What's Left of a Jew Who Has Abandoned Religion? (A lot.)

By EUGENE GOODHEART

There’s a Yiddish expression, S’iz shver tzu zein a yid (It’s hard to be a Jew). “Hard but interesting,” a distinguished writer once said. When I say hard I don’t mean in the obvious sense of belonging to a pariah people that has known every conceivable indignity and atrocity. “Hard” doesn’t do justice to such suffering. I mean hard in the sense of knowing what it means to be Jewish. It is not hard for the Orthodox Jew, who lives by the Book, or the Hasid, who follows his rebbe, or even the Yiddish-speaking and -reading Jew who does not believe in God or is indifferent to the question of whether or not he exists. The Orthodox Jew, the Hasid, the Yiddishist are all secure in their identity. But what of the rest of us who, when pressed, struggle to make sense of our Jewishness?

I was raised in full consciousness of being Jewish. I was sent to a Yiddish shuleh and grew up in a Jewish environment. Without religion, my parents proved to me that the moral life could be a calling. I am not a believer; I can’t bring myself to go to synagogue or temple, nor do I atone for my sins on Yom Kippur. Although the Tunisian-born Jew Albert Memmi defines the Jewish fate as a misfortune, my fate is fortunately that of my parents’ migration to America. Paraphrasing Saul Bellow’s Chicagoan Augie March, I am an American, Brooklyn-born. Like Augie March, I assume my Jewishness without having to define it. Put another way, if I confined myself to composing a portrait of a Jew, I would have betrayed the kind of Jew I am.

And yet, while my Jewishness doesn’t define me, I can nevertheless find its presence everywhere in my life. I can read and speak Yiddish. A much-traveled academic (a wandering Jew?), I have fortuitously landed at Brandeis University, the only secular Jewish institution of higher learning in America. When a Jewish friend of mine, Alvin Kibel, said that he was not a Jew, that nothing in his theory and practice qualified him as one, I argued with some bitterness that of course he was one and there was something shameful in his denial of it. “What am I denying? Tell me what makes me Jewish.” I couldn’t say. I have apologized for not allowing him his self-description, but have not recanted the sentiment.

My Yiddish education—attenuated as it is—has remained an indelible part of me. There is nothing like meeting an old Yiddish-speaking friend from the past. The language itself is like a warm embrace. It is automatic membership in a club: no résumés, no interviews, no dues required. Yiddish is like some metaphysical substratum to which I always have access. In times of crisis or despair or pleasurable intimacy with a friend I often find myself thrown back to Yiddish expression, where for the moment my soul comes to rest. My bond with my oldest friends has as its medium a Jewish joke, an intonation that my wife, who is only half Jewish and comes from a completely different tradition, recognizes as something alien, quite unlike my customary way of speaking and acting among colleagues and acquaintances.

The twin tenets of my Jewish education were solidarity with the working class and pride in our Jewish identity. And, indeed, Jews have not had to be taught ethnic pride; it came to them as a birthright. Unlike other oppressed peoples, who have internalized their oppressors’ view of them, Jews are not burdened by a sense of inferiority; whatever social or physical inferiority they may feel is compensated for by a sense of intellectual or spiritual distinction. They have the Book or, for secular Jews, a thousand books. Excluded from full participation in the life of most societies, they have been acknowledged for their gifts even by their persecutors, who granted them positions in trade and commerce. Even their pariah status has been in a sense a mark of success.

What makes Jews like me a hard case is that we constantly reflect upon and question who we are. We are so divided in ourselves, so much objects of our own irony. And so I ask myself: what is left of the Jew when he has abandoned Judaism, its religion and language? Maybe a certain reflectiveness, an inability to take things for granted, a continuously nagging sense of difficulty and problem, anxiety, guilt. Jewish guilt is the motive for moral passion, the constant worrying about whether one has done right, done enough, done too much. How should one react to provocation, injustice, indifference, neglect, the suffering of others?

This is something I often ask myself. Being Jewish for me is at once a given and a question.


This essay is adapted, with permission, from Goodheart's book, Confessions of a Secular Jew.