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Home Presentation for Yom Kippur Symposium 5768, September 22, 2007
When Rabbi Block first asked me to give a brief talk under the heading, “The Impact of Judaism on My Life,” I was overwhelmed not only by the breadth of the subject. I said it would be impossible for me to detach Judaism from the rest of my identity. It would be like giving a talk on the impact of elbows on my life. Rabbi Block – rabbinically – responded to this objection by saying that it might be a good place to begin my talk.
When someone who has to deliver sermons on a weekly basis gives advice on oratory, it’s probably a good idea to take it, so rather than separate out Judaism from my life and talk about how one thing affects the other, it seems to me far more pertinent to talk about why it is impossible for me to disentangle one from the other. Judaism is central in my family life, in my personal life, in my work. I take a great deal of pleasure in the beauty of the Hebrew language. I enjoy the intellectual and theological tradition, the same tradition that has led Judaism to be unique among the world’s major religions in having a holy book written in the form of an argument. On Yom Kippur I think it also worthwhile to speak of the wisdom of an ethical approach that understand the frailty of human nature. In some systems of belief the contemplation of sin is considered equal to the commission of sin, and while I don’t want to hold up one religion as superior to another, for me, I am far more comfortable with an ethics in which we are held accountable not for our thoughts but for our deed – one in which God sees us not as already carved in stone, already judged, but as works in progress, capable of growing, evolving and learning from our mistakes.
When I think back over the course of my life, however, it is easy for me to cast my Jewishness as something that emerged in my adult life. In the house where I grew up, Judaism, as I understand it and practice it, did not receive much attention. The trajectory of Jewishness in my family history goes something like this. My great grandfather was very observant and expected his children to be so. My grandfather was not observant, but he expected his children to be. My father, in turn, was neither observant, nor did he expect his children to be observant.
Growing up, we never marked Shabbat in any particular way, but as an adult Shabbat is an important part of my family life. As a child, I did not know until I was ten or eleven that Jews don’t eat pork or mix meat and dairy. As an adult I keep a kosher home and regularly discuss the dietary laws with my older child. (I admit that keeping kosher is fairly easy for me since we’re vegetarian – it just requires an extra sponge for the cat food). As a child I hardly knew the names or sounds of Hebrew letters; and an adult I spent several years studying biblical Hebrew.
Yet, as disparate as these things seem, I see myself not as having made a break from my parents, but rather as existing upon the same continuum, moving to a slightly different place within the spectrum. When I was a child, my parents did not emphasize Jewish practice, or even Jewish learning, but somehow Jewish identity remained significant, at times central. I may never have known precisely what it meant to be Jewish or how to read Hebrew or what some of the holidays were for, but I always knew that I was Jewish, that being Jewish meant I belonged to an ancient and storied tribe, and being Jewish, if nothing else, was somehow important. I could not always have said why, but I knew that it was so.
A few weeks ago, while I had somewhere in the back of my mind the question of what I would say for this talk, I happened to read Philip Roth’s novel, The Plot Against America, and I was struck by how the narrator – growing up in an alternate America of the 1940s describes his parents’ relationship to their Jewishness. He writes, “These were Jews who needed no large terms of reference, no profession of faith or doctrinal creed, in order to be Jews…. Neither was their being Jews a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be ‘proud’ of. What they were was what they couldn’t get rid of – what they couldn’t even begin to want to get rid of. Their being Jews issued from their being themselves…. It was as it was, in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it, regardless of the consequences.”
Because it is a tribal religion, Judaism is quite literally written in my DNA, but it is also more figuratively written in my cultural DNA. I grew up with parents who respectively knew little about Jewish ritual and practice, or chose to ignore and forget what they knew, and yet because that sense of particularity remained, a recognition of fundamental distinction that made us different and unique, and because of that uniqueness, important. It was this understanding of a historical significance, that kept alive for me the cultural continuity, that led to my own curiosity about language and history and theology and identity. We are often tempted to see in our Jewish past a community of the monolithically observant, and to see ourselves as lax and detached from that past, but the truth is always more complicated. There have always been, within all Jewish communities degrees of observance and commitment. The true gift of modernity is the ability to see ourselves as part of a continuum, and – true to the great Jewish theological and intellectual tradition – make informed and thoughtful decisions about what sort of Jewish life to lead.
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