I am one of the people interviewed in the PBS series and hope people will watch what I believe is the most nuanced and sophisticated telling of the Jewish American story to date: a story that has wisdom for any American because it is a story as much about being American as it is about being Jewish. So I will be sweet and allusive.
We do not know what Jewish identity meant in the past because there was no one Jewish identity to be known. There were Jewish identities. There were many different expressions of Jewishness that, as with any religious culture, were products of interactions between people, their times, their inherited tradition, the larger cultures in which they were embedded, and their personal biographies and biologies.
Jewish identity in the first century in Palestine was very different than Jewish identity in Poland in the seventeenth century which was very different than Jewish identity in Spain in the twelfth century which was different than Jewish identity in New Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century which is different than the many kinds of Jewish identities on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the twenty-first century. In fact, when one studies the Jewish past one discovers that identity is really a verb and not a noun.
It is something that is continuously being constructed and not some static thing one possesses. Judaism (a word that did not even exist until the modern period) is an ever changing construction and the Jewish people and ever moving construct. What does remain the same is the fact that there has been a group of people, whatever their particular theologies and practices, who continue to call themselves Jews, who use the Torah, understood as widely and inclusively as possible e.g. a biblical passage, a Talmudic text, a philosophical treatise, medieval poem, a recipe, a Lenny Bruce routine, a Philip Roth novel, a Bob Dylan song... to wrestle with the meaning of life, i.e. to know more clearly the truth about life, to love more deeply and courageously, and to live more justly and compassionately.
And what will Jewish mean in the future? The only thing one can say for certain about the spiritual journey is that it is unpredictable. If anyone would have told my grandmother – born in Poland in 1898 and who lived well into her nineties - when she was a teenager, that over the next century or so all of Jewry would basically move across oceans, that one third of those who called themselves Jews would be murdered by one of the most modern and cultured nations on the planet, that after 2000 years Jews would return to the Land of Israel and establish a democratic state, that in a place called America Jews would enjoy unprecedented freedom, power, and affluence, that in that place called America just about every university in the country would have a Judaic department, that more Jewish books, plays, music, art, would be produced than at any other time in Jewish history, that there would be forms of Jewishness that stretch from the most atheistic to the most conventionally traditional, from BuJews (Buddhist Jews) to HinJews (Hindu Jews), from New Age Jews to mainstream liberal Protestant- like Jews, from militant nationalistic Jews to pacifist Jews, from non-Jewish Jews (Madonna) to Seinfeld Jews, from synagogue going Jews to bagels and lox Jews, that in that place called America rather than wanting to convert or murder us Gentiles would actually want to marry us and that this profound change in attitude rather than being a cause for celebration and engagement would generate an anxiety only rivaled by an anxiety about anti-Semitism…she would be completely dumbfounded.
Jewish identity will be plural and will mean what those people who consciously call themselves Jews decide it will mean. It will include, just like every other cultural/religious identity, “saints” and sinners, tribalists and globalists, hustlers and heroes, spiritual geniuses and hardened cynics, Jews who exclude other Jews from being called Jews and Jews who include Jews who could not care less about being included as Jews, philanthropists and philanderers, good folk and bad folk…all wandering “together” in a loose sort of way on the way to a promised land that can never be reached because it is always promised.
How will we Jews survive: retain our roots and embrace change? Like we always have, by never thinking we have the final solution (we don’t like final solutions as they tend to be very unhealthy for us and others) to that question or for that matter to any really important question about life. We will retain our Jewishness by arguing about the meanings of our past, the challenges of our present, and the dreams of our future. We will survive and flourish as long as we, like every individual and every people, continuously negotiate an ever moving, ever fluid, never definitive, ever flowing line or dance between being separated and being connected, being different and being the same, resisting and adapting, drawing boundaries and destroying boundaries, celebrating differences and marveling at commonalities, affirming our uniqueness relative to other human beings/groups and embracing our oneness with other human beings and groups…all in the service of an ever-changing, always being argued about purpose: to heal ourselves and this world.
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