Why Be Jewish?
al., SAMUEL HEILMAN et
Why be Jewish? Americans of the '90s question our success. We succeed materially and ask why we are not happy. We watch our children going out into the world lacking a value compass to direct...
...and blessing the kids before Kiddush on Friday night...
...God will judge and forgive and bless and understand and care...
...The Holocaust occurred, must be remembered and its meaning sought...
...by giving reasons they think are not sufficient, reasons they reject—they-like Jewish food or Jewish jokes or Jewish culture or Jewish history...
...Of course, each of us is tempted not to live this way...
...Now God said unto Abram: 'Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house'"— it seemed a good place to begin with a beatnik from Berkeley who played a terrific blues guitar...
...This was the same sound Elijah the prophet heard when he stood on the place where Moses stood and heard the kol d'mamah dakah, the thin, barely audible sound of almost breathing...
...With friends, I have even established an egalitarian beit midrash where religious and secular men and women learn together...
...But the way they practiced Judaism didn't suit me...
...The themes of our conversations vary: God and the human condition in God's world, justice, creativity, love, jealousy, idol worship, truth, time, food, humor and much more...
...And so I am Jewish also, just for the exhilarating pride of being Jewish...
...to act to emancipate the slaves and set the prisoners free...
...But it does not have, as many think, no sound...
...It is Torah, in its broadest definition, that includes the ethical requirement to repair the world (tikun olam), provides a framework for family life and is the vehicle for transmitting Judaism as "a heritage from the living to the living," in the words of Elie Wiesel...
...The recognition that I too can create midrash gave me the tools and the power to stay true to myself and to tradition at the same time...
...I am a secular Jew, but I study Talmud...
...This path came to its end...
...For him, the heart of Judaism was synagogue attendance and worship, and throughout my childhood, he attended services—by himself—at Kesher Israel, an Orthodox shul in Georgetown...
...But this is not all...
...But what they don't get is that my so-called "fanaticism" makes me feel good...
...Irving Greenberg A Jewish story: The world we live in is the scene of a remarkable process moving from chaos to order, from non-life to life...
...Even by the standards of this bizarre world, we are a bizarre people, and wanting to be one of us if you aren't is perhaps a mad idea...
...Abraham is my father, Sarah my mother, and the promises made to them are promises made to me...
...Out of this comes not only a clearer sense of my identity but also a sense of belonging...
...We created an egalitarian hiddushin or ring ceremony in which we exchanged rings and each pledged devotion to the other, and together we wrote an egalitarian ketubah or marriage contract...
...Which god did Hitler write about in Mein Kampf, whose name he invoked to justify the extermination of the Jews...
...Clearly, God is not at fault, but rather the religious systems that ignored or perverted God's commandments to actively pursue justice...
...the process is called redemption, tikun olam...
...In truth, I feel I am never more Jewish than when I express blasphemous thoughts like these...
...Nothing else...
...Through attempting to repair and heal what we have done in the past, we set it within a larger context of meaning and effectively rewrite the past...
...It is as a Jewish son, husband and father—perhaps more than anything else—that I imagine I shall be remembered after I am gone...
...What's more, I do like it...
...Dictatorship, discrimination and oppression suppress the equality of people...
...While all religions have within them the seeds of extremism, Judaism stands in a different light...
...I also read Kabbalah, Chasidic literature, modern Hebrew literature, Freud, Jung and Nietzsche...
...When there is no one else to whom to turn, I have a conviction that the Jewish community will be there for me...
...But we ask another question, peculiarly ours...
...My father loved to tell stories about his boyhood there...
...Now the content of the actual revelation: To paraphrase the philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, "And God came down on Mount Sinai," happened...
...The Jewish To make this choice, I must expand my consciousness and embrace my immediate family, the Jewish people, and my extended family, humanity...
...I couldn't...
...Dad was the Jew in the family...
...We have attempted to persuade our youth to be Jewish by presenting them every reason but Sinai...
...Each of the other reasons is either incomplete or with little content...
...Our closest neighbor—across the stream and up the hill—was a goat farmer we called Old MacDonald...
...For both my husband and me, the challenge of creating our Jewish wedding was a powerful experience that helped us since to build our Jewish home...
...I'd imagine the Bible-thumping, fundamentalist Christians who were the "target audience" for the book I was working on and grow more and more depressed...
...I still didn't get it...
...Remaining Jewish to spite Hitler means that an individual Jew is only another unused artifact...
...If every people, faith and community mirrored this behavior, it >.-iuld be a better world...
...Be ajew and practice a faith where three out of four denominations ordain women as religious leaders...
...I am Abraham arguing with God...
...More than that, when I sit with my children around the Sabbath table, reciting the same kiddush and singing the same zemirot that my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents before me did, when I repeat the lessons of the Talmud and use the words of the commentators and exegetes before me, when each Passover I feel as if "I myself have this night experienced the exodus from Egypt," or when I throw myself up against the Western Wall and sense that I have returned to a place whence my forefathers were banished and have closed the circle of exile and redemption, I feel as if I have found a way to cheat death...
...My grandfather, an Ostrovieczer chasid living in Poland, would probably have deemed such an inquiry at best an impertinence, a klotz koshe, in his Yiddish vernacular, and at worst a demonstration of heresy, apikorsus...
...I am neither Reform, Conservative or Reconstructionist...
...But it is also the easiest thing, since the process of teshuvah begins with the simple thought of wanting to begin...
...Midrash is like a kite: On one end it is tied to the ground, on the other, the kite has no limit as it soars in the sky...
...Together, I join in Jewish testimony that life will win out...
...Here we could feel at home, not as guests...
...I don't know...
...In 1960, when my parents bought a sprawling house at the top of a hill on Swinks Mill Road, there couldn't have been more than a handful of Jews in the whole town...
...And if I let them, or I walk away on my own, I betray that trust...
...He never did marry the girl, I did...
...The extreme wing of the multicultural revolution on campuses, for example, judges people by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their characters...
...I become part of the people who are co-workers with humanity for tikun olam...
...To get there, of course, he had to drive—along the stream, up the hill, across the Pike and then over the Potomac River...
