Tomorrow night, along with Jews across America and around the world, I’ll be heading to my synagogue to begin observing Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. For most of my life, I attended reluctantly, dreading the long hours of prayer. I was proud to be Jewish, taking satisfaction in my people’s survival and success despite the attempts to annihilate us. But I was also embarrassed by what I perceived as Judaism’s weirdness and obsolescence: all those nitpicky laws, and that implausible, reward-and-punishment God I thought was portrayed in the liturgy.
“I’m just a cultural Jew,” I would tell people, though I knew nothing about Jewish culture, history, languages, arts, or philosophy. I more meant that I liked edgy humor and bought too much food for dinner parties. Or I’d say that I was “an ethnic Jew,” not realizing that there are Jews of just about every ethnicity, and every race too. Sometimes I proclaimed that “social justice is my Judaism,” without any idea what Jewish tradition says about social justice. I think I mainly wanted to assure people that I wasn’t one of those Jews who follow all those laws, though I had never met any of those Jews or bothered to learn about any of those laws.
As far as I knew, Judaism consisted of little more than a handful of holidays, some universal values—help the vulnerable; don’t lie—and the Holocaust. Then, about a decade ago, I started studying Jewish tradition. What I found was nothing like the Judaism I had known, and it turned out to be an answer to the question that I and many others would be asking years later, about how to be a Jew in a time of rising anti-Semitism.
I had always thought that Judaism had a particular creed, one that required me to have “faith” in a certain kind of God. But I discovered an astonishing range of conceptions of God, and plenty of Jewish atheists. I learned that Jewish texts are not books of dogma. In Judaism’s most sacred text, the Torah, humans argue with God and even change God’s mind. And the 2-million-word commentary known as the Talmud, which forms the basis of Jewish law, is a collection of vigorous debates among ancient rabbis. In Jewish tradition, the process of probing, questioning, and analyzing is not separate from spirituality; it is spirituality.
I had bought the old line that Christianity is a religion of love, and Judaism is a religion of law, enforced by an angry Old Testament God. But if I had paid even the slightest attention to the prayers we recited in synagogue, I would have noticed many declarations of God’s love for us. As I studied Jewish law—about how we should speak, care for our body, cope with change, conduct our professional life, and treat others—I found it to be far wiser and more humane than much of what passes for wisdom today.
How had I so badly misunderstood my own tradition, and why had I been exposed to so little of it? I knew what Catholicism says about abortion and contraception, but not what Judaism says about them. I knew what various politicians thought about issues such as poverty and criminal justice, but I knew nothing about the Jewish thinking on these matters—or that there even was Jewish thinking. For so many years, my Jewish identity had consisted of a series of caveats and apologies, amounting to little more than a cross between an ethnic joke and some statements about social justice with which any priest, minister, imam, and decent secular person would agree.
One major reason for my ignorance, I came to learn, dates back 2,000 years, to the founding of Christianity, when many early Church leaders defined their religion in opposition to Judaism. They insisted that God had forsaken the Jews and that Christians had taken their place as the chosen people, an idea known as “replacement theology” or “supersessionism.” They condemned Jewish texts and traditions and Jews themselves as materialistic, legalistic, spiritually dead, even evil. Centuries later, medieval Church leaders censored the Talmud and ordered it burned.
In the 19th century, my ancestors in Western Europe, seeking to assimilate while still remaining Jewish, began de-emphasizing aspects of Judaism that their fellow citizens disdained. They downplayed the Talmud and put greater weight on the biblical text they shared with Christians. They made their synagogues look like churches, installing organs and pews, and ditched rituals that were considered “uncivilized,” such as blowing the shofar, a ram’s horn, and breaking a glass at weddings.
I had once thought my cultural/ethnic/social-justice Jewish identity was empowering—the result of charting my own path as a modern Jew. But as I studied my ancestors, I began to understand how warped it had been—by hatred and lies, and by the language of the Christian-majority culture in which I had been raised, one filled with words and conceptions that not only fail to accommodate Judaism’s truths but also distort and demean them. In recent decades, major Christian denominations have renounced their historic anti-Judaism, yet its legacy lingers.
My former Jewish identity was, in many ways, the product of 2,000 years of anti-Semitism and 200 years of efforts by Jews to erase parts of ourselves and our tradition in the vain hope of being accepted and safe. My Jewish identity back then was not empowering; it was humiliating.
Now the ancient scourge of anti-Semitism is once again flaring up, and American Jews are understandably focused on combatting it. But it’s hard to fight Jew hatred when you don’t really know what being a Jew means. Back when I knew nothing about Jewish tradition and history, I wouldn’t have known how to respond to someone who said that the Jewish God is violent and vengeful, or that Israel is a colonialist endeavor. I had little to offer beyond Seinfeld and tikkun olam. Once I knew the Jewish story, however, I was no longer intimidated by such accusations.
Trying to fight anti-Semitism can be like trying to fight a tsunami with a bucket. It may be time for Jews to devote more of our efforts to building an ark—reclaiming the parts of our tradition that we have lost and building stronger Jewish communities—that will help us not just withstand hatred, but live deeper, worthier, and more truly Jewish lives.
This article has been adapted from Sarah Hurwitz’s new book, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us.
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