A Journal of Mystical Inclinations Toward the One

Arianne

April 21, 2006

My Abrahamic Identity

"You speak Arabic?"
"No"
"Yes you do...look at your face. Where are you from?"
"Toronto"
"No...no you are not from Toronto - where are you from?"
"My mother was born in Egypt"
"Ahh...you do speak Arabic then"
"No"

The nice man who sells me my zataar continues to speak to me in Arabic to this day...four years later...convinced that I am just playing with him.

The man at the gas station in Albany sees me and greets me a confident "Salam Alekum'
I return the greeting, "Alkum Salam"
Peace is with us as I buy my gum.
Little does he know I am Jewish.

The man on the bus asks me if I am "one of those Israeli girls" becuase I have such curly hair.

I have made one of my closets Montreal friends because he approached me in a cafe and asked if I was Jewish...I asked him if he was Chinese...we were both right and now he lives across the road.

Does it really matter what my conception of myself is when other people seem to be able to decide for me?

Is it a certain malleability that I portray that allows me to mesh into many cultures?

Or is it just my hair?

It is no accident that I look this way and as hard as I try to conceive of myself as a white Canadian at times the Arab woman in bounces back and says “wake up!”

The Arab identity is so much more romantic....granted my mother left Egypt before she was one and my grandparents were not even born there - but yet we remain Egyptian - and Egypt is our country!

Nations aside it is the feeling of the Arab world that shows up in the women of my family that intrigues me - with them fire, emotion, yelling, crying, cooking, interrupting is all part of the religion.
We are Jewish - this is certain - but every now and again those lines get blurred when I come across a Christian or a Muslim from the Arab world who I immediately connect with

Take for example, Ahmed, the infamous owner and controller of the now closed narghileh bar, Nefrettit in Montreal. His very exclusive - and some would say fickle choice of who his customers could be presented a challenge for some friends and I who longed to be members of his mysterious club. We got in and were devout and customers who played by the rules. He loved us and we loved him but I never told him I was Jewish. Years later it slipped that I was Jewish...my shoulders tensed....would he hate me....no...he just giggled and then told me about his favourite Jewish friends...crisis non-existent.

He liked me because I am "Egyptian" and because I followed his rules.

Religion did not matter.

Does religious identity matter as much as we think it does?

I work in a Multi-Faith Chaplaincy
They know about my Sufi connections...but to date it still feels like a very personal part of my spiritual process.
I can talk to other Sufis no problem but to a Catholic...it feels harder...my assumptions are large and my fears of being judged and boxed in are larger.
I went through a time of panic recently
What if the world knows i am Sufi?!
I tell the world I am Jewish because I am
I let the Arabs think I am Arab because I am.
I don’t really care if they think I am Muslim because it feels like somewhere way back someone in my family could have been....or at very least Arabic prayers ring true and familiar in my heart the way Hebrew ones do.

A story:
About a month ago I was walking down the sunny Sunday Montreal street in wonderful company of my smoking friend when we pass a clearly very drunk man who asks my friend for a smoke.
We stop.
He smokes.
I compliment the drunk man on his necklace.
It is a metal circle with small metal balls all around it.
It looked clearly Christian to me and due to my long time obsession with all things Christian and symbolic (especially in the form of accessories) I had to tell him I liked it.
His eyes got wide and said, "You know about this?"
I responded, "kind of."
He rambled on for a while until I figured out he was trying to explain to me what the balls represented...he said they remind him that Jesus fell many times and got back up
I understood
"The stations of the cross right?" I said.
He began to cry.
Suddenly there on the street a drunk man cried because I knew what his necklace meant.
I knew it because I got a crash course in the stations of the cross when I was in Jerusalem once and tagged along with a group of gospel pilgrims as they walked from station to station, cried and sang.
And there at the corner of Duluth and St. Denis
I was a Christian to a man who needed to meet one.

This was a defining moment for me.
One where I could remember that it is not the label on my heart that matters but just that I use it.
That I let it be free of labels for moments like that.
It felt as though in that moment my work became clear.
This is what interfaith means to me.
It means seeing somebody else just as they are and being okay with that – remembering too that an acknowledgement of another person’s path in no ways threatens the depth or integrity of my own.

The challenge is to also do that with myself.
As Passover approaches I am more Jewish than ever.
Speaking daily to my mother on the phone about foods, discussions and guests for the big first seder.
She asked me to lead the seder so I begin to reflect upon the story of exodus and feel it within my system....and I am excited
yet that day on the street I felt the stations of the cross
and in Istanbul I felt that call to prayer
Is that bad?

Or did that prophet Abraham really start something for us monotheists? Maybe I don't need to have all the answers now.
After all, it is just the first issue of saffron.
This is the first attempt at conceiving of my Abrahamic identity.

Posted by Arianne at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Biography

Arianne was walking through a corn field one night taking a shortcut home when she saw a mysterious blue light. She never speaks of what happened next, but animals have been inexplicably drawn to her ever since. They're always spamming her at arianne@saffronjournal.org.

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