Rabbi Haim (formerly Jaime) Casas: "Why do I have to limit myself?" (3/8/18)

Rabbi Haim Casas is the first Spanish-born rabbi of Andalusia since Spain's passing of the infamous 1492 Edict of Expulsion.

Casas has made clear that he is much more than an epithet. He holds -- and is -- so much. But I've found it impossible to separate him from his history.

This piece unpacks the complex legacies of Spain's Golden Age and of Sephardic Jewry, Casas' own story as a descent of anusim, the ubiquitous consequences of globalism, and my own conclusions regarding our misunderstandings about majority culture.

portrait by Gabrielle Amar

It took maybe about half an hour for it to hit, but once it delivered, the message approached me in full force like a comet on fire or a billboard in flashing lights: “this is the most amazing place you have ever been to.”

The place has a beautiful and reserved exterior. Inside it, however, lies an unapologetic frenzy. I felt like I was standing inside the innards of a body, caught between the structural equivalents of a brain on fire, contracting pink-pearly slippery organ linings, a gurgling stomach, a heart pumping on overdrive, blue and red and purple veins crossing every which way like train tracks. The space is teemed with different colors and separate elements. Its busyness was weirdly familiar. Pulsating through the medieval structure was a multitude of elements different but reminiscent of the multiple functions happening inside my own body. Also pulsating through it was a schizophrenia similar to the kind branding my own thoughts and actions, and a mesh of cultures similar to the ever-increasing globalism of our time.

The site is not unique for its different styles. Any preserved historical site doubles also as a metaphorical tel, holding strata of cultural influence, offering insight into a world that once was and the peoples that developed it, and offering perspective on how it compares to contemporary cultures. Jerusalem, Jericho, Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Isfahan, Fez, Edinburgh, Varanasi, Toledo: these cities all offer us, the current generation, historical “hand-me-downs,” structures that were worn down and built upon over the years, and often repurposed at the hands of different people.

Romantic, isn’t it? When you use that kind of language, history sounds fun and transparent. But it’s not, at least from my experience. I could never understand the narrators of my history textbooks, who tried to engender an excitement in their reader from explaining the crumbling remains of an early agricultural village or the stone infrastructures of medieval fortresses. History has tried to capture and keep people’s interest by marketing lessons and tours as forms of time travel. And no matter how hard a tour guide would try, or how passionate the anonymous PBS anchor voice seemed, the history that physical places reflect has, for most of my life, felt very distant, and even -- I hope my teachers aren’t reading this -- irrelevant. What we often see in historical sites are not worlds untouched, with human ideas and interactions preserved, but physical shards that depend on human imagination, research, and interpretation to be pieced together. A structure’s meaning is usually found in its illinear developments: in the curves of conversations, in the bounds of disagreements, in the turns of time. Structures usually lose their meaning because all that is usually left for us to experience from their development is, at best, the final, clean, well-preserved physical outcome, and at worst, the few weathered building-blocks or bones. (That's not to say that there's nothing to learn from physical structures or their remnants.)

I like to think of my past experiences of trying to understand historical sites in their totality this way: when I write essays, I often feel like my rough drafts and tens of Google search tabs and half-scribbled hand-drawn outlines reveal much more about my voice and thought process than the more polished paper I (sometimes) submit to teachers. My really good friend Gabrielle once told me that the way I write bears no similarity to the way I speak, which is probably more true than I initially wanted to believe. My ideas sometimes fill my mind with so much turmoil that I can’t finish a sentence without stuttering or ditching it completely for a new one. History understands my dilemma, I like to think. I understand history as the net sum of all human turmoil. It’s often tongue-tied, confused, and incapable of completing a single idea, let alone following a clear, single, logical path. But all we know and see is the final product: clean, solid, eternalized and far separate from its creator -- both in textbooks or in its remaining structures.

