Jewish and American

Of the 52 Shabbatot of the Jewish year, Shabbat Thanksgiving may not rank at the very top of the hierarchy. Many people are away, and those of us who are here feel the lingering side effects of the last two days of food… and relatives. Certainly, when compared to Shabbat Shuvah, between Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, or Shabbat Hagadol, just before Passover, Shabbat Thanksgiving is a strictly American and relatively recent phenomenon. That said, for us in the room, I think that this Shabbat, perhaps more than any other Shabbat of the year, is deeply important, in that it alerts us to the two calendars by which we live: the secular or civic time of Thanksgiving, and the Jewish rhythms of Shabbat and festivals. This weekend forces us to consider what it is to be part of both traditions. Moreover, on this Shabbat, we have students in from college, products of our community, back to see family and back today to check in on the synagogue in which they grew up. It is to this audience, the liberal arts crowd, past, present, or future, that I direct my thoughts today. I want to think aloud with you about what it means to be part of both a campus culture and Jewish tradition – a hyphenated identity with a foot in two worlds. A bit of a disclaimer up front: as with the twisted professorial path of some of your college lectures, there may be a moment or two when you wonder where I am heading. I can’t promise you that every moment will make perfect sense, but at the very least, rest assured there is no exam at the end.

Last month, the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi Strauss died at the age of 100. His death prompted me to dust off some of his books from my freshman Intro to Anthropology class. Lévi Strauss spent his career studying cultural systems from different continents and eras, comparing everything from kinship systems, marriage rules, rituals of all kinds, and mythological narratives. Over the course of his career, he came to the conclusion that “the human mind is everywhere one and the same and that it has the same capacities.” His book The Savage Mind argues that, notwithstanding certain contextual differences, there really aren’t any differences between the primitive mind and the civilized mind. Lévi Strauss’s research tallies the cultural tropes shared across civilizations, what he called “the search for the invariant.” So, for instance, something common to many mythologies is a cosmology with a central vertical axis that connects the sky and the earth, variously symbolized as the world pole, the sacred mountain, the church steeple, or as we read this morning, Jacob’s ladder. The cosmologies may differ in particulars, but they reflect a universal element of mythology – Shamanistic, Biblical, or otherwise.

From reading Lévi Strauss, I went on to read a fascinating book that put him into conversation with two other thinkers from our college reading list, Freud and Marx. The Ordeal of Civility is by John Murray Cuddihy, a member of the faculty at CUNY. His thesis is altogether intriguing. Cuddihy reflects on the intellectual legacy of Lévi Strauss, Freud, and Marx, pointing out that these giants of anthropology, psychology, and economics are all of Jewish descent. Freud and Marx’s Jewishness are the subject of much scholarship, and Lévi Strauss, though never a practicing Jew, was the grandson of a Rabbi in Versailles and recalled being called a “dirty Jew” in grade school.

Cuddihy argues out that each one of these famous diaspora Jewish intellectuals was involved in a lover’s quarrel with the modern world. Each of them epitomizes Bernard Rosenberg’s definition of a Jewish intellectual as someone “who pretends to have forgotten his Yiddish.” Marx’s father had converted, while Freud and Lévi Strauss never had an open break. No matter what their Jewish background, each of them developed an ideological strategy by which to transcend their Jewishness. Freud’s psychoanalysis sought to identify those conditions that were common across ethnic cultures and ethnic lines: the unconscious, the taboos, the confrontations with guilt, shame, and sexuality. So too, Marx’s communism sought to deny or transcend economic differences often associated with a bourgeois Jewish trading class. Lévi Strauss, as I noted, made his name by pointing out that religions all have the same goal and while differing on tactics, share far more than they otherwise acknowledge.

Each thinker, according to Cuddihy, kicked Judaism upstairs, escaping upward into a more refined level of the cultural system. They, or at least Lévi Strauss and Freud, refused to formally assimilate. They leveled the playing field, creating disciplines that made Jewish problems, and the Jewish people, universal. In other words, each of the disciplines they created enabled Jews to be full participants in a secular world without having to wear their Judaism on their sleeves.

