Great piece, though I must say it seems your contrarian approach to BRI only heightened the plausibility of its Zionist nudging. Also, don't forget that San Francisco is…7 miles by 7 miles! Sevens abound, here or abound.

-Matt

I hate the idea that we can replace/replenish after the Holocaust. I think it’s part of the post-Holocaust trauma that’s so much at the core of Israeli machismo (and Diaspora schizophrenia), to somehow imagine that we can make it any less devastating than it was and continues to be for us, all of us but especially direct descendants. As if each and every one of the 6 million were not a unique and irreplaceable individual. I almost prefer the Hasidic idea that they are souls that get reincarnated, sometimes of necessity in gentiles, when there aren’t enough Jews.

A friend of mine wanted to lead a reverse birthright, taking Israeli Jews of Eastern European descent on a tour of Poland, Germany, Lithuania, etc, to see the places (and ashes) they came from.

I don’t think the Catholics will pick up on Birthright any time soon, but I think there are other Diaspora groups studying the idea (the Armenian community, for one). I hope they’re reading essays like yours as well.

Also, do you know, did that guy on your trip end up marrying some manicured Jew and making many private-schooled Jewish babies?

Really enjoyed it, and learned a lot, and had some good self-reflecting moments. I appreciate this piece as well!

It’s the universal struggle faced by all women. Corny, perhaps, but you and I -and millions of others- share this struggle on a daily basis nonetheless. I am a Baptist Christian who would be devastated -OK, maybe just hopelessly depressed- without the concept of Jesus still waiting beside God to forgive and/or save us all. I could never give up on this notion, because I feel strongly that we all need a LOT of saving!

However, I too have lapsed in my Baptist following … I struggle with the ideals of Christianity more frequently than my mother ever did. I even posted this line on my web page: I often check mark ‘Suspend Subscription’ with my religion. ‘Reason:’ Conflicts with my subscription to Womanhood. You and I get it, completely. No further explanation necessary. So do millions upon millions of other woman following any of the major religions; except one.

Now, I am not chicken-sh//t, but I’ll not name that major religion whose female followers are FAR behind the curve in intellectual development only because I love them, and I know it will do more harm and foster no good to do so (not that this minuscule little thread on this start-up website has even a thousand views per day, but still…) I love all women first and foremost. I try to live my life through the ideal that first, my actions should culminate in no harm to women, (and their children) and second, any decisions or actions I make should try to emulate Christian ideals.

You see, ALL RELIGIONS were forged by men, since women were too busy with messy inconveniences like menstruation and reproduction. So, guilt not over your natural and logical progression toward rebellion, for it is exactly what this world needs more of: free-thinking women.

P.S. I am married some 11 years now to an Arab Muslim, and I know what I know, but will only say this much to the more liberal male posters who think we can all “just get along, coexist, or live peaceful and prosper: HA! If you only knew how male Muslims talk about us behind our backs -or in my case, right in front of my face, in my own house, no less- you would be singing a very different tune. My advise is to wake-up, grow some hair where it counts, and be ready to protect your tribe at all costs. (Yes, I do love my husband. Yes, it has gotten harder to respect him as a direct result of his narrow, intolerant ideology, and yes, our marriage is always on shaky ground.)

Justine

Judaism is an argument. To have had so much continuity means it is also an ongoing memory, and a wisdom regarding what to let go in order to hold on.

Barring some catastrophe — with which we are also familiar — 100 years from now a family of Jewish cultures will be 100 years more deeply established in Israel. I can’t speak to the likely situation outside Israel except in the United States, about which I can say this. It is true that being Jewish in the US is for many becoming very much like being Irish or Italian: a strand woven into the fabric, here more thickly, there more thinly. But I can also say that American culture itself has Jewish flavors in its recipe, and they aren’t all as superficial as bagel.

Diversity requires both difference and combination. To say that Jews outside Israel, or not otherwise immersed in some exclusively Jewish context, will not participate in the argument because they will not really understand, makes no more sense than to say that Jews in Israel won’t really know what it is to be strangers in a land not theirs, or to answer to a higher authority than the local government.

The reality is, my critics have both missed out on a part of what is already in the essay and drawn attention to things I left out. Right off the bat, anyone who thinks I didn’t love Israel should please go back and re-read the third quarter of my essay. I worked hard to write it, and I’d so appreciate if people took a quick glance before lambasting me.