...Why did we have to go out that day and buy a rug...
...There is no comfortable shortcut, as might exist in other religions...
...God will help...
...Now he's three, and my husband and I have had to figure out how we are going to transmit Judaism to him...
...I am not halachically observant...
...Yet the "birth" answer is inadequate because it says nothing about the content of being Jewish...
...Other peoples and religions have comparable concepts...
...I must say that he really did listen...
...I studied the Bible as history, as literature, as political tract, but not as a religious document...
...Not that my conflicts suddenly disappeared or that my new relationship to Judaism sprang, as if by magic, out of the midtown offices of Reader's Digest...
...An Israeli, even one who is totally secular, participates in one of the great dramas of Jewish history...
...Because God is its ground, life is becoming more and more like God—more powerful, more conscious, more capable of deep emotion, more alive...
...They are significant parts of being Jewish...
...Being a Jew may be the right and the only viable choice for most Jews, but not because Judaism is better (or worse) than any other religion...
...They ask only what does the text say, but I go on to ask what does it say to me today and how do I act on it...
...We allow less room for moral sloppiness...
...I can't," I said...
...How the sound of the prayers themselves would issue up and echo in the vaulted ceiling...
...Sickness itself will have to be cured, for nothing erodes the uniqueness of the individual more than cancer, stroke or paralysis...
...Humans are asked to use their reason to understand the processes of nature and of life and thus learn to cure disease and prevent catastrophes...
...But it means not only sharing the thrills and triumphs of the Jewish legacy and survival but also feeling the pain of Jewish destruction, exile and persecution...
...I must acknowledge the gift of life and value given to me by my predecessors who loved, upgraded the world, created life and brought me into this world...
...At the same time we were, by virtue of my father's powerful sense of Judaism, absolutely, and without question, Jews...
...But rather than discuss my intimate relationship with God, I will try instead to explain the attraction I find in studying our classical sources and how my secular life is influenced by them...
...I was content...
...Sinai incorporates all of the other partial answers...
...Being properly Jewish seemed—at least for me—dauntingly difficult, an act of will and tremendous effort...
...Not exacdy an original thought, but— at least for me—a deeply personal, deeply important one...
...I understood I can and I must live in dialogue with the Torah, and that a "text" is not only written words but also rituals and holidays—like Shabbat and marriage vows...
...When I open the Talmud, I see Rabbi Yohanan quarreling with Resh-Lakish, Rashi smiling at his side, the Tosafot groaning in their corner...
...Ruth Calderon Ben-Shahar Consider me a peculiar bird...
...This same insight is echoed in another legend: Only the first letter of the first word of the first utterance was given...
...Be a Jew because it may shape you into a better person...
...Being Jewish is also a4trust...
...I don't belong to a synagogue...
...I believe it is time for the Jewish people to reassert our moral authority in a world yearning for a moral rudder...
...The issue was much more how to translate myjewishness into a meaningful existence...
...a world pursuing moral shortcuts will find itself cleaning up after the collective, ignored mistakes of previous generations...
...We wanted and needed a Jewish ceremony...
...I didn't get it...
...Imagine a deck of 52 religious playing cards, each one representing a different, primary religious idea such as salvation, love of neighbor, God, afterlife, guilt, charity, revelation and the like...
...We resented having to find a rabbi we never saw before and probably never would again, having to sign a ketubah that includes an agreement between my father and my husband concerning the purchase of the bride (me...
...But it is not only when I reiterate the rituals and practices of my ancestors that I feel this pride—although that faithful repetition remains a powerful experience in my life...
...I revel in this history...
...For years I was passively Jewish...
...With this choice, I join in the long line of Jewish teachers/models who by their own example and through Jewish influence on Christianity, Islam and Western culture transformed the world again and again...
...Now I must live my life to make this truth manifest and keep this hope alive until the whole world is redeemed, until "they will do no harm nor destroy on My holy mountain (that is, the whole earth...
...Angry for the loss of tradition...
...Without it, I would be impoverished and lost...
...Our very existence challenges the worst exclusionary and xenophobic impulses in society, and so it is no accident that Judaism and Jews are often the first target of extreme multiculturalists, nationalists and racists...
...My father was convinced that the Yiddish language would transmit yiddishkeit, the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe...
...There is another difference...
...Indeed, I had always known that I was, somehow, centrally Jewish...
...It allows me to share in a great chain of being that begins somewhere in the primordial past with Abraham and Sarah and passes through one of the most remarkable series of developments in human civilization...
...Each week I gave him a variation on the same answer that Judaism has not been transmitted in a relevant and meaningful way...
...I frequently meet people (more often than not, fellow Jews) who characterize the degree to which we observe Judaism as nothing short of "fanatic...
...They transcend geography and society...
...And oh...
...Nobody could make me put on my white socks and best dress and sit through the mind-numbing eternity that people called "services...
...It was over these books and around the Jewish tradition that our family continues to encounter one another...
...I suppose that's some sort of reason for beingjewish after all...
...Yet I really can't answer the question in these terms...
...I have spent the next 40 years of my life trying to remedy the deficiency...
...From birth through bar mitzvah, marriage and death, it is to the Jews I return and with them that my existence is dignified...
...hate throwing things out...
...I am sitting in Talmud class, telling God that the law does not come from heaven...
...Becoming a Tibetan is wasteful...
...That wasn't right for us...
...The same for the Egyptians...
...When we campaigned for Anatoly Sharansky, we also rallied for Andrei Sakharov...
...Yet although constituting only one-third of one percent of humankind, this people has already influenced history for the better— more than any other group...
...Even so, I have seen many Israelis who, taken out of their land, are just another nationality group, somewhat distant or indifferent to Jewish life and likely to disappear quickly as a distinctive group...
...Because studying classical texts is considered religious territory in Israel, Israelis expect me to be observant and American Jews don't understand the phenomenon of a committed secular Jew...
...In sum, it means that, above and beyond the commonplaces of our own existence, we can integrate into our consciousness the concentrated expression of the whole collective life of the Jewish people...
