the story of exile is (at least arguably) a story of victorious becoming. Our roots are exile. It’s a promise and a strength.

But as both Magid and Hartman suggest, to seize a narrative rooted in promise and strength is to reject, or to exile, weakness, the weak, and the unrooted. If Jewishness is to be a light to the world, I think it’s not through a recognition of the Jewish core of exile, but rather through a recognition that Jewish exile prescribes no core. To be a light to the nations means recognizing there’s no one source of light. The past helps us learn who we are, and can be a source of resistance, of hope and of freedom. But also, sometimes, roots are chains.  

They will fill my limp skin
with wild dreams from their root
and grow from my flesh
new handfuls of hate.

—Audre Lorde