Having been born in 1960s and raised in a mostly secular environment, I was far removed from the old world Judaism of my grandparents and great grandparents, who immigrated here from the Ukraine. My maternal grandfather and a few distant relatives practiced the traditions with an Orthodox fervor, complete with readings from the Torah and the fulfillment of the prescribed rituals. They understood both the mundane and sacred in what they were reading and practicing, including the Talmudic applications of it. Yet, for me, it was like observing somebody else’s religion or culture. It felt very foreign to me, and to this day it still feels that way to some degree.
I will never relate to the mindset of someone raised in an Orthodox community, where Jewish tradition, learning, ritual, morality, and the Torah and Talmud are the priorities of everyday living. My experience of Judaism will always be filtered and diluted through the memories and impressions of growing up in an open, secular society, which was and continues to be an international and cultural melting pot of values, attitudes, ideas, beliefs, and knowledge. I am an assimilated American Jew with ethical and spiritual beliefs that have many sources, including, but not limited to Judaism.
Hebrew school was the only source of formal Jewish education in my early life, but like the Judaism 101 type books, it was an assimilated version of what the generic Jew is supposed to believe and practice. I don’t remember much of anything from that education, other than being bored and angry that the bullies from public school were there pretending to be good Jews, even to me, the kid they bullied earlier in the day in public school. However, through the boredom and anger, I somehow learned how to read Hebrew and did a good job reading from the Torah and fulfilling the traditions at my Bar Mitzvah.
Outside of Hebrew school, the only message I received about my Jewishness was to stay close to my own kind, and beware of the antisemitic hatred that supposedly lurked in the hearts of our Christian neighbors, peers, friends, and infatuations. However, I never encountered the antisemitic behavior that I was warned about, except for the occasional jokes about “Jews and financial greed,” but this was no worse than the jokes made about other ethnic groups. Thus, being a victim of ethnic jokes did not provide me with a sense of Jewish identity based on persecution, since every ethnic group seemed to be a target for jokes. I grew up with no sense of what being Jewish was supposed to be about, and as a consequence, I did not personally identify myself as being Jewish, not to myself or others.
During the past 15 years, I’ve read and collected articles and books on various aspects of Judaism and Jewish thought, primarily to fill the gaps of what I had not learned about my heritage as a child. For now though, Judaism continues to feel more like a community of strangers, some who seem very foreign and unlike me, and some who seem vaguely familiar to me, but in a way that I cannot yet articulate to myself or others.
Modern Judaism is a mixed bag of traditions, ideas, religious texts, history, antisemitic issues, geography, politics, mysticism, ethics, and attitudes. I find it very difficult to create a sense of Jewish identity around all that, and so for now, I am focused on identifying the Jewish strangers who resonate with something familiar inside me. My hope is that through my writing and imagination, I can somehow coax them into speaking more loudly and more directly to me.
© 2015 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
Notes from David 