My Jewish Life – Thoughts about Identity and Belonging

Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the unbeliever who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon-fires of the ancient hope!

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

I

For one memorable Passover Seder spent in Liberia, two other Peace Corps volunteers, neither of whom were Jewish, joined me in feasting on biscuits and Vimto from the Lebanese store in lieu of matzo and Manischewitz. No Haggadah available, we read from a volume of Rabelais, memorializing Hans Carvel’s ring rather than the exodus from Egypt. Unique as that occasion was, it reflects my generally cavalier treatment of religious ritual. These days I mark the holidays by munching on matzo on Passover and hamantaschen on Purim, lighting a menorah on Chanukah and fasting on Yom Kippur, a few vestigial rites of an assimilated, agnostic Jew. Some might hardly consider me a Jew at all.

It’s a far cry from how my family used to celebrate these occasions when I was growing up. I was born a week before Israel was declared a state, as joyful an event to my parents, I believe, as the birth of their third child. My father emigrated from Poland when he was ten, my mother’s family arrived from Hungary, and the establishment of a homeland for Jews had great significance for them, scarred as they were by the cultural memory of Holocaust and pogroms. Maintaining Jewish traditions and rituals was crucial for them, having come close to witnessing their extinction.

They were Orthodox Jews, relatively moderate in their religious observance. They kept a kosher home with separate dishes and cutlery for milchig and fleishig, dairy and meat, and two additional sets for Passover. I didn’t taste pork or shrimp or wolf down a bologna sandwich with a glass of milk until I left home. We lived in the Bronx amidst many other Ashkenazi Jews with similar backgrounds and lifestyles. My mother lit candles on Friday night and my father, a yarmulke on his head (we pronounced it yamuka), said Kiddush with a glass of concord wine in his hand and a challah in front of him. The meal hardly varied – chopped liver, gefilte fish, chicken soup with lokshen and potato kugel.

On the Sabbath, we weren’t allowed to write or turn lights on or off, but my father went to work on Saturdays. The television was kept on with the volume and brightness turned down so that we could ritualistically watch I Remember Mama and more entertainingly, Sgt. Bilko after dinner without having to turn the set on. We attended synagogue on Purim to listen to the reading of the Book of Esther and make noise every time the name of the villain Haman was mentioned, on Simchat Torah, a joyous holiday full of singing and good cheer, and on the solemn High Holy Days, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kipur when the entire liturgy was droned through in all-day services, the men wrapped in prayer shawls swaying back and forth, the women upstairs or in another section separated by a curtain, and the streets packed with people dressed in holiday finery. When I was young it hardly occurred to me our neighborhood was different from any other around the country.

Our Passover seders followed a set formula. My father read through the Hagadah in Hebrew, zooming through it, rarely stumbling in his recital, even though he didn’t understand the text. The language issuing from his mouth didn’t sound like the modern Hebrew of Israel; it wasn’t for communicating with others but for davening or prayer. We carefully followed the seder rituals, washing our hands, raising our cups, and dipping pieces of celery in salt water at the appropriate times. Passover with its different routines and foods was a holiday I always looked forward to and the drinking of four cups of wine, tiny though they were, didn’t lessen its appeal. For my parents it was a serious business associated with duty rather than enjoyment, requiring effort, labor and expense to haul out and pack away dishes and replace all the food in the house with items bearing a Kosher for Passover tag.

Like my brother and sister before me I attended Talmud Torah after school where I learned the aleph-bet and absorbed Jewish lore and law. I enjoyed those classes and when I started third grade in a new school that neither my parents nor I was pleased with, we made the decision that I should leave public school and attend yeshiva, which I did for the next seven years. There, the first half of the long school day was devoted to Jewish studies. After lunch we had English classes. Latecomer as I was to the school, I was behind the others, most of whom had been there two years and could speak Yiddish, which was used in class. My parents spoke Yiddish at home mostly as a secret language when they didn’t want the kids to know what they were talking about, and my knowledge was limited to common words like schlep, schmatte, tuchus, nosh, and meshuggah, known by most New Yorkers, Jew and gentile alike. The remedy found for my linguistic deficiencies was to place me one grade lower in Hebrew than in English, and that is the way I limped unevenly through my studies.

