On Jewishness

What to do about being a Jew (by choice)

It’s almost repentance/new year time for Jewish people, and I think I have never felt as uncomfortable with my Jewishness as now. I converted 14 years ago (I think), and in the 90’s it was very cool and fun to be Jewish. Then 09/11 happened, and Bush happened, and then all the terrible anti-Islamic, anti-Arab sentiment happened, and then Israel got so mean, and suddenly being Jewish felt terrible. And then going to synagogue felt terrible, because it was Israel my country right or wrong, and people got mad, if you said anything different. Our congregants were not terribly nice to the wonderful woman who came to teach about Islam, and I feel very often lately that being Jewish is not such a good idea.

But of course what I’ve just written is completely idiotic. It didn’t suddenly get problematic to be Jewish, and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim prejudice didn’t just pop into peoples minds in 2001. I think it is I who have been very stupid and very naïve about this whole Jewish thing.

I find that I cannot write intelligently about my Jewish identity. Not really. I approximate it, fly around it, circumnavigate it, but to say that I am a Jew is somehow not accurate; it does not elucidate what my relationship to Judaism is.

I am realizing this year that to say that I AM Jewish is wrong. To say that I live and breathe and think inside of Jewishness would be closer. For many years I peered out into the world from within Christianity. It was an uncomfortable location for me, filled with coffee cake socials and uneasy whispering about people who were “different”. Jewishness is a more spacious but also very troubled locale to speak/think from. I laboriously walk around this perimeter, looking out at Islam, and Evangelical Christianity, and lately at Buddhism. I am not always sure what I am doing here. But then I remember that my favorite thinkers – the agonizers, the pioneers – were in this circle too: Marx, Freud, and the incomparable Helene Cixous.

Derrida once wrote, “I would like to live with ghosts.” I know what he means. I live with the phantoms of who I was – choir practice in the Presbyterian church – and the projections of what my orthodox acquaintances see -- an unwelcome hybrid: a secular woman who claims but has no legitimate Jewish heritage. And I live with the ghostly memory of Israel, as a place where one of my babysitters, an impoverished Christian Southern “lady” told me was the Promised Land, where everyone could go and be welcome. And live in peace. That particular ghost stays with me and seems – more and more – to clank its chains, insisting, crying out for veracity.

So as I – a non-Hebrew speaking, unbatmitzvahed straight white woman located in Jewishness – contemplate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I ask myself how and in what ways I can enlarge this circle that I have entered but have not entirely joined. As a person inside but not OF Jewishness, how can I make the circle larger, more permeable, more spacious, more open, more gracious, more kind, more understanding, more politically nimble, more ethically aware.

I don’t know. But still, I need to ask the question.

That need to ask is perhaps part of why I was attracted to Jewishness in the first place. And why I remain in this perplexing place.