Searching for the Self: An Exchange of Letters

Brown, Janet Lehrman

SEARCHING FOR THE SELF AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS JANET LEHRMAN BROWN Last year as part of my campaign to be nice to my parents, I went to Rosh Hashanah services at our local temple. It had been at...

...I could identify with her, as I could not with the stodgy figures in my Sunday School books...
...When "The Holocaust" aired on TV I did not want to watch it...
...But for me clubhouse Judaism won't work...
...Which made me want to puke...
...And I don't want to...
...Janet: Where will those people who are needed to fill the congregations come from...
...Understandings of the world are not, after all, genetically transmitted...
...Is this an Alphonse-Gaston routine, in which each of us stands on the steps of the temple and waits for someone else to enter its doors before we ourselves enter...
...I told myself I could not stand the hypocrisy of the people who attended...
...Suddenly, I was a Jew again...
...He was old, of course, but that wasn't reason enough...
...But not so...
...But I'm glad you're back, since (obviously) we need all the help we can get...
...Fine...
...Barbed wire fences along the side of the road flashed in the sun...
...you will find that many of them are there with questions...
...The pursuit of those ways, based though it may be on memory, goes beyond memory, extends to adventure...
...But I am bound to ask just what it is that you would give...
...As the Rabbi droned on about the Great Jewish Tradition, I tried to imagine what message a stranger like my Goyish but open-minded boy friend would have extracted from this sermon, what answer he would have found here to the question, "What do Jews worship...
...They are formed by family and by culture, and your grandmother's culture was the historic culture of the Jews...
...Even now, at the age of thirty, when I read Anne Frank with my junior high literature class, I cried at the end and fumbled with an explanation for my tears...
...He had seen the same films as a student in Sunday School...
...And then, of course, there's the problem of generalizing from one episode, from one case...
...You want something more evocative of your grandmother, that good woman who "lived a spiritual life in a Jewish fashion...
...For the next twenty miles in that car, I cried my heart out...
...I had seen so many explicit films of the camps when I was a teenager that I had had nightmares for days and years afterwards...
...It wasn't enough to hold you, and, but for an accidental highway, you might never have found your way back...
...Then again, he was hard to get along with...
...My husband seemed to sense my discomfort although he didn't probe too deeply...
...I infer, therefore, that the pride you speak of is that we were not among the authors of evil...
...So that when "Holocaust" aired on TV, I found I really did not want or need to watch it...
...But waves of sound seemed to ripple out of the tall grass along the roadside...
...The irony of friends telling me to visit Dachau: halfway around the world, I realized I had been there...
...The last time I ever saw her she was lighting the shabbos candles from her bed...
...There are two explanations for why the Jewish people have existed as long as they have...
...I was a Jew then as I am one now...
...Given its extravagant productivity, given its manifest power to sustain and enrich the lives of so very many different people in so very many different places and circumstances, the burden's on you—and on me, on all of us...
...That is what I most want to say to you...
...After this would have come the punch line: we should all be proud because they, like us, were Jews...
...For my father it is...
...It does not appear to them worth the effort...
...you mean to understand...
...I have met him in many synagogues and temples across the country...
...You want your rabbi to teach what your grandmother knew...
...vaguely supernatural—a belief in a God-force or an afterlife—he finds distastefully unscientific...
...But I didn't...
...And the one fairly certain thing, the one thing that I can say to you with considerable confidence, is that only so will you get a lot, will you get what you seek...
...The acts of charity she performed were not performed because the Jewish tradition prescribes good works, but because my grandmother had an understanding of the world, a spiritual understanding, which made good works natural...
...You see, I had thought that cities like Mauthausen would have changed their names after World War II, simply out of shame for what happened there...
...There are, therefore, many people who walk away from the enterprise...
...I went to dances at the Jewish Community Center but made fun of the other kids (a poultice for not being asked to dance, no doubt...
...There is no one to hand it to you...
...Most likely even she wasn't...
...For many years, I did not want to be a Jew...
...And I worry that a trip that starts with the Holocaust may never discover the rest of what's there, the pride that comes not only out of our reactions to what others have done, but from the directions we've freely chosen...
...Starving, bony figures with gaping, howling mouths seemed to haunt the road ahead...
...Come the high holidays, they look out at a sea of people—most of them as much in search as you— who sit there and say, "Show me...