During those yeshiva years I was devoutly religious. I believed wholeheartedly in the existence of God and entertained no iota of doubt that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was looking over me. I wore my yarmulke, fastened to my scalp by a bobby pin, day and night, a reminder that God was always present, watching everything I did, hearing everything I said, knowing everything I thought. I said morning, afternoon and evening prayers and made the appropriate blessings before and after each meal. On the upper right hand corner of every sheet of paper on which I wrote, whether it was a letter or a page of homework, I never failed to place the Hebrew equivalents of the letters B and H for Baruch Hashem, or Blessed be God. I attended synagogue every Saturday and wore a key fashioned into a tie clip so as not to flout the rule prohibiting the carrying of objects on the Sabbath. I was fastidious about all the minutiae of rabbinic law, insisting that no item of clothing I wore contained shatnez, a mixture of wool and linen. Underneath my shirt I always wore the tassels called tzitzit. I was all in.

As firm as I was in my beliefs, I still felt like an outsider in the yeshiva community. My family wasn’t as religious as my classmates’ and I felt like a pretender trying to fit in. I was embarrassed by my parents because they were less than perfect in their observances. My mother, who took on a job at a department store to help defray the considerable cost of my schooling, joined my father in the mortal sin of working on the Sabbath, and I was mortified by their iniquitous ways, terrified that someone at school would find out. I was absolutely insufferable but my parents were proud of my religious zeal and hoped I’d become a rabbi.

As I advanced from grade to grade, the Jewish studies grew more complex and involved. At first we read the chumash, starting from Genesis, translating into English. Later the translation was to Yiddish and included commentaries by Rashi. Then the Talmud was added to the syllabus, huge tomes consisting of mishnah, an elucidation of biblical law, and gemara, commentary and disputation about that text. The confusing babble of Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish, none of which I had much facility in or could even always distinguish from one another, overwhelmed me. Even in English, the texts didn’t make much sense. As I recall it now years of my life revolved around discussions of who is liable if an ox strays into a neighbor’s yard and gores another ox, or if someone digs a hole into which an ox falls and is killed or injured. None of my neighbors happened to own oxen and the only holes around were those dug by Con Edison, insisting as they did, heedless to the potential danger to oxen, “Dig we must.” What I was learning had little meaning for me and the difficulty of the studies along with an oppressive atmosphere thick with commandments and prohibitions wasn’t made easier by the onset on puberty.

After ninth grade, yeshiva and I had enough of each other and I was thrust back into public school as a high school sophomore, feeling as much an outsider there on account of my parochial school background as I had felt before in yeshiva. After so many years of gender-segregated schooling I was unused to being around girls, didn’t know how to talk to them and couldn’t stop thinking about them. My resentment at having been deprived of a normal childhood helped turn me against my once deeply held religious beliefs as did the growing conviction that I’d been duped into putting my faith in a loving God deeply concerned about my personal well-being. A developing awareness of the world beyond the yeshiva and the Bronx made me question if I was really lucky enough to be a member of a small group of chosen people that God actually gave a damn about. How did I manage to win that lottery without even entering? I found that the rabbis who taught me didn’t necessarily lead more exemplary lives than secular Jews or non-Jews, and wondered about the correlation between piety and goodness. Maybe following a rigid set of commandments, many trivial and obscure, wasn’t enough to insure righteousness. The spirituality I craved was absent in the kind of religious training I had, structured as it was around a ferocious God obsessed with obedience and hearing repeated proclamations of how great He was, more like an earthly despot than a divinity. My disenchantment with the religion that had played such a large role in my life was both visceral and intellectual, fueled by my failures and follies as much as by rational thought and a desire to give my life meaning.

While my active involvement with Judaism as a religion ended with my withdrawal from yeshiva, I was still connected with other aspects of Jewish culture. Instead of taking French or Spanish to fulfill my high school foreign language requirement, not for the first or last time in my life I opted for what I thought would be easier and took Hebrew for the next two years. Beyond that my Jewish identity didn’t play much of a role in my life until I arrived in Israel a year after the Six-Day War. Going there wasn’t due to a yearning for the homeland or a rebirth of my religious ardor. Having dropped out of college before the end of my junior year, I was hitchhiking around Europe, making my way through Italy to the Greek isles, when my money ran out. It was on a boat in the Mediterranean that I heard that one of the few places it was possible to work abroad without a visa was on a kibbutz, and that’s how I ended up in the ancestral land.

