Rebel Without a Cause

For those of you invested in the subtleties of sartorial identity, my late grandfather is as fascinating a case study as can be found. An Orthodox rabbi who served his congregation in Glasgow, Scotland with distinction until his death in 1972, my grandfather devoted a lifetime of energy and enthusiasm in service to the Jewish tradition and the Jewish people. Given his passions and life work, it probably comes as no surprise to you that I proudly keep a photograph of him on his pulpit on my desk at home. And yet when I look at his picture, it is the way he dressed as a rabbi that I find to be most remarkable: he is wearing what today we would consider the vestments of a Christian clergyman. A clerical collar, a bib, a black clerical robe, and gaiters – the traditional dress for priests and bishops of the Anglican Church. It wasn’t just the way he dressed that was modeled after his gentile contemporaries. Always clean-shaven, always speaking in an unaccented Queen’s English, my grandfather belonged to a generation of mid-century anglicized Orthodox rabbis. He was referred to not as “Rabbi” but as “Reverend,” and his last name, Cosgrove – which, not coincidentally, is also my own – was a change from Kozlovsky. His doctorate, a reflection of his erudition and intellectual curiosity, was a credential sought by a generation of Jews who understood the degree to be a ticket of admission into British society: the Reverend Dr. I.K. Cosgrove – a Freemason, at that. A prouder Jew you could not find. As a congregational leader, as Senior Jewish Chaplain to the Armed Forces in Scotland during World War II, my grandfather represented our people to the world and the concerns of the Jewish people were woven into every fiber of his being. And yet, were you to be sitting next to him on a bus, you would have absolutely no idea that he was Jewish, never mind a rabbi. In fact, I am told that throughout his life, people would often mistake him for a priest.

Outward facing as it may be, clothing reveals more about our inner selves than we care to admit. As many cultural anthropologists have noted, woven into our choices of dress are a host of unspoken statements, about class, geography, marital status, politics, and much else. Be it Mahatma Gandhi’s public adoption of homespun Khadi and loincloth as a rejection of western norms and a show of solidarity with the peasantry, the henna ritual that precedes a Persian wedding, or the decision to wear maize and blue on certain fall Saturdays, there is nothing incidental about these markers of identity. This knowledge is engrained in us as Jews. The tallit, the four-cornered prayer shawl with its tzitzit, the fringes commanded in the Bible to remind us of God’s mitzvot. The shtreimels, kapotas, and kittels of the Hasidic community. Putting on – or not – a yarmulke, a sheitel, or a necklace with a magen david. There was a time, not too long ago, when to sit on this bimah on the High Holidays, men were required (and back then it was only men) to wear top hats and tails. These are all markers of identity, statements of our self-understanding, and statements of how society understands us. There were times, like in sixteenth-century Poland, when Jews were required to wear distinctive clothing; and there were times, like Tsarist Russia in the 1850s, when Jews were banned from wearing distinctive clothing. Sometimes the norms are imposed on us, sometimes the norms are self-imposed: choices we make to assert who we are, either in resistance or in accommodation to the society in which we live. Either way, these are all cultural cues – signals of belonging, signals of differentiation. Are we seeking to blend in? Are we seeking to be distinct? It may not always be conscious, but it is never casual. As the song goes, we are what we wear and how we dress.

I have no direct knowledge of Abraham’s sartorial choices. There is, unfortunately, no photograph. But if the rabbinic imagination is to be believed, he would be outfitted as the rebellious bad boy of his day. Black leather jacket, dark sunglasses, Bowery boots, and maybe a snakeskin silver cuff to match his swagger. Abraham wasn’t just the first Jew; he was the first iconoclast of the biblical tradition. Adam was thrown out of the Garden; Cain struggled with his inner demons; Noah went with crowd. Only with Abraham do we have our very first rebel. Lekh l’kha! “Go forth! From your native land, from your birthplace, from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.” (12:1) The drama of Abraham’s journey was never just about geography; it was a break from his birthplace, from his family of origin, from all that had come before. The rabbis go to great lengths to embellish the revolutionary nature of Abraham’s identity. How while working in his father’s idol shop, he came to realize the folly of worshiping statues, so he smashed them all. At risk of stating the obvious, it is what the word iconoclast actually means: “a smasher of idols.” In his faith, in his lineage, in his land, Abraham stood out –never conforming to the norm, never doing what was popular. He broke with his father; he argued with God; he stood up against the inhabitants of the land and saved his nephew Lot on more than one occasion.

