For the Symposium on Roberta Kwall, The Myth of the Cultural Jew
For Roberta Rosenthal Kwall, to be a Jew is to be a person
who lives life in relationship with a particular body of law, with halakhah.
The “cultural Jew”—the post Enlightenment notion that it is possible to
disentangle Yiddishkeit from Torah—is a myth.
As a child of one of the bastions of this myth, of stridently
secular north Tel Aviv, I have been asking מי הוא יהודי?,
Who is a Jew? for a long time, and my initial response to Roberta’s
thesis was reactive.
My high school history teacher would have me believe that I
was a Jew because of anti-Semitism. Wherever you go, he intoned, eventually you
will learn that you do not belong. That’s why we need a state of our own. Having
tasted the fruits of American multiculturalism during my family’s stints in the
U.S., this struck me as a sad way to construct an identity. If this was
Jewishness, I wanted no part in it. So at 18, I left Israel
determined to start fresh—not as a Jew, not as an Israeli, but as a human
being. What I discovered—at Yale, the University of Jordan, Stanford, NYU,
Davis Polk, and the University of Richmond—was that doing this was impossible. It
was impossible not because of my relationship with Jewish law, but because of
my inescapable bond with Jewish culture.
I was still Jewish the time I spent Pesach with a non-Jewish
friend at a Japanese restaurant. I was Jewish (and quite thoroughly Israeli)
when I introduced myself to Palestinians as an American from Connecticut. (“But
what is your religion? What is your origin?” they kept asking. “No religion.
American. Just American.”) I was Jewish at the Upper East Side trimming party
where seeing the roasted pig, its head still on, I clicked to a scene my
grandmother describes in her survivor’s testimony: washing dishes at a lavish
Christening party as smoke billowed in the distance above the Warsaw Ghetto where
she had left her father.
I am Jewish at the faculty meeting where my heart is at war
with itself—do I name the elephant in the room or is this quagmire one I should
stay out of? The impulse to speak up, the passion (some might say chutzpa)
that poured out of me in my most recent
scholarship come from the Israeli Jew in me. Of course Jews don’t have a
monopoly on these qualities, but I recognize the flavor they take in me as
particular, particularly Jewish. So too is my shame at the prospect of being
perceived as pushy. The blood that rushes to my face comes from the part of me
that was raised to follow not the laws of kashrut, but the laws of
assimilation—to identify the Strunk and Whites of the world as the arbiters on
aesthetic grace and integrity, to cultivate a distaste for anything that might
be read as “Jewey,” to cover.
Halakhah is an element in some of these stories, but
not all, and pulling the threads apart is tricky. This ambiguity is where my
reactive self, the self that approached The Myth of the Cultural Jew ready
for a fight, saw a strategic opportunity. Really? I could name plenty of
counterexamples. The bacon-eating, Friday-night-clubbing,
circumcision-questioning Israelis I grew up with are oblivious if not hostile
to halakhah, and they are not a myth. My heroes Benjamin and Barbara
Harshav—devoted translators and scholars of Hebrew and Yiddish art and
literature, of Marc Chagall, and S. Y. Agnon, and Abraham Sutzkever—are not a
myth. The aspects of Phillip Roth and Woody Allen and Jon Stewart that make
them recognizably Jewish are not a myth.
And yet. When I read Roberta more slowly on a lazy Shabbat
afternoon in my sunroom (not planning to work, just to peruse, but being drawn
in) I found myself friendlier to her project.
I won’t presume to make pronouncements about what Judaism is
or should be on a grand scale. I can say that beyond the title—which is more provocative
than some of the book—Roberta’s less sweeping suggestion that Jewish law is
more important to Jewish culture and to its survival than many people realize
resonates with my own experience.
One piece of this arises when I meet American Jews whose
connection with Judaism seems tenuous. Two of my most revered Buddhist teachers
come to mind. Both women were raised in secular Jewish homes, both celebrate
some version of Christmas. Neither harbors any ill will towards Judaism, but
nor do they feel a particular affinity. It’s possible that their wisdom and the
light they emanate when they lead meditations are part of the spiritual DNA they
inherited from generations of scholars of Kabbalah and Talmud and
Torah. It’s possible that this is also true of other American teachers
of mindfulness, a disproportionate number of whom hail from Jewish families. Maybe
yes, and maybe no. What seems likely is that they are the end of the line.
