Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Yom Kippur and diversity in groups

[Emily Pitt (epitt]

Racheli wrote:

>Wow, it sounds like you have a serious chip on your shoulder >

Are you kidding here? do you even know the person to whom you are ascribing 
this motive?  This statement does nothing to encourage dialogue and does 
everything to shut down and discredit the person you are talking to. 

>Do you
really believe that if an event is scheduled on a Jewish holidy it  means
that people don't think Jews exist?   Could
there be other reasons for the scheduling, which don't have anything to do
with ignoring/disliking Jews?>

This is not an issue of who likes who and who dislikes who. It is an issue of 
who uses power and how that power is used. If someone in my group who was 
Muslim told me that I scheduled my committee's meeting on Ramadan without 
realizing it, I would apologize and try to reschedule. Just because I don't 
share the same belief system does not mean that I can't understand the 
importance of discrediting someone's entire experience by telling them that 
their holy day does not matter and that I cannot be bothered with trying to 
accomodate it. If I were to tell that person that I simply can't change around 
the calendar at the whim of the few, I am minimizing that person's experience. 
It doesn't mean that I have to change my entire life around to accomodate 
others. It simply means that I have a responsibility, as a member of a 
community, to acknowledge the diversity of that group by not minimizing others' 
experiences. For people who are part of the majority group, it is difficult to 
step outside your own experience to see things from another's perspective.  But 
stepping outside of one's own experience and trying to understand the 
importance of the issues of those who are different from yourself is the most 
essential element of creating community. If we're not going to do that, why on 
earth would we even be in cohousing?


You also said:
>I think that you must realize that if *everyone's* holidays were taken
into account, the possibility of finding times to meet will be reduced to
somewhere around zero >

Once again, this is an issue of diversity, not a matter of someone trying to 
make YOUR life inconvenient. How often does it happen in your group that 
someone wants to hold a major meeting on Christmas eve and then gets upset when 
people try to get them to reschedule it, and just tells the Christians in the 
group that they'll have to miss that meeting? Someone who doesn't have that 
experience may not be able to understand that, but it does not in any way 
absolve them from having the responsibility of trying to do so. Cohousing is 
about community.
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