...Awareness struck me with full force, like a blow to the gut, when we reached the outskirts of Mauthausen...
...Actually, I too was a hypocrite, but I did not know it then...
...And you, as you say, would "give a lot" for that...
...You want something that is spiritually purer...
...I went to temple but refused to listen...
...No, you are not.by anything more significant than the accident of birth a Jew...
...Place her, on the high holidays, in your temple, and she would have felt as alienated as you...
...What religion can I give her, if I do not reclaim my own...
...Her conflicts she likely kept to herself...
...But with age, vision clears...
...Otherwise I might have gone to Temple this Rosh Hashanah, enjoyed looking at everyone's new clothing, let my mind wander during the sermon, and gone home smugly complimenting myself for being part of the Great Jewish People...
...There's no mystery about why my father has a strong Jewish identification: for him Jews are the people who are on his side...
...The answer would have been clear, I think...
...Lines of shaved heads and nude gaunt forms stood at the fence, their bloody fingers sticking fiercely to the barbed wire...
...And since you seem glad to be back...
...I grew up in America...
...And lines of people wound slowly and silently toward a huge grey silo of a building, the oven...
...Yet you make no reference to any specific source of pride...
...I tried to renounce my Jewish heritage in both subtle and not so subtle ways...
...My grandmother lived a spiritual life in a Jewish fashion...
...The answers are there to be found...
...So I found a non-Jewish boy who could soothe the former (though not all the way—too much guilt...
...I don't know the rabbi you heard that day...
...A Judaism that could teach me what it taught my grandmother would be a Judaism to which I could give my heart...
...I grew up in a good Jewish home...
...In spite of the rhetoric I've heard about "the Jewish community" I have yet to encounter it as a real entity...
...You write, at the very end of your statement, of the "pain" and the "pride...
...I have a daughter now...
...But I wonder, even about him, even after what you've said, what sort of an impression he might have made on you had you come to him and said, "Some of my friends and I would like to meet with you once a week, and really study...
...But that is what you seek, what you admire, what you wish you could claim as your own...
...Jews—at least educated, middle-class, American Jews— worship an idea of Jewishness...
...The name remained and young children frolicked in the sunshine, for yes, the sun did shine here...
...There is less an air of expectancy than a brooding skepticism...
...Some non-Jewish friends had remarked at our departure that we shouldn't miss Dachau since we'd be so close to Germany...
...From what you say about him, I suspect I'm fortunate not to know him...
...I went to Hebrew school three afternoons a week...
...So what...
...No sociological jargon, no effort to make things 'relevant.' The texts, in their own terms...
...What my grandmother did was radiate a sprightly joy which clearly was connected with her Jewish beliefs...
...As the town flickered by, people seemed to spring from the earth and call to me...
...The passages we read out loud from the Union Prayerbook make a point of stressing just how likely he was to visit us with a variety of misfortunes...
...We're dealing with a 4,000 year old tradition—one that includes and once nurtured your grandmother, and so cannot be casually dismissed as lightweight—and when you enter that tradition, it seems to me that you can't place the burden of proof on its representatives...
...For what is it that you go on to say...
...If this explanation is true, you can put the Jews among good-natured people who don't persecute them, and you will have solved the Jewish Question as thoroughly as any Nazi could wish...
...Strangers have come together, for a wide variety of reasons, for a wide variety of backgrounds, and the poor rabbi, who knows better than you that this is his own annual opportunity to work a piece of magic—and who also, if he's like most, has his own personal agenda with God that day—must charm, educate, inspire, convert...
...I know this is hard to take from a hypocrite...
...She knew the whole, and did not confuse it for the part...
...No, in our time we must create such congregations, and we must do so even though we lack many of the required resources...
...What I did instead was listen carefully to what the Rabbi had to say, and as I did so I remembered why it was that I had stopped going to Temple in the first place...
...A mediocre rabbi...
...I knew now that the horror movie in my mind had become my day nightmare and I was inside the fence now...
...You see, I'm one of those younger Jews whom the Reform rabbis worry about...
...You understand and accept that the experiences which shaped him—specifically, exposure to anti-Semitism as a child—are valid experiences...
...My husband (a non-practicing Jew, like myself) and 1 had driven from Innsbruck to Vienna, through northern Austria, as part of our first trip abroad...
