It’s Not Your Grandparents’ Judaism

When I was growing up, in a highly assimilated Jewish home in New York, Judaism was a fringe element in my life, one I didn’t understand very well.

 

It was a Maxwell House Passover Haggadah, bagels and lox, no milk with my bologna sandwich. It was mustard with deli but never mayo and the homemade gefilte fish each of my grandmothers perfected. Judaism was an electric Hanukkah menorah with orange light bulbs and Chinese food and a movie on Christmas.

 

It was driving my younger brother to Hebrew School with no understanding of what he was learning. Judaism was walking to shul with my father for Yom Kippur the one year of my whole childhood that he attended, and knowing I should not get caught drinking from the water fountain that day, but not understanding why.

 

Judaism was going to the Bat Mitzvah of one friend in all of junior high school and not having a clue what it meant. It was eating bread on Passover, but only if I took it outside. It was feeling a certain connection with other Jews, but not knowing what that was all about.

 

Growing up, Judaism was an ephemeral substance, floating in the air around me. I could not grasp it long enough to make meaning from it.

 

The ability to make meaning from Judaism didn’t begin to happen until I was in my 20s, discovering it on my own, first driven by intellectual curiosity and later by commitment.

 

Today, I wish I could communicate to the millions of Jews who are Jews like I was – Jews in name only, who worship the gods of social justice and equality for all, Jews who are good and kind and decent individuals, without a grasp of the Judaism that animates my whole life. I wish I could introduce them to the power and the depth of the Judaism with which I live.

 

I wish I could give them the intellectual thrill of seeing deeply into a verse of the Bible through the eyes of the classic Biblical commentators who reveal the secrets that God packed into the Hebrew words of each verse.

 

I wish I could open for them the spiritual thrill of connecting through one of the many doorways into Judaism, among them the doorway of intellectual rigor, the doorway of private prayer in a secluded place, the doorway of peoplehood, the doorway of connection to the very stones of the Land of Israel, the doorway of holiday observances that are significant and soulful and not only gustatory, the doorway of prayer, of music, of alignment with the Creator of All. The doorway of having a relationship with one's own soul.

 

I wish I could give them a single Jewish moment that was so transcendent that it would bring them to tears. I wish I could convince them that Judaism is so much more profound, philosophical, penetrating and perspicacious than they could ever have imagined.

 

I totally understand why the most sensitive of Jews, who were not given a solid Jewish education, are attracted to Buddhism and other Eastern traditions. Their souls need sustenance and they don’t know that Judaism is so deep, so complex, so multi-dimensional, that whatever specific food their souls need for nourishment, Judaism has it.

 

Judaism has always had it.