Adapted from Respecting the Wicked Child

What Does It Have to Do With Me?

By MITCHELL SILVER

You are modern, secular, and thoroughly liberal—a child of the Enlightenment. So why be a Jew? And how can you be a Jew, and make your children Jews, without betraying your Enlightenment heritage?

I come to this subject out of personal and professional need. I cannot remember not knowing I was Jewish. I always felt that this was a very important fact about me. But it was not clear why it was important. My parents were not religious, but their irreligion was not a matter of high, or even low, principle. They just did not take it seriously. I was sent to Hebrew school, where I learned very little Hebrew and not much of anything else, either—perhaps only a superficial acquaintance with some customs that still maintained a hold on American Jewry of the 1950s and 1960s. It was plain that my parents were not very clear about why they were sending me to Hebrew school and that they were not terribly concerned with what I was taught there.

My maternal grandparents were Yiddish-speaking immigrants, but whatever significance was laid on that had to do with their newness to America. There was no conscious desire to preserve the old ways they had brought with them. Although there was a strong sense of ethnic identity, there was scarcely a concept of Jewish culture in the house. Jewish consciousness was manifested through barely articulated nostalgia, chauvinism, and paranoia. By the time I was ten, actual Jewish practice struck me as “square.” Three years later I was bar mitzvahed, and I would not have been shocked if that had been the last Jewish thing I ever did. In college most of my friends were Jewish, and none of them ever did anything explicitly Jewish in the four years I was there. But, however alienated I felt from Jewish practice, I never felt estranged from my Jewish identity. Doing anything Jewish seemed archaic, provincial, and unreasonable, but my identity as a Jew, although it may have waned a bit at times, was never in question. Still, under those conditions, it was puzzling what that identity amounted to.

With the birth of my children, the puzzle became a practical problem. I found that I wanted my Jewish identity transmitted to my children, but without understanding what my identity amounted to, I saw no likely means of transmission. I could not reproduce the Jewish milieu of my upbringing, and I would not have wanted to even if I could. The old country grandparents were gone, along with the nostalgia and prejudices that were natural to their children’s homes. Bad Hebrew schools still existed, but I had lost the innocence that allowed my parents to send me to one of them.

For the religious, or those who can act in good conscience though they are religious, however difficult it may be, the means of passing on a Jewish identity are not obscure. Judaism abounds with practices, and a modicum of religious observance provides enough family activities to make a strong impression on a childhood. But we of little (or no) faith, who are also fussy about acting in ways not in accordance with our basic convictions, have a problem. How do we make our children feel Jewish when we reject, or are indifferent to, Jewish practice?


Why Bother?

Most Jews are familiar with the parable of the four sons in the Passover Haggadah. Three are characterized in terms of the wisdom of their questions: There is a wise son, a simple son, and a son too ignorant to formulate a question. These labels emphasize the intellectual properties of the questioners. But the fourth son is given a moral description. He is the wicked son. His sin is the expression of alienation from the tradition. The other sons ask how to celebrate the seder properly or what it is all about. The wicked son asks, “What has it to do with me?”

Among contemporary Jews there are many wicked children, and they merit answers that amount to more than the traditional scornful dismissal. This is an attempt to address one large group of alienated Jews from a perspective they already have: secularist. It is unlikely that any arguments can create a Jewish identity or community where none exists. But a confused identity and weak commitment might be clarified, strengthened, and rationalized by certain considerations.

Why bother getting a secular Jewish education or, more to the point, giving your children one? The reasons I will provide are neither general nor conclusive. They are not general because they do not apply to those who are “religious,”¹ or those who feel absolutely no connection to the Jewish people. They are not conclusive because there may be weighty, unrefuted, counterbalancing reasons to drop one’s Jewish identity. But they are reasons that support and add substance to an already existing inclination seeking justifications.


Portrait of a Wicked Child

I begin with a portrait of a typical contemporary “wicked” child, now in fact an adult with some children of her own. Her grandparents or great-grandparents immigrated to America from Eastern Europe, and she heard some Yiddish during childhood. She was sent to a few years of Hebrew school, where she learned some Bible stories, a few holiday traditions, and some Hebrew. She hated it and remembers almost nothing. She speaks no Hebrew and knows only a couple of Yiddish expressions, and these are pretty much the same ones that the average television-watching Gentile American is coming to know. Similarly, while she believes she has a special attachment to Jewish foods, her daily diet is standard, urban, middle-class American. She eats more tuna than herring, more yogurt than sour cream, more tofu than cabbage. If she eats a lot of bagels, well, so do her non-Jewish neighbors. There was little synagogue attendance in her youth and for years only a friend’s or relative’s wedding or bar/bat mitzvah gets her to shul. Agnostic or atheist, she believes that the Bible is a wholly human document. Its laws and recommendations are without any supernatural authority, its metaphysical explanations, myths of more or less charm, its narrative accounts, legends of varying historical accuracy. She is too dimly aware of other traditional Jewish texts to have any opinion about them beyond the belief that they are of no relevance to her life. What she knows of Jewish laws and customs—Sabbath observance, kosher laws, mikvah  ritual—strike her as burdensome and silly and perhaps even morally objectionable. Still she is a Jew. She would not deny it or its importance. Furthermore, it is important to her that her children feel that they are Jews. While she might bristle and would dispense with the ritual, in the end she would certainly have her sons circumcised. And although she is not sure how or why it happened, most of her friends are Jewish.

Such a person finds in herself a gut desire to instill a Jewish identity in her children but has difficulty finding reasons for doing so. Without reasons, the will to enact her desire is weakened, and the way to enact her desire seems a muddle.² This muddled way further undermines her will. When there is no way, it is hard to maintain a will.

Why maintain and attempt to pass on a Jewish identity? Because human cultures are valuable; because Jewish culture is valuable; because only Jews will maintain Jewish culture; because people have suffered to maintain Jewish culture; because Jew-haters want to see the death of Jewish culture; because you cannot help living in some culture, and a Jewish American one will feel most natural (unless American consumerism does, but that will leave you isolated and alienated); because Jewish culture can provide you with a place in a community and history, and it can give substance to many of your ingrained attitudes and habits; because Jewish culture can ground your progressive politics and moral commitments; because it gives you something that you like to give your children, making them less likely to seek what you do not like; because it does not prevent you from appropriating anything that is of value or appealing to you from all of human culture; finally, because it in no way prevents you from being a tolerant, rational, good citizen of the world who treats all humans as equals and with respect.

Excerpted from Respecting the Wicked Child: A Philosophy of Jewish Identity and Education, by Mitchell Silver, and reprinted by permission of the University of Massachsuetts Press.

NOTES

¹ It is perhaps more accurate to say that there are other reasons for being Jewish that are the dominating ones for religious people.
² Of course the desire is a muddle too. It is not simply that we have a sharp, clear, but nonrationally motivated desire. The desire is of mixed and murky origins. To a limited extent, my project of rationalizing the desire throws light on those origins, for I suspect the desire often grows from reasons of which we are dimly aware. But the desire typically will also stem from nonrational psychological processes. These are of great interest, but not of direct pertinence, to this inquiry. Whatever its origins, I’m concerned to show that the desire to remain Jewish, and have your children identify as Jews, is a desire that can be given a rational and moral foundation.