I. Shavuot 39a
I am a rationalist, uncomfortable with metaphysical explanations that cut the bowels out of insoluble paradoxes through resort to incontrovertible spiritual claims. Explanations must come to an end somewhere—I'll return to this again—but in this case I have put my self into the hands of mystical thought because my reason cannot take me to the place where I am standing now.
Our sages taught that the souls of converts were also present at Sinai to assent to and confirm the covenant with the rest of Israel and its future generations: As for me, some part of me has also assented to that covenant and now must make its separate confirmation. Here too I break my usual monistic view of man and am forced to say that the soul which assented must be distinct in some way from the mind and organism which justify, since it is impossible that I would have assented to this on my own terms and improbable that my extremely predictable nature (resistant to change, suspicious of subjectivity, culturally parochial) would come to this juncture of its own right. You can tell from the stiffness of my language here that I'm still uncomfortable with my explanation even though the grandeur of the metaphysical event of Sinai is deeply appealing to me as a creature of literary aesthetics—Sinai is, for me, a true myth, an event whose reality has hijacked what would have been the normal and reasonable trajectory of my life.
In any sense in which I would usually use the word "know," then, I don't know why I am a Jew. But I am.
Let me resort to a short history. Here are the facts: I was raised in a christian household and, as is so universally the case with people like myself, revolted from the revolting church-camp atmosphere in which I grew up by adopting the aggressively atheist worldview which has become a cliché of American university life. In my junior year I fell into the company of the most remarkable person I have ever known, a classmate of mine in the German program who was something of an amateur scholar of the Shoah and with whom I began to discuss Israel and the Jews. My friend, a gentile and also an atheist, was at that time an outspoken advocate for Israeli interests; I found myself gripped by a wrenching and totally irrational affinity for Israel as a political entity and for the Israeli people as the last living example of real national grit in the Western world. The only shouting arguments I've ever had have concerned Israel—let me tell you that my nature is phlegmatic to the point of defectiveness; nobody was as surprised as I was that this topic, irrelevant to me and utterly unrelated to my interests, could reduce me to a species of ideological attack dog, aggressive, loyal and more than a little vicious.
I aged and cooled. My interests are literary, and I began to read the Bible as an exercise in criticism; my fascination with Israel turned into a voracious appetite for Hebrew scripture. This went on for some time until, in the summer of 2010 (and after a great deal of astonished resistance) I began to pray, in retrospect as a totally uneducated Jew. Suddenly—and these are the only words I can think of to describe it—a theological mindset had congealed in me, or rather materialized at the bottom of my mind as a kind of chemical precipitate. It was there, stubborn and unsettling and indifferent to my self-concept as a materialist thinker. At about this time I began gesturing toward sabbath observance; In 2011, after a year of eating through a disorganized and ludicrously non-comprehensive mass of readings, I presented myself to R. Bass and told her what I have told you. To my reckoning I have had the Jewish people lodged in my head for five years, thought of myself as spiritually Jewish for two, and lived as an increasingly observant Jew for one.
II. Echad
I have been able to justify my religious convictions to myself because of the sublimity of monotheism or, as I irritatingly refer to it in conversation, radical monotheism. The development of Jewish thought toward a god which is truly and in the full sense one god, a concept we share with Islam and some forms of protestantism is, for me, the central mystery of Judaism and an answer to the central Christian mystery of the body of christ, at once fully human and fully divine—another supreme idea which, however, does not speak to my soul and which I consider an impossible contradiction in terms. I believe that G-d is and can only be perfectly simple, unbounded by time and space, present in a complete, unchanging, independent and self-sufficient state in every moment, separate from (neither within nor containing, but—for lack of a better term—through, like a bed of nails piercing a sheet of paper) the universe, utterly unapproachable on His own terms but whose thought holds every particle of the world in its place: a thing to which the words exist, is, believe, like do not and cannot apply. I refer here, in a philosophically sloppy way, to the negative theology of Maimonides.
Here there is, however, a paradox. How to be at once both a monotheist in the true sense and also, as I do, assent to the truth of Torah? Our God is not only necessarily the ineffable One of philosophy but also, in his revelation to us, the holy one of Israel who walked in the cool of the evening with Adam, spoke with Abraham at Mamre, who wrestled bodily with Jacob, came against Moses at the inn, and whom Ezekiel saw in a chariot of fire. How do we hold in mind both the philosophical truth of His perfection and also the religious truth of the J author, whose god has hands, face, voice, emotions, the capacity to change His mind, to love and grieve and rankle in the human sense?
