Who is a Jew?

Although I've given a lot of thought to this topic over the years, I'm not sure how far I've gotten with it.

I'm tempted to think of Jewishness as an essentially contested concept, whose meaning by its nature cannot be decisively fixed.  For OJs, you're Jewish if (a) you are born to a Jewish mother or (b) you convert under the guidance of regcognized OJ authorities.  For RJs, you're Jewish if (a) you are born to a Jewish mother or father and self-identify as Jewish or (b) you convert under the guidance of regcognized religious authorities of any stripe.  OJs, by and large, do not accept the authority of RJ rulings in this area, and RJs do not recognize OJs standing to render authoritative opnions on the matter of their own status.  OJs claim authenticity via adherence to halacha; RJs claim that adherence to halacha is not the only route to authenticity.

All of this is pretty well known.  As an RJ, I was raised believing that patrilineal descent was a sufficient cause of Jewishness and that anyone who said otherwise was being exclusive and exclusionary.  If someone was "Jewish enough" for Hitler, I remember learning, why shouldn't they be Jewish enough for the Jewish people, for the State of Israel, etc.  I had some friends in Sunday School and Hebrew School whose mothers weren't Jewish, but they had Bar and Bat Mitzvahs just the same.  It just never seemed to matter who "was" or "wasn't" a Jew.

After years of undergraduate and graduate education studing the socio-political and philosophical underpinnings of identity (not in the context of Judiasm per se), it seems to me rather obvious that there are many different "Jewishnesses" that overlap in socio-religious space, including:

1. self-identification:  if I say I'm a Jew, then I'm Jewish
2. social-identification: if consensus in my community says I'm a Jew, then I'm Jewish
3. technical identification: if my communitiy's authority figures say that I meet the requirements of being Jewish -- be they liberal or conservative -- then I'm Jewish
4. cultural identification:  if I'm raised by cultural Jews, then regardless of what I, they or others say, then I'm Jewish

The Torah says you're Jewish if you're born to a Jewish mother, but that's clearly just a technical identification only.  One could self identifty as Jewish, and behave accordingly, but live in a community where no one else recognized your technical identification as Jewish.  One could be born and raised as a Jew, but eventually stop thinking of one's self as Jewish.  In each case, there could be arguments made on each side, but there is no earthly neutral arbiter to say which is "right."  Replace "Jewish" with "American" or "Native American" or "socialist" or what have you and the point is the same:  When it comes to identity, no one gets to definitively call the shots.

Well, at least that what the liberal RJ in me says.

The problem I find, in the end, is that this explanation is unsatisfying...but I'm not sure exactly how to express it.  If it is enough to say one is Jewish to be Jewish, then what are the possibilities (or lack thereof) for that Jewishness?  How much consensus is needed?  What justificaitons are needed?  What explanations are required? 

RJ says patrilineal descent counts; halacha says it doesn't.  In a sense, of course, this only concerns the technical identification, i.e., the decision-rules for determining who will and will not be counted as Jewish.  As an RJ, as a liberal thinker, I recoil from the patriarchy of halacha; but, then, does "adding in" patrilineal descent make things right, or does it fundamentally subscribe to the underlying illiberal logic inherent in matrilineal-only descent?  That is, if we decide who "is" or "isn't" a Jew based, in the first instance, on one's parents, isn't that at odds with the allegedly liberal underpinnings of RJ, that the rules need to change with the times?  This is my confusion:  If you reject halacha as a basis for law, then what do you have?  The problem, of course, is that halacha has no room for amendment, only for addition.  It's a fundamentally ossified document.  The American Constitution provides a good counterpoint:  There is nothing in the document that can't be changed by sufficient consensus, either by amendment or the accretion of precedent.  If we wanted to, we could amend away the right to free speech, religion, etc. -- the very things we say are fundamental to being American.  Halacha offers no such process.  We don't get to vote, and consensus is fashioned in a highly exclusionary way. 

But isn't that the way all religions work?

Why I follow the blogs I follow...

It struck me today, looking at the list of blogs I follow, how very different my situation is from them.

I commented the other day on one of them, Undercover Kofer (who, by the way, is fascinating to read and has great taste in blog layout to boot), that

There are a lot of Jewish blogs out there. The vast majority, I have found, are highly uncritical -- of Israel, of Judaism, of pretty much everything. And therefore uninteresting. The big exception are the OTD blogs, mostly because they are written by highly intelligent, conflicted, and deeply introspective people. Althgouh I am not orthodox, reading about how others grapple with their own Judaism is fascinating, insightful and inspirational.

I've been thinking about this lately, why these OTD blogs are so interesting...  I think it's because I see in many of their posts the nuts and bolts of the intellectual struggle it takes to reconcile orthodox Judaism and the modern world.  I'm trying to do the same thing, I think, but from a very different direction.  While the orthodox blogs I'm reading describe the difficulty in combining a fundamentally conservative worldview with the modern, liberal society in which we live, I'm trying to reconcile my fundamentally liberal worldview with what I have come to see is the fundamentally conservative nature of religion in general and Judaism in particular.  How can I claim to be liberal, to respect the Other, without in some way inflating myself?  If I say to each his own, then what is the basis for doing things the way I do them or believing the things I believe?  To the extent I place my faith in the ability of human beings to determine their own destiny and to better themselves, then what role have I left for a Higher Power?