You see, whether it is Marx and Freud, or you and I, the modern Jew is faced with a very basic problem. How does one acknowledge the particularity of our Jewish origins and, at the same time, claim to be a full participant in civic society? There are many answers to this question, often called “The Jewish Question.” Theodore Herzl saw the desire for Jews to be like all other people and their inability to do so in Europe, so he founded political Zionism, believing a Jewish state to be the only way for Jews to be both Jews and citizens of the world. Chabad, or the Ba’al Teshuvah movement, rejects modernity, or at least the intellectual claims that modernity presents. In a sense, Conservative, Reform, and Orthodox Judaism all represent different modes by which a Jew negotiates his or her place in Jewish and secular culture. Cuddihy’s thesis seems to be suggesting that the fathers of western culture and the modern liberal arts education represent another path. Each one recoiled at the thought of the Jew being a social pariah, and responded by transforming all the distinguishing characteristics of being Jewish, cultural and psychological, into shared features of a diverse and variegated humanity. Modernity, in the words of Sartre in his Anti-Semite and Jew, brought with it a passion for the universal, where “there is no French truth or German truth…no Negro truth and or Jewish truth.” Freud, Marx and Lévi Strauss, were champions of the universal, in service to their disciplines, but also in response to their awkward status as Jews in the modern world.

All this is interesting – I hope. But this is not a college classroom, it is a synagogue and, in the intimacy of this partisan crowd, there is a very practical and troubling question lingering beneath the surface. When we send our kids off to college, what sort of identity are we hoping they will create? If you are in college, what sort of identity are you seeking to create? You go to college, you take anthropology, psychology, and economics, you room with people of different faiths, traditions, and ethnic backgrounds, coming from exotic places called “the suburbs.” On the one hand, one point of sending your children to college (or going to college) is to see that your children (or you) are part of a diverse landscape of varied religions and backgrounds. Your Bible, your rituals, your Jewishness is but another club at the Student Union. Now let’s all go cheer for the same football team. On the other hand, if the Jewish graduates of a liberal arts college believe their Judaism to be no more and no less significant than any other cultural markers, then what exactly makes Jewish identity worth preserving?

I meet, with increasing regularity, children of this congregation who have fallen in love with non-Jews, and either at their own volition or at the prompting of a parent, we sit in my office and discuss their relationship. Not once has any of these Jewish kids expressed a disdain for Judaism, or for that matter, has the non-Jewish partner recoiled at their potential spouse’s Jewishness. Nearly every couple says something to the effect of “I am a good ethical person, so is she. One of us is Jewish, the other is Catholic or Protestant or something else… Rabbi, we are two good people in love – what exactly is so complicated here?” We live in a curious and delightful and terrifying time where the anxiety wrought by the vexing Jewish question has been replaced by something more frightening – indifference.

Unless we are able to ask and answer the question of Jewish particularity, both respecting the diversity of humanity, and insisting on the unique contribution of Judaism to humanity, a contribution without which humanity will be irreparably impoverished, a contribution worth standing up for, fighting for and marrying for, well, then the simple truth is that we are dead in the water. We need an answer for those couples in my office, your children, and the thousands who never even bother to make an appointment. Freud, Marx, and Lévi Strauss may have been plenty smart, but with all due respect, they are not Jewish role models. I don’t want to create Jews whose very success drives them to transcend their Jewishness. I want to create Jews who are able to wrestle all night with modernity, letting our sparring partner of secularism go at the moment we emerge victorious, at the moment we emerge named as Israel.

One final story, not from psychology, not from anthropology, nor from economics, but from Law. I heard it first by way of Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg. It is the story of Justice Louis Brandeis in law school and his induction into the Harvard Honor Society. It had not been an easy road for Brandeis. For the past three years, other students – uninvited – had sat next to him as he ate lunch every day, saying things like “Brandeis, you’re brilliant, you could end up on the Supreme Court – except that you are a Jew. Why don’t you convert? Then all your problems will be solved.” Brandeis had listened but had not responded. Finally, in his senior year of law school, his preeminence could not be denied. Jewish or not, he was invited to join the “Honor Society.” On the evening of the official induction, the atmosphere was thick. All eyes were on him as he walked to the lectern. Slowly he looked around the room and began to speak; “I’m sorry I was born a Jew,” he said. With that, the room erupted in applause, in an explosion of shouting and cheers. They had convinced him, they thought. They had prevailed upon him at last. Brandeis waited. When silence was regained he began again. “I am sorry I was born a Jew, but only because I wish I had the privilege of choosing Judaism on my own.” This time there was no shouting, no explosion, no cheers, this time there was respectful silence. The members of the society listened attentively, awed by his strength of conviction and strength of character, by his unequivocal choice. When he finished, they gave him a standing ovation.

This story may be apocryphal. It is told without corroboration. It is a story about positive identification, how one Jew was able to negotiate his professional and secular ambitions and emerge with his Jewish identity intact and a source of welling pride. It is a story worth repeating, a story worth seeking to replicate in our own lives and the lives of our children. To see Judaism not as something to shirk or transcend, not as a choice among equals, but as a birthright worthy of transmission, worthy of struggle, worthy of celebrating. May that story be our story for generations to come.