What is Jewish Anyway? A Meditation
Listening to Masha Gessen talk to Lydia Polgreen about how the Soviet Union considered her nationality – on her passport – “Jewish” (they were talking about gender, but these threads are often tangled), and how Jewish as a nationality was code for all sorts of things one could and couldn’t be or do in the former Soviet Union. That recording – a few days after Hamas invaded Israel – sent me asking “What do we mean by “Jewish?”
Jewish is many things: a feeling, an identity, a people, a culture, a community, a religion, and for some a nationality. What Jewish is, in any one moment, depends completely on time and place.
Here are some specific moments my own relationship to Jewish was shaped and reshaped over more than sixty years.
June 1967
My first memory of my parents being publicly Jewish was soon after the 1967 War, the “Six Day War” as most American Jews called it. My father stood proudly in our living room, talking to his friends about the need to defend Israel from those who wanted to destroy it from all sides. This posture of defense was always there. We were victims. “In every generation,” people tried to kill us; we needed to defend ourselves from outside aggression. Israel was the bulwark of this defense.
February 1974
After a pause of a bit over nine months, my father’s cancer returned. He’s in excruciating pain and about to start an experimental chemotherapy regimen to eliminate the rogue cells that are causing new tumors in his back. I come home from school and see him “laying Tefillin,” those odd amulets you see Orthodox Jewish men wrap around their forehead and their arm to say daily prayers. My father and I started talking about religion. We read The Prophet and Man’s Search for Meaning together. After three years of Christian summer camp, I began attending a Christian prayer meeting before school.
Summer 1977
My first year at Yale I took a beginner class in Modern Hebrew and a college seminar on the Social Psychology of Jews and Blacks in America. And the summer between freshman and sophomore years, I visited Israel. You can read about that experience here.
New Years Eve 1977 - 78
If you want evidence that nothing happens randomly, this is it: My friend Lisa got mono and gave me her free trip to Israel with United Jewish Appeal. I met my future husband on that trip – from three busloads of students, we were among the very few who understood Hebrew. We looked at one another on the outskirts of Jerusalem, when we saw – at once – that our tour guide was not translating what the local people were saying; he was turning it into a safe narrative about the triumph of Israeli pluralism and democracy. I began saying, shorthand about the two of us, “Jed grew up almost Orthodox; I grew up almost Presbyterian.”
Winter 1985
I am living in London, finishing my dissertation research on 17th and 18th century English women poets. Much of my research involved following hunches and breadcrumbs the way you could do when the whole catalog of the British Library was arrayed around the room. I found something that shocked me: a bunch of pamphlets from the 1720s that talked about Jews as “black.” I imagined my next scholarly project as a study of the complexities of race in the early English novel.
Spring 1993
I am pregnant with my third child, and my mother, sister and I have an adult Bat Mitzvah together. The next few years are swift and stormy: I don’t get tenure; none of the other jobs I’m offered is quite right. I have three children ages 5, 3 and just born, and I am more exhausted than I’d ever known. I try – for the second time – to write a book about my father, based on those late-night conversations I’d had with him when he was exploring Judaism as a practice for the first time, and I was attending Christian bible study.
Summer 2001
We are planning for our son’s bar mitzvah, and I’m spending a lot of time at the synagogue. I start to say to my friends, “I’m worried for the soul of the Jewish people.” I cannot remember the antecedents of that thing I said repeatedly. I do remember the kinds of things people said in response, mostly along the lines of “I’m too worried about … [fill in the blank with bar mitzvah, college, my parents aging, or any present thing] … to think about the soul of the Jewish people.” I felt profoundly out of step, alone, almost haunted by something I could not quite put my finger on. And then the world as we knew it exploded on 9/11/2001.
Summer 2006
We visited Israel, and a woman artist gave me a series of watercolor and pastel paintings she’d made in her studio-bunker. She had a sense that something dangerous was happening, and the Israeli government was not talking about it. She said in Hebrew, “Do something. Say something. It’s going to get worse.” I began a dialogue program for Israeli, Palestinian, and American high school teachers and students. You can read about that here.
October 7, 2023
Jed had turned on MSNBC: before we were awake, Hamas had invaded Israel, murdered many people and taken some hostages back to Gaza. Everything changed for us as Jews in America, and I started writing about it.