...But you are ready for the effort...
...Such understandings of the world are by no means limited to Jews, nor are they ubiquitous among Jews...
...The most that I can say for him is that it's no great joy to enter a calling that has teaching as its central aspect, and then to discover that your students cut almost all their classes...
...The first one, the depressing one, is that they survived because they were constantly persecuted...
...I even learned to speak Hebrew when I was sixteen and went to Israel, stars in my eyes, to be a chalutz...
...by not performing holiday rituals, first by slipping out of temple choir, then out of temple itself for good...
...I do not know, of course, but I would guess that in your own childhood, there was an essentially emotional relationship to Judaism, one that did not offer much more than a vague and highly generalized sense of association...
...Perhaps this comes with growing up, this realization of an identy born inside the soul of a person...
...I stopped crying and just listened to my heart, its regular beat, and wiped my eyes...
...You left a shack...
...And that's the best of the assembly...
...I don't know, as you claim to, whether the survival of the Jews can adequately be explained by the kind of faith you saw in your grandmother's eyes...
...The rabbi: I hold no brief for the kind of rabbi you describe...
...It's not that I'm not a religious person...
...Several times on our Austrian trip we had to pass through Germany, and I realized each time that I stopped breathing until the car reached Austrian soil again...
...there are only hands to hold as you search for it, together with all of the rest of us who are searching...
...You could almost hear the bodies of a thousand Jewish saints whirling as the Rabbi spoke—and maybe those of a few social scientists, since the sociological jargon dragged in to give the sermon relevance was often incorrectly used...
...The flack I've gotten hasn't come from anti-Semites...
...I guess he understood what I was feeling...
...There are those Jews—a growing number these days—who interpret "ways of living" to mean some very specific ways, conforming to commandments they perceive as binding...
...I already have several of those...
...I can never forget that...
...There is, however, another explanation for the survival of Judaism...
...Be charismatic," the audience (for it is not a congregation) says...
...But I was too timid to drop out so blatantly and thus challenge my parents' authority...
...He finds no difficulty in being aggressively Jewish, even though anything...
...I want to make sure that you are aware that the home you now enter is ever so much more lavishly furnished than you once thought it, than the home you supposed you were leaving...
...But is it enough to replace this God with the worship of Jewishness...
...disease had shrivelled her to the size of a child, but her eyes still shone with faith...
...If all that Judaism can offer me and my generation is a reference group, we may well be on our way to a similar fate here in America...
...And there are others—I count myself among them—who have a fuzzier notion of what the "ways" are, but who are committed to their pursuit...
...And it is unfortunate, I agree, that the tradition has somewhere been ruptured, that one cannot simply enter the house of Judaism and find there an ongoing congregation, into which one fits most naturally...
...There are so very many others like you, in search...
...It had been at least four years since I'd gone, and having mellowed somewhat with age—I'm thirty now—I was kind of hoping it would mark the beginning of a better relationship with Judaism...
...The fate of the Sephardic Jews who fled to China after the expulsion from Spain points a warning here...
...You, and they, are the only people who can fill the congregations, who can make the dedication, who can reclaim the rightful inheritance...
...You say that the "acts of charity she performed were not performed because the Jewish tradition prescribes good works, but because my grandmother had an understanding of the world, a spritual understanding, which made good works natural...
...But the bottom line, as they say, is you...
...the rest just want out as quickly as possible...
...Until Jewish congregations are led by people and filled with people who have dedicated themselves to a lifetime of learning and living the spiritual reality that animated my grandmother, I will have to leave undecided the question: Am I, by anything more significant than an accident of birth, a Jew...
...You do not want to be, because it is lonely, and because it is work, and because you are not quite sure where the payoff is...
...Even a horrendous rabbi...
...Judaism is not merely a set of emotional responses, no matter how compelling...
...He would then have explained that this leader, whose speech impediment had identified him as learning-impaired, had led his ethnic group on a forty-year encounter session in an ecologically unendangered area...
...I became the sister of the boy whose legs were broken over and over again in some insane medical experiment...
...you return to a mansion, if you will it...
...Some of my friends are Jewish, but a lot aren't, and worse—in the eyes of my family and the Reform rabbis—I've fallen seriously in love with a wonderful man who isn't the least bit Jewish...
...So let's talk about the three main characters in your story: the rabbi, your grandmother—and, most important, JLB herself...
