I just finished reading Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs (subtitled: The pleasures and regrets of a husband, father and son). As with all his writing, I enjoyed it very much. He grew up in the same time I did, is Jewish and so, his essays often contain landmarks or ideas that resonate deeply with me. We had a discussion during services last Friday night on the topic, Why be Jewish? It was our joint service with the Conservative synagogue in town, something we do every year. Each Rabbi spoke first and then opened things up to the congregations to add their thoughts. I will not be able to do justice to either Rabbis' premises, but the basic gist seemed to be that for some being Jewish is a matter of sociology (like being Irish) and for others it's a matter of theology and that for most Jews, especially those in the Reform and Conservative movements talking about God is really, really uncomfortable.
What's this have to do with Chabon? Well, in one of the last essays in the book he says "I am a liberal, agnostic, empiricist, proud to be a semi-observant, bacon-eating Jew and I have only contempt for the intolerance, ignorance, anti-intellectualism, self-deception, implicit violence, and misogyny that underlies religious fundamentalism of every flavor, from bearded to clean-cut." I don't know but to me that sentence embodies where many of my fellow Jews and certainly I often find myself standing. I was born Jewish. It's something I take for granted, although I when I was a child I would get scared that it might not be true and I might not "really" be Jewish and therefore not accepted by my own people. I was adopted as an infant and in theory my biological maternal parent was Jewish but I would still wake up scared that I wasn't really and this led to many years that I felt I couldn't fully participate in Jewish life without being a fraud. I had completely forgotten about this until our rabbi spoke about moving away from a sociological reason for being Jewish and moving towards a theological reason. I can get behind that 100%. I am a Jew because Judaism embodies the ideals and beliefs that speak to me as a human being trying to live in a contemporary and often scary universe. I actively chose to be part of the Reform movement because I believe in the necessity of my faith to be an organic thing, open to change and adaptation to the realities of the world we live in. I don't believe that I am any less Jewish even if my family was lied to about my origins and I don't believe my children are any less Jewish because they were born and adopted in other countries and therefor don't "look" Jewish and I don't believe that my somewhat agnostic husband, who chose Judaism after careful thought and study is any less Jewish than any other Jew.
And yet. It would be naive to ignore the reality that many Jews would not consider us "Jewish enough" and that it hurts to know those thoughts are out there (and I would add that it would also be naive to believe that the only Jews who feel that way are strictly observant-there are plenty of liberal Jews who have institutionalized antipathy towards those they see as less authentically Jewish). And yet. I have it over my husband and others who were not raised in Jewish homes because I am comfortable with all the...for lack of a better word...stuff. The holidays. The foods. The expectations. The ebb and flow of a Shabbat service. The etiquette at a Shiva minyan. All of these things come naturally without a lot of thought (they do for my children as well-they may be Chinese and Cambodian American but they have been Jewish and part of a Jewish home for all their remembered lives). I have been to Israel once and yet I miss it terribly. My husband has no interest in going to Israel and is baffled by the emphasis placed on it and what sometimes seems like a lack of accountability for some of Israel's actions. A concern I share while also fetishsizing the country as though it were a picture perfect postcard of an idealic Jewish life.
And yet. Even within our Reform congregations there is (and should be) a huge amount of theological diversity. I grew up in a time when woman never wore kippot or tallitot. I would try to do one or the other and feel really, really silly. In time I have become comfortable with wearing a head covering on Shabbat during services but I am not consistent in that practice. This year (that is 5770) I actively decided to take on the obligation of wearing a tallit whenever I am at services and Torah is being read. This was a huge step for me. It took me almost 5 years of thinking about this. Thinking about why I'd want to do this. Getting over my fear of seeming silly or pretentious when I do so. I finally just shut off all the internal noise and asked myself: Why? Why would I do this? What would it mean? I realized it meant an obvious thing and a more secret thing that I wasn't admitting to myself. The obvious thing was simply that by wearing a tallit I was able to to honor the ritual and sacredness of reading from the Torah and also able to focus my prayer and thoughts in a more meaningful way. I was connecting myself to our people and more importantly to our Torah in doing so. The unspoken or for a long time unthought, unadmitted, part? Simply that I can. I am a Jew. More to the point, I am a "real" Jew and if this ritual is one that I believe has importance and meaning in my life I have every right to wear a tallit and do so without shame or feeling like I was playing dress-up. It was something of a shock to me to realize I just always believed I didn't really have the right-not because I was part of the Reform movement, not because I was a woman, but because I was still a child waking up in the middle of the night scared I wasn't really Jewish.
My Judaism isn't about a free pass I got because of an accident of birth. It's about being an active participant in a living, breathing faith that espouses the values I most wish to emulate. My Judaism is a reflection on my relationship to the faith but it is not the only way to get there. I accept that for every Jew, certainly every Jew within my own community, there are different paths to the same place -that place of being a Jew, even a "liberal,agnostic..semi-observant bacon-eating Jew." All those paths are authentic, all those paths are part of an organic whole and we are all "real" Jews.