Dear Friends,
The closest thing that Jews have to a creed is a quotation from the Book of Deuteronomy, which declares: “Listen Israel, ADONAI is our God, ADONAI is one.” Even people who know little about Judaism know that monotheism was the revolutionary theological contribution of the Jews to the ancient world. At a time when people were animistic or polytheistic, Judaism taught that there was a unity behind it all, which they called Yaweh, who was not a God of the gods like Zeus, but who was the only [capital G] God. To this day, even Jews who have abandoned any belief in God acknowledge that the God in whom they do not believe is One. How all the more notable, then, that this one God has spawned such a divided People.
Yes, God may be One, but the Jewish People is not, nor has it ever been so. From a very early age, long before I could define a political or religious construct, I embodied the reality of internal Jewish divisions. As I have noted in previous essays and addresses, my parents, who were cultural and biological Jews, chose to send me to an Orthodox day school because it was the only safe option in our antisemitic neighborhood. This came at an expense to them, measured more by the ire of my religiously hostile socialist paternal grandmother who lived with us than by the $75.00 monthly tuition, which was a significant financial burden for them. Therapeutically, I have referred to this time as ‘the tennis ball’ period of my life. Mayer Zambo would transport me daily to what was the functional equivalent of a pre-War II Eastern European shtetl. The ride gave me time to pull out my tsitsis and slap on a yarlmulka to be appropriately dressed for school. Eight hours later, Zambo returned me to the arms of my grandmother, Esther (featured in my last letter to you), who greeted me with a ham and cheese sandwich for her ‘little Yid’ as she mockingly called me.
And so, I was well prepared for my experience as a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College the semester after its founding. Philadelphia, being one of the last bastions of Conservative Judaism in the United States, Ira Eisenstein’s new rabbinical college was not welcomed. Personally, the Conservative Jews among whom I had davened weekly shunned me as a meshumid, a traitor, while my former teachers at Bays Yakov thought me to be an apikorus, an apostate. Reconstructionists were simply ‘the Jews of the Jews’ in terms of their marginalization.
At rabbinical school, I learned that my life had been like the life of wealthy Western European Jews at the dawn of the Enlightenment. Indeed, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), the patriarch of modern Jewish philosophy and theology in Germany, justified my personal Jewish dichotomy by teaching that one could be a Jew at home, and still be ‘a man of the world’ in the public sphere. The only difference was that my Jewish/secular existence was reversed: I lived the life of an observant Jew in school and on the hostile streets of my neighborhood, and became a person of the world at home with family.
Over the course of the next six years at RRC, I studied the many internal divisions of our People throughout the ages, beginning with the challenge to Moses by Korah and Datan and Aviram in the Wilderness, to the divisions of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms after the reign of David, to the hostility between Pharisees and Sadducees, followed 1500 years later by the Litvaks and the Hasidim, and then by the Zionists and the Jewish anti-Zionists beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, leading to the arguments between political and cultural Zionists, which endured until the founding of the State.
Internal divisions have been second only to antisemitism as an existential threat to all Jews throughout the years. Our Sages attributed the source of Rome’s destruction of the Temple and our People’s consequent two-millennia-long exile to a social dispute between two Jews. Today, our internal divisions are being played out internationally by two equal and powerful Jewish communities who live their Jewish lives in radically different political and social contexts, with very different stakes in the game. Meanwhile, in our time, in which nuance is absent, non-Jews see all Jews as indistinguishable from one another. They see us as one, as they have since the birth of the Jewish People after their redemption from Egypt.
So, what does the future hold for us as a People? How would I know? As they say, I am not a prophet or the son of a prophet. I am just a Jew who is the repository of a long history lived in many lands. I am the embodiment of many Jewish ‘isms’ and ‘ologies,; the product of loving indoctrination and challenging questions. The only one-ness I perceive is the existence of a complex People who have never given into Fate or despair.
That will have to do for now. I know that there will be more to come soon.
With love and hopes for peace, I am warmly yours,
Lee
