Wrestling With My Jewish Identity

“Will you come to my Christian children’s baptisms?” asked my thirteen year old son Michael.

This was 2007. Michael had entered our bedroom in a disputatious frame of mind.

We were ensconced in white-furred club chairs, facing one another with our feet propped on a shared ottoman. Our comfortable debate stage.

Michael wanted me to know that neither his recent Bar Mitzvah nor eight years of attending the Rodeph Sholom Day School had closed the deal on him being Jewish.¹

I told him I’d skip the baptisms because I’d feel uncomfortable showing support for a change in our future grandchildren’s religion. But I’d still love them.

Well, in that case, said Michael, if I wouldn’t go to the baptisms, he wasn’t sure he’d want me to have any relationship with his Christian children. Were my narrow religious prejudices really more important than honoring a special day for his children? How could I be such a cold-hearted grandfather to these sweet, mythical babies, my future flesh and blood?

And it went on from there.

Seventeen years later, I’d give a different answer. Michael is now thirty years old and appreciates that it’s important to me that my grandchildren be Jewish.

So if the mature Michael still decided to convert and raise his children as Christians, I’d know that it was of great importance to him. And I’d prioritize our family relationships over my disappointment and discomfort with the baptisms.

I also have faith that should these highly unlikely baptisms occur, karma’s ² response is certain. Michael’s future baptized children will convert back to Judaism.

Atheism vs. Tradition

I have been wrestling with my Jewish identity, sparked by reading in quick succession two diametrically opposed Substack posts.

In Letter To A Christian,

Sam Harris

, an avowed atheist, writes to a “moderate” Christian. “Moderate” defined as non-fundamentalist, permitting doubt about the infallibility of scriptural authority and allowing for an adjustment of some beliefs to accommodate science and the modern world. ³

To Harris, this sort of moderation is “an elaborate exercise in self-deception” and a way to “betray faith and reason equally.”

Moreover, Harris has parenting advice to give: don’t raise your children in any of the three Abrahamic faiths ⁴ because doing so leads to religion-based divisiveness.

Harris believes that any benefit of religion is outweighed by its propensity to create discord and violence. So if atheism became a universal belief and religion became a relic to be studied rather than practiced, then the world would become far more peaceful.

Maybe. But you’d have to believe that people wouldn’t replace religion with other things to violently disagree about such as…politics. ⁵ 

The second essay I read is by the

Librarian of Celaeno

, ⁶ a devout Christian. His essay is also in the form of a response. He obliterates a claim that the worship of the true powerful Jesus of the bible has been usurped in the modern church by the worship of a Jesus pathetically weak and politically correct.

I disagree with many of the Librarian’s socially conservative and often provocative points of view.  But if you value brilliant, biting, and laugh-out-loud writing, read him.

Politically, I’m more aligned with Sam Harris than with the Librarian, but I find Harris’s belief in an absence of belief hollow. People are not necessarily wired to practice ethical behavior unmoored from religious belief or religious traditions and teachings. I know I’m not.

In contrast to Harris, the Librarian directly relates ethics to his religious belief:

“Christ befriended the lowly because, as One who needs nothing, His love is infinite… He forgave the people who murdered Him...Forgiveness is the sole prerogative of the powerful”

I’ll sign up to befriending the lowly, aspiring to infinite love, and the value of forgiveness. These are core tenets of Jewish ethics also.

I am not, however, a believer. I’m highly selective about which Jewish traditions to observe, I don’t believe the Torah was written by god, and I believe that whatever is a higher power or first mover, i.e., whatever created or preceded the universe, is something we humans don’t have a clue how to describe.

So then why is my Jewish identity so important to me and why is it important to me that my grandchildren have a strong Jewish identity?

Two Centuries

The Jewish people have been around for some three thousand years but that’s a span far too long for me to comprehend. That’s a million days, a million sunrises, a million sunsets.

I can, however, comprehend my Jewish identity within a time continuum of two centuries. I have the writings of two great-grandfathers, both born around 1870, both devout, both highly significant within their Jewish communities.

I have a Jewish grandchild Max born in 2022 and the prospect of more grandchildren on the way. Max may end up attending the Rodeph Sholom School like his mother Lauren and his Uncles Andrew and Michael.

I can imagine witnessing Max’s early Jewish life cycle events––a role in a Rodeph Sholom play, his Bar Mitzvah, perhaps even a wedding. I can foresee having a close enough relationship with Max that I’ll be able to imagine what Max might be like in 2070. That’s two centuries after my great-grandfathers were born.

So I already hold in my head and heart a span of six Jewish generations whom I can say I know. That’s a powerful thought. Because I’m part of forming something far bigger than myself. And there’s a holiness to that act of creation.⁷

I went for a walk in the park this week with Ben, my friend and rabbi. I told Ben that I sometimes imagined that my ancestors could see me doing things they’d approve of, like walking with my rabbi discussing Judaism. Or that they had somehow been present at the Jewish weddings of my two married children.

It’s a form of faith I can't explain by a belief in god. It's a belief that my Jewish self and my Jewish ancestors and descendants, bound together through time, transcend our individual lives on earth.

Michael again

Michael is between apartments and staying with us for a few months. This week, he and I reminisced about our baptism debate so many years ago.

I thought of a new debate point. Baptism, I said, was originally a Jewish rite, popularized by John the Baptist, a Jew who was a contemporary of Jesus.

Michael laughed at me and said, “So then how could you possibly object to attending?’

I laughed at me, too.

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Question for the comments: What is your source of faith, religious or otherwise?

1. Recently, Michael did a  “23 and me” test that showed he’s 99%+ Ashkenazi Jewish.

2. I’m using karma here informally. Formally, Karma is a precept of Buddhism and Hinduism.

3. I believe Harris’s post requires a paid subscription. He does say, however, that he will provide a subscription if paying does not fit into someone’s budget.

4. The three Abrahamic faiths are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Below are some world religion stats from Pew Research. Judaism, all the way at the bottom, is projected to hold steady at 0.2% of world population.

5. James Madison in Federalist 10 on the inevitability of factions among humanity:

“So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”

6. “Librarian” is a term of affection and respect used by his Substack friends.

7. In this short video interview of 

Anne Kadet

, writer of CAFÉ ANNE, Anne answers a question about the act of creating. Her answer helped me find the words to describe what I was feeling.