Jewish Identity: Still Under Construction
posted by Rabbi Irwin Kula
This month the most ambitious documentary on the American Jewish
experience, a six-hour series called “The Jewish Americans,” aired on
PBS stations around the country. The program, whose third and final
segment was on Wednesday, is the most nuanced and sophisticated telling
of the Jewish American story to date. The documentary invites us to
reflect about what Jewish identity has meant in the past, what it will
mean in the future, and how a minority group retains its identity.
Historically,
there was never a single Jewish identity, there were many Jewish
identities. As with any religious culture, there were different
expressions of Jewishness that were products of interactions between
people, their times, their inherited traditions, the larger cultures in
which they were embedded, and their personal biographies.
Jewish
identity in the first century in Palestine was very different than
Jewish identity in Poland in the 17th century, which was very different
than Jewish identity in Spain in the 12th century, which was different
than Jewish identity in New Mexico at the end of the nineteenth
century, which is different from the many kinds of Jewish identities in
Jerusalem and Manhattan in the 21st century. In fact, when one studies
the Jewish past, one discovers that identity is really a verb and not a
noun — it is something that is continuously being constructed and not
something that is static that one possesses.
Judaism, a word that
did not even exist until the modern period, is an ever-changing
construction, and the Jewish people an ever-moving construct, no more
fixed than the term “American.” What does remain the same is that there
has been a group of people, whatever their particular theologies and
practices, who continue to call themselves Jews, who use the Torah,
understood as widely and inclusively as possible — whether a biblical
passage, a Talmudic text, a philosophical treatise, a Lenny Bruce
routine, a Philip Roth novel, or a Bob Dylan song — to wrestle with the
meaning of life, to love more deeply and courageously, and to live more
justly and compassionately.
What will Jewish mean in the future? The
only thing one can say for certain about any spiritual journey is that
it is unpredictable. If anyone told my grandmother as a teenager (she
was born in Poland in 1898 and lived well into her 90s), that over the
next century or so the following would happen: all of Jewry would
basically move across oceans; that one third of the Jewish population
would be murdered by one of the most modern and cultured nations on the
planet; that after 2,000 years Jews would return to the Land of Israel
and establish a democratic state; that in a place called America, Jews
would enjoy unprecedented freedom, power, and affluence; that more
Jewish books, plays, music, art, would be produced than at any other
time in Jewish history; and that instead of wanting to convert or
murder Jews, Gentiles would actually want to marry them, and that this
profound change in attitude would not cause celebration, but rather an
anxiety rivaled only by the fear of anti-Semitism — she would be
completely dumbfounded.
Today, forms of Jewishness run the gamut
from atheistic to conventionally traditional, from BuJews (Buddhist
Jews) to HinJews (Hindu Jews), from New Age Jews to mainstream liberal
Jews, from militant nationalistic Jews to pacifist Jews, from
non-Jewish Jews (Madonna) to Seinfeld Jews, from synagogue-going Jews
to bagels-and-lox Jews. Jewish identity is and will be what those who
call themselves Jews decide it will be. It will include, just like
every other cultural/religious identity, saints and sinners, tribalists
and globalists, hustlers and heroes, spiritual geniuses and hardened
cynics, Jews who exclude other Jews from being called Jews, Jews who
could not care less about being included as Jews, philanthropists and
philanderers, and good folk and bad folk all wandering together in a
loose sort of way to a promised land that can never be reached because
it is always promised.
Jews will survive like we always have by
never thinking we have the final solution to the question of how to
survive or for that matter to any question about life (we don’t like
final solutions because they tend to be deadly). We will retain our
Jewishness by arguing about the meanings of our past, the challenges of
our present, and the dreams of our future. We will survive and flourish
as long as we, like every individual and every people, continue to
negotiate a moving, fluid dance between being separate and connected,
between resisting and adapting, and between celebrating differences and
marveling at commonalities, affirming our uniqueness and embracing our
oneness with other human beings while in the service of an
ever-changing purpose — to heal ourselves and others. This is the
challenge for every minority community. Most importantly, today it is
the challenge for America itself in our relationship to the world.
|