...When Haj Amin Husseini, the mufti (Moslem leader) of Jerusalem, rallied the Arab world to the Nazi cause, how many believers invoked the name of Allah and his prophet Mohammed to speak up in protest...
...It only says, "Don't consciously and affirmatively become something other than Jewish...
...Or maybe I'm stingy...
...I feel myself to have stood at Sinai and accepted Torah...
...Teshuvah is the ever-present possibility, urge and gesture of returning to our Source, the Holy One of All Being...
...Be a Jew and enter a pluralistic community that thinks, nurtures and acts...
...In a literature class at Harvard College, the professor found Christ images in many of the novels we were reading about the redemptive suffering of the novel's hero...
...As they commemorate Jewish occasions and acts we have done together my children will, I hope, evoke the memory of the connections forged between us...
...where I was raised, was an odd choice for a Jewish family...
...This quiet sound and the sustained, silent attention that renders it audible place demands on behavior...
...For the first of these he turned up with an eight-pack of beer, which I put in the fridge before beginning to read him the story of Abraham...
...To which, looking up from his newspaper, the man answers: "Vos, bin ikh meshugah...
...Then I got married and I found myself, much to my own surprise, agreeing to keep a kosher house...
...Continuation of a line that has existed for 3,000 years is itself a reason to be Jewish...
...To remain Jewish in order to prove Hitler wrong is not a positive reason...
...The holy days are the times when we all touch base with one another, and no matter where we are we connect to wish one another "shavuah tov," a good week, when the Sabbath departs...
...Yosefl...
...I don't know enough about other answers to know whether our answers are any less inadequate than theirs...
...I remember the importance of commitment to the past before making any changes...
...The emergence of human life in the universe is a turning point...
...In the ceremony acceptable to the Rabbinate, the bride does not have an active role and I wanted to participate...
...Now give me a reason for beingjewish...
...Now my mother (who had been raised Reform and didn't know any Hebrew), older sister and I would go to the home of Mr...
...I disagree...
...Let's have some beer...
...Since I have always been one of us, however, it has never occurred to me to be anything else...
...Is being Jewish better for everyone...
...Hitler ordered the collection of Jewish ritual artifacts for the purpose of creating a museum in Prague of an extinct and despised people...
...Jennifer M. Green It was Reader's Digest that made me a Jew...
...The real surprise and the joy is the chance to join in the arguments with Rabbi Akiba and with Rashi, citing proof from your chevruta—your own insights—in a vibrant dialogue...
...We are commanded to start living ethically so as to move the world toward perfection...
...Each individual^and each generation sees them through unique lenses...
...I have no better answer than that I am Jewish because I have to be...
...She and I have been living in Israel for 22 years and have two daughters, the older of whom is now in the army...
...With an intangible God like this, Judaism is not likely to become one of the world's most practiced religions in the near future...
...These were the issues that energized young people to demonstrate, to educate, to be involved...
...To be Jewish means overcoming existential loneliness and helps me avoid becoming trapped in the evanescent present...
...Synagogue made me feel like a weirdo: my brother and I would sit there, the siddurim stashed in the pockets of the chairs in front of us, and thumb wrestle...
...It was only a beginning...
...I was sent to a private school which was then a bastion for Washington's WASP elite...
...Although the academic world, where I studied philosophy, Bible and Jewish thought, gave me tools for research, it was not the place for personal grappling with the Torah...
...We invite moment readers—the Jewish-born and committed, the Jewish discovering, the Jewish by choice and conversion—to send us their own answers to our question...
...maybe not even for everyone born Jewish...
...Since that night, I've been trying to find a more compelling answer to the question "Why Be Jewish...
...Let's get serious...
...Nostalgia about some idealized Jewish life in the past, the genealogical searches for ancestors or Israeli dance are an expression of Jewish interest, but they are not reasons to be Jewish...
...Tibetans make better Tibetans than Jews do...
...This is, I think, what Naftali was getting at...
...Before we are done, the world will be perfected...
...But if you don't set some time apart from American junk-culture, you turn into something less than human...
...I suppose I could begin with psychohistorical reasons...
...On special occasions, like seder or the High Holidays, we would all pile into our station wagon and drive the 50 or so miles that separated our mundane suburban lives from the legendary realm of Baltimore...
...moment put this bottom-line question to nine people for whom Judaism is central in their lives but for whom Jewishness takes varied shapes and reasons...
...The world needs Jewish Jews...
...But if I protect what I have been given so that my heirs receive it intact, I can leave this world with a sense of personal and historical integrity—no small matter when, as I come closer to the end than to the beginning of my life, I begin to reflect on the meaning and purpose of my existence...
...Imagine a system of community and life that directs people toward concern for both their own group and the fate of the rest of the world...
...And because so much of my family died in the Holocaust, this capacity to restore a way of life they led makes me feel as if the horror of that time has been vanquished by my own continuity...
...Look at it this way...
...And how I would sit there, uncomfortable within my own skin, praying for the whole thing to be over so I could go home and have lunch...
...Building on the original Jewish theological (some say God-given) innovations—monotheism, the 10 commandments and the requirement for a day of rest—it is time to assert Truths that are human derivatives of 4,000 years of divinely-inspired Jewish life, namely: community, pluralism and action—tikun olam...
...The rarely challenged implication was that being the first to come up with an idea meant you owned it or excelled at it...
...These are messianic images, and the Jewish system of life and mitzvot is a framework to bring us closer to realizing this vision...
...With Mr...
...Consider the irony of the argument...
...Recendy, my father took a day off from his downtown Orthodox shul and joined us...
...So for our wedding we turned to midrash, to interpret the sources in a way that allowed us to make a wedding ceremony that suited us...
...after two or three hours of indecision and haggling, we got the price down to $250 and bought a very pretty, very colorful, tribal rug...
...They keep appearing among Jews generation after generation...
...That's where Jews were Jews...
...How the light would flood in from the stained-glass windows set high in the walls...
...My search has taken me back to my weekly walks from shul with Naftali...
...Not that this was any great alternative...
...their traumata still scar my consciousness and their joys are mine to share...
