Are Jews a race or a religion? Today, this is a question that is less about solving this age-old question than one that seeks to position the person being questioned politically. What do I mean when I say it is all politics? It is politics not religion that determines whether the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel is able to make the exclusive determination about who is a Jew to the exclusion of all other rabbis in the world, Orthodox or not. These political decisions control individuals’ right to marry, to live and to work in Israel. It’s also politics that creates the dissatisfactory, Orthodox-leaning Einheitsgemeinde of Jews in Germany that stifles organic changes in the make-up of the Jewish population there. It is a myth, by the way, that those changes are simply assimilation, secularization or a watering down of Jewish life. It’s also politics to regard the self-administration of Hassidic life, in which a religious community forms a polity as well, as always corrupt because it takes place outside of the secular political sphere. One must be careful to note that these forms of self-administration among Hassidic groups, which make up religious, social, and for the most part, also racial communities, were the norm among Jews for many hundreds of years before the Hassids ever showed up on the scene. Yes, self-administration among Jews is a pre-modern kernel that lives on inside modern states such as Israel and the United States and indeed, Germany. Nation-state Judaism (Israel) is very new and not especially informative when it comes to discussion of the essence of Jews as a race or a religion.
If Jews are a religion, then the question of what is it that Jews believe will not generate satisfactory answers that fit into the Christian model of belief systems, or doxa. Luckily, we live in an age where religious studies scholarship no longer has such a narrow definition of religion as dogma. But there are multiple contested ideas of what this Jewish faith really is among the lived narratives of those people who identify as such. And this panoply of views about Jewish faith could be called sects or hashkafot or streams, pick your metaphor. The views change from generation to generation, with stringencies, negotiations, loopholes, secularization and reforms. Reform is an ugly word for some Jews because of belief among some of them that reform opened Jews up to being exterminated by the Germans, as if this mattered to that state-level killing machine run by murderers who cared little about questions of liturgy. But as later generations, we try to make meaning out of that time and this is one thesis of many about “why.” Even if Reform is polarizing for some Jews, it is in Reform services where I hear, “now we will recite x prayer followed by y or according to your own tradition.” And that sounds hollow at first though it is in fact a profound moment of inclusion of the diversity of Jews that is absolutely necessary when klal Israel is hard to find anywhere else.
The truth is, you don’t really have to believe anything to be a Jew. Just ask the Darwinian Ahad Ha’am. Still, you might just believe in Jews like many national Zionists, some of whom see God as a minor actor in the whole narrative of Jewish history. Also, there is nothing but garden-variety racism that keeps other races from being accepted as full members of the Jewish people. It’s even a falsification of Jewish history to be overly concerned with the genealogical (racial) aspects of Judaism (the question of a person’s yichus comes to mind). There are other Jews who belong to Jewish social organizations, do charity work or work as bloggers in the Jewniverse and they don’t believe a word of the Talmud is true. The meaning is simply somewhere in the process of engagement, on any level, in that thing we call Jewish. And it is hard to imagine that one type of Jewish engagement could exist without another one: the charity organization composed of non-believing Jews cannot easily be removed from the work of professional religious Jews who rely on their funding nor can the same organization work independent from the state of Israel. This is just one example of the interconnectedness of these streams of Jewishness, even when one group finds the other repellent, which can sometimes happen, of course. These are human beings we are dealing with.
But not every level of engagement is treated equally by politics. When we defend the rights of Jews, it’s clear that some Jews are more equal before the law than others. In general, those Jews who fit the classic mold of Judaism as a religion who are granted privileges above others. That’s really the only partner that the liberal nation-state looks for when it makes accommodations to religious groups and minorities, such as when Jews live in Germany. Yet the moral core of Judaism lies elsewhere, too, outside the confines of the synagogue and this must be acknowledged, even if it brings up issues from the “dark times.”
Since this is my last post, I don’t want to leave things in a dark spot. Things today are complicated and sometimes I do want to run away from it all. Not with Shabbatai Zvi to the Orient or with returnees to the Holy Land. Not even to the goldene medina America (which some think, you know, that “es zol brenen, Columbus’s medine Amerike”). That sort of running away has been done. If things in my life work out, I will continue these looped poles of living in Germany, Austria, US and Israel and lots of places in between. But let me tell you where I will run off to if things in this life I am living don’t work out. The Plan B that every person living today should at least try to keep in his or her back pocket. My Plan B is Yiddish Farm in Goshen, NY. On the surface, it looks like Yiddish Farm is built on the same ideology that got all those Russian Jews to go to Palestine in the First Aliyah (the Farmer’s Aliyah) and build a land from nothing. But instead of Zionism, it’s more like Galutism and anyone is invited to join if you want to learn Yiddish. To quote Herzl, “Wenn ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen.” It also involves organic food. I like both of those things and in my fantasy world, I can also farm. That’s what I believe, anyway.
http://vimeo.com/45978742