My initial contact wasn’t auspicious. Israel remains the only country I’ve ever visited that tried to bar my entry. It was partially due to the fact that when I boarded the plane in Athens there was no covered gangway and I had to make my way down the tarmac in a heavy downpour. I was soaked through and still disheveled when I landed in Tel Aviv where I was questioned about my reason for being there and asked to show names and addresses of relatives in Israel who could vouch for me. I was surprised, having heard that Jews from anywhere in the world could claim citizenship and call Israel home. Not much of a homecoming, but I did have the requisite references and was allowed to enter. I wasn’t aware of it at the time but Israel was trying to check the onslaught of hippies into the country who encamped in Eilat and other scenic spots. I was singled out for interrogation even though I was traveling with a suitcase rather than a backpack, wearing a sports coat, albeit wrinkled and rumpled after getting drenched, and had taken nary a puff on a reefer up to that point in my life. I wasn’t a hippie when I arrived in Israel but could pass for one two years later when I departed, having ingested during my stay in the Holy Land as large a quantity of hashish and hallucinogens as any of my counterparts serving in Vietnam.

The kibbutz I ended up on had a large contingent of older Americans, many of whom emigrated from the US during the Korean War. There was also a new group composed mostly of Americans who’d been preparing for aliyah or immigration for much of their lives at a Zionist camp in New Jersey, into which I was naturally absorbed. Kibbutzniks viewed me as part of the group, called a garin or seed, which would form the next generation of workers. The garin members accepted me as one of them and I felt like one of them, too. We were the same age and had similar backgrounds. All I lacked was the same ideological training and expectation of remaining in Israel for the rest of my life. It was a formative experience, living and working in such close proximity with others. I was comfortable around the Americans and also the Europeans, mostly concentration camp survivors and war refugees. The people I had least in common with were the sabras, native-born Israelis, most of whom were veterans of the Six-Day War, strong, proud, militaristic and a far cry from the effete, intellectual, anti-war crowd I fit into. After a year on kibbutz it was time to move on, but I faced the same problem that brought me there in the first place: lack of money. I’d received no compensation beyond room and board and vouchers for use in the kibbutz store. I managed to get to Jerusalem where I stayed a year, busing tables in the bar of the renowned King David Hotel, living first in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Geula and then in a much friendlier Arab neighborhood near the Damascus Gate, which looked like Disneyland lit up at night.

II

With a background including an Orthodox Jewish upbringing, a yeshiva education and living in Israel, it might be thought I’d be pretty secure in my Jewish identity, but I used to have a recurring dream in which I was denounced, not for being Jewish, but for not being Jewish enough and not following basic customs and practices. I’d awake enraged and resentful at being judged lacking by people whose connection to Judaism was probably limited to being bar mitzvahed, attending synagogue a couple of times a year, and writing an occasional check to a Jewish charity. It made me feel defensive, ready to say, in the words of the old song, ‘I’ve Forgotten More Than You’ll Ever Know’ to anyone who challenged my Jewish-ness. Not that anyone ever did. The criticism must have bubbled up from within, not because of a longing to return to my old beliefs but because of the realization that I’d become one of the vilest things a person can be according to Jewish lore: an apikoros. Possibly from the Aramaic word meaning “to abandon” or maybe connected to the philosopher Epicurus, the word hadn’t been explicitly defined by my teachers but its meaning was clear as they hissed it out: a heretic, an infidel, someone who turns against his own people and heritage.

It’s hard to deny that I fit the bill. Every box could be checked off. I gave up my belief in God, in the Torah, in the idea of being one of the Chosen People. If that weren’t enough, (echoing the Passover song Dayenu – “it would have sufficed”), I generally bucked Jewish traditions. On top of that, I voiced criticism of Israeli policies. How, in view of all that can I consider myself a Jew? The answer is simply that I am. Genetically, I come from Semitic, Ashkenazi forebears. That’s the least of it, though. It’s ingrained in my being. It’s the way I was brought up, which can’t be undone. Just as I remain a native New Yorker even though I haven’t lived there in over fifty years, and I remain an American regardless of where I travel and how much I fume about American policies and culture, I remain a Jew, despite my agnosticism. If I rebel against certain aspects of Judaism it’s because there is something there to rebel against. And if none of that makes me Jewish there’s the certainty that I’ll be Jewish enough for the Haters when they come after me.

