tattoos
license plates
bumper stickers
icons
get a life
or brands, at least
I have been struck over the last year in particular by the power of marketing . But it isn’t new; it’s just that I’ve paid more attention to how it is done. We are so poised to accept these masks. It makes things easier to know what to expect. So when I stood around my first Shabbos in Queens over 30 years ago, with a friend, also new in town, who was besheiteled and pregnant, the ladies in shul all looked at her and looked right through me.
That’s okay. I knew from that I would need to find a different shul. It wasn’t the right brand for me.
Can’t we all get along, people?
No.
I like to pretend I’m a mystery and that I don’t fit in easily to a little category, but really, I do. And I have to be aware of it to be honest. It doesn’t mean that we can’t break out of our boxes every once in a while, but…
I just finished reading Jeffrey Rosen’s The Unwanted Gaze. He talks about the erosion of privacy in the modern world. The irony is that he was lambasted for speaking out against Sotomayor, but it was really sloppy editing that did him in. So in his own way, he got thrown into a box, even though he was looking to keep people from looking into our boxes. He states that we all have our masks for different occasions, and that’s okay. Well, he was quoting someone, but I’m too lazy to go find out which person that was; I think it was a German somebody.
I was part of a conference this past week (thus my silence for a while) dealing with Authenticity. The fact is, I realized, unless you are big enough of a macher, you can’t afford to be really authentic. You can quote other people who have the same feelings as you about any kind of thing, but you really can’t afford to admit weakness or doubts without undermining your authority. So authentic is something you can be in your private realm, but not too far out into the ocean. The waves are too strong.
I think that is one reason that we daven in the plural, especially in public, especially in the upcoming prayers of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. When we say “Ashamnu, Bagadnu…”, the alphabetical listing of our sins, and we always use the plural, because we can’t afford to admit that it is ours privately, but we can’t afford to not admit it at all.
This is a good mask,
brand,
bumper sticker.
I am glad to use it for now.
