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If you live in a place like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or Jerusalem,
Israel, or even Los Angeles, California, it's not all that unusual to see a man
pass by wearing a yarmulke. Hell, it's not even that out of place to see a
group of blackhat Orthodox Jews walking down the street, all jabbering away in
Yiddish about a passage in Gemora that they all interpret differently. If you
live in a place like that.
But if you live in San Francisco, or Berkeley, or Marin, or Oakland,
such things are not commonplace. In fact, it's extremely rare to see even just
a small, black, crocheted kipah on a man's head as he passes you by on Market
Street.
So it's understandably a source of interest when you're on the Muni
and an Orthodox Jew, complete with tzitzis (fringes) and yarmulke, steps on
and sits besides you. It's probably even weirder if the Jew happens to be
daavening at the moment.
We all know the feeling. We're in a public place of some kind, and
someone with an odd appearance enters the stage. They could be a Muslim wearing
a turban, or a heavily pierced man, or even just someone who is unfortunately
obese. We were all taught from a young age that it's impolite to stare, but we
can't help it. We feel drawn to the oddity. It sucks us in; we can't help but
ogle, as if at some kind of creeping, crawling, insect. And it never once
occurs to us how the person being stared at must feel.
This happens to me all the time, although I'm not always the starer.
I'm actually about half the time the object of the staring.
But it no longer puts me off when I'm sitting on the subway reading a
book, and I get that feeling you get when people are looking at you. It no
longer surprises me. I can hardly expect people not to stare, after all, how
many Orthodox Jews are there in the Bay Area?
There's the occasional muttered slur, the easily detectable
discomfort of the person next to whom I'm sitting. But I've discovered from
experience that it's better not to get involved.
But this past week, as I returned to my home after getting off the
43, I passed a Sikh family sitting on a bus stop. All seven heads turned 180
degrees in a very Looney Toones-esque fashion. As soon as I was a few yards
away (maybe they thought I was out of earshot, or maybe they didn't really
care), they started jabbering away in Hindi, in loud, excited
voices.
I don't know what they were saying; I don't speak any Hindi. But this
much was clear: They were definitely talking about the Jew in the tzitzis and
yarmulke.
Normally I'd say they couldn't be accused of anything besides a lack
of manners. But in this case, it was a family of Sikhs, all seven of whom wore
religious garb. The men had turbans, the women had saris...the whole
deal.
With this family, it seems all too likely that they've been subject to
plenty of staring as well. So I thought, what right do you have to subject me
to the discomfort that you likely experience just as much as I do? It's no
longer an issue of where your manners have gone, I just want to know what's
become of your pride.
I was ticked, and it didn't help that the stares continued all the
way home, from every damned pedestrian I passed, including the little boy who
opened his mouth and quickly got a hand in his face from his mother.
It's a crime we're all guilty of, every last one of us. But that
doesn't make it any more excusable.
Looks can kill, and we are all murderers. We all talk about the need
for people to stop placing such a big social emphasis on people's differences,
and we are all hypocrites. The social emphasis will lift when we let go of it.
And frankly, I do not see it being lifted. I don't care how accepting everyone
says San Francisco is; as long as I can't sit on a bus without being stared at,
it's just as bigoted as Atlanta. We in the Bay Area brag about how liberal we
are; about how no one is rejected or turned away, about how everyone is given
his or her fair chance, but it's all garbage in the end. When you take away
Haight Street and the Castro, San Francisco ceases to be that little accepting
hippie town, and becomes just another zealous American dump. We say that a
black man is equal to a white man in the Bay Area, we say that there's not
anti-Latino prejudice, we say there's no anti-Islam, and we say there's no
antisemitism. But we're kidding ourselves, and the price of our voluntary
blindness and unwillingness to open our eyes is the once great city that we
live in.
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