...And when people asked me about my Jewish upbringing, I'd launch into a long, confused, self-contradictory story about the all-gey suburb where I'd grown up, my German-Jewish parents, my macher father who spoke Hebrew fluently and attended services—usually without the rest of us—at an Orthodox shul, our WASPy ways, our liberal politics, the "restricted" country club where my best friend's family played golf and tennis...and on and on...
...Only two answers appear equal to the cosmic question, 'Why be Jewish...
...BeingJewish is also a way to mark the various turning points of my life...
...But my family's Judaism was practiced in intimidating isolation...
...But taken together they describe how we understand our purpose as a people...
...We finished it off...
...My mother was not particularly interested in maintaining the forms of traditional Jewish life, although she identified Jewishly...
...It did not come naturally...
...Why do we observe the Sabbath...
...for the earth is full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea" (Isaiah 11:9...
...What of the argument that each Jew is part of the 4,000-year chain of tradition and that no individual Jew should bear the responsibility of breaking that chain forever...
...In this sense, I consider myself a traditional Jew, for tradition means literally the handing over of something from one generation to another...
...I resented being sent up to the women's section, away from the Torah and all the action...
...I would return to school in time for my mother to pick me up...
...Be a Jew and discover that every year, season, month, week and day, joy and sorrow is sanctified by our tradition...
...Since people are raised in families and are shaped by society, they are summoned to do all this in their natural collectives, as well as individually...
...I cannot separate my biography from my being Jewish...
...Therefore, remain Jewish or disappoint and dishonor the memory of your ancestors...
...It all depends on what would replace Jews and Judaism...
...These reasons, they say, are inadequate...
...We have no legacy of Crusades, Inquisitions or religiously-based atrocities against other faiths...
...Yet perhaps with my family, my being Jewish becomes most important...
...And as I sat there, struggling again to regain my beginner's understanding of the siddur, it occurred to me that I was witnessing something that I could never have imagined as a child: my husband, my son, my father and myself, sitting together in prayer...
...My mother believed that Jewish ritual would transmit Jewish values...
...I spent my childhood not so much in a state of rebellion against the parental model as in a state of bewilderment...
...Who can really explain the continuation of Jewish faith in light of the Holocaust...
...One is because we Jews somehow have a divine attachment (through our books or beliefs) that others don't have or, two, because there is some reason why it is important that there be Jews (and Judaism) in 200 or 300 or 500 years...
...I am Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev bringing a lawsuit against God—except I sue him for damages for killing innocent little children and causing unnecessary pain...
...We can envision that war will be ended...
...We spent most of Saturday afternoon pricing out kilims at a rug store at Dupont Circle...
...I want to draw people to it and make it last forever...
...I desperately need something else...
...The dictionary would explain midrash as commentary...
...All I had to do was choose, and then I too would have an "identity," a "calling," a "mission...
...I thought I had the answer: Be Jewish because the Jewish people needs you...
...Then he would ask, "Why are so many young people running away from their heritage...
...I have noticed that many people begin to answer the question "Why be Jewish...
...My sister, who had the reputation of being "as stubborn as a bull," flady refused to continue with him...
...My mother was right...
...The Holocaust is not a reason to be Jewish...
...That crazy I'm not...
...That was the day that we decided to make a genuine effort to keep the Sabbath...
...And then something happened...
...All sorts of forces would take it away from me...
...or because of the State of Israel...
...Unfortunately, choosing one's way over another's risks chauvinism...
...I needed some way to observe Shabbat, but every Saturday-morning visit to our neighborhood synagogue was a disappointment...
...And so we have come to the conclusion that we are going to have to make Judaism a central part of our lives...
...Every Shabbat when I posed the question, Naftali would abrupdy stop walking, turn to me, squeeze my hand harder, and proclaim like a prophet: "Because God took us out of Egypt and made a covenant with the Jewish people...
...Apart from my birth, they are why I continue to be a Jew...
...HillelHalkin Many years ago, when I was a graduate student at Columbia, a Jewish girl I knew was living with a nonjewish boy...
...McLean, in those days, was the sticks...
...But the world is not yet structured to respect these values...
...The irony was that Dad himself had been raised in a tighdy-knit Jewish community, where his family had lived ever since the Civil War, when they emigrated to Baltimore from Manchester, England (before that they were in the town of Mur Goslin in Posen, in what is today Poland, but was then German-speaking...
...The implications of covenant are that we are not alone in a hostile universe...
...For us today, therefore, religious destiny has become instead religious persuasion and therefore being Jewish now must be defended as a choice...
...The land of my forebears is mine too...
...The Jewish way of life has managed to keep the worst individual human instincts at bay for thousands of years...
...You can depend on this assurance, says Judaism, because it is God's promise and God's plan...
...they do not bear its culture...
...My responsibilities were to help plan the book, write photo captions and "short takes" on such subjects as the Star of David and the yarmulke, and edit the typically turgid copy, transforming it into easily-read, easily-understood Reader's Digest prose...
...I worked, along with the other junior staffers, in a row of little brown cubicles, some 50 feet from the closest source of natural light...
...We were cut off geographically from anything like a Jewish community...
...All humans will be taken from slavery into freedom, given a land of their own where they will live in security and dignity by right...
...Living a life of midrash is not the easiest way to live a Jewish life...
...They were thinking of getting married and had discussed the possibility of his converting—and since I was their expert on Judaism, it was decided that he would come to me for lessons...
...Being actively Jewish is certainly difficult and requires constant learning and attention to detail...
...Israel, while imperfect, has an outstanding record of respect for the religious needs and sensitivities of other faiths...
...It enriches me...
...For me, Judaism almost means thinking ugly and blasphemous thoughts—and then fasting and going to shul on Yom Kippur and davening and confessing our sins...
...And I believe in being the best you can at what you are...
...Not only is there nothing to see of this God, this is also a God whose name cannot be spoken by human vocal cords...
...Two people in love don't...
...the Eternal God will wipe away the tears from all faces" (Isaiah 25:8...
...Trying to understand Torah constitutes the highest activity of mind, just as living in accordance with it is the highest expression of human conduct...