Approaching Hanukkah 2023
Hanukkah is a story about the battle between Jewish fundamentalists and Jewish pluralists. The zealots’ faith makes a tiny pot of oil last for eight days. The pluralists – who associated with and assimilated into the dominant Greco-Roman culture – are as other and as much a problem as the Roman conquerors.
Right now, as Jews, we stand at another moment like that Hanukkah story: poised between the camp that stands with Israel, right or wrong, and those of us who seek something else, something ineffable and peaceful, aligned with compassion and democracy for all people.
For people who are not Jewish, it seems obvious that you can support Jewish people’s right to live, believe, and worship as we please, without supporting Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and its atrocities in Gaza; and, at the same time, you can support all Palestinian people’s right to live, believe, and worship as they please (there are, it needs to be said, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians), while condemning the murders and kidnapping led by Hamas on October 7. “We stand with Israel” and “Ceasefire now” are not inherently oppositional, but the current political situation – in Israel and here – has made it a continuous dialogue to hold up both those things at once.
Here’s my attempt to do that.
In my own heart, I am carving out a peaceful space to stand with a Jewish and democratic Israel and with the human rights of all people. This involves scraping away some old ways of knowing to make that new, more open space.
If we can agree that religion is very personal – defined not only by the dominant culture, but also the individual weeping heart – I will start by telling you I never felt more Jewish than that first summer I spent in Israel in 1977. It was the first time I traveled outside North America. It was the first time I lived and worked in a language other than English. It was the first time I was on my own without the structures of family or school.
I felt a kind of all over my body, inside and out kind of Judaism, and I associated it with that place, that little strip of land the size of NJ fighting for survival among our Arab neighbors.
Though I never believed in or supported things like Birthright (how could we as American Jews have some prior right to a land where other people were already living), I associated fiercely with the people who created the Jewish state – maybe not in 1948, but in the 1910s when some of my father’s relatives escaped from what is now Ukraine to Palestine, and others came to Philadelphia and the Lower East Side of NYC.
I can still feel it. When I type the word “ceasefire” or say it over the phone to my senators and representative in Congress I feel the primacy of my Jewish body and its kinship with strangers everywhere. It is the first lesson my father taught me in those late night conversations, “Because we were strangers in a strange land…” he would say, we must take in others who are escaping from danger in the places they were born.
And then – still summer 1977 – after a sleepless night on Mt. Scopus and half a dozen sunrise services at half a dozen exotic Christian churches on the Mount of Olives, I sat in Gethsemane and felt the spirit of Jesus. “I think I must have been an early Christian,” I wrote in my journal that day, “one of the early converts.”
I’m extremely susceptible to these things that are only barely palpable to others; the fainter the trace the more it attracts me. So I’ve studied Christianity, Buddhism, Hindu mysticism and visit the holy sites wherever I travel. My religious identity used to be “pluralist;” over 15 years of daily meditating, it has become “mystic.” My body has shifted; my sense of possibility is connected to everyone, to Us.
I was never nationalist in my Jewish thinking. The idea of a state religion seems archaic to me. Medieval. Dangerous. I was quite susceptible to the heroic Zionist myth of Israel being a light to other nations.
And yes I know that most Jews in the United States, including me, are white European people and colonists in the context of 2023.
But what is Jewish anyway? Generations of hate – and running from that hate – made us a nation. We acquired that ideal from those who wanted to exterminate us: ship us all to Israel and ask their god to kill us all at once.
All of 2023 I had been grieving, for I knew not when. So when Hamas invaded Israel, I was spiritually ready. I was already mourning. For us. For them. For the death of my brand of mythical Jewish. It’s alive and well, actually, as it always is in what we call the diaspora, safe places like Babylon, Berlin, or Boston. Places we’re so assimilated you barely notice us. Until you start to root us out.
There’s a war out there: individuals with assault rifles, missiles, and very concentrated hate. Hamas and the current Israeli government: two brands of that hate, in a death struggle that kills many people needlessly.
Those arcane rituals I saw my grandmothers do every week and on an annual cycle. Ideals my father went to war to protect, though he didn’t connect those things with Jewish practice until very near the end of his life. Hebrew is a Jewish thread that connects an ancient and a modern language and culture. Jewish literature includes 24 canonical books of history, prophecy, and wisdom writings (aka the “Hebrew Bible”).
And the poetry we are whispering in the dark with others who are mourning and praying for enduring peace … we are creating it all new today … as we have so many times before.