My 'Jewish Question'

from Richard Ostrofsky

of Second Thoughts Bookstore (now closed)
www.secthoughts.com
quill@travel-net.com

December, 2010

Issues of ethnicity and identity, and of ethnicity as a key component of

identity, have become critical in this post-modern, globalizing, diasporan
world. I have written about these issues, in this column and elsewhere,
from several points of view, but never in any really personal way. I'd like
to repair that omission this month with a column on my own Jewishness,
and what it does (and doesn't) mean to me. I want to write, as frankly as I
can, about my own experience of ethnicity and identity. But I hope the
column may be of interest to people of whatever ethnic background who
feel, as I do, that ancestral issues are an encumbrance on nearly all their
real preoccupations and concerns, yet too important (for some
unintelligible reason) to be simply dropped or ignored.
I am not religious – certainly not in any traditional Jewish sense. My
father, a complete child of the Enlightenment, who was even less
concerned with religion than I have been, did have me circumcised as an
infant for reasons I never asked about. Probably because it was nearly
automatic in that time and place, though I believe it's less so today. When I
was 12 he asked if I wanted a Bar Mitzvah, so as not to be different from
the other Jewish kids in our neigborhood (in the Bronx, in New York
City). We discussed that, I said no, that I wouldn't have a problem with
being different, and that was the end of it. Some years later, when the
United States bogged itself down in Viet Nam, on discovering that I wasn't
very much of an American, I went to Israel, partly in hopes of finding
some sort of Jewish identity. I happened to be there for the Six-Day War in
June of 1967, and was stirred by the wave of patriotism that swept the
country in the run-up to war, and by the wave of pride in victory, survival
and the taking of the Old City of Jerusalem. But in the aftermath, my wife
and I (I had gotten married meanwhile to another visitor whom I met
while studying Hebrew on a kibbutz) agreed that Israel was no place to
make a life unless you were a committed Zionist – which we were not. We
left Israel and came to Canada – to Montreal, where my wife had an aunt.
She and our daughter are still there and, after thirty five years in Ottawa, I
have moved back to Montreal to be near my Quebecoise-Jewish daughter
and grand daughter – and near my (for long) ex-wife who lives upstairs
from them.
 Along the way, like many others of my generation, I took an interest in
Taoist and Zen thought, fell into a Japanese martial art (aikido), and was
led thereby to some wide reading about religion and religious thought and
history in general, but on the histories of Christianity and Judaism in
particular. In that connection, I learned a fair bit about Judaeo-Christian
religious history but the upshot was that aikido and writing ended up as
central to my identity, while Judaism is not. And yet, after all this, I remain
very much a New York Jew in some respects, though rather alienated from
the tribe in some others.
There is a lineage of secularized, assimilated, cosmopolitan Jews
going all the way back to Joseph in the Bible, the advisor to Pharoah, with
his 'coat of many colors.' More historically, figures like Spinoza, Marx
Einstein, Freud, and Derrida come to mind – skeptical thinkers, right about
some things, wrong about others but usually outside the mainstream of
conventional thought, and contributing greatly to it for that very reason.
Of course, there were many lesser people like myself in this same lineage
who, assimilated as they were, and regardless of their talents and merits,
shared a certain very Jewish temperament – their propensity and need to
'wrestle with God,' like Jacob in the wilderness.
Now, with this lineage I identify strongly. I understand that old story of
Jacob's wrestling match (initiated by God, notice, and not by Jacob
himself) as symbol, permission and encouragement for existential struggle
as such. Read this way, it's of a piece with many other stories in the Bible
and in Jewish folklore afterwards. Abraham had his struggles with God, a
couple of generations before Jacob. Moses struggles with God in Egypt,
on the mountain, and in the Sinai wilderness. Job struggles with God.
Jesus struggles on the cross, notably when he asks why God has forsaken
him.
And the Jewish God allows himself to be struggled with – seems to
demand it, in fact. Muslims, Christians and many Jews have emphasized
the need for obedience – for ultimate submission to God's will. Yet a
peculiar glory of the Jewish tradition is the permission God gave it, or that
it gave itself, to talk back to God: to question, criticize the arrangements,
complain and negotiate.
This tradition of not taking 'God's ways' – nature and happenstance –
as mere givens strikes me as the really great Jewish teaching, far beyond
monotheism (which is still, basically a fantasy of the supernatural), and
well able to survive God's 'death.' I am sad that more people, Jews and
non-Jews somehow descended from this Jewish tradition don't take
advantage of its permission and encouragement to question. And God
himself seems to be sad, in many of the Jewish stories, that most of the
humans he created are just sheep, sometimes avaricious or power-hungry
sheep, rather than worthy sparring partners.
So where does this leave me? Today, at 67, I am an atheistic,
thoroughly assimilated North American Jew who admires, identifies with,
and would like to continue and propagate certain aspects of his ethnic and
religious heritage, while detesting and rejecting some other aspects. In this
I feel very much in the spirit of the times, for this problem of keeping faith
somehow with our ancestors and ancestral cultures is a common one now.
Propagandists both for Zionism and for rabbinical Judaism (on the rare
occasions when I have crossed their paths) have called me a 'self-hating'
Jew. But I am nothing of the sort – only a modern one who would take
what he can from the past without feeling bound by it. I have encountered
much the same attitude in lapsed Catholics, up-to-date feminists, black
people, Canadian Chinese, and diasporan types of every kind. It's the
world we are living in today, and there are two ways to get it wrong: either
to repudiate or ignore the past, or to feel pre-empted and committed by it.
The more creative response is to recognize and honor the ancestral past
while recognizing that its obsessions and agendas, especially its hatreds,
are best left there. For it is the present that we must live in, and the future
we must live toward; and, in this respect, regardless of our martyred
ancestors and their oppressors, we are all in the same boat.