...Most Jews I've met, including those at the margins of Jewish life, feel this mystery...
...I went to high school, smoked grass, read Look Homeward Angel, learned to use mascara, went to college, majored in English, decided to be a famous person and moved to New York, where I got a so-called "glamour" job, at Mademoiselle magazine typing and filing articles with names like "Oral Sex is Okay" and 'Thigh Anxiety...
...The yeshivah world in Israel is closed to women, and in any case the course of study there ignores many sources and methods important to me...
...This is happening because this world is grounded in—in biblical language, created by—an infinite source of life, love and power which we call God...
...I was born in Israel...
...We stubbornly and despite all the evidence look forward to a time when all creation will join in the Great Return—a unity of all the world reflecting the Unitary Source of all Creation...
...Teshuvah is the hardest thing in the world, for to fully make it would bring the Messiah...
...For me, study in a beit midrash is a way to connect to the never-ending Jewish conversation with rabbis and scholars across all ages...
...Some say that there is little difference between the world's monotheistic religions and therefore, as long as people are turning to any of them, they are equally valid...
...To be Jewish is to sense that there is more to your existence than the altogether brief span of years that make up a single lifetime...
...But then I switched jobs: typing up articles about breast size at Mademoiselle gave way to editing essays about the Prophets at Reader's Digest, and my father—who seemed always to be so incredibly distant—seemed proud...
...The partnership is called brit (covenant...
...No longer was I to be sent to Rodef Shalom...
...It makes me fully human...
...That is a particularly powerful form of pride for me, a sense that I have kept the trust...
...As sociologist Peter L. Berger has noted, contemporary life has fostered "a near-inconceivable expansion of the area of human life open to choices," and what was once fate is now a matter of choice...
...No other ancient society has survived into the present or left the mark we have...
...Since I'd never bothered to actually do any of the homework Mr...
...All right," he said...
...It means holding the hand of the child who was led into the fiery furnace and mourning for the destroyed Temple and its dispersed and slaughtered worshipers...
...Sinai has a non-rational component...
...Many of our secular friends chose to close their eyes and wait dll it was over...
...Some of them hit the "why" directly...
...The number of kosher Chinese restaurants probably exceeds those kosher restaurants serving brisket, matzah ball soup and cholent...
...He, She or It remains a terrible and terrifying issue...
...When we rallied to the rescue of Ethiopian Jews, we didn't forget to feed their non-Jewish neighbors...
...But it also never dawned on me to take on any of the traditional forms of my religion...
...But we felt like dreck...
...But it is enough that it is better for me...
...McLean, Virginia, the suburb of Washington, D.C...
...to start sharing now so that no one goes hungry...
...So why do I choose to be Jewish...
...Chauvinism is distorted self-love achieved through denigrating others just as self-hate is a distorted love of others achieved through denigrating oneself...
...Through teshuvah all life is returned to its source...
...Naftali, it turns out, had the answer—sort of...
...I share a feeling of community with other Jews and thus never feel totally alone...
...It is, you might say, a description from 'The Source of All Being" of 'The Way of All Being...
...An unhappy couple needs reasons to stay together...
...Increasing numbers of Jews find litde or no reason to be Jewish...
...I don't believe we've solved the problem of God—God's existence and relationship to what goes on down here...
...I have searched for paths by which individuals remain Jewish and determine its content...
...It doesn't bother me in the least...
...There is something unexplainable about the Jewish people...
...They have been with us since we bothered recording what was important...
...I actually sat down and read the Bible—the whole shebang...
...The excuse that Jews have lacked power and therefore never had the opportunity to show their darker side no longer holds...
...I know that our answers, our Jewish answers, are inadequate...
...But after a while it didn't matter so much, that I didn't get it, because I grew up...
...I visited Israel, thinking that in Israel one could be a Jew merely by living there...
...Jews share, indeed often articulate, this disquiet...
...The God of the Jews has no image, no personal history, was not born and has neither spouse nor children...
...Any other noise will drown it out...
...Only today—in a world wealthy enough to spend millions to save one life—can we begin to do justice to the infinite value of humans...
...Susman we lasted maybe six months, at the end of which my sister and I staged a rebellion...
...No life is an island unto itself...
...I was confused...
...With this relationship comes a special task in the world...
...But we should not yield to the status quo...
...The tradition is that all Jews who ever were or will be were present at Sinai when God presented the Torah to the Jewish people...
...She stood in front of our father, who in our house was the arbiter of all things Jewish, and said: "I'm not going back...
...It is only this: The Return...
...Then I was hired, at the age of 26, as an assistant editor in the book division of Reader's Digest...
...I would sit there and conduct my own Saturday service...
...If we sell out and exploit the status quo, the sacrifices and achievements of all that preceded us are squandered for our personal ease or advantage...
...This obligation is on all righteous people...
...By remaining Jewish you allow your descendants the option of grappling with the same question...
...Indeed, nearly every Jewish communal organization in the world uses this argument, especially around fund-raising time...
...The secular community I belong to does not reject God or Judaism, it is not on its way to assimilation, but it is a community for which halachah is not the way...
...their experiences, the songs they sang, still echo in my memory...
...They read only the Torah and the classical commentaries...
...But these are not the Jews of history...
...And while the Jewish people has its religious extremists, they are actively discredited and rejected by the overwhelming majority of Jews...
...And I'm not sure that it is important that there be Jews (or Judaism) in 200, 300 or 500 years...
...I thought, 'There must be a Moses figure...
...Except maybe during the High Holidays...
...And most recendy, even though Iraqi scuds damaged thousands of Israeli homes, only one person died...
...Afterwards, he would spend the afternoon at work—at the waspy downtown law firm where, in the mid-'50s, he'd been given one of the "Jewish seats...
...My answer might be different if I believed that we had some divine lock on truth, but I don't...
...Which houses of worship and world religious leaders stood silent, turning the other cheek, as Hider carried out his genocidal campaign...
...The wealthy, the strong can grab what they can and let might make right...
...Imagine a time when justice prevails for all and there is peace...