There are biases and notions stemming from religion and the way I was raised which I struggle to rid myself of, as well as obstinate quirks that reassert themselves. If I meet someone named Shaeffer a part of me says, “Hmm, I wonder if he’s Jewish,” as if that made some kind of a difference, as if that would constitute a significant connection between us. But wishing to free myself of undesirable attitudes is not the same as repudiating my Jewish identity. Even if I didn’t want to be Jewish or American or Caucasian, there is no way I could cease to be. Identity, after all, is not just about how I see myself but how I am seen by others. When I lived in Liberia and Korea, my Jewish identity was superseded by other identities – being Caucasian, a Westerner, an American. I never feel more American than when I travel abroad. Once I’m back home, I’m no longer “the American” so my Jewish identity becomes more prominent. I don’t wish to renounce any of those identities, and acknowledge they all have a significant role in making me who I am, even if don’t slap a bumper sticker on my car proclaiming “I’m proud to be a Jew” (or American, Caucasian, or male).

I was the only Jew in my small department in grad school in Iowa and wasn’t aware of any unusual treatment afforded me on account of my ethnic background, which was no secret. Another Jewish student from “back east” briefly joined the department after I’d been there several years, a rather irritating fellow, it was generally agreed, who was convinced that he was the victim of antisemitic bias. He eventually brought a discrimination suit against the university. When he complained to me about how he was treated, I recall saying to him something like, “The only person here who doesn’t like you because you’re Jewish is me.” By recognizing that his obnoxious behavior could affect how people regarded me, I confirmed at least the potential for antisemitism. I didn’t doubt that he sincerely believed he was the victim of bias (maybe he had an innate bias that Midwesterners were bound to be antisemitic), but I believed he was disliked on his own merits and not because he was Jewish. If someone reacts negatively to me, I tend to attribute it to something in my personality rather than ethnicity or other aspect of my heritage. But we’re all different, and just as we vary in our tolerance of pain, we differ in how we interpret the way people behave toward us.

It’s been a while since I heard the expression “Don’t jew me down,” but I wouldn’t rush to brand anyone as antisemitic for saying it. Engaging in aggressive haggling isn’t a heinous act and has probably been associated with Jews from the time Abraham bargained with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. There may be no more intent to offend in the use of that idiom than in calling a musical instrument a Jew’s harp or by naming a fungus Jew’s Ear. Hackles are raised as soon as the word Jew is used in a strange context, whether there is intent to offend or not. For some, intent is irrelevant, but judging a driver who accidentally hits a pedestrian the same way as one who intentionally mows down a crowd of people is absurd, and so is disregarding the intent of an insensitive remark. We’re cautious these days, some might feel overly so, about the words we use, especially if race, ethnicity or gender is involved. It’s understandable and may be a sign of positive social change and progress. I’m not optimistic about that however, because I haven’t experienced a period of greater intolerance and hostility to otherness than the present. Maybe we’re ignoring serious threats because we’re too busy paying attention to trivialities.

Persecution is a prominent fixture in the Jewish psyche and even if one brushes aside such events as the destruction of the temples by the Babylonians and Romans as ancient history, which they are, the Holocaust is too recent and too devastating not to have left its mark on just about everyone of Jewish heritage. Sensitivity to discrimination is justified by history, but there are times when I feel, as my colleague in grad school made me feel, that accusations of antisemitism are not only misplaced but detrimental. When Representative Ilhan Omar tweeted something about money influencing US policy on Israel, she was pounced upon by a number of Jewish entities who branded her as antisemitic and called for congress to punish her even though she said nothing derogatory about Jews, Judaism or the state of Israel. As outrageous as it was of her to suggest that money could possibly sway political decisions (who could imagine such a thing?), targeting her as a threat to American Jewry is absurd, especially at a time when antisemitism, racism and other forms of intolerance, hatred and bigotry constitute the platform of a political party only to too glad to amplify the attack. Focusing attention on a mouse to the left of you while ignoring the beast on the other side that is preparing to devour you isn’t the wisest course of action, and feeding the mouse you’ve dispatched to the beast doesn’t pacify but strengthens it. With the horrors of the Holocaust seared into every Jewish soul, wariness of any sentiment that smacks of antisemitism is understandable, but conflating relatively innocuous words with real threats courts catastrophe.