But my experience in the Mesquita of Cordoba's old town center was different from all other past experiences that had colored the disconnect I just described. My visit to Cordoba’s Mosque-Cathedral was a unique experience because I had never before encountered a historical narrative that felt so lively. The Mesquita is not a portal and does not require a time traveling machine. It’s a breathing organism. Entering the Mesquita is listening to a raging voicemail from a raucous past and calling the number back. It’s slipping into the gushing streams of history’s vivid subconscious. It’s beginning to recognize the spirit of exchange that orbits and influences our physical spaces, and it’s beginning to recognize that history begins to resonate (I speak for myself here) where it meets the imagination.

The Mesquita’s different pieces coalesce into a whole more disparate than its parts. It’s the final product of a tumultuous series of conquests and centuries of expansion -- all of whose influences still remain and can still be seen by its visitors. It was first the site of a Roman pagan temple, then the Visigothic church of Basilica of Saint Vincent. The same structure was transformed into a mosque in the 758 by the Umayyads shortly after the Muslim conquest of Spain in 711. It was decided that the Basilica would be split in half: part mosque and part church. It was then rebuilt and expanded by the Umayyads as a mosque, and then following the Reconquista and Christian recapture of the city in the 1200’s, a cruciform Renaissance style church -- the Cathedral of Our Lady of Assumption -- was built in the center of the mosque and expanded until the 18th century with Gothic and Baroque elements. The Mesquita spans a milenia of different cultural and architectural and religious elements, manifested in its Roman, Byzantine, Greek, Moorish, Renaissance, Gothic, and Baroque styles.

Standing before me was a 24,000 square meter expanse and a forest of nearly 900 columns. During its first stage of development, the mosque held only 120 columns, which were repurposed from Roman pagan temples, and Byzantine and Visigothic buildings. (For example, the fairly unreligious Umayyads had repurposed materials with Roman symbols to build their water troughs, and their successors, the Abbasids, had kept them, but slashed the heads of Roman pagan figures because of Islam’s forbiddance of iconography.) Some columns hold Corinthian flare. Others are Ionic. The oldest columns stand on plinths to balance their varying heights; newer ones made under abda-al Rahman II were made without bases and were adorned in greater detail, including leaf details to represent the caliphs. Columns’ shafts were made of limestone, and later ones were made of white jasper, green marble or granite, and were positioned in alternating patterns. Supported by these different columns hovers a canopy of the Mesquita’s famous Visigothic Horseshoe arches, whose voussoirs alternate between dark red brick and sand-colored limestone. The Mesquita’s roof is adorned in gold and deep-colored floral lattice work, as well as floor-to-ceiling art pieces of Arabic calligraphy.

With one turn, a few steps, or a look in a different direction were Gothic vaults and Renaissance beams painted in white and frosted with gold detail. As I approached the center of the mosque, the grand Cathedral unfolded. The wooden Baroque choir stands as a great mass of wood, carved with two floors of seats stained a brown so deep that the color resembles the blackness of coffee. The choir is decorated in fully, curly, floral carvings, and above the seats lies an organ, and above it, high white walls and ceilings with more gold Renaissance detail from which light steams through long glass windows. The baroque altar facing the choir is flushed in pastels and gold and the angelic faces of saints and angels I couldn’t recognize. It rises many stories high to reach the level of the skylight. Lining the mosque’s periphery, made through the columns, were individual rooms: gold chambers decorated with oil portraits of saints housed in gold frames, and in some of them, chests of relics.

~

Cordoba holds an illustrious history, one that is reflected by many monuments, among them the Mesquita. Spain, under Muslim rule, ushered in a period of artistic and scientific exploration and cultural flourishing known as the “Golden Age.” Perhaps “gilded” would be more appropriate in some contexts than “golden.” “Golden” is misleading, since it falsey warrants that this period was one of total peace and religious tolerance, where all citizens stood on equal social and political footing. This period did, however, foster connections between Jews, Muslims and Christians -- not necessarily out of a pursuit for peace but a pursuit for greater knowledge. Competitive intellectual and academic pursuits demanded cooperation between translators, mathematicians, astronomists, writers, and philosophers who were of different religious and cultural backgrounds. Thus, the pursuit for greater knowledge and understanding also demanded the inevitable crossing and breaking of religious and cultural boundaries.