...But then late one night, at the conclusion of a World Union of Jewish Students executive meeting, a question was raised...
...As an image of God, every human is endowed with three intrinsic dignities—infinite value, equality and uniqueness...
...they are rather my neighbors and friends—my extended family who, in a world that seems so bereft of community, offer me an anchor...
...These are my people who have made this culture, these contributions to civilization...
...I have been handed something very precious...
...In an attempt to make me get it, my parents sent me to Sunday School, where I sat, aching with a boredom that bordered on despair, through four years of earnest attempts on the part of various teachers to impart the aleph-bel and the Bible's greatest hits...
...David Epstein My formal Jewish education as a child in Texas was abysmal...
...But let's start with the world...
...Being Jewish offers an intimacy with others that would simply not be otherwise possible in contemporary society...
...My particularized concern for the memory of the Holocaust is because Hitler selected only those who were at Sinai for extermination...
...Whether I have good reasons for wanting Judaism to be here in 500 years is irrelevant...
...And I want to glory in it, savor it and share it with all who are near and dear to me...
...When I finished, he said, "That's a neat story...
...For the first time, living creatures are capable of grasping the pattern that is unfolding and can participate in its realization...
...What will happen when Jews are no longer oppressed and peace will come to the Middle East...
...As Rav Kook teaches, it flows unnoticed throughout creation...
...But ultimately humans will set the pace...
...But that letter is aleph, the first letter of the alphabet, and is customarily unpronounceable...
...The Jewish food of Eastern Europe, the unlean cuisine, is no longer a reason to be Jewish...
...Our distinctiveness is a tradition that obligates us to perform mitzvot and act in a prescribed manner, whether we feel like it or not...
...The fortunate free can get away with living for themselves...
...It is enough that I want my children and grandchildren to share in the richness and the struggle and the angst that being Jewish is...
...The difference between one religion and another is the order of the cards...
...In nature, sicknesses erode and natural catastrophes destroy these dignities...
...Sadly, our way would not be sanctioned by the Orthodox authorities that today control weddings in Israel, so we also performed a civil wedding in Cyprus that, ironically, the state accepts...
...In another religion the order may be reversed...
...These are the books you will study with your children," the bookseller assured us...
...If the Jewish value of sanctity of human life was adopted universally, there wouldn't be slavery in the Arab world, 35,000 children dying daily from malnutrition or legions of homeless people on the streets...
...But we were not prepared to let go of our heritage and have a civil ceremony...
...But, if we all do our best, go as far as we can go, then pass the mission on to our children and they to their children, ultimately it will get done...
...Lately I've found myself rising on Saturday mornings to put on a skirt and blouse and then heading off with my husband and son to shul—a Conservative one, in the suburbs, where there are young families with kids who play with puzzles and read their Curious George books in the aisles...
...But, what was a Moses figure...
...But in order to challenge, we must exist...
...But I live in another age...
...One Saturday not long ago my husband and I, overcome with rug lust, junked up the day of rest by giving in to our consumerist, yuppie urge to...buy a rug...
...Far from surrendering to destruction, this people responded with the greatest renewal of life and reassertion of the dignity and value of human life in its history...
...They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks...they shall not learn war any more" (Isaiah 2:4...
...Thus, we prove again that "love is stronger than death" (Song of Songs, 8:6...
...This may indicate a lack of imagination...
...A Jew sits staring and staring at him until he can no longer control himself and asks: "Mister, zayt moykhl, ir zayt a yid...
...But this is ethically wrong...
...Jews make better Jews than Tibetans do...
...Oh, you work with students, that's nice," he would say...
...An unutterable Name by which we evoke the unity of all being, just this is our God...
...I remember once, while swimming in the warm waters of the Mediterranean at Caesarea and climbing over the Roman ruins there that are now part of an Israeli national park, I felt this same pride...
...But the real, down-to-earth reason to be Jewish is because living Jewishly is good...
...Each of us is the beneficiary of the incredible chain of life that has brought humanity to this point...
...I've seen this argument work a thousand times with students in over 20 countries...
...In human society, hunger, poverty and war deny the value of individual life...
...Inside my brain, my father's stories became cinema verite...
...To believe in that history, moreover, is to imaginatively enter into it...
...Since human rootedness in God is their natural need and their well-being, their religions are charged to sustain and direct them to God and toward each other...
...Because Judaism is the religion that "discovered" and taught the world about the God behind nature, the author of the redemption plan...
...Sustained by this infinite source, life will keep developing until its every possibility, quantitatively and qualitatively, will be realized...
...With that privilege comes the opportunity to opt in or out of Judaism...
...With study, midrash has taken an important place in my life...
...And to ignore them is more than abdicating an existential responsibility, it is a sin...
...His eyes were at once angry and sad...
...If you identify with this story, you will choose to live like a covenantal human being...
...I tried to think of a reason for being Jewish...
...Beingjewish is thus my life, my hope and my legacy...
...I don't remember what we talked about...
...The redemption in our time of Jewish captives from Entebbe to Yemen, from Russia to Ethiopia, and the creation of the State of Israel stand out as modern-day miracles...
...And in doing so we become something more than ourselves, part of the past and implicated in the future, sharing in the eternity of the Jewish people...
...It will be filled with life and restructured so that the fullness of human value, equality and uniqueness will be upheld and nurtured...
...Several squirmed with discomfort at the question but then all wrote with honesty and intensity and some with humor...
...my shelves were stocked with Reader's Digest best-sellers: The Home Improvement Manual, The Complete Gardener's Handbook, Life in Bible Times...
...My children know me as the father who takes them to shut, who taught them to read Torah and who put tefillin on with them the first time...
...I joined a Bible study group because I knew only fragments of the text and then only as simple fables...
...Any decent religion must—in order to be a religion—play with a full deck...
...I'm left with angst—which isn't really so bad and is even quite Jewish...
...In this generation, I join a group that experienced the qualitatively greatest assault of death and degradation on human life...
...Soviet Jewry, Ethiopian Jewry, Yemenite Jewry, Syrian Jewry, Israel and antisemitism...
