Responding to an Ancestral Voice: Thoughts on Being (or not being) Jewish

Recently re-read this beautiful book. Such an eloquent, honest, and deeply respectful exploration of his religion. I wish with all my heart that I could convince my dad to read it. But of course he won't. 

This second reading made me wonder (again) why I care, why I'm drawn to Judaism. From what I understand, I'm not considered Jewish, at least according to Orthodox and Conservative definitions. It's not just that I'm a Christian, which would make me apostate in their eyes regardless of heritage or ancestry. It's that my mother was not a Jew. 

I've struggled with this question ("who is a Jew?"), being the parent of three children of mixed ancestry. Their dad is Japanese, which makes them "half" Japanese racially. To suggest that their father's race has no bearing on their racial make-up is ridiculous. Yet that's what is said about me. I'm not a Jew racially even though my father is Jewish. And I'm not a Jew religiously because I believe Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah. In order to be a Jew, I would need to convert (and reject Christianity).

A couple of weeks ago at church, there was a guest speaker who happens to be a Messianic Jew, i.e., a Jewish believer in Jesus, who was invited to speak briefly about Israel (he leads tours). In explaining how he, a Jew, came to believe in Yeshua (Jesus), the man said his mother was an Irish Catholic and his father an agnostic Jew. So technically, legally, I mean, he's not a Jew. That's what I was thinking. Later though, in explaining how he ended up living in Israel, he said that he was told that because he was Jewish, he was allowed to become an Israeli citizen. He was referring to something called the Law of Return ("aliyah") which, according to Wikipedia, is  

. . . Israeli legislation, passed on 5 July 1950, that gives Jews the right of return and the right to live in Israel and to gain Israeli citizenship. In 1970, the right of entry and settlement was extended to people with one Jewish grandparent or people married to a Jew, although they were not considered Jewish under Jewish law.

So this man, not legally a Jew, can be an Israeli citizen. 

And even though I'm not a Jew because my mother was not a Jew, my dad's parents were both Jewish, which means technically, I, too, have the "right of return." 

This is all a bit confusing, and to be honest, deep down I reject the notion that I'm not Jewish. Why I feel that way I can't really explain. Something keeps drawing me to learn more about this ancient religion. From Wouk's Epilogue, these passages stood out:

Maybe I'm responding to "this ancestral voice." But why? My sister, my brother, my father, who share this ancestry, why don't they respond in the same way? 

Wouk understands, and does not judge. I believe he wrote his book as much with them in mind as for people like me. 

I love this book.

Recommended Reading: This is my God: The Jewish Way of Life

Herman Wouk is a devoutly religious Jew. That said, he understands doubt. I love what he writes in the epilogue: 

Though I have lived as an observant Jew, I have never been able to pretend to religious certainties. I have found it impossible to join in cheerleading condemnations of Reform, Conservatism, and irreligious Zionism; and for all my too-frequent public speaking, I have never denounced the assimilators. The words of Tennyson: "There lives more faith in honest doubt believe me, than in half the creeds...."

Later in that same chapter he writes, "I was gambling my whole existence on one hunch: that being a Jew was not a trivial and somewhat inconvenient accident, but the best thing in my life; and that to be a Jew the soundest way was the classic way." 

Later still, he pauses to discuss the tendency among non-religious Jews in America to not train their children in Judaism. They justify this decision, Wouk writes, because they don't want to "warp" their children. "When they grow up," these parents argue, the children "can make their own choice." 

Wouk disagrees with their justification. He responds: 

This view dictates the most total warping [parents] can condemn a child to. They warm him to a lifetime of rationalizing his ignorance. What adult sits down among the school children to learn the Hebrew alphabet, the Torah, and the ways of Jewry? It is the easiest thing in the world to drop one's early religious training, as many of my readers know. It is sheer mountain-climbing to regain ground lost in childhood. It ought to occur to such parents that they may be wrong about the faith; that it makes no sense to cement their children into their own attitude of denial. Judaism was in my possession when I reached the point of wanting it--like arithmetic, like geography, like all the things I learned long before I had the slightest desire or need for them.

I read these words from the perspective of a person who was raised in an irreligious home but who, for some reason, believed in God and truly craved a religious identity. In time, I made my choice. To my parents' chagrin (mostly my dad's), I converted rather dramatically to Christianity at age 22, knowing next to nothing about that faith, and then devoted the rest of my life (to this point, at least) to Christianity. Might I have never become a Christian had I been raised as an observant Jew? 

I also read these words from the perspective of one who tried to instill Christian faith in her children. In retrospect, my attempts were rather feeble, especially when compared against the way observant Jews literally school their children, especially the boys, (za rabatu! to work!, as Herman Wouk's grandfather said to him immediately upon completing his bar mitzvah) in not just the Torah but also the Talmud. Was I afraid to insist on such rigor for fear of turning them off, driving them away? I think so. Maybe it's because I'm a first generation Christian who doesn't know what I was doing. How does this compare against generations of parents, and their parents, and their parents' parents, and so on, raising children the same way, the way it's always been done. I wasn't raised this way, and as a first generation Christian, I was muddling along, trying to figure things out while the clock was ticking.

