Not until recently did I get a pretty good sense of why I’ve had such an ambivalent relationship to Judaism and, in fact, Jewishness in the years since my Bar Mitzvah. After eight years of Hebrew school, which I disliked, and a ceremony that was enjoyable inasmuch as it made me the center of attention and the target of many gifts, I began to drift away from Jewish life, although I occasionally co-directed services at our lay-led Reconstructionist congregation, T’chiyah. In college, my Jewish involvement was limited to grating onions and potatoes at Chanukah and spending one miserable semester as the treasurer of Hillel.

My first six and a half years in Seattle saw me attending the occasional service, usually at either De Hirsch or, more recently, at Kol HaNeshamah, and going to Jconnect events like Jews ‘n’ Brews. My decision in August to move into the Ravenna Kibbutz was the first decisive step back towards Jewishness in my adult life, and yet… I still get uneasy when an assembled group wants to sing too many Jewish songs in a row, or when someone seems, you know, a little TOO into Judaism or their own Jewish identity. Part of the issue, I guess, is my uneasy relationship with identity politics, which I realize is important to an extent but can also lead to divisiveness, balkanization, and paranoia.

Fairly recently, somebody I know used the phrase “Hebrew school baggage” to describe why some young (or not-so-young) Jews have issues with not only certain aspects of Judaism/Jewishness but with Judaism/Jewishness in general. Unease, of course, can be confronted and tamed, but it’s a process. I’ve discovered in just the past six months or so that it’s a worthwhile one, albeit a sometimes uncomfortable one. There’s the underlying feeling that I’m a “bad” Jew if someone else is more into their Jewish identity than I am, but also a measure of envy—why can’t I have what they have? Why can’t I feel more grounded in what I was, after all, born into?

Giving up countless Sunday mornings to sing songs (enforced singing is, for me, no more pleasurable than the enforced reading of the secular school system is for others) and learn Hebrew isn’t exactly cruel and unusual punishment, but clearly there was something missing in the lessons. I didn’t know about the concept of Tikkun Olam until just a few years ago, and the idea that Judaism can be a spiritual path rather than simply a system of arcane, superstitious, and largely irrelevant rules was entirely foreign to me until very recently.

The early years, the Hebrew school years, are formative ones, to be sure, but for every adult, whatever “baggage” he or she may be carrying, one of the chief challenges of adulthood is to unlearn the unhelpful lessons and learn some truly relevant ones. If you have Hebrew school baggage, I’d love to hear about it, and how you hope to leave some of it behind going forward.

I just finished reading Simon Rich’s delightful little ball of humor essays, Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations. I’ve written about Rich before ...specifically here, where, after he was named one of the Heeb 100, I was having trouble deciding if I wanted to Jew-marry him, or eat his brain out of spite and envy. My decision is still pending. But, the book, which Rich wrote while still an undergrad at Harvard, really is worth your time. It’s basically a bunch of tiny comedic vignettes that cast common place situations in a new light. Such topics include, “If life were like middle school,” “if life were like hokey,” and “my mom’s all-time top five boyfriends.”  As you might imagine, it’s not a particularly dense text. Perfect if you’re looking for something quick and amusing. I read the whole thing in like an hour and a half while riding a bicycle and eating a grapefruit.

Since Ant Farm, Rich has written another similarly styled book called Free Range Chickens. While I can’t speak to it directly, I assume it’s probably just as funny.

In the course of researching an upcoming Jew-ish.com article on Jews and Buddhism, I watched Laurel Chiten’s hourlong documentary The Jew in the Lotus, which is based on Rodger Kamenetz’s book of the same name. In 1990, a number of prominent American rabbis met with the Dalai Lama so that His Holiness might ask them the secret of Jews’ survival—physical, cultural, and spiritual—as a people in exile. One interviewee notes that Tibetans are the Jews of Asia, in that they’ve been displaced and are a people without a country, which Jews were until 1948. Chiten moves back and forth between footage from the historic meeting and interviews, years later (her film was released in 1998), with members of the Jewish contingent, including Kamenetz, who was trying to dig himself out of a dark spot in his life and accompanied the rabbis as a “scribe,” to use his term.