...It is like the Nutcracker ballet, when at night all the toys come to life and dance...
...Where else does one get the chance to be part of a conference call with Moses Maimonides, Rabbi Akiba and the self-probing early 20th-century Hebrew writer, Yosef Chaim Brenner...
...I am Jacob/Israel wrestling with the angel, refusing to let go until I receive the blessing...
...I call these high cards: The nameless one (that's God), the way (that's Torah) and returning to the source (that's repairing and healing ourselves...
...I'd wander the residential streets with their split-levels and yellowing lawns, certain that I would be kidnapped...
...The girls were gossiping, the fans were noisy and I was frustrated...
...There is a sensibility against a religious answer...
...Susman was not her idea of a party...
...Today, there are no Mesopotamians or Assyrians or Babylonians or Canaanites or Edomites or Philistines...
...Teshuvah is not simply apologizing or making right the damage we have done, though these surely are prerequisites...
...Sinai is the answer to why be Jewish...
...To do midrash one needs a classic text, an audience that is familiar with it, a wish or need for change and some courage...
...First, I thought one could remain Jewish simply by reading about Jewish history and literature...
...In the autumn of my third year, I began to play hookey...
...it is the softest audible sound there is...
...And thus shall I have my own recurrent personal victory over oblivion...
...About a year later, our son, Samuel, was born...
...My connection to the land and people and State of Israel is through that experience at Sinai...
...As Chaim Raphael once said, "When you're in love, everyone looks Jewish...
...In my childish perception of things, it was Baltimore that beckoned whenever the subject of Judaism came up...
...Without the Torah tradition, being Jewish as an ethical proposition is reduced to vague generalities: "being a good person," "being a mensch" or "doing the right thing...
...Because it makes us more fully human...
...or person sinned against, name the sin and ask forgiveness...
...In this '90s world, as at no other time in Jewish history, we are safe and privileged to be able to ask "Why be Jewish...
...For discovering the Bible was not only a bridge to my own heritage and history: it was also a bridge to my father...
...The process can go no faster than humans are capable of going—or it will lead to abuse and/or backsliding...
...Finally I found myself a bench by the Yarkon River close to my house in Tel Aviv...
...Even my mother, who was supposed to be on my father's side, admitted that spending time with Mr...
...I must expand my love to include future unborn generations and their welfare...
...How my grandfather's lips would move, as if directed by God himself, over the worn Hebrew letters...
...You may know the joke about the black man on the subway who is reading a Yiddish paper...
...This routine and unfortunate alienation from the Source of our true selves can only be repaired through the act of teshuvah...
...They are both variations of the same primary insecurity...
...Somehow this "Source of all Being" can get through to human beings, or at least, to anyone who is listening...
...If Samuel's going to grow up to reject Judaism, let him at least reject it from knowledge, from familiarity, from insight...
...Jews, because we are a rainbow of colors and races, break that neat and immoral reflex...
...The goal will not be reached in one generation...
...While we don't agree on the particulars, we do agree that we want to raise a child who knows who he is...
...S.F.S...
...Another encounter with living midrash occurred when my husband and I wanted to marry...
...My uncomfortable conclusion is that the Jewish people have a special relationship to history, and, yes, to God...
...To be precise, it is the sound the larynx makes as it clicks into gear...
...They may even have succeeded in the end, but to me it's as odd as wanting to be a scarlet tanager or a Tasmanian ant-eater...
...The vast majority of people who have ever lived have been denied these intrinsic dignities...
...The idea that the characters I was reading about actually walked the face of the earth, and that I could go to Israel and actually see the mountain where Saul was slain or the tunnel that Hezekiah had built took hold of my brain...
...He was right, as I recalled to my eldest son when we began this summer our review of the tractate dealing with vows...
...We Jews believe that such "commandments" are woven into the basic foundation of creation...
...To be Jewish is to feel a kinship with the extraordinary characters of Jewish history, to stand there at Sinai when the Torah was received and to share in the triumph of the fifth of Iyar in 1948 when the State of Israel was born...
...Susman, to be tutored in the basics of the Hebrew grammar...
...Through it, I can really suck at this life...
...I have no choice...
...The "Holocaust" answer is that we must remain Jewish in memory of the Jewish martyrs and in order to deny Hitler the success he sought in the Final Solution, the extinction of the Jewish people...
...We experience emptiness, yearn for structure in life, lament the loss of family warmth and unity, are impoverished by the disappearance of ceremony and ritual and seek meaning for our lives that transcends acquiring wealth and self-gratification...
...They are all reasons to be Jewish...
...But if it is for you, its treasures are yours to seek out: us community and holidays, its call to remember the exodus from Egypt and its obligation to follow its laws...
...What was once only some thoughtless or even wicked act, now—when viewed from the perspective of our present teshuvah—becomes only the embarrassing commencement of this greater healing now realized...
...Furthermore, if we are to include in our spectrum of Jews such diverse expressions as Ethiopian, Reform, Israeli and Lubavitch, we cannot honesdy speak of a singular or exclusive Jewish culture...
...Lawrence Kushner In the twilight of the 20th century, with people trying on religions like shoppers trying on clothing in a bargain basement, anyone who remains a Jew must be considered a 'Jew by choice...
...it is the mother of all articulate speech...
...Imagine what the world would look like if everyone valued human life...
...More than just an individual gesture, teshuvah is a great world-yearning that flows through and animates all creation...
...For the Romans who wanted to destroy my people and obliterate our memory are gone, and we Jews are back, playing in their ruins that we have integrated into our national heritage...
...Of course, one could claim that it happened at birth, courtesy of Mom and Dad...
...But it is my only way...
...So I would begin every week forgetting Naftali's advice and following my own...
...Thus, we betray the chances of our children and children's children—and all children—of getting to that better world, that paradise which all humans deserve...
...Services still dragged on for about 10 million years...
...The beit midrash I sought and established was based on the chevruta—a traditional form of study where two people study a text together creating private microcosms...
...Because it is a better way of life for the world and for each individual...
...It never dawned on me to try to deny myjewishness...