Some time ago I was listening to a JTS podcast. The question arose: is G-d Jewish? Certainly not, responded the panel. At the time, I was scandalized. The thought stuck to me like a burr for some weeks until I realized that it was correct—how impossible that the ineffable and unbounded One could be bounded, contained in some way, in Judaism! At the same time, it is a truth that He made a particular and continuous revelation to the Jewish people at Sinai, and that although G-d is not a god of the Jews alone or exclusively, he is accessible to us in—and only in—a uniquely Jewish way, and, uniquely in human history until that point, a way mediated primarily by the written word. It is this tension between philosophical purity and the complex paradox of sacred text that saves the philosophy from sterility and the text from a fundamentalism indistinguishable from idolatry; without this coupling the former is useless, the latter fascist.
III. From all He had created
As with so much of the law there are, as I understand it, two principal ways we think of the sabbath. The first is a matter of religious law and its attendant theology; the second is ethical, in the Aristotelian sense. I will touch on both.
Theologically: A memorial of creation and the day in which G-d rested from the act of creation. For us, this means that we attempt to participate in the timeless ratiocination of a timeless god whose nature is such that the act of creation is not past but continuous, since, existing at all times, the moment of creation is as completely present in the experience of G-d as the heat death of the universe and the metaphysical event we refer to as olam haba. I've begun to joke to my friends that eventually I will wake up to discover that I've begun making preparations for the sabbath on Sunday night; in a sense, this is the purpose of the sabbath as an institution, so that not only the day itself but the days of the week before it might allow man to imitate his creator, putting his tiny purview into order so that he might also rest from all his labor and contemplate the abstract, language-dwelling world of thought which (I believe) the Torah refers to when it teaches that we are made in His image, namely that we have access to the abstract and participate in the unique ontological condition of language-using creatures. I believe that this opportunity to imitate the creator is the best way to rationalize its condition as chief among our days of assembly.
We refer to it also as an offering of sabbath rest, which suggests to me that we should regard the sabbath as another way to replace the temple services and—given that the institution of the sabbath both predates the possibility of offering sacrifice and also commands observance even when temple rituals are impossible (i.e. we must rest from purification of the temple on the sabbath even if this means abrogation of continuous offering)—it would not be unreasonable to think of this supreme sabbath offering as the teleology to which animal sacrifice was a necessary predecessor. In any event, sabbath observance is obligatory, non-negotiable, paramount, and casually disregarded by the laity of all non-orthodox movements within Judaism.
Ethically: Someone else's rabbi taught explicitly that the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath; our rabbis confirm this, though (to my understanding) less directly. The conservative movement has supplemented its siddur with meditations on the sabbath as an opportunity to relax and find tranquility which, although only part of the picture, it certainly is. From personal experience I can say that the institution of the sabbath gives us the opportunity—or compels us, depending on one's perspective—to focus the mind (the da'at, binah v'haskeil which in our times typically rest in a state of hibernation) and fully come awake. It is a gift of and commandment to clarity. Further, and for me especially, it provides a fixed structure that organizes the week into a meaningful cycle of beginning and ending, preparation and completion; this is endlessly better than a round of drudgery followed by two days of frantic recreation—although I do sometimes miss Saturday.
IV. If an Unkosher Meatball Falls into a Pot of Kosher Meatballs, Should You Tell Anyone What Happened or Just Eat the Meatballs Anyway?
Kosher means "suitable," and as such extends far beyond food to all forms of Jewish interaction with the world; but I'll deal with food here. As before, I'd like to touch first on theological, then on ethical points.
Theologically: we begin with ritual purity and the corporate purity of the Jewish people. I mentioned in my first essay the idea of arbitrary boundaries; putting aside the rationalization that kashrut began as a hygenic measure—there is nothing unsafe about camel or horse meat; the tribal origins of the law proceed from disgust, not proto-science—let me take the opportunity to talk about the productive arbitrariness of the law. Explanations come to an end somewhere; here, they have no beginning. The orthodox do not eat caviar not because caviar is, of itself, foul; they do not eat it because they do not eat sturgeon. Why? Because they do not eat the scaleless sturgeon. Shrimp do not stink in the nostril of the holy one—they are an abomination for us, and the project of explaining why inevitably ends in some form of intellectual disingenuousness. This is not a bad thing. To assent to an arbitrary and inexplicable holiness code is to take the necessary step outside the self which allows us to exist in a universe, even for a moment, that is not us; to behave not according to pure subjectivity but to behave according to a structure and system of boundaries which we cannot change to suit us. For me, this is the glory of being a people of the book; the existence of the text (with all its perplexity) keeps us on the one hand from superstition and solipsism, from bloodless rationalism on the other.