I'm not sure who has it harder. 

Well, okay, I think orthodox probably have it harder insofar as the demands of mitzvot observance are greater than the demands of the kind of heshbon hanefesh I'm engaging in.  I can blog or not, but I certainly don't think I'm transgressing you-know-who's will either way.  But the more I look around, the more I read what other RJs write, the more I listen to my fellow congregants in my own ultra-liberal shul...the more I think I have a long, hard road ahead of me:  to discover and practice a Judaism truly consistent with my own beliefs.

How does one do that?

Last post for this first day...

Shabbat Shalom!

It's really a shame...or is it?

I'm in the middle of reading The World of the Yeshiva: An Intimate Portrait of Orthodox Jewry by William Helmreich.  It's an intelligent, fascinating read on many levels, and I plan to write a more extensive post with my thoughts when I'm finished. 

There's something that has bugged me for a long time, though, and reading this book has really brought up the matter again:  The extent to which Reform Jews (RJs) in general, and myself in particular, lack any substantive knowledge of Talmud.  It's not a big surprise, of course:  the Reform movement from its inception made it clear that halacha was not a binding source of Jewish law.  The fact that we RJs don't know it, therefore, "makes sense."  Reading Helmreich's book has also driven home for me how much foundational knowledge is required before one can even think of approaching the study of Talmud:  Aramaic, Hebrew, and Torah all have to be known cold.  And then one has to devote years to its study, daf by daf.

It's overwhelming.

I know the point isn't to "know" Talmud but rather to "study" it,  I know that very few people ever gain truly comprehensive knowledge of it; I certainly won't.  But even though I definitely view Oral Torah as man-made, even though I undoubtedly would disagree with much that is contained in it, and even though I could never be happy or comfortable living in a community that used it as a basis for its laws...I am nevertheless sad to be distanced from it.  This is for me the paradox of trying to live as an engaged, committed RJ in today's world:  I cannot just shake my head and say "oh well, I don't know much about the Talmud, and that's okay" but neither am I willing to make the sacrifices of time, effort, and ideology that its study would require.

I wish the RJ movement would have started teaching me Hebrew and Aramaic more seriously, at an earlier age.  I wish I had been exposed to real Torah and Talmud when I was young enough to absorb it like a sponge. 

Does anyone else feel that way?

What is going to happen here...

Okay, vague and cryptic first post, right?

So here's what I'm planning to do here:  On a regular basis, daily if possible, but certainly several times a week, I plan to take up different Jewish and Jewish-related topics, questions, problems, and stories.  There is no stone here I'm not willing to turn over. 

Some of these issues will be intensely personal, others will be global in scope.  I imagine some will be brief thoughts, while others will be longer, more in-depth explorations of the topic at hand.  I hope to be as autobiographical as possible, but only to personalize the discussions.  I am well aware that there are many Jews more knowledgable than I on these issues.  But this blog -- the entire point of all of this -- is meant on the one hand as a vehicle for me personally to work through the meanings and implications of the laws, rituals, language, culture, history, politics for my life but also, on the other hand, to offer up my own struggle as a real-time history of what it's like for a committed Jew (well, at least someone who likes to consider himself as one) to work though the contradictions between his faith and modernity, and between his religion, which is fundamentally conservative, and his ideology, which is fundamentally liberal. 

I'm terrified and excited beyond words to see where it goes.

Why another Jewish blog?

Why am I writing this blog?  Why should anyone bother to read it?

This blog, this post, is the culmination really of years of not knowing what to do with the unsatisfactory answers to a million different questions about who I am, where I come from, and who I want to be.  Without realizing it, I've been looking for this blog for most of my life; yes, even before there was such a thing as a blog, before I knew what a blog was, before I came to appreciate the nature of the blogosphere's collective wisdom.  I was desperately looking for a blog by a Reform Jew grappling with the kinds of questions that I have confronted and continue to confront.  Only in the past few months did I finally, belatedly, begin to sift through the many terrific Jewish-related blogs out there -- many of them are linked here -- but none of them focused on the specific issues that I grapple with.  I salute them because they have given me the inspiration to do this, not knowing where it will take me or what I will find when I get there.

I'll have a lot more to say about these things over time.

But it still begs the question, why this blog, and why now?

• because I've been on the road to this moment for a very long time, and I've run out of excuses
• because there are ideas that I believe need to be expressed and that need to be explored
• because the words of Rabbi Bag Bag have always spoken to me:  "Turn it, and turn it again, for everything is in it; And contemplate it, and grow old and gray over it, and stir not from it, for you have no better principle than it"
• because I have fallen short in my life as a Reform Jew -- I have not studied and questioned and known the laws before knowing where I stand
• because over the past few years, questions I never thought I'd have to ask have been put on my table
• because this is the only subject I've ever really wanted to write about

As I said, I don't know where this journey will go.  I don't know how much insight or wisdom I will have to offer.  Actually, I have no idea if anyone, ever, will even see or bother to read any of this.  But I promise that on this blog, I will struggle always to tell as much of my truth as I can, in the hopes that putting it out there will somehow make a difference.  I am not obligated to complete the task, but neither am I free to abstain from it.