...Apartheid, racism, antisemitism and other forms of hatred deny the uniqueness of every person...
...The ultimate dream is the triumph of life over death—"Death will be swallowed up in eternity...
...There will always be rugs...
...Which freely translates as: "What, me a Jew...
...I doubt it...
...For 4,000 years the Jewish people have continued to exist, worshiping one God, while other peoples and cultures—far more numerous and powerful, and with many deities— have vanished...
...The Greeks of today have no relation to classical Greece...
...I grew up and found out that there were other things to get passionate about: literature, art, money, even food...
...Even worse, it implied that non-Jews were culturally or genetically inferior when it came to figuring out that there is a Holy Oneness to all Being or behaving ethically toward one "another...
...To the true believer, the question is a preposterous one, since being Jewish—except for the relatively few who have entered the religion by way of conversion—is for the faithful very simply a matter of destiny...
...Even today, when I think of the town on the harbor, I think of a kind of authentic, down-home Jewishness, holiness mixing with great food...
...Abramozvitz Every Shabbat on my way home from a Jerusalem shul I would take Naftali's frail white hand and slowly walk with him to his home...
...The eight-pack was cold by then...
...My first experience with adapting tradition, with living midrash, took place in my teens...
...I disagree...
...How my father's eyes would glow and then tear up...
...Sinai" is an awkward answer for some...
...Why should they be Jewish...
...Without Sinai, however, our youth will find no persuasive basis for being Jewish...
...But, on the other hand, the sky is the limit...
...Be a Jew and be a link in a holy chain stretching back to Abraham and Sarah and forward to messianic times...
...sad because he knew that I really sought a more modern answer and he could not provide it...
...Perhaps it is not for everyone...
...bit by bit it seemed to be a part of who I was...
...It is to safeguard a heritage that I have received from my predecessors and which I must hand on intact to my children and heirs...
...Judaism requires that before a person can ask God for forgiveness, she or he must confront the (continued on page 72) Hershel Shanks To say that I am Jewish because I like Jewish food or enjoy Jewish jokes or even because I support the State of Israel seems shallow and inadequate...
...because of the Holocaust (to prove Hitler wrong and to triumph over evil incarnate...
...When I relate to my family, it is more often than not through the medium of Judaism...
...And perhaps, in the process, you can help fill the moral vacuum in a tumultuous world searching for meaning and peace...
...So, why be Jewish...
...The following seem to me to be some of the "top cards" of the 'Jewish deck," the core of the way we Jews have tried to make spiritual sense out of the mystery of life...
...And God spoke," is already human interpretation...
...We watch our children going out into the world lacking a value compass to direct them to goodness...
...In one spiritual tradition the first card is "salvation" while "revelation" doesn't show up until card number 43...
...After some time, I stopped going and stayed home...
...All living creatures, but especially humans, have been called to a partnership with God—to perfect the world and insure the triumph of life...
...Well into his eighties, my Shabbat companion would ask me every week what I did for a living...
...Despite enormous counter forces, including universal organic breakdown and death, life grows ever more luxuriant, multibranched, complex...
...What, we must ask ourselves, would be the top cards in the Jewish deck...
...Nobody talked to me...
...Indeed, the Name itself is composed from the root letters of the Hebrew verb "to be" and probably means something like, 'The One who brings into being all that is...
...When I was 11, my parents switched tacdcs...
...I was raised in a house where Judaism and the rest of life were separate entities...
...for a certain sum of money...
...Nor dos felt migi...
...The kite stays strongly tied to the ground...
...Understanding the concept of midrash and the uses our rabbis freely made of it, especially in the Talmudic period, caused a revolution in my life...
...Not that it helped much...
...I would then ask him what I should tell students...
...Be a Jew and live a rich family life...
...Humans are invited to increase the productivity of the world until it becomes a paradise, sustaining all of life with all that life needs...
...Being Jewish was never in question...
...After a period of study, we knew we wanted a Jewish wedding but not through the auspices of the Orthodox Rabbinate...
...Before my wife and I married, we decided to buy a full set of the Talmud to mark our establishing a Jewish home and family...
...And there we would sit—at Dad's old shul—listening to Abba Weisgal, as ancient as the stars, chant the mournful-sounding, indecipherable words...
...A good midrash has a tight string that binds it to tradition as it allows it to fly free...
...Human models will inspire and lead the process...
...When you need reasons, you're in trouble...
...But in this beit midrash my secular friends and the secular texts could be equal partners...
...In the years ahead, if our answers fail to connect with our hearts or—most foreboding of all—if silence is the response, then our children and grandchildren may never ask "Why be Jewish...
...I still can't think of a reason for beingjewish...
...The result of this getting through is what we Jews call Torah...
...I believe a world that engages in constant moral wresding is bound to be a more moral world...
...It was once fashionable, for example, to boast that Judaism gave the world ethical monotheism...
...The final outcome will be a world in which hunger, poverty and oppression will be overcome...
...In the words of the proverb: "She is a tree of life to those who hold fast to her...
...That wasn't the answer either...
...I want Sam to feel that Judaism is as much a part of him as his blood and his bones...
...Bit by bit I began to get it, I began to feel that Judaism wasn't some alien and unorganic part of me that—like the ugly blue overcoat that my mother bought me in third grade—I was forced to wear...
...We Jews are an imperfect people with an imperfect faith, but unlike most of those around us we raise our voices in protest, even when it is Christians killing Moslems in Sabra and Shatilla or in Bosnia...
...Susman had assigned, I was still unable to decipher the difference between a sin and a shin, a chet and a hay...
...Be ajew and through Jewish study, dialogue with a third century rabbi over issues of justice, family life, even food...
...I have known Jews who'wanted to be Tibetan Buddhists, Indian Hindus, English Episcopalians...
...Indeed, I had real, if unfocused interest...
...It wasn't that I didn't care—it was more that I didn't get it...
...Being Jewish, for me, is being alive, living life at its most intense...
...others could not explain why without speaking of "how" they are Jewish...
...I was hired to work on Mysteries of the Bible...
Vol. 17 • December 1992 • No. 6
