Jewish Identity: Who We Are – and Who We Are Not

Maimonides once wrote that we cannot affirmatively understand the nature of God, but we can know what He is not.

If we inquire into Jewish identity, it is not as ineffable as the nature of a supreme being. We can derive from sources that include our history and our sacred texts. But the history and scriptures of the Jewish people are partly defined by maintaining a measured but critical eye on how we differ from our neighbours.

We have the story of Noah and the Flood. About a century and a half ago, historians rediscovered another Flood story – the Sumerian story of Gilgamesh. Perhaps both Noah and Gilgamesh drew upon the same earlier Near Eastern traditions. The story of Noah proposes a righteous God, not a pantheon of squabbling and all-too-human deities. In the Gilgamesh story, one human character, Utnapishtim, achieves immortality. In Noah, posterity is achieved by enabling generations to follow.

The Israelite tradition emphasizes the lives we live and those of our children but does not say much about the individual afterlife. Why? Perhaps, in part, it was a reaction to the neighbors. In particular,  the Egyptian culture was primarily focused on the hereafter. The pyramids were massive launching pads to the next life; the Book of the Dead is among the cultural legacy of the Pharaohs. Perhaps the Israelite focus on life in this world was a negation of a death obsession they saw and rejected.

At times, the Israelites wanted to be like their neighbors. Their neighbor had kings, and the Israelites asked God if they could have one, too. At their best, the Israelite kings recognized that they were human and subject to the overriding laws of God. The prophets reminded them. At their worst, the kings acted like other Near Eastern potentates. Solomon conscripted his own people into building a bigger place for himself than the Temple.

Some of the neighbors engaged in child sacrifice. In the story of the first Israelite, Abraham, the binding of Isaac story concludes that God does not want it. In the horrifying description of the Israelite King Manasseh, God condemns the king’s horrifying indulgence in a foreign cultic activity that included sacrificing his own son.

The Jewish bible is explicit that the Israelites must follow the Gods revealed to them by god, not those practiced by their neighbors:

After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dealt, shall ye not do; and after the doings of the land of Canaan whither I bring you, shall ye not do; neither shall ye walk in their ordinances.;” Leviticus 18:3

In every age, there emerge new forms of idol worship, new ways to confuse fallible human beings with divinities, new false religions -often presented as secular political movements –  and new ways to make money or amuse ourselves that can consume us rather than leave us with the time to contemplate. Abraham has been called the first iconoclast, but the idols he smashed were in Ur. In ancient times, we chose to be ourselves and not others. Our traditions can give us reasons and aspirations for remaining who we are and are not.

Israel received the Torah, said God, because it was the smallest of people. The promised land is, by any geopolitical standard, spectacularly vulnerable. It is on an invasion path connecting three continents. The people of Israel were at various times invaded by the Egyptians of Africa, the Assyrians of Asia, the Greeks, and the Romans of Europe. What the people of Israel wanted, what their God promised, was not that the Israelites, in turn, would conquer the wide world; it was that the Israelites would battle for their own homeland and their own homeland only. Within that land, they would be a nation of priests, a light unto other nations, inspiring them by their example. Through the millennia, the Jewish people have done so. Values that include the inherent equality of all individual human beings, an intense opposition to tyranny and serfdom, and respect for the rule of law  – have had an enormous impact on other religions and the politics of the Enlightenment and beyond.

In an episode of the Simpsons, the jaded Reverend Lovejoy urges the demanding Ned Flanders to consider joining another religion; their holy books “in a way, they’re all the same.” No, not all religions are the same in their content and in their reach. Some strive to be universal by persuasion or force. The Bible and the Tradition accept that other nations can be great. Abraham was the father of many nations, and Esau and his nation, Edom, are portrayed as having their own virtues. The Talmud recognized that other ancient nations had a talent for astronomy.

In Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses, the restless and ever-striving hero looks at his settled and temperate son and says, “He does his work; I mine.” As Jews, we embrace pluralism, but the respect we accord others is no less due to ourselves. And as a people with a profound inclination and talent for self-criticism, we should not be oblivious to the faults of other cultures and other creeds. Abraham has been called the first iconoclast. But the idols he smashed were in Ur, and he left for the promised land. He knew what he was against, he knew that he had to leave, even when he knew little about where he was headed.

We have also been self-critical; we question our leaders, community, and ourselves. But we have also been alert to other civilizations’ limitations. Our forefathers and mothers our greatest kings, were flawed human beings. The prophetic tradition in the Bible largely consists of condemnation of our own shortcomings. But our critical eye should not disappear when we look at our surrounding cultures and creeds. We can respect them without adulating them or disappearing into them.

What we painfully see now, as in all times, are self-described Jews who adulate others while execrating our own traditions and homeland. They are sometimes called self-hating Jews. That is misleading. They are happily in love with themselves and their new allegiances. They enjoy adorning themselves with Jewish symbols whose meaning they have never bothered to understand or have chosen to abandon.

Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote an essay about a very different group – extreme traditionalist elements within the contemporary Jewish world. Singer writes that in pre-Enlightenment times, Jews adopted strategies to preserve their identity, including outward displays, like dressing in the opposite way to the surrounding communities. “If non-Jews wore a short coat, Jews would wear a long one. If their hats were round, Jewish hats would be pointed. .…They instinctively altered the language of their host nation so that it became its own dialect…” Strategies to avoid assimilation also included residing in their own distinct areas.

In modern times, almost all Jews are immersed in powerfully mainstream cultures. We cannot rely on outward displays and separation to know who we are – and who we are not. We need instead to understand the profound roots of our existence as a distinct people. Mishpatim is not the Code of Hammurabi. Modern Judaism has contributed to modern religions and quasi-religions, from Christianity and Islam to Social Justice, and still, it should remain true to its evolving self.

As a Jew in a Diaspora country you live, you can be a proud nationalist of your host country – and still maintain a Jewish insistence on the limits of state power and respect for minority rights. You can support the freedom for all in your country that permits everyone – including you as part of your own Jewish community  -to also continue in your distinct beliefs and traditions.

As an advocate for Social Justice, you can rightly recall the sources from the books of Moses that express intense concern over the fair treatment of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. But Jewish teaching also insists on the individual’s responsibility to strive to support their own self, family, and community. Helping the disadvantaged is an obligation for all free individuals, not the exclusive role of an all-knowing and all-powerful state. Leviticus calls for equal justice for every individual under the law – including the rich as well as the poor; it does not propose that state authorities divide society into crude groupings of Oppressors and Victims.

As an environmentalist, you can warmly recall the Jewish understanding that nature was created by the same God who created humankind and that all living creatures must be treated humanely. Yet you could also keep in mind Judaism’s distinct reverence for human life. The Tradition does not say you must prioritize maintaining a fish habitat over ensuring that human beings have enough water to drink and to put out fires.

In all your thinking, you might draw inspiration from the fact that the Jewish way is not to lose ourselves to abstractions and fanaticism. In Mishpatim, the values of God and his conventional people are explained by addressing concrete, real-world examples. Talmudic thinking is about constantly testing ideas in the context of practical fact situations. The Jewish tradition is radically humble about our ability to know the nature of an infinite power who exists beyond depiction;  the focus is on the mitzvot, which are practicable steps a limited human being can take to try to achieve a holy and ethical life.

Judaism will not survive and has no enduring reason to survive if it is merely one route to precisely the same worldview that can be reached by other faiths and philosophies. Overlaps and similarities there are and should be; mutual interchanges can be positive, but melding into the rest of the world is not our mission.

It will take great courage and energy for our dwindling part of the world population to persist in its identity and move forward. If we fail, we will have denied to the next generations a legacy that we ourselves received. The wider world may not even know that it misses us. But it will be a colder, darker, and duller place without our light, which has its own spectral signature.