There’s a peculiar notion that victims of bias cannot themselves be biased. I’ve seen, however, that Jews, like any other group of people, can discriminate as well as be discriminated against, and claiming to be God’s Chosen People makes both inevitable, the former because of the superiority it implies and the latter because of the resentment it engenders. Race was the subject of some of the fiercest arguments I had with my parents. Eminently decent people, their speech was nevertheless colored, shall we say, by an underlying disdain for anyone different from themselves. They referred to African Americans as “the schwartze”, one of the Yiddish words I learned early on. Not that there’s anything wrong with the word itself, which just means black. But that’s the case with all pejoratives – the offense isn’t in the words but in how they are used, and the way my parents said schwartze made me cringe. They called Asians “Chinamen”, and later in life when I told my father I was marrying a Korean woman, he disconsolately berated me for marrying a Chinaman. So homogeneous was that population to him that there weren’t even gender distinctions. It might have been funny if it didn’t break my heart. They were so insular, so tribal in their outlook, and how could I blame them for that when they were the products of their own times and circumstances?

I’ve read that many of the names of tribes of the indigenous people of North America translate into English as The People, suggesting that those belonging to other groups are something other than people. The Torah, describing the entire population of the earth, with the exception of the Jews, as the goyim or nations, establishes the idea of otherness from the opposite direction. Whoever we are and wherever we come from, some notion of the specialness of the group we belong to and the otherness of everyone else not belonging that group is baked into our very beings. Try as we may, (and try we ought), it’s well nigh impossible for most of us to eradicate the perception, rejected by our intellect but stubbornly embraced by habit and instinct, that other means lesser. A similar phenomenon exists on the individual level; our egos convince us that I matters more than thou, perhaps for the simple reason that there is no thou without an I to perceive it. Until that time when we can think and act as a single organism without boundaries, the problems associated with otherness will persist. Perhaps the very best among us, those worthy of the name tzadik, saint or arhat, can accept that everyone existing beyond the boundaries of their own beings are not other but a part of themselves. Having attained the ultimate level of enlightenment, they may be capable of obeying the simple precept at the heart of virtually every religion and culture, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It’s sadly ironic that religion, the very vehicle that should help us erase boundaries and bring us closer together is often the instrument for further divisions. Religion, race, ethnicity and nationality provide support and something to be a part of, to belong to, but at the cost of establishing artificial boundaries that separate us from each other.

One of my daughters, after a trip to Israel, mentioned that she saw something peculiar there – men wrapping themselves in electrical tape. I was at a loss to explain it until she said it was by the Wailing Wall. Then, after I stopped laughing, I pulled out of my closet a small, blue velvet bag embroidered with a Star of David and showed her my tefillin, two little black boxes with black straps attached, and explained how I used to put them on along with my prayer shawl for morning prayer. I believe that for a second she was startled that I once engaged in such bizarre practices. It was ages since I handled the tefillin and as I gazed at them I thought how strange they were even to me. What was once a regular part of my routine had become as foreign to me as something from another life, and so it is with much of the ritualistic elements of religion that I have sloughed off. My lackadaisical commemoration of Jewish traditions, including even the substitution of a ribald tale for the words of the Haggadah, isn’t meant to mock sacred rituals but to acknowledge my Jewish upbringing, to confirm my ethnic identity, to wistfully remember how the rituals from my childhood were once rooted in an absolute belief in a loving, omniscient, omnipotent God, a belief that now seems remote and naive. The bitter herb I nibble on today with a piece of matzo dipped in charoset isn’t so much a reminder to me of the time my forbears were slaves in Egypt as of the inexorable passage of time and erosion of innocence by the experience, at once beautiful and brutal, that is life.