Israel was the most beautiful place I’ve ever been, but based on careful observations, many conversations with Israelis-and yes, the oppressive vibe I felt on my birthright trip- I believe that we will never have peace or fairness there while it is a Jewish state. One of the stories I left out was a conversation I had with a 19 year old female soldier, with whom I formed a close friendship. We walked down Mt. Massada together-and I asked her as many questions as I could. She told me hated the army and hated her life. She told me she had friends who were in jail for evading, and that she was afraid of jail. She cried. She told me that she believed there would never be peace in Israel. “What about a two-party state?” I asked. “If we let them in, they will kill us,” she said. “They will always hate us. We have to kill them first, so we will be fighting forever.” “What’s here for you, then?” I asked. “Are you here to practice Judaism?” “I’m not religious,” she explained. “Judaism is a nationality. This is our land.”

So, yes, 85 percent of Jews in Israel are secular. That’s exactly the point. We are not fighting for religious freedom. We’re fighting a nasty senseless power struggle that has gotten way out of hand. I believe my soldier friend that “they” will kill “us” if we let “them” live here. But maybe the solution is work on how to live together rather than keep “them” out. The belief that Arabs are too crazy to negotiate with (yes, that’s the message I got on birthright) is not a particularly evolved or generous one. From what I can tell, a country that was established to compensate for a great act of hatred (the Holocaust) is now a nexus of hatred itself. Maybe that’s why I resented being told to have seven Jewish babies to “fix” the Holocaust. The aspects of Judaism that I still cherish (yes, there are many) would encourage me to redeem the ills of the Holocaust by working for peace and intellectual freedom, not by putting more strain on an already over-populated, troubled world. But that doesn’t mean I hate Israel.

Israel was so full of passionate people that the land itself seemed to exude a supernatural force. I was completely captivated by it, I craved it, I tried to imbibe it, but I was also alarmed at the direction that force is taking.

Some of that direction was conveyed on my trip. Was I told not to look at the Mosque? Not in so many words. We didn’t get go near it, though. And I was told negative things about it, and the people who went there. Everything I heard was “us” and “them.” I was told not to put one foot in the Arab quarter. I was shown the street where our quarter ended and warned not to buy one thing from a store on the next block.

And as for “forsaking Judaism” that was an accurate report of what I said and felt at the time, and was meant to be slightly self mocking and retrospective. But I grew up voluntarily leading synagogue services, attended Hebrew school and youth group long after my bat mitzvah and fasted on Yom Kippur without err from age 6-20. I respect and value Jewish traditions and texts.

I still go to some portion of our family holiday dinners. I will usually read the four questions when called upon to do so. I value the commitment to intelligent questioning that appears so frequently in Jewish philosophy. But politically, ideologically and socially, I find that there are beliefs and practices that I wish to disassociate from.

Many of those are exemplified by certain elements of fanaticism that were present on my birthright trip. Giving up Judaism was not an act of laziness or disregard but a statement. The Judaism I would hypothetically partake in fosters free thought and free thinking. My birthright trip did not encourage free thinking, and nor does Judaism as I have seen it manifested as of late. Thus, it’s a statement I still stand by.

That said: yes, Sara, I still love dirt. I still love the pistachio plant I planted, the women who ran the candle store in Sefad, the sight of the sun rising as I climbed Massada, and the stars outside our Bedouin tent. I love the old Turkish woman on the docks who singled me out from our group to tell me the story of her immigration. I love the hora—on a mountain in Israel or at my cousin’s wedding. I had startling, wise and tender conversations with everyone on my trip, and met one of my greatest friends and kindred spirit there. (We bonded because we both thought we were being brainwashed..)

But I believe my foremost responsibility is to stand up for the ideals I believe in. Perhaps I didn’t take the right tone to do so, but I wanted to provoke thought and conversation without explicitly stating anything too radical or political. I feel compelled to clear things up because while I’m ok with people thinking I’m wrong, I hate to be labeled as ungrateful, thoughtless or ignorant.

Speaking of which: the mediocre comment. It was what my 22-year old imagination concocted. It was in my journal in 2005. But if I could get it out of this essay, I certainly would. As Catherine pointed out, it was more of a comment about “perfect” men than Jews, but the truth is, I’ve never dated a Jewish man or a “perfect” man, so I actually have no right to comment on the abilities of either. The fact that I’d entertained the hyperbolic and melodramatic notion has always been amusing to me personally, but I probably should have kept it as inside joke. Sorry.