So now, here I am at age 56, attempting to learn about, discover, understand the Judaism my atheist Jewish father chose not to impose on his kids, and if possible, to try and reclaim a tiny piece of this amazing heritage. 

It isn't easy. I'm so ignorant, on so many levels. Wouk's analogy to mountain climbing is apt. I finished this book and realized I've barely reached the foothills. My ignorance is vast and widespread.

Nevertheless, I loved this book (you should see my marginalia). I will read it again. Maybe even again. I will ask my children to read it. I'm thinking of even sending it to my dad. Perhaps he'll read it and, in reading, be drawn to Herman Wouk's God.  

Recommended Reading: Outwitting History

Loy alekho hamelokke ligmor.  "It is not up to you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it."

 Beautiful words. They're Hebrew. Odd that they're quoted in this book about Yiddish. But they were uttered as words of comfort to the author of the book I just finished, Outwitting History, during a rare moment of discouragement.

This is a book I loved for so many reasons, but I guess the most compelling reason was because it was honest. Yes, there were poignant and funny and heartbreaking stories. But there was also a sense of history and significance. What Aaron Lansky did was truly remarkable. And that he remembers so many of the details is also remarkable. Did he keep a diary, or is he just a darned good story-teller? Maybe both. 

I loved the book. It made me laugh out loud. It made me weep silent tears. It was populated with people I think I know. I can hear their voices in my head. They're my people. But they're also strangers to me. 

A theme runs through this book. Where are the yungermen? The young people? The young Jews? The idea of assimilation comes across as a tragedy. And perhaps it is. But who's to blame? 

One point, articulated near the end of the book, stood out to me. Lansky was talking about historical amnesia. He told a story of a rabbi who was speaking at the Yiddish Book Center on the subject of Jewish humor. Lansky, his wife, and others were laughing so hard their sides hurt. At one point, Lansky happened to glance around and noticed that his interns weren't laughing. Later he asked why. Their answer: We didn't get the joke. 

"This was not a good sign," Lansky writes. "If our smartest and most Jewishly committed young people no longer get the joke, it means that on the most fundamental level, they don't understand Jewish culture." 

But who's to blame?

I find myself drawn to books on Judaism lately because of my dad. He and I had an interesting discussion this past November. I remember we were sitting in my sister's study, waiting for a friend of mine to come pick me up for a dinner engagement. While waiting, my dad, an agnostic Jew, expressed concern about whether I and my siblings and his grandchildren understood or appreciated their Jewishness. 

My dad is a Jew. But we weren't raised as Jews, either religiously or culturally. Whatever "Jewishness" we understood or appreciated theoretically would come from him. But, to be frank, there was none. Bagels, knishes, rye bread, matzo brie, Fiddler on the Roof? This is Jewish? Yet here he sat, aggrieved that his children and grandchildren didn't understand or appreciate their Jewishness, as if it were our fault.

Lansky writes:

This is what makes the books we've saved so important. In their pages lies a civilization, a missing millennium of Jewish history, the knowledge we need to defend ourselves. Moreover, they contain a sensibility, born of marginality, that our fractured world desperately needs. After all, nothing heightens one's commitment to social justice more than injustice, nothing hones one's love of peace more than a few thousand years of violence and oppression. Yet at this precise moment, when threats of terrorism, environmental catastrophe, and nuclear annihilation have the whole world feeling vulnerable, when Jewishness has more to say than ever before, what do we do? We disavow our past, jettison our books, and forget to teach our children who they are.

Yes, I wrote in the margin. My dad is guilty of this. My dad bemoans the fact that his children are ignorant of their Jewishness, but who else but he could have instilled Jewishness in us? 

Jewishness is not something acquired or adopted (though many will and do convert). It is something passed down, from mother to daughter, from father to son, from parent to child. In this regard, I am bereft. But is he alone to blame? Perhaps his own parents failed him in the same way. 

Anyway. Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books, by Aaron Lansky. A really great book. Highly recommended. You will laugh, you will cry, you will learn.

And now I move on to This is My God: The Jewish Way of Life, by Herman Wouk (pronounced Woke). He's still alive, I believe, living in Palm Springs. He was born in 1915. His wife recently passed away. We won't have him here for much longer.

I started reading it this morning, and on the dedication page I read the following: 

Nobody can be more aware of the deep lacks in This is my God than I am. The theme needs a prophet. The subject needs monumental scholarship. I offer the book, relying on the maxim of Rabbi Tarfon in Ethics of the Fathers: "The work is not yours to finish; but neither are you free to take no part in it."

What????