Post Yiddishkeit

SCHULWEIS, HAROLD M.

Post Yiddishkeit HAROLD M. SCHULWEIS I GREW up in the Bronx in the mid-1920s, a child of East European immigrant Jews. My Jewish upbringing was secular, Yiddishist, socialist. The songs my...

...I want their children in our Hebrew and day schools and in our youth programs and summer camps...
...Yet Yiddishkeit was not Judaism as is traditionally understood...
...Yiddishkeit severed from Judaism turned into a tragic amputation...
...It did not continue to the next generation...
...As I see it, that is the task of a renewed synagogue— to overcome the false either/or choices of Jewishness or Judaism that rupture our Jewish identity...
...But not as a foreign language...
...What was untaught was that Jewish conscience is implanted in the theology, ritual, and religious expression of a people...
...The words I heard in my home most often were yoisher, which means justice, and mitzvah, which does not mean "commandment" as my zayde taught, but a decent act, a good deed...
...They need a Judaic nexus...
...I want their participation in an ethical action project and in adult Jewish education...
...Yiddishkeit was not the Judaism of the synagogue, prayers, ritual law, theological doctrine, or religious denominations...
...Sadly, Yiddishkeit was orphaned...
...The songs my mother sang weren't religious— they were volklieder, Yiddish folk songs, the songs of the people...
...There was no God talk...
...The synagogue must prove itself capable of joining together the Yiddishkeit of my parents with the Judaism that gave birth to so much of its moral passion and loyalism...
...Yiddishkeit was menschlichkeit, the ideal of kindness and decency...
...The Yiddishist sensibility of rachmones (compassion) did not originate in Spinoza or Marx or Engels...
...I was struck by the chasm between Yiddishkeit and Judaism, between moral sensibility and Jewish law, between conscience and Jewish belief, between the home and the synagogue...
...Papa could never warm up to the rabbis...
...Their parents' compassion, moral sensibility, universalistic and humanistic outrage at injustice have grown thin...
...Yiddishkeit spread branches without roots, branches cut off from the soil of Judaism...
...The Yiddish schools I attended died...
...What was forgotten amid the beauty of Yiddishkeit was that its ethics of Jewish humanism did not spring out of the air...
...I would connect them to the poetry of Psalms, the passion of Jeremiah, the wisdom of the Ethics of the Fathers, the logic of Talmud, and the song of Hasidism...
...Yiddish for my generation was a mamaloshen, the language created by European Jewry...
...Yiddish was the sweet soul of Yiddishkeit Yiddishkeit without theology had intimations of Godliness...
...They are, for the most part, not members of the Jewish community...
...The heirs of Yiddishkeit have become neither-nor Jews...
...I want their minds and their souls...
...There were stories about Jewish festivals and Yiddish stories about everyday life, but no sacred texts or religious ritual, tallis, tefillin, lulav, and etrog...
...Of course, my parents spoke Yiddish to each other...
...The authentic Jewish response should avoid the either/or divisions that separate Yiddishkeit from Judaism and seek to embrace the wisdom of both...
...Forgive me, Papa...
...Post Yiddishkeit HAROLD M. SCHULWEIS I GREW up in the Bronx in the mid-1920s, a child of East European immigrant Jews...
...Ironically, my father in later years had to suffer his son's attraction to the rabbinate...
...Yiddishkeit was Jewishness: a world of ethics, ethnicity, folk culture, and the idealism of die viassen, the masses...
...I went to scbula, like all the children of my papa's cbaverhn...
...It came from the Torah...
...So, too, did the Yiddish theater I knew and the Yiddish press I read...
...These Yiddish afternoon schools, associated with socialist organizations like the Arbeter Farband, Shalom Aleichem, and Arbeter Ring, offered no classes in prayer or ritual law, like Mishnah or Gemara...
...It produced doubly alienated children, estranged from both the Judaism of grandparents and the Yiddishkeit of parents...
...Now, with a generation of Yiddishkeit gone, a new generation has come of age...
...These native-born Jews call themselves secular, cultural, ethnic, and ethical Jews, but they are doubly estranged from the world of the synagogue and the spiritual language of Yiddishkeit...
...It's not their membership I crave...
...neither believers nor atheists, neither Zionists nor anti-Zionists, neither socialists nor capitalists...
...The vaunted tzedakah philanthropy of secular Yiddishists grew out of Biblical and rabbinic judicial soil...
...Theirs is an anemic Jewishness, without depth, conviction, or serious practice...
...Papa didn't send me to yeshiva to study with rabbis...

Vol. 27 • February 2002 • No. 1


 
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