Think about what I sound like when, faced with the tremendous contribution the Greeks have made to civilization, the best thing I can come up with to describe their culture is that they make decent olives.

You were born into a faith that is thousands of years old and that has made significant contributions to humanity. A faith whose followers were eroded numerically throughout history by essentially being considered strangers in lands that were not the one from which they’d been exiled, through persecution and assimilation. Today, there are roughly 14 million people worldwide who identify themselves as Jews. Out of more than 6 billion people, hardly a critical mass.

You say right off the bat that you rejected Judaism early on. My guess (I may be wrong) is that a faith that essentially asked you, on a yearly basis and for no apparent reason, to fast one day, light candles for eight days a few months later, and forsake bread for a few days in the spring (to name but a few things) didn’t exactly resonate with the critical and independent mind and personality that you hoped to cultivate. Hanging on to old and senseless traditions for the sake of hanging on to them didn’t make sense. (By the way, it doesn’t for me either.) And so what other choice could there be than to reject this semblance of an identity that is partially obsessed with food (I forgot to mention the whole ban on pork and seafood) and partially with remembering battles fought millennia ago.

It is clearly with this mindset that you went on a Birthright program. One according to which all this Jewish identity stuff is useless dribble that will nevertheless be shoved down your throat during the 240 hours that you’ll spend in Israel. It is this mindset that had you seeing shadows where there were none. Not being allowed to look at a mosque? What nonsense. Sam the boring Jewish MBA who’s probably mediocre in bed? Who needs stereotypes about Jews coming from others (I’ll steer clear of the dreaded “anti-S” term) when we can come up with them on our own. Israeli soldiers out to bomb all the Palestinians? Why bother asking them what they think about the conflict. (The variety of answers would have made you dizzy but who needs the headache of subtle hues when black and white is so much more comforting.) The woman who became Orthodox after moving to Israel? Shhhh, don’t tell the 85% or more of Israelis who are fiercely secular and drive to the beach on Saturdays to barbecue meat that is as likely to be kosher as not. And it goes on and on.

With all due respect, you are the poster girl for Birthright. Your text illustrates exactly what is happening to young Jews all over the world who don’t have the faintest idea of the value and complexity of the faith of which they are the descendants. When something is of no value to you, you rightfully throw it away. And anything, such as a Birthright trip, that reminds you that things are not quite as simple as you think, that challenges your very comfortable (and erroneous) view of Jews and Judaism, is discarded without a second thought. It’s so much easier to believe that Israel is just an enlarged version of everything that turned you off Judaism – a mind-numbing conformism to a worldview that is as narrow as it is devoid of sense – than to dig deeper. You’d be right if it were true.

My prediction? 100 years from now, there will be those Jews living in Israel, attached to their heritage and faith while fighting for their right to be individuals, living in the very places that marked their common history, and speaking a revived ancient language; and those individuals outside of Israel somehow being reminded that they had a Jewish relative somewhere in their family tree every time they bite into a bagel.

I sense great anger in your comments – towards your parents, towards Judaism and towards a society that you view as controlling. Not that I wish to bring up my credentials, but you have a passive-aggressive personality. It’s not difficult for me to spot, because I had one too.

The world cannot manipulate you without your cooperation. No one would think less of you had you moved to Israel and abandoned the religion, or had no children. Rather than contribute mendacious feelings to those around you, take life by the horns and just be yourself. Look at the mosque. Control your own reproduction. Never feel responsible for rebuilding the Jewish religion with your eggs. But, at the same time, know that only a handful of individuals wish to control you and they cannot accomplish this without your complaince. The vast majority of the world’s population doesn’t care what you do.

I was young once too (I might be your parent’s age). I too fought society and rebelled against anyone who seemed to want to control me. Eventually, I realized that the world was not out to control me. In fact, only you could allow that to happen.

I hope that you can find a way to push the anger aside. You are obviously a bright and talented young woman. I wish you a happy and rewarding life (with no one trying to control you). I apologize for this lecture. It’s just that, for a moment, I saw myself in your writing.

Charles Weinblatt
Author, Jacob’s Courage