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Irwin Blog Jan 24, 2008 Print E-mail
Tuesday, 29 January 2008

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.
 
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