By Deborah Secular

camps that representatives from all seven HDNA machanot will attend this year.

Working at Cornerstone was great, because before I did, I was suspicious of its motives. How could something that wasn’t part of the right-wing, capitalist, fancy-bar-mitzvah-party Jewish Establishment afford to pay for people to come for free? All of those snacks I had heard about, I reasoned, must have come with some strings attached.

In between organizing supply closets filled with craft items, I learned that many of the educators at Cornerstone question their relationship with Judaism, too. Plenty of them struggle with the conflict between their connection to Israel and the oppression its government perpetuates. Some of them even like to talk about things like the socialist origins of Israeli dance moves, and all of them think Habo is cool.

Why did I think we were too radical for Cornerstone? Did I, like Moses, have the sense that authority figures only want to hear vanilla versions of what I’m really all about?

There are more examples of disparity between our intentions and our messages. Why don’t we mention the word “Zionist” in leftist circles? Why do we assume the quickest way to broaden our base on our college campuses is to join other groups? How will we ever become mainstream, which must be our goal as we strive to create a new social order, if we always assume the current mainstream would be better off hearing a strategically edited version of our aims?

Maybe it wouldn’t have worked for Moses. Maybe Pharaoh still would have balked nine times even if, from the beginning, Moses had just up and asked for freedom for his people. But dancing around the point didn’t really work either - instead, it almost forced him to leave the kids behind.

Only when we bravely and truthfully articulate who we are to the outside world will it listen to us. Only when we trust that the outside world isn’t too uptight to hear us can we find the partners we need to make change.

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