Living our Purpose: Dialogue and Action in International Community Building
Across the world, we face a crisis of Truth. How can we renew our ties to others across the World? How can we build intellectual and spiritual community across national and linguistic borders?
In my last article, I described how this blog aspires to provide space where Jewish ideas and ecological knowledge can come together in a fruitful dialogue to help us understand the ethical responsibility imbued in living engagement with technology and community. Jewish Ecology aims to help shed new light on how we can help build a vibrant network of Jewish and more-than-Jewish communities that can thrive together in the more-than-human World.
While lengthy articles and intricate conceptual frameworks can help us better grapple with our relations in the World, the scope of our project requires that bring all our tools to the table. Through this article, I hope to help make these efforts more accessible.
In an effort to anchor this project within this broader effort — across different technologies and goals — this article will delve into the specific context and relationships that connect this project to the Judaism of Uganda, the Abayudaya. Through this connection, this article will offer you three distinct technological formats for engagement, each of with the aims of ensuring that you, dear reader, can participate in the unfolding process of Jewish Ecology.
While my past articles have leaned heavily on prose and visual schemas, this article will introduce my creative work in the podcasting space. Over the past 6 months, I have been contributing to the collaborative project known as the Jewish Diasporist podcast – both as interviewer and interviewee. Through this work, I have come to better understand and appreciate the miraculous diversity of Jewish Life. This article serves to extend this insight, while also offering you an opportunity to help support with the richness of Jewish thriving and learning.
In Summer 2023, while working at a Jewish summer camp, I had the privilege of working with Tzion while running the Overnight/Nature programming at the URJ Camp Newman. Tzion is a pious and trailblazing Jewish scholar who holds fast to his Judaism. During some of our rare time off together, we recorded an interview in which Tzion shared many stories about both his life, and their broader context in the history and diversity of Abayudaya Jewish life. This interview was later released as episode 11 of the Jewish Diaspora podcast. Together, this podcast, alongside this article, aspire to help support Tzion in a broader mission – ensuring access to Jewish texts across the Abayudaya Jewish community.
You can learn more about this mission by checking out the fundraiser, and listening to the podcast below.
From Learning to Action: Fundraising for the Abayudaya
Throughout Tzion’s Jewish learning, he has been immersed in Jewish community and textual study, In the interview, he explains how his community has had limited access to Jewish translations of scripture – largely because the commonly read Luganda language had only been used for a Christian translation of the “Old Testament”. Tzion has used his learning, time and effort to translate the Torah into this language. I am working with Tzion to raise money to print enough copies to ensure each synagogue in Uganda has access to enough books for a minyan. You can find more information about this fundraiser here.
Additionally, if you would like to help extend the reach of this fundraising effort, please share this article and/or download our flyer to share in your Jewish community.
In the interview, Tzion and I take a delve into how unique context of Abayudaya Judaism, showing how their unique multilingual and intertextual tradition facilitates a potent approach to Torah study. Through the act of translation, language helps inspire deeper insights into our knowledge and understanding of the Holy Book.
Judaism in Uganda: The Story of the Abayudaya w/ Tzion Kaukira
Podcast time stamps:
0:00: introduction to this episode of the Jewish Diasporist Podcast
2:23 Start of Interview, providing context for this interview
3:35 Tzion’s life, growing up as a Jew navigating the structure of different Jewish communities across Uganda
9:00 Disagreement with minhag (ritual rules) and Tzion’s movement to different Jewish communities in Uganda
10:48 Lugwere, the tribal language of many Abayudaya Jews, and the community politics of movement
11:37 The genesis of the Abayudaya: Judaism, colonialism and the textual basis for power
14:15 Judaism and politics of Idi Amin’s dictatorship
17:00 The kibbutz that rebuilt Abayudaya Judaism
19:07 Abayudaya and international Jewish diversity: Denominations and conversions
23:38 the Abayudaya as an “emerging” community: The politics of jewish identity
24:00 Luganda as a vital language, through which Abayudaya find new insights in scripture. The importance of the cross-pollination of language, culture, and ethics: Sin and Fear as a case study for the importance of language
26:33 Language and Torah study: the importance of a Jewish translation. Multilingual community and study in the struggle for Truth. Implicit meaning in Luganda and English.
28:45 “These are the Words that you will speak to the people Yisrael” Exodus 19:6 as a case study for meaning in language. Is Yisrael a tribal people of a relational identity
32:27 Jewish identity, textual tradition, and finding one’s own Jewish path: navigating community and antisemitism
36:12 Colonialism, racism and Jewish resilience in Uganda and the USA
38:46 Abayudaya Joy: Finding meaning in this Life and after the violence of history
39:45 “Everything for the Good”: Subverting colonialism through revitalizing the living Torah.
43:25 Learning from Tzion’s Story: Connecting personal and communal history
46:02 Learning to Love being Jewish: What reform Judaism does best
46:48 Judaism beyond denominations: “What does it mean to be a Jew?”
49:51 Jewish community across the globe: Learning across the internet
A Poem
To (hopefully) help elaborates some of the key ideas came out in the recorded discussion, I have decided to write a poem. I hope to inspire a fuller appreciation of the centrality of language and the Book in shaping our understanding of Judaism’s evolution in the World. In a way, poetry is an act of translation – and it is only through translation that we can find modern meaning in our ancient Book. I hope the poem below resonates with you.
The Book
To write a book is to transform an idea
into letters and words and pages on end
until there is nothing left to say.
A book’s imbued with a fleeting moment
and sets it into stone,
Taking all that one finds in the world
and building from it a home.
A book moves from idea to tome,
but only in reading can words come to roam
through the minds of its readers.
A dialogue of minds: encountered as alive.
Who are we but the stories we tell?
And to be a Jew, our stories — our books
Are meant to be read aloud, again and again, we find
new meaning with each new look.
Maybe I should write a book.
But books are but words
Etched onto a page
My words are ever fleeting
Unbounded except in body
in place
in time
To write a book the words must be firm
Not flimsy or shifting or a varied with tone. Our words
can’t be empty
we’re etching in stone.
We Jews begin and end in Torah,
A Book of books, with words and letters and stories
set down in a time long gone
Whose meanings have shifted as generations spread
new languages arising at dawn.
Again and again our Book has been brought
Into new languages
And our culture not lost.
But with each new rendition
and each generation
Our study, its meaning, the depth of our knowing,
Our culture has diversified and our languages
multiplied, our Torah remains our common soul.
Our Word,
our language;
Rebuilt with each translation
Our stories,
our home,
in with each generation.
You may mourn change.
I celebrate it.
Everything for the Good
We are many,
we are one,
but our words are shattered,
flattened,
A dead echo of a breath long forgotten.
A word without life is a body without breath.
In speaking together,
many languages;
common ground.
We seek Truth.
Unless we come together;
mending a broken breath,
filling up our words to tether
Our life to all that is.
Alone we are a candle,
Together we are a sun;
But remaining in a broken world,
Our words amount to none.
A book can be a universe,
The natural world a book,
Between the words,
and lines,
and pages,
The World amounts to One.
We stand here in a dialogue
In language, minds entwined;
We seek truth here before us,
Its meaning beyond all rhyme
Through showing how three different forms of communication — podcast, fundraiser, and poetry — can be interwoven to help integrate our ideas and our actions, this article aimed to show what it might look like to unify our goals and technologies with our values.
Thank you for engaging with the Jewish Ecology blog. I hope you appreciated this different form of article, and I did not find my poetry too off putting or discombobulating. Please let me know if these alternative forms of engagement were helpful for you. Feel free to share your thoughts (and to subscribe) below!