With colors and darting designs at every turn, the Mesquita’s aforementioned familiarity aroused symbols deeper and more personal than that of a physical body. I told my good friend Charlotte half-jokingly that exploring the Mesquita was like looking into a mirror and seeing a reflection of my identity’s own disparate pieces (because, knowing me, everything has to relate back to identity; it’s developed from being the lens to the very focus of my learning, which has its own set of complications to be discussed later). My parents carry with them the influences of their respective majority cultures: from my Persian side, Islamic culture, and from my Scottish side, Christianity (though Scotland's Protestants would’ve been among the first to criticize the church’s iconography). It’s not logical or the most accurate comparison, but it’s a testament to well, first and foremost, how I, in the most sincere and non-self deprecating way possible, am the center of my own world; and second, and more importantly, how honestly the Mesquita’s structures reflect its vivid past.

The Mesquita also represents the reality of cross-cultural interaction laced throughout our history and our cultures’ developments. Globalization is not a mere phenomenon that has sprung up in the last thirty years. I found it compelling that Muslims rulers were initially fine with repurposing and using items with pagan symbols, or Greek/Byzantine architecture. And I found it equally curious that following the Reconquista, when it came time to establishing another church to worship humanity’s savior, Jesus, and to continue to spread the political power of Christianity’s universal truth across Europe, a place built by and for infidels was deemed suitable without being torn down.

The Mesquita is what we each represent as individuals who speak and think and feel and act differently at different times, who change not by forgetting or eradicating past memories or experiences but by building off of them. The Mesquita is also what we represent collectively, as bearers of multiple lineages, or as the descendents of recent single lineages that were once influenced by other cultures.

Mexican-American writer Luis Alberto Urrea said this of the English language: “English! It’s made up of all of these untidy words, man, have you noticed? Native American (skunk), German (waltz), Danish (twerp), Latin (adolescent), Scottish (feckless)... It’s a glorious wreck (a good old Viking word, that). Glorious. I say, in all its shambling, mutable beauty. People daily speak a quilt work of words, and continents and nations and tribes and even enemies dance all over your mouth when you speak.”

Food is another good example to demonstrate my point. If you’re Persian, the “traditional” food you eat was influenced by the Chinese (noodles in your ashereshte), Indians (your dugh and various spices), Russians (salad oliviyeh is based off of a Russian egg salad), the Mongols, various regions in east-Asia, and the Turks. If you’re American, the differentiation between different cultures may seem more clear. We may recognize that pizza, shepherd pot pie and tacos do not hold American roots. But do we realize to what extent? We may recognize Chai tea is not American, but it’s not “authentically” Indian either since tea was brought over to India by the British. Our pasta in pomodoro sauce is neither American nor “authentically” Italian, or our chocolate “authentically” Swiss since both tomatoes and cocoa are native to the Americas. (I give credit to Yuval Noah Hararri for this one.)

But it’s also interesting to consider that as people engaged in a cross-cultural world, the cultures we adopt are simultaneously affected and influenced by our own culture. (This is a generalization, of course, and its truth varies with a country’s global power and influence.) Our spicy tuna with extra spicy mayo may seem Japanese, our orange chicken Chinese, our burritos Mexican, yet these foods were never developed in their originals countries. They’re all American creations though branded as “ethnic” foods.

The Mesquita represents the cross-cultural interactions and fusion of traditions that have eternalized medieval Cordoba. Of course, what remains today is mainly memory. Cordoba had been liquidated of its sizable Jewish (and Muslim) population long ago in the infamous year of 1492, and with the expulsion, the illustrious connections forged between Spanish Jews, Muslims, and Christians. There are plenty of tourist shops who now profit off of the city’s history by merely selling keychains and menorahs and Spanish tiles and crosses embranded with “Cordoba: The City of the Three Faiths” or “COEXIST.”