What is the meaning, the rabbis ask, of Abraham being called ha-ivri? The word ivri comes from the same root as ever, as in “the other side.” The whole world standing on one side and Abraham on the other. We tell ourselves that this is what it means to be a Jew: to be unafraid to look different, unafraid to believe different, unafraid to act, speak, or sound different. To be yourself in a world trying to make you be something else. By a certain telling, the fundamental definition of what it means to be a Jew is to be a descendant of Abraham.

Of all the ways to frame conversations around Jewish identity, it is this question – the question of maintaining difference even as we live within our broader society – that has defined our past and continues to be debated today. Not just in the clothes we wear – though that is a fun and visible means to express identity – but in language, music, architecture, thought, theology, and otherwise. As with all myths, the notion that – like Abraham – Jews have always stood out as nonconformists says more about those who tell it than about the actual truth. The great Jewish thinker Philo wrote in Greek, and Maimonides wrote in Arabic. They were influenced by the thought of their day. Be it toga or turban, they looked, I imagine, indistinguishable from the population in which they lived. Like my grandfather, their devotion to their people was not measured by the degree to which they did or didn’t differentiate themselves in language or dress. As replete as rabbinic literature is with prohibitions against hukkat ha-goyim, following the aesthetics of general culture, Jewish history reveals a multitude of examples of Jews integrating elements of non-Jewish culture into Jewish life and living. The great historian and late Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Gerson Cohen z”l, pointed out that our names, our music, our poetry, our practices, and sometimes even our doctrines come by way of assimilating non-Jewish elements into Jewish life. It is a little jarring to realize that a beloved musical composition like Hatikvah is derived from a sixteenth century Italian song, or that present day Hasidic dress is borrowed from seventeenth-century Polish gentry. And while there have been some, like the early nineteenth-century Hatam Sofer, who held that a Jew, in order to remain whole – shalem – must resist the names, language, and dress of non-Jews; others, like Cohen, have maintained that it is the very infusion of these non-Jewish elements into Judaism that has enabled our faith and people to be transformed and revitalized. In Cohen’s words, “Assimilation properly channeled and exploited can become a blessing.” (Jewish History and Jewish Destiny, p. 155)

Like most great questions, the question of how one can maintain Jewish difference while living in a non-Jewish world is a question that has no single answer. For every example arguing one way, there is a counterexample making the opposite point – a dialectic and debate that is not going away anytime soon. And like most great questions, more interesting than tracing how it has played out through Jewish history, is to conduct an audit as to how it plays out in our own lives. Do you embrace the blessing of being a Jew, an heir to an iconoclast, or are you a cultural conformist? One does not need to be an idol-smashing Abraham, but we should all be able to identify those rhythms, behaviors, aesthetics, and values that set you apart as a Jew or Jewish family. If someone were to walk into your home, would they know it to be a Jewish one? If they were to look in your kitchen cupboard, would they see anything Jewish about it? If they were to check the browsing history on your computer or see the books that sit at your bedside, could they sense that you are connected to the story of the Jewish people? Were you to lay out your calendar, the cycle of your week, is there anything that distinguishes it from a non-Jewish one? Were someone to take a look at your bank statement, would your philanthropic history signal a commitment to the Jewish future? Judaism is an all-encompassing religion; the spheres in which you differentiate yourself may be different than those of someone else. Again, we need not all be like Abraham, but we all do need to identify the Abrahamic impulse in our lives. The year is still young. We should seek to create those times, those practices, those choices that remind us and remind the world that life is too short and too precious for us to just blend into the faceless crowd of humanity. No different than my children remind me, “Be yourself, everybody is else already taken,” so today I remind you: Be a Jew, stay true to yourself, and fulfill God’s charge to Abraham.

Lekh l’kha. Literally, “Go forth,” but as interpreted by the Ishbitzer Rebbe: “Go forth . . to find your authentic self . . . to learn who it is you are meant to be.” Isn’t that, in the end, the ultimate fashion statement – authenticity? After all, the real question is not whether we as Jews maintain difference, but whether we as Jews make a difference. Proud, but never parochial; fashionable, but never conforming; rebels with the greatest cause of all: To be a blessing – to all the families of the earth.

References:

Cohen, Gerson. Jewish History and Jewish Destiny, Moreshet Series, Studies in Jewish History, Literature and Thought (New York: JTSA, 1997)

Dynner, Glenn. “The Garment of Torah: Clothing Decrees and the Warsaw Career of the First Gerer Rebbe.” In Warsaw. The Jewish Metropolis: Essays in Honor of the 75th Birthday of Professor Antony Polonsky, edited by Glenn Dynner and François Guesnet (Boston: Brill, 2015)