Ethically: I have heard keeping kosher described in terms of mindfulness about what we buy and eat, which to me sounds suspiciously similar to the rationale behind buying organic and can, I think, banalize the theological justification of dietary taboo. Having casually dismissed hygenic explanations for kashrut, I do however think that the sociological function of dietary law is historical fact. Keeping kosher keeps us separate; it makes it impossible, observed with a not unreasonable level of strictness, to fully interact with gentiles in social settings. Eating together is, anthropologically, the beginning of coming to mutual understanding with people who are unlike you: A man who eats nothing in the company of eaters is an alien, a sinister figure; it is impossible for him to create fellowship under such conditions. Viewed in a positive light, kashrut unifies the Jewish people. My kitchen, for instance—once I am taught how to kasher it—will be kosher; I keep my kitchen to a much higher halachic standard than I observe when I am out of the house. I eat hot dairy in public but—as a vegetarian—instead of having separate meat and milk dishes I have disposable tableware should I ever order a pizza. Why? Because it is crucially important to me that any observant Jew be comfortable eating in my house, this almost fantastic-seeming prospect of the existence of scrupulous Jews who, analogous to the coming of the messiah, I hopefully and faithfully expect to eventually show up at my doorstep. Kashrut binds me to the Jewish people more than it separates me from gentiles.
V. Yevamot 47a
I've already talked about my relationship to the state of Israel, so let me here deal with a counterfactual I probed fairly stringently as I began to consider the possibility—then the necessity—of actually converting to Judaism. First: What if this were in fact some kind of post-ethnic maneuver for identity, especially in a university environment where minority status carried such rhetorical and social clout? I freely admit that my nature is viciously flawed by an impulse toward exhibitionism, posturing, and self-regard; but after much thought I decided that this was not the case. I here resort again not to argument but, uncharacteristically, to my feelings: I investigated my heart and found that I was not experiencing a desire to be a Jew or to be a Jew in the eyes of others, but rather that in some irrational way I was a kind of Jew—although a Jew fundamentally damaged and in need of repair. There is the fact that my grandfather was a lapsed Jew—he married a mafia princess named Siniscalo who proceeded to destroy my father's life—but this narrative of regaining what my shliemazl grandfather dithered away is just a rationalization for a condition I cannot explain. "Prunes are a good Jewish food" was the sum total of my father's transmission of Jewish identity to me, and whatever this is, it's not a converso's pot of lentils later re-identified as crypto-cholent. There is the troubling coincidence of my values with the ancient qualities of the Jewish people—scholarliness, argumentation, a traditionally cerebral rather than charismatic approach to religion—and I think it would not be unfair to call my identification with the Jews the coping mechanism of someone who has been intellectually and socially lonely, to invent an ideal heritage of people—finally! like me!—who share my apartness and congenital intellectualism. What can I say except that this is not the case? It is not.
I do not think of myself as a subscriber to a creed so much as a member of a nation. Let me recount an experience that took me rather by surprise: One day last summer I set out to teach myself Hatikvah, and found a youtube upload of the Jews of a liberated death camp singing it after the arrival of the American troops. While it was loading I had trundled off to my kitchen to wash up a teacup or something; I listened to this historical curiosity for about a minute and began bawling. You have most probably intuited by now that I am not an emotional man, but let me tell you that I can count on one hand the number of times I've broken down like that in my adult life—previous culprits being my mother, graduate school, romantic relationships designed specially by Kafka's angry ghost—you know, the things people ordinarily cry about.. Shaken, I immediately and frantically turned it off. This, perhaps, is the reassuring fact half-buried in so much emotional reasoning; perhaps this is why I would get red in the face talking about settlements in the west bank when I was an undergraduate: Even then, when I would have given the lie to anyone with the amusing notion that I would one day show up at a synagogue in Arlington and be horrified to discover that we sing our entire liturgy, some part of me already identified with the Jewish people in the same way that my pre-rational, clannish, entirely human prejudices cleave to my friends and family. What injures the Jews injures me; their triumphs (it's strange to refer to the Jews in the third person) are mine, this people is my people, their god my G-d.
You mention the suffering of the Jews. This gives me pause: What right do I have to this heritage, this enduring peoplehood in the face of so much misery and deprivation, especially now—G-d willing—that the historical persecution of Jews in the free world has come to an end at the cost of the extermination of European Jewry? I have none. I know, and I am unworthy.
