Song of My Secular Self

By LAUREN SANDLER

Recently, I was having lunch with a new writer-friend, one of those terrific first dates in which commonality is effortlessly determined by subtle gestures and ironic asides. We were talking about an author she knows whose brand of optimism, gratitude, and satisfaction with her career in publishing was unfathomable to us. She threw out a quote or two mimicking just how thrilled this writer was about everything. And then her mouth twisted into a sardonic grin as she leaned over the table and whispered, “She’s obviously not Jewish.”

Later that day my phone rang and swiftly launched me into an argument that had me pacing around my living room, profanity and rhetoric crackling in the air. It was another friend, who was born to a Jewish mother who abandoned him in infancy, leaving him to be raised by an utterly non-Jewish father. About a year prior, a rabbi of an apparently formidable establishment informed my friend that despite his entirely a-Semitic upbringing, his Jewish “blood” rendered him as Jewish as Abraham or Isaac, to whose apocryphal story this friend could not even relate. Ever since his official diagnosis as a Jew, we had endured a weekly verbal battle: was he Jewish (yes! he insisted on this rabbi’s authority) or wasn’t he (uh, not really, I bit back)?

The next day I went to Loehmann’s and bought a gamine little black swing blazer, made with really good wool, off the clearance rack.

I regale you with such quotidian minutiae from My Jewish Life to pose a question rather than answer it. I claim the great tradition of Jewish atheism as my own. I am a services-shunning, inter-marrying, matzo-ball-repelled (seriously, I can’t get ‘em down) Jew. The tradition I have inherited is not one in which I light candles or bake challah or find comfort in the plaintive, timeless cry of the liturgy. It is the tradition of devout secularism. Instead of a pre-teen pilgrimage to Israel, my parents sent me off to Maine summer camp with a t-shirt that said QUESTION AUTHORITY BUT NOT YOUR MOTHER.  Little did I know at the time what a truly Jewish act it was.

But why? This is the question. In other words, what makes my unspoken condemnation of another author’s exultant career define me as Jewish, and her as a Shiksa of the Month? What stokes my outrage in the notion that to define oneself as Jewish, one must merely consider DNA, and not the precious and ambivalent tradition of Jewish culture as it seeps through intense family dynamics over thousands of years. (Was I angry that my newly self-identified “Jewish” friend never had to experience the Catholic kids pelting him with pennies, as I did, at a dance school in a church basement, where classes were arranged around the CCD schedule? Or that he never had to suffer the pains and glories of adolescence in close quarters with a Jewish mother, no matter how defiantly secular and proudly feminist she may be?) What makes Susan Sontag a Jewish writer, when she was raised without Jewish influences, or Martha Gellhorn? Or even allows the aptly named Mary McCarthy—author of Memoirs of a Catholic Girlhood, amongst other stunning works—to claim a Semitic heritage?

Of course, there are the clichés—all true in my life: a certain sense of humor, a certain critical mind, a certain degree of anxiety, a certain love of a good sale. All these traits are freely and fiercely inculcated in a culture, independent of any haftorah portion. Meet my family, and you’ll probably understand why. But that’s just the same as being anything else, isn’t it? Is there something that courses through our bodies and minds, something deeper than cultural inheritance, as unrelated to religious history—even an abandoned one in my case—as Genesis is to evolutionary biology? A professor of Jewish Studies commented to me the other week, “Wouldn’t it be so much easier if we could just call ourselves a race?” The next day, my hair frizzing, my brain chemicals on overdrive, I rode the 4 train to my obstetrician’s office, and pondered her words as I yielded eight vials of blood to be tested for the “Ashkenazi panel” of inherited birth defects. Tay Sachs knows no fear of God; cystic fibrosis no MCAT scores. Perhaps she had a point.

I’m no olive-skinned, raven-haired Jewess. My mannerisms, intonation, and sensibility are what shine through auburn-tinged hair and a smattering of freckles. When reporting in the Middle East, Iraqis would comment on how Jordanian I looked, for an American girl, and never gave me a second thought as they gushed conspiracy theories about Israel. When traveling through Christian America to report a book on Evangelical youth culture, my background was gleaned only one time before I announced it myself: by a born-again Messianic Jew from the East Side, who tried to covert me with his prophetic reading of Hebrew astrology, liberally seasoning his monologue with Yiddish, speaking “my language,” as he entirely misunderstood me.

In megachurches and mosques alike, I have asked legions of faithful what has drawn them into the fold, what need a new—or renewed—place in a religious community offers them that a purely secular life cannot. Belonging, they tell me. A sense of identity. A place in the world and in themselves where they know who they are, and who their people are. They ask me why I have never been wooed by such promises, since surely, as a non-believer who speaks of the dearth of community in the secular world, surely I must hunger for what they have found to fill their own sense of void. And yet, though I participate in no active Jewish community, I have never lacked an identity, or a place in the world. My most existential crises seem inherently Jewish enough to offer some foundation—at bottom, more Being than Nothingness.

Assimilated enough that I rarely have to contend with my Otherness in America—both economically and culturally—I've had the advantage of not needing to obsess over my own Jewishness, and thus the privilege to focus my studies and my career on other cultures and corners of the world, ones which threaten, ones which are threatened. This is perhaps the most sacred of traditions that my parents have passed onto me, raising me in their own humanity-revering temple of social justice. It is this inheritance that relatively obliterates the significance of the internal calendar that alerts me to the Barney’s warehouse sale (Labor Day, but it’s not as good as it used to be) or why I’ve always perceived the hilarity when, in Hannah and her Sisters, Woody Allen’s character wants out of Judaism and thus purchases a jar of Hellman’s and a loaf of Wonder Bread (if you have to ask, you probably grew up with said purchases).

It’s a choice, a luxury really, to wrestle with the notions of what makes me Jewish. In considering these questions, I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the starkly unique properties of this immigrant people I call my own, who soared through the classes, out of the pogroms, and up from the ghetto, fueled perhaps by a cocktail of brain chemistry and assimilationist, angst-ridden ambition to win all those Nobel prizes, lead all those social movements, and make all that money. Not to question the existence of God—I resolved that one for myself before I packed that t-shirt in my summer camp trunk—but to question what it means to be us, to be an “us,” questioning the authority of history, of science, of culture, and of who we have become; challenging these notions as just some of life’s puzzles—not the most urgent ones anymore, nor the most trivial—perhaps that’s secular Judaism in its purest distillation.