...Having stumbled onto that highway and come back, must you not be concerned that you provide your children with something more substantial than you started with...
...The rabbi you encountered may be a caricature, but even the best of his colleagues end up damnably frustrated...
...Make it happen...
...I do not mean to challenge you as you come home, not at all...
...but also ways of living...
...Just as some of the people who have done the things I've had to protest were Jewish, and some weren't...
...In what conceivable sense does that have any bearing at all on the meanings of Judaism and Jewishness...
...The people who have stood by my side in times of stress have not been distinguished from those who haven't by the fact of their being Jewish...
...If Judaism is going to command my devotion, it is going to have to offer me something more profound than a group identification...
...I became Anne Frank, and I was dying of tuberculosis and starvation...
...Although he regards religious doctrine as "distastefully unscientific," he very much wants to assert his Jewishness...
...I don't mean to sit as judge...
...But I am convinced, entirely, that we must find the way to move beyond it...
...Was there no dignity to my people...
...JENNY NATHAN Am I a minority...
...But you are those people...
...If one seeks to enter Judaism, best that it should be in order to lay claim to goodness, to acts of charity, to peace of mind and soul...
...I think of my grandmother for whom God was a friend, albeit a demanding one, and who believed firmly that death was a gateway into a new existence...
...Welcomed by the Chinese merchant class for their intelligence and skill, they had all but disappeared through intermarriage and assimilation within a century or two...
...With very, very few exceptions, the worst possible way to use a rabbi, any rabbi, is to have him do his high holiday number...
...You are prepared, it appears, to understand and accept that, for him...
...He wants to be with it, to be relevant...
...Until Jewish congregations are led by people and filled with people who have dedicated themselves to a lifetime of learning and living the spiritual reality that animated my grandmother," you will have to leave undecided the question of the significance of your own Judaism...
...When my grandmother was told she had cancer, her spiritual understanding continued to give her strength...
...In short, a God no sensible, balanced, modern person was likely to be drawn to...
...The thing that bothers me most is the nature of your "moment of truth...
...Of course he was just as likely to rescue us from these misfortunes—that may even have been the point of the passages—but he sounded at best unstable, and unhealthily fond of praise...
...For I stand as a Jew in this world, and therein lies so much pride and honor...
...So I challenged Judaism instead because it could not fight back, and it eventually lost...
...As a matter of fact her chauvinism was more likely to come out about Hungarians, since my grandmother was an immigrant from that unlucky land...
...The car slowed as we reached other small towns in Austria...
...Morally, it is surely more attractive to be the hunted rather than the hunter...
...For the human soul does not give up that much pain or pride very easily...
...Pain and pride, to be sure...
...And do you not owe it to yourself, as well, to amplify and enrich the meanings and the messages which Judaism offers you...
...If there is'to be meaning to the accident, your grandmother's meaning or your own, it is a meaning you will have to impose upon that accident, a meaning that you will have to work towards...
...How do you explain to fourteen year old kids with skateboards in their closets, living in Orange County, home of the Golden Arches, what it was like for Anne Frank and her sister at Bergen Belsen...
...You would "give a lot...
...They'll listen to the rabbi's psychological jargon, but when they have problems, you better believe they're going to go to a psychologist...
...Your father, as many of the congregants, came to the synagogue for reasons of which you do not entirely approve...
...Perhaps...
...The origin of that Jewishness...
...Not to forget it, but to broaden our Judaic horizons...
...I hope you can accept that...
...And yet, and yet: I suspect that your grandmother herself might have drawn a rather more direct connection between the prescriptions of the Jewish tradition and her own acts of charity...
...My skewed vision did not see this as a child or as a teenager...
...In this manner, we raced past the lovely birch trees surrounding Berchtes-gaden and didn't seem to slow until we saw the Austrian border guards again...
...They usually came to the temple once a year at high holy days, and then always in fancy furs and expensive suits...
...But she would have known that her alienation was from that temple, that rabbi, perhaps even those Jews—and not from Judaism...
...I thought about this God a bit further, wondering why-he's been retired...
...Some were, some weren't...
...And no one seemed willing to stop it, to fight back, and I was so ashamed...
