The Box That Cannot Contain Us

Most of us have filled out the form. Race. Ethnicity. Religion. Check the appropriate box. For Jews, the appropriate box has never been quite so obvious.

California is currently considering legislation that would make the problem a little more visible. Senate Bill 1387 would define ethnicity as inclusive of Jewish identity and would require state agencies that already collect information about ancestry or ethnicity to include a separate category for Jewish ancestry or ethnicity. The legislation does not redefine Judaism as something other than a religion. It recognizes that Jewish identity may also be something more.

At first glance, this seems like a relatively minor change in government record keeping. Another box on another form. But the box raises an ancient question. What exactly is a Jew?

For much of American life, the simplest answer has been that Judaism is a religion. Christianity is a religion. Islam is a religion. Judaism is a religion. We have synagogues rather than churches, rabbis rather than ministers, Shabbat rather than Sunday. In a nation committed to religious liberty, the category served us well. It is also incomplete.

A Jew who stops believing in God does not ordinarily wake up the next morning and discover that he is no longer Jewish. A Jew who rarely enters a synagogue may still feel an inexplicable bond with Jews thousands of miles away. A secular Israeli and an observant Jew in Brooklyn may disagree about almost every matter of religious practice and still recognize one another as members of the same people.

And when Jews gather around the Seder table, we do something revealing. We do not simply commemorate what happened to somebody else’s ancestors long ago. The Haggadah instructs every generation to see itself as though we ourselves had gone forth from Egypt. That is more than religious belief. It is collective memory. It is belonging. It is peoplehood.

Jewish tradition has always possessed language for this. We speak of Am Yisrael, the People of Israel. The Torah tells the story not merely of individuals who share certain theological convictions, but of a people bound together by covenant, memory, obligation and destiny.

Our difficulty begins when we try to translate that identity into categories created by societies in which religion and ethnicity are usually separate things. Christianity travels easily across those categories. A person may be Nigerian and Christian, Korean and Christian, Mexican and Christian. Christianity describes the religion while another word describes the person’s ethnicity or ancestry. Jewishness has never fit quite so neatly.

For many Jews, ancestry is part of Jewish identity. So are food, language, music, humor, family memories and inherited customs. For others, religious practice is central. For still others, attachment to Israel or identification with Jewish history carries enormous weight. Many Jews experience all these things simultaneously.

This is one reason the California proposal has attracted support from Jewish organizations. Advocates argue that when Jews are counted only as a religious community, significant aspects of Jewish life become statistically invisible. They believe ethnic and ancestry data could provide a clearer picture of Jewish communities in areas ranging from health to education to the impact of antisemitism. I understand the argument. I also understand the instinctive uneasiness many Jews will feel when confronted with a very different sentence: The government would like to know whether you are Jewish. Jewish memory does not allow us to hear those words innocently.

The proposed California legislation makes self-identification voluntary and treats personally identifying information as confidential. Public information would be aggregated. Those protections matter. Still, Jews carry a historical memory in which lists have not always been benign. Being counted can mean being recognized. Being counted can also mean being located. Both truths deserve to remain in the conversation.

But there is another difficulty with simply adding an ethnic checkbox marked “Jewish.” It does not solve the problem of defining us. A Persian Jew may quite properly regard herself as Persian and Jewish. A Black Jew is not required to surrender one identity in order to affirm another. Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Ethiopian, Latino and other Jewish communities carry histories and cultures that cannot be collapsed into a single ethnic experience. California itself has acknowledged the extraordinary diversity within the state’s Jewish population.

And then there is the convert. If Jewishness were simply an ethnicity inherited through ancestry, conversion would make little sense. Ancestry cannot be acquired through conversion. But one can become Jewish. The Book of Ruth gives us one of Judaism’s most enduring descriptions of that transformation. Ruth does not merely say to Naomi, “Your God will be my God.” She begins somewhere else: “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). People and faith are intertwined. The convert does not merely adopt a new set of religious beliefs. The convert enters a people, receives its memories, assumes its obligations and joins its destiny. That is why I hesitate to answer the California question by simply declaring that Jews are an ethnicity. We are. And we aren’t. We are a religion, but religion does not fully contain us. We are connected by ancestry, but ancestry does not fully contain us. We are a culture, but culture does not fully contain us. We are a civilization, a historical community, a covenantal community and a people. Each description captures something true. None captures the whole.

There may be something especially American about our discomfort with this ambiguity. America likes categories. Government forms need categories. Databases need categories. Public policy needs categories. Eventually, someone has to decide which box should appear on the form. Jewish identity arose long before those boxes existed.

For thousands of years we have carried something more complicated: a people who can welcome newcomers; a family whose members need not share ancestry; a religion that even some of its nonbelievers refuse to leave; a worldwide community whose members may speak different languages, eat different foods, observe Judaism differently and still experience one another as somehow connected.

California may ultimately give Jews another box to check. There may be good reasons to welcome it. Better information can lead to greater recognition of Jewish needs and a fuller understanding of who American Jews actually are. There are also good reasons for vigilance whenever governments collect information about identity. But the most interesting thing about the new checkbox may be what it reveals about us.For generations, American Jews learned to say that Judaism was our religion. That language helped us claim our rightful place in a society built upon religious freedom.

Now another little box is reminding us of something our own tradition never forgot. We are a religion. We are an ancestry. We are a culture. But none of those words alone explains what has bound Jews to one another across continents, languages, centuries and radically different ways of living Jewish lives.

Judaism has given us an older and more demanding word: Am. A people. To call ourselves a people is not simply to describe where we came from. It says something about the obligations we carry toward one another. We inherit memories of events we did not personally experience. We mourn Jews we never knew. We celebrate achