I have never been especially good at being Jewish. I escaped through a window of my first and only Hebrew School class and never returned or invited back. I tried twice to flee my own Bar Mitzvah and was physically restrained by a large and angry rabbi on one side if the pulpit and my older brother on the other, they pinned me in to keep me from running.
I was sent to my room and grounded for challenging the Passover holiday as bloodthirsty and wantonly vengeful (killing those innocent Egyptian first-born babies did not seem just to me) and complained loudly about my grandmother having to sit upstairs in her temple with other women. The faith seemed drenched in impenetrable ritual, and I have never liked ritual, not then, and not now. It was not a good fit.
I left the faith in my teenage years to become a Quaker, I loved the idea of worshipping silently and living simply and doing good and without judgement. I have never related in any serious way with Israel or wanted to go there. I always bristled at the idea of the Chosen People, it seemed a bit self-righteous to me. I could never learn any Hebrew or grasp much of the Yiddish spoken around me when I was young.
I don’t deny being Jewish, and in many ways I am proud of the faith’s commitment to righteous deeds, education and caring for others. The Jews I knew as a child were hard-working, loving and peaceful people. I was close to the people of the holocaust, they were all around me and I knew about every member of my family who was lost in that awful time. I understand well what it is that Nazi’s did, it was not history they were worried about.
But in my own life, I have never really had to think too much about being Jewish or been asked about it. Being Jewish never stopped me from doing anything I wanted to do that I know of, and apart from hearing the occasional hateful or insensitive comment or vicious e-mail, no one has bothered me much about it.
Where I live, there are not many Jews at all, and I have never felt any resentment or prejudice, although a farmer up the hill in West Hebron was delighted to learn I was a Jew, and came to slap me on the back and said it was exciting to know one up close (he never did quite figure out what I was doing there).
A wise Jewish friend (why does that sound like a cliché to me?) told me once that there comes a time in life when every Jew suddenly has to think about it or speak about it, whether he wants to or not.
Watching people marching through Charlottesville the other night carrying their torches and chanting that Jews and blacks would not replace them, I thought that time might be coming, and in recent days, a number of friends, Jewish and otherwise, have messaged me wondering why I hadn’t spoken up about being Jewish in America right now, as the number of vandal attacks on Jewish cemeteries and Temples mounts.
It is a quite understandable article of faith in Judaism that Jews must speak up against wrongdoing, the world depends on it.
I know the script calls for me to speak out against the white supremacists and Nazi’s who marched on Charlottesville and killed an idealistic young woman named Heather Heyer this weekend, but I find that I am not ready to do that. I feel, as one who is committed to an open and authentic life, that I do not wish or need to speak out when everyone else on the earth seems to be speaking out.
No one is really looking to me for that, and I have nothing profound to say about it. People must make up their own minds and form their own judgements, and I have faith in that outcome.
Perhaps because I was born Jewish, I am never comfortable in a mob, truth and thoughtfulness never thrive in the midst of outrage and hysteria, however justified it seems. If such a time comes, I will know it, and I will have something say.
A mayor I battled with once when I was a reporter assured me that I would be one of the first ones they came for when the bad guys finally took over. People like me (and many of you) are always the first ones they come after, Jewish or not.
I will be honest, I do not yet feel that America is an anti-semitic nation or that any such movement is ascending in a serious way. I could, of course, be wrong, and history will judge me for that if I am.
But I wish to be very cautious before I start talking about Nazi’s in America. The hatred may sound the same, but we are a very different country than Germany in the 1930’s. Even Germany is a very different country than it was then. Some people are calling Germany the “New America.”
This is a large and diverse country, and there have always been haters and mobs, many people have suffered here much more than the Jews have, and suffer still. I do not believe our President is an anti-Semite who is endorsing the murder of Jews, despite his bone-headed comments Tuesday.
I don’t believe he possesses any true ideology of any kind, he seems a creature of other people’s ideas, and he is not that curious or well-informed. He has always had all kinds of Jews around him, in his work and personal life, and none of them thinks he supports genocide. I know he can do awful harm, too many people to count are banging on that drum.
Does everyone really need to speak out on everything all the time and all at once? Can we really hear anyone in all of that din. I saw that Heather Heyer’s mother spoke out today. It is her time to do that, not me.
I believe when everyone else is talking about something, I need to be talking about something else.
Sometimes, silence and reflection is much more powerful than outrage and condemnation. I just can’t do the mob, even if some things really are black and white.
As to being Jewish, I regret being so estranged from my birthright faith. I do seek to perform righteous deeds, perhaps that is in my genes.
I still go to Quaker Meeting once in a while, and I feel very close to the Quaker ideals, it is my kind of religion. My favorite religious readings are the teachings of Jesus Christ, the real one, the journals of Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk, and the Kabbalah, the writings of the Jewish mystics through time.
There is not one word in the Kabbalah that is angry, demeaning of women, arrogant or self-righteous. The God there loves Mother Earth, cares about the poor, and torments the uncaring, and he is a feminist. I love him. But this does not make me feel that Judaism is my faith. The God of the Kabbalah is quite different from the vengeful and angry God in the Old Testament, the people who wrote the Kabbalah hid and worked in medieval caves in fear of their lives.
Tonight I do have this message for people who march through other people’s streets and carry torches in the dark and chant hateful things in the night.
It is my nightly reading from the Kabbalah, I always close my eyes and open the book and seem to come to the page I need.
Tonight’s passage was called The Song Of Songs.
It is a favorite, I’d rather share this and sing it to the marchers than be outraged and talk about what it means for me to be Jewish.
“There is one who sings the song of his soul, discovering in his soul everything – utter spiritual fulfillment. There is one who signs the songs of his people…
There is one who ascends with all these songs in unison – the song of the soul, the song of the nation, the song of humanity, the song of the cosmos – resounding together, blending in harmony, circulating the sap of life, the sound of holy joy.”
I might just sing that song tonight.
