There are those today who agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that Jewishness is sustained by antisemitism, actually formed by it. As a Jew I depend on the antisemite. I appreciate Sartre’s empathy, his concern to name that very foul-smelling force that has twisted, murdered, shut out, denigrated and threatened. It’s lovely to have realistic and well-informed allies. And my own trajectory into orthodox practice has been in part a rejection of all that religious and psychological denigration I grew up with. It can still feel like liberation, to enter spaces deemed as so profoundly wrong and unattractive, and to be happy and find peace there.

And if I allow myself a hallelujah, in this (hopefully) public place, I would make it as the poet Paul Celan might, who wrote, as Michael Hamburger translated him, “Praised be your name no one.” For this, apart from modernism, is after the Holocaust.

And there are those (the historian Enzo Traverso, whose sparkling, compelling and alarming book The End of Jewish Modernity I have for now abandoned in despair) who say that that series of events, what Celan called “that which happened,” “burst the abscess” of antisemitism, and that it is now a spent force, unacceptable, fringe, fanatic. This too has its reassuring side. Join the throng of humanity, Mark, stop looking into those deep shadows. Enjoy life. Aaaah, the antidote. History has been a rough ride for the Jewish people, but now, hey, come on, wake up, it’s a new era. Others bear the weight of that giant wheel. I will stop there, and it is getting dark, at ten this Thursday morning before Hanukkah.

“What’s Hanukkah?” says a voice in the Talmud, as they discuss contexts of lighting candles. I think of this man as having been dozing, and suddenly waking. “What – Hanukkah [already]?” (the construction is the same).  Or dismissively waving the issue away: “Here we are discussing lighting the Sabbath lights, and you bring Hanukkah as a relevant comparison? Pleeuz.” This quiet little festival in the winter months just when we have respite from the holy days of autumn and spring. It isn’t difficult to follow the rules at Hanukkah. And don’t forget to make music.

So antisemitism is a spent force, and it is has holed up in me as a persistent and well rooted self hatred. Oi, what am I to do? I could tell you a joke. Later perhaps. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Yes, but there is a distinction between my paranoid constructions of the outside, and what’s really going on, being said, hatched (I jest) there. To know that my constructions of the outside, never mind the inside, are just that, constructions, helps. I don’t have to believe all my thoughts.

Separatism provides blessed escape. Identity, which fixes things, is a harbour for those of us who haven’t managed to find our voices in the diverse throng of voices which really, according to the philosopher Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, constitutes having a mind. Identity is like the medication that even devotees of the talking cure see as sometimes necessary.

You cosmopolitans! Pity me, or better still, help me. Help me out of my separatism, retrace my steps that allow me to albeit ironically embrace the Hebrew poet Bialik’s imagined return to the community left behind: “You have not changed from what you were before / Old oldness, no new thing. / Let me join you brothers! / Together let us rot till we stink!” (translated by Tuvya Ruebner).

The truth is, we went our separate ways a long time ago now. Isn’t it better like this? I read your newspaper, you might even read mine. I haven’t forgotten you. But we both have better things to do. When I made you read my books we both got hurt. When you misquoted them, when you filtered out the resonance of our voices, and made your jovial categorizations of us, most of all when you didn’t acknowledge your envy, you muddied my world and hampered my movement. But I got free, not absolutely, but somewhat, and see these enormous flowers in which one can live הפרחים גדולים כאילו אפשר לגור בתוכם (from the poem by Tuvya Ruebner, “Spring in the World”).