One of my teachers inherited a tallis and tefillin
that had belonged to her great grandfather. Initially, she put them in a drawer
for safekeeping. Then, recognizing that no one in her family would use them
again and that the fabric of the tallis was eroding with the passage of
time, she wanted to find a better way to preserve these items and through them,
to remember her ancestor. So she framed them. They hang in her home beside a
picture of the man who used them to davven. Seeing them, I felt a mix of
appreciation for the honor accorded to these sacred objects and also צביטה בלב , a pinch in the heart over the fact that
they live behind glass, like relics in a museum.
Again, I don’t think it’s my place to judge or even to wish
that these incredible women should find a closer connection with Judaism,
something that the project to save Judaism from extinction presumes. To the
extent that this impulse motivates Roberta’s work, I differ. The part of me
that sympathizes despite myself, the reason I feel the pinch is that assimilated
Jews reflect something in me that I’m not at peace with, an anxiety I have
felt about my own Jewishness fading.
The Myth of the Cultural Jew—which in addition to its
main argument also offers a window into the incredibly rich tapestry that is my
tradition—helps me connect some of these dots. It helps me realize that
notwithstanding the gifts that have come my way through meditation, notwithstanding
the lessons I’ve learned from Buddhists and Quakers and Christians, when I lose
touch with Jewish practice there is a voice within me that says: חבל, it’s a shame.
The second way in which I resonate with Roberta’s project has
to do with celebrating Judaism’s commitment to pluralism. Israel does, after
all, mean “God wrestler.” Pluralism, the multiplicity of narratives, the
rejection of “textual fundamentalism”—these are at the heart of what Judaism
means, as Roberta so beautifully illustrates.
The Myth of the Cultural Jew—these words are not so inviting.
But other words throughout parts of the book are. The ones I resonate with most
dovetail with the tikkun, the healing reversal, I’ve experienced from
other observant Jews who accepted me as I was, at every point along my path
from secularism to my evolving idiosyncratic observance.
Some of these angels are Orthodox or Modern Orthodox, some
are practitioners of Jewish Renewal, and some refuse to be categorized (when
asked, they simply say: I am a Jew). Not only did they reverse the cold
shoulder I’d experienced from less tolerant religious Jews, they genuinely embraced
the possibility that davka the secular world I come from is essential
not as fodder for conversion, but as its own expression of Israel. They assured
me that my
midrash on the Exodus is every bit as legitimate as theirs, that I
have a place at the table not only as a polite guest, but as a co-creator. By
curbing the impulse to dismiss my kind of Judaism as a myth, these fellow
travelers helped me drop my resistance to theirs, and to open to the
possibility that Jewish law might be part of my path too. They helped me
understand that law can be a vehicle for transcendence, an incredibly powerful spiritual
technology.
On that sunny Shabbat afternoon, what I read beyond
the p’shat of Roberta’s argument was an invitation, an invitation to all
Jews—cultural, religious, and all shades in between. The actions, the words,
the nigunim (tunes), the history, the Yiddishe Kopf (discursive
habits), the neshama (spirit), the kavana (intention) that Jews
bring to our lives—they are all important, in different degrees to
different Jews.
Let’s not judge one other. Let’s get together. Let’s open a
conversation. Not because we want to save something from extinction. Because
we’re family, we share a history, and connecting through this history is incomparably
meaningful. We share a history that includes some pretty violent breaks, breaks
that led some of us to lose track of relatives, so it’s quite possible that any
two Jews are literally kin. Our great-grandparents might have been cousins in
Warsaw or Baghdad or Shanghai. They might have said kaddish together in
Alexandria or Kobe or Brisk. Saying it together today, or breaking bread, or
doing tashlich can connect us to them, and through them to something in
ourselves.
Observing these rituals is participating in law and culture.
Law broadly conceived, with its infinite, kaleidoscopic interpretive
possibilities is not the only vessel of our tradition. But for me, nor
is it expendable.
Shari Motro is Professor of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law. You can reach her by e-mail at smotro at richmond.edu