Jerusalem is also regarded as a center for the Abrahamic faiths, but its lacks cooperation between them; It’s interesting to me that both cities today profit off of tourism, even though neither have actualized their potential for a present peace among active populations. People today go to Cordoba to learn about the enduring legacy of extinct peoples; people go to Jerusalem to see peoples of an extinct collective legacy.

This is a generalization, of course. There are people who have dedicated their lives to breathing life back into places of rich history and colliding cultural traditions. What is the enduring legacy of Cordoba, and more specifically, its Sephardi Jewish population? This is where Rabbi Haim Casas comes in.

~

Rabbi Haim Casas was born Jaime Casas. He was born and raised in a Catholic home in Cordoba, Spain. During Jaime’s childhood, his family cleaned their home before the weekend and ate hamim on Saturday. (Hamim is chulant, and it is still eaten on Saturday in Spain today. Following the Expulsion, pork was added to the recipe to rid the stew of its Jewish influence and to keep away suspecing authorities.) Jaime’s grandpa took him to Cordoba’s Jewish quarter every Sunday. When he was older, Jaime worked in the Memorial de le Shoah in Paris. That was when he stumbled upon the file of Isaac Casas: a Salonikan Jew deported to Auschwitz. This led Jaime, who had adopted his mother’s family, to probe further into his patrilineal family history. He realized that his father’s family name, “Sanchez-Leyva,” closely resembles the last name “Levy,” the surname of descendents of ancient Hebrew cantors.

I asked Haim if he experienced one pivotal “aha!” moment when he realized that he was the descendent of anusim, Jews who were threatened to be killed if they didn’t convert to Christianity. I asked him if there was some clear and obvious turning point that changed his identity, and led him to jump fully into Judaism. “No, he told me.” He described his process of returning to Judaism as “organic” and slow, beginning when he was 15 and ending when he was 24.

Haim is the first Spanish-born rabbi of Cordoba (and Andalusia) since the 1492 Expulsion. I resist to introduce Casas with this; on a two hour bus drive from Seville to Cordoba, the respective points of two of Rabbi Casas’ projects, Makom Sefaraad (whose programs aim to establish dialogue between diverse bodies modeled after Spain’s history of coexistence) and Casa de Sefaraad (a Sephardic Jewish museum), I asked Casas to divulge more about the experiential and existential challenges in rediscovering his Jewish roots. “I want to be known for what I am doing and not for my story,” he told me. I deeply respect his integrity. Haim has no interest in capitalizing upon a name or upon a history that, while no longer vibrant in its place of origin, has survived as an enduring cultural rival to Ashkenazi Judaism (and other Jewish traditions that the faulty Sephardic-Ashkenazi duality has wiped clean from mainstream collective Jewish memory). Even though Haim’s focus on community work and legacy is noble, the story behind his Jewish identity and his vision for rebuilding Sephardic Judaism in Spain are deeply intertwined in my eyes.

Casas represents many things. He represents a strong community whose Jews, after 500 years of exile, still proudly identity as Sepharadim, still pray with Sephardic melodies, and still cook Sephardic foods. It’s incredible, considering that Jews who descend from the traditions of Mizrachi communities, or the Bene Israel of India, or the Amazeer in Morocco, or the Romaniotes in Greece are less well-known to the world. Despite the physical distance, Sephardim’s loyalty to Spain haven’t wavered. Casas represents a people, a rich cultural heritage and spirit, that never died.

On the other hand, Rabbi Casas, who was raised as a Catholic and whose Jewish roots were not known to him -- and probably wouldn’t have been had it been for that serendipitous research find -- also represents a new reality for the Jewish people, a change of face and experience.

Rabbi Casas went to law school. He then met my program’s founder, who encouraged him to pursue rabbinical school. Rabbi Casas was ordained last summer, in July of 2017, at the Leo Baeck College in London, a rabbinical seminary for progressive Judaism. Thus, Casas not only represents a chasm between a people’s tradition and change in its population or physical relation to its center, but perceived tensions in trying to bridge that chasm: as both a progressive future-seeker, and simultaneous tradition-builder.