...As long as a good rabbi is one who does not alienate the town's business leaders, congregations will be made up, as they are now, of moderately well-off folks who need the reference group that Judaism provides, who enjoy weddings and bar-mitzvahs like any other party, and who are raising children for whom Judaism can have no real gut-relevance...
...He may be a mite embarrassed at the title "Rabbi," preferring to be called "Doctor...
...But there's more, much more, to the pride than that...
...I've had a few flashes of what it was, but nothing I can sustain from day to day...
...But since I've become an adult, I've been unable to see any reason, save nostalgia, for making a Jewish identity the center of my personal identity...
...She didn't harp on her Judaism, or brag that so-and-so, the famous such-and-such was Jewish...
...you've got two hours, or three, to defeat the massed forces of secularization, of modernism, of alienation and assimilation...
...The fact is, of course, that you will not be your grandmother...
...I was watching my baby thrown into the air by a German soldier...
...If the congregation can somehow get itself filled with the "right" kind of people, with people who are "properly" motivated, then you will enter, and join...
...Look more carefully at the others next time...
...Didn't they want to live...
...You would, as you say, "give a lot" to know what she knew...
...It's so tastefully done," they said, "and so moving...
...LEONARD FEIN Dear Janet Lehrman Brown: Your letter is, of course, a question, even though it comes in the disguise of an attack...
...First of all, what right had a non-Jew to tell me anything about concentration camps...
...And the pursuit—and sometime discovery—of those ways is what gets transmitted to the next generation...
...I was horny, you should pardon the expression, and confused...
...But they are not your experiences...
...As a teenager, when I saw the play, Anne Frank, I became Anne Frank...
...Part of me still wanted to be a "good girl...
...In the 60's, when I was a teenager, rebellion against authority was all the rage—Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, long hair, flowers, extolling nature in a society that was just beginning to revel in a choice of different shades of toilet paper...
...We did when we were kids, but that was a long time ago, and now we want a non-pediatric Judaism...
...But the Judaism I saw at my local temple cannot...
...that much you know from your grandmother's life, as those who sit near you know it from their parents and grandparents, from their shaping experiences...
...But you must understand that the push and pull of Judaism becomes so strong as I grow older...
...I've been discriminated against because I was a woman and wouldn't keep to my place, and I've been sent away from lunch counters unserved because I lived on a Hippy farm, but the closest I've come to anti-Semitism was the time I was fired from a job in a cocktail lounge because my hair was too frizzy—and that happened in the South...
...The best way that I can explain it is to say that if this Rabbi had been speaking about Moses and the Children of Israel in the Desert he would have told his congregation about the case of a charismatic leader of an ethnic group that had been culturally and economically disadvantaged for a significant time span...
...I'd give a lot to know what she knew...
...Yet you rather casually dismiss a couple of obvious possibilities...
...I tried to look straight ahead, to see and hear nothing, for I knew my imagination would take me back to those nightmare films of my youth...
...The point, I guess, is that for a rabbi to work, you've got to know how to use him...
...LEONARD FEIN Dear Jenny Nathan: It is not for me to say "Welcome home...
...Will you help...
...I do not doubt the power of the Holocaust, nor do I question it...
...I have only to think of my father's stories of his boyhood, when as a small, frightened, Jewish immigrant, he had to run home from school dodging the rocks thrown by Polish immigrant children who chased after him crying, "Christ-killer...
...Yet I am troubled, and I want to share my concerns with you...
...The worship by Jewish ancestors of a God, now retired, whom those ancestors had once believed it prudent to worship, praise, and extol...
...so you say...
...we don't make provision for official greeters...
...Yes, she brought her own plates when she visited us, but we knew, at least we children knew, that that was not the point...
...I had already lived it—in this lifetime, and undoubtedly in others...
...Bravo...
...In no situation throughout my life have I been in a strange town and needed help and been able to turn instinctively to Jews simply because they were Jews—yet in many such situations I have turned to women, because they were women, or musicians because they were musicians, with no other introduction, and made an instant, helpful connection...
...No, in fact the problem may be that I am...
...Judaism solved neither of these problems, as far as I could see...
...But since the real attack on Judaism and Jewish belonging is clad in indifference and speaks in the language of sullen silence, I know that you do not mean to destroy...
...and refused to think about the latter until about fifteen years later driving on a backwoods Austrian road on the way to Vienna...

Vol. 4 • September 1979 • No. 8


 
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