As films about interfaith dialogue go, it’s both direct and subtle; the value of the powwow is clear from the footage (the Dalai Lama learns a thing or two, and the rabbis and their coterie seem duly impressed by his presence), but everyone took something different away from it. Kamenetz comes off in the film as humble, funny, and likable, and few portraits I’ve seen of spiritual seekers so deftly capture how gradual, and sometimes confusing, the process is. We don’t always know what we need until we find it, and sometimes even then it takes us a while. The film itself might be hard to find—I got a screener copy from the director—but it’s worth seeking out.

In other cultural-mashup news, the Ravenna Kibbutz took a field trip tonight to Town Hall for part of this weekend’s “Jewish in America” program. Seattle Jewish Film Festival director Pamela Lavitt presented a few short films, including Tiffany Shlain’s endearing The Tribe, which explains Jewish history in 15 minutes using Barbie dolls, and the Oscar-winning short West Bank Story, which riffs on West Side Story and was particularly poignant to view in light of the current situation in Gaza.

After the films, Joshua Nelson performed a heavily gospel-influenced song about wanting to be a more observant Jew. When I talked to Lavitt afterwards, she shared my enthusiasm for his smooth, incredibly elastic voice and commented that gospel legend Mahalia Jackson is one of his biggest influences. His main message was that just when you think you’ve nailed down the definition of Jewish music, it surprises you. His rendition of “Adon Olam,” viewable (and hearable) on YouTube, certainly bears that out.

Adam Kirsch’s thoughtful piece on the influential Jewish writer and philosopher is worth reading, especially because its reflection on her relationship with Heidegger, who eventually joined the Nazi Party, is part of a larger examination of her Jewish identity that feels fresh even though a lot has already been written on the subject.

I added this as a comment under Leyna’s post, but then decided that it’s long enough (and ranty enough) to maybe be a decent post of its own. So, here it is.

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This is one of my serious buttons, too. (This is probably why you and I got married on Facebook—we have so much in common besides just our Jewishness.)

One of my formative Jewish experiences was receiving a pamphlet in the mail when I was 13 that told me I shouldn’t marry a non-Jew. And why not? Because to do so would be to hurt Judaism.

First of all, I found (and still find) it creepy that some international Jewish organization is tracking Jews the world over and hitting them with marriage-related propaganda when Bar/Bat Mitzvah is nigh.

Second, I was already smart enough back then to have, like you, a “Fuck you!” reaction to such pap, which was likely installed in me by my agnostic father. Incidentally, his college romance with a non-Jew was destroyed by both families, neither of whom could bear to let interfaith love proceed smoothly and, you know, happily. 

When I moved into the Ravenna Kibbutz in August of last year, I was kind of “coming out” as a Jew for the first time as an adult. All the world can now tell, because of where I live and how I spend a lot of my time, that I’m Jewish, though to me that identity is a cultural one, not a religious one. And when people tell me to fast on Yom Kippur or whatever, it angers me just as much as the “Marry a Jew!” ads on Facebook (and the concept behind them) anger you.

I also know, from a past relationship, that some issues that come up for interfaith couples (a deceptive term when both people are atheists, but I digress) are, for example, Jewish-Protestant ones. Like: The non-Jewish partner can’t understand why the Jewish one complains so much (it’s called kvetching; look it up), and the Jewish one can’t comprehend why the non-Jewish one has such a damn sunny outlook (it’s called not having been systematically oppressed for millennia; Wikipedia it).

Nonetheless, I’m a firm believer that relationship viability should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Blanket prescriptions (and proscriptions) regarding love are almost always misguided (unless it’s, like, “Don’t marry an arsonist,” in which case I’m on board).

I’m nearly 30 and have only dated two Jewish women, and neither relationship was what you’d call serious. That said, I no longer feel the perverse pride of a rebellious teenager at the notion of not dating Jewish. I could go either way, and hey, maybe there WOULD be some advantages to dating someone who understands kvetching. But placating some shadowy, paranoia-mongering organization concerned that my love will shatter Judaism into a million little pieces isn’t one of them.