What are you to do, when you hold the position of a community leader for a community that is just beginning to grow again? What are you to do as someone who assumed the position of reviving and cultivating religious tradition in a place where most of its religious ties have been cut, and its cultural influences buried? How do you cover lost ground, and connect two time periods that have been breached? And how do you do this in a country that it predominantly secular, and whose many bearers of Jewish blood don’t even know about their Jewish roots?

How you relate to progressivism is a universal dilemma for anyone who belongs to an older tradition, but this question is much more intense in Spain, where things are so well-mixed and almost everything is tinged with a bit of doubt.

Rabbi Casas told me that we need to recognize that there is a difference in culture between the Jews of Spain from 500 years ago and of the same population today; they’re different people. “We are not those people anymore,” he told me. “People aren’t conscious of times changing. They aren’t conditioned by the past. The times go beyond us, even if we change in our lifetime.”

While he was referring to the customs of Spanish Jews pre-Expulsion, his statement could refer to a host of things that have nothing to do with the Sephardim or Jewish people as a whole. We know more as a society about science, we’re living in a faster-paced, more technologically-advanced and far more globalized world than the generation previous. Our social norms and values have and are continuing to rapidly evolve. Rabbi Casas told me that the last thing he wants to do is create a “Sephardic Disneyland” in trying to rebuild Sephardic Judaism. “What is authentic, what is pure?” he asked me. There’s a great irony when we talk about experiencing and building cultures: “when we try to be authentic, we do something artificial.”

Sephardic Jews were never ghettoized, and interacted with outside cultures, evolving and adapting to new elements it crossed. Casas’ own expression of his Sephardic Judaism is influenced by Spanish culture -- but the way he relates to and practices Judaism is not necessarily relevant for other Sephardic Jews living in and outside of Spain. “The most authentic Sephardic Judaism, “ Casas said, was “never insular” and remains that way. The question resurfaces: what is authentic, what is pure, and also what is insular?

The interesting thing to consider -- and this Rabbi Casas stresses -- is that there is no singular, authentic expression of Sephardic Judaism, just as there is no “fake” Sephardic Judaism. This reality holds true both in the Sephardic diaspora and within Spain today.

Sephardic Judaism is not a mere reflection of Spanish culture, as French Judaism is of French culture or Polish Judaism of Polish culture. Sephardic Judaism is a little bit more complicated. When Casas says Sephardic Judaism was never and still is not insular, he doesn’t mean that it only interacted with Spain’s majority culture or the different cultural influences that comprise it (as showcased in the Mesquita). Sephardic Judaism is not only the product of exchanges between Spanish Jews and Spanish Muslims and Spanish Christians; Sephardic Judaism is more than the fusion of knowledge of Midieval poets and astronomers and philosophers and rabbis.

Sephardic Judaism is not only an expression of Spain’s internal diversity. Sephardic Judaism is also a diaspora identity. After the 1492 expulsion, Sephardic Jews migrated to places far and wide, among them Greece, Morocco, Italy, France, Algeria, Turkey, Bulgaria, the Levant, and even Iran! Therefore, Casas understands that his vision for reimagining and recreating his Sephardic Judaism in Spain involves a Sephardic Judaism that is different from the expressions of Judaism for Sephardic diaspora communities, which have lived outside of Spain for multiple centuries. What connects Rabbi Casas to global Sephardic Jewry is their shared roots, not a contemporary shared culture. Even though he is “devoted to preserve [diiaspora Sephardic Jews’] legacy and memory” through various cultural projects, Rabbi Casas reminded me that he remains Spanish -- “very Spanish.” Part of recognizing the repercussions of the 1492 expulsion and the Diaspora’s refractive influence on Sephardic Judaism’s multiple expressions is recognizing the reality of Haim’s own Sephardic Judaism. His Judaism is “totally influenced by [his] Spanish identity.”

That’s not to say that Casas’ expression of Sephardic Judaism is any more dissimilar from Sephardic diaspora Jewry than from Sephardic Jews currently living in Spain. Sephardic Jews who are currently living in Spain also have their own individual way of expressing this complex and rich and diverse and dynamic lineage -- and their own right to pursue a vision that differs from Casas’. This internal diversity is what’s “most authentic” and natural, and is also part of what Casas was referring to when he described Sephardic Judaism as anything but insular. Sephardic Judaism has not only absorbed other cultures and integrated into different national identities, but has broken down internal unified or exclusive organizations common for defined nations. Within individual nations and their own cultures, Sephardic Judaism continues to perpetuate the diversity of the diaspora (and of medieval Spain) on a more intimate scale.

There's a great irony to all of this. Ferdinand and Isabella tried to rid Spain of its Jews and Muslims and their influence with the 1492 Edict of Expulsion. Spain's leadership envisioned an insular Spanish culture, similar to how many of us envision and believe in the existence of a distinctly Jewish culture. And here is Andalusia's first rabbi in 500 years, whose lineage had been buried by the Spanish authorities, and is now claiming Spanish culture to be what fostered his own Jewish identity and Sephardic Judaism's global lineage. There seems to be no escaping this global reality, not just for us Jews, but for all people, even the powerful Ferdinand and Isabella.

I want to return to an earlier point Rabbi Casas mentioned, which is that Spanish culture has strongly influenced him. Rabbi Casas didn’t say this explicitly, but from my conclusion, I think his story argues that the tension between majority culture and religious identity is illusory. That’s not to say we don’t face difficulty in navigating majority culture as a minority. I just think the problem is misunderstood. We like to frame the tension we experience as a tension between culture and culture. But if Judaism is most authentic when it’s representative of greater culture, as Sephardic Judaism is -- as are all other Jewish communities around the world -- then it’s not so much an issue of how people eat, drink, celebrate, think, paint, speak, love, communicate, or play sports. Rabbi Casas (and diaspora Jewry in general) have led me to the conclusion that the inevitable tension that Jews live in, the compromises we’ve had to make, the dissonance we’ve embraced and integrated into what’s become a normal day-to-day struggle, really exists between religion and religion.

I think we often tend to confuse identity as a whole with religious observance/tradition. Even if countries are secular, the remnants of religious practice and theology still influence and reverberate throughout cultures. For example, America is secular, yet culturally-Christian. All 45 of its presidents have been Christian, and this has dictated annual White House Christmas and Easter events and traditions. Stores and restaurants close early on Sunday, since it’s seen as a “holy day” -- and for young people who seek no religion other than hedonism, they, too, can satisfy their Sunday spiritual needs through the ritual of brunch. I think American culture (egalitarianism, individualism, liberty) have greatly impacted American Judaism. At the same time, I think the threatening part of American majority culture on American Judaism lies in its Christian culture, which doesn’t accommodate Shabbat or kashrut rules. That’s the root of the tension: not how minority and majority culture relate to one another, but how the religious influences on both greater cultures relate to one another.

Rabbi Casas’ weariness of the word “authentic” reminds me a lot of what Noah Yuval Hararri wrote in Sapiens: “Natural” is teleological. Naturalness is a Christian concept, founded upon the idea that God, the creator of nature, endowed all of nature with a purpose aligned with God’s design. We’ve convinced ourselves that we possess a “natural” biological purpose, yet we’ve forgotten that our bodies have evolved, and their purposes too. We used our mouths once to collect only air. Now we use them to communicate, to transfer air from our lungs into blow-up latex balloons, to suck thick milkshakes from straws, to kiss. Anything -- a little baby, time, tradition, a company, a romance, a lunch break -- can be seen through the arc of a symbolic evolution. Things change. Change is what is most natural, just as it’s often what’s, paradoxically, most authentic.

Casas described a scenario to explain his point: he took my two RA’s one night out to a Spanish bar when we were in Spain. An old flamenco song about the Virgin Mary started to play. It’s an old Spanish classic, and Rabbi Casas loves the melody. Did he sing? “Of course I did,” he told me. “It’s part of who I am.”

“Why do I have to limit myself?” Casas turned to me. “I find the scheina [holy, divine presence of God] not always in a synagogue, but sometimes in studying Christian and Muslim mysticism. [Did] this all have to stop [when I became a rabbi]?”

Rabbi Casas taught me that Mary was influenced by depictions of the feminine in Phoenician cultures in Southern Spain. The date of Rosh Hashanah coincides with the Babylonian new year in the Hammurabi codes. Santa Tarese and John the Cross, important mystical figures in Christianity, were both of of Marrano backgrounds.

“Why be a Jew then?” immediately popped into my mind. Pluralism, in all of its post-modern glory, is praised for blurring distinctive national and cultural and religious lines. The post-modern person is a cultural commuter, stripped of loyalty to a single tradition or nation, constantly swapping cultures to enjoy a common humanity, one whose facets are open for all to explore, adopt, switch, and enjoy. But this is not Casas’ vision or practice. He hasn’t severed himself from his own roots to understand the world.

It’s the classic debate of particularism and universalism, except not really. It’s not so much of a strong or relevant debate, because the cultural legacy of Sephardim -- one that existed 500 years ago, and is probably one of the few things that’s run continuously since the Expulsion and remains true today in Haim Casas’ life -- is a fusion of the two pieces that many of us (regardless of our political and religious orientations) have deemed contradictory and irreconcilable.

It’s important, however, to not get the impression that majority culture and Judaism are not engaged in a constant and equal flow of exchange: “I understand Catholic culture better through Judaism, not Judaism through greater culture.”

It’s taken me a very long time to understand this. Casas doesn’t commute between cultures. He lives as a Jew. Not an assimilated Jew, whose understanding of Christian culture will, at a given moment, suspend his own Judaism. The way he accepts and makes sense of other cultures through the particulars of his own identity trumps everything I thought I understood about living in a diverse, pluralistic society.

I was assigned an excerpt of Mills’ Sociological Imagination a few years ago and reread it recently. Mills describes a necessary and new skill set that the modern person must adopt: he/she must be able to develop a two-tiered consciousness, one rooted in their own culture and personal experience, and one rooted in the developments of other cultures. To live in a society today, one must be able to quickly disassociate from one consciousness and slip into another quickly. That sounds like a normal convention for a Jew living in a diverse metropolitan city today: compromise, suspension, change.

It was also hard for me to understand how Rabbi Casas relates to majority culture considering that I just got back from a year of traveling to other countries and visiting their Jewish populations. I feel like I’ve made better sense of myself -- in many aspects, not just in a religious sense -- by studying the other. Learning about other traditions is how I’ve come to my Jewish pride, studying other national liberation movements is how I’ve better understood the imperative of and reasoning behind Zionism, learning others’ stories is how I’m starting to discover the beginnings of my own interests. I place a lot of credit on other people in how they’ve influenced and created me. But now I’m starting to think I have been learning and making sense of things through the prism of my own experience this whole time, too. My experience at the Mesquita perhaps wasn’t a self-centered single incident, a shortcoming of my inability to disassociate from a tier of personal consciousness and slip into a larger global one. Instead, it was indicative of a larger process of learning that I can accommodate the world’s differences, that I don’t need to disassociate for the world to accommodate me.

In one of his essays in the Insecurity of Freedom, Heschel wrote that the question we must always ask ourselves is not “what can I get out of the world?” but “what can the world can get out of me?” I think -- I hope! -- this is what lies at the essence of Rabbi Casas’ vision for Sephardi Judaism, and Cordoba’s rich history of coexistence. Perhaps this sentiment is what will also help us different spaces without having to compromise ourselves. (After all, my body takes up its own space.)

To listen to our conversation:

https://audiomack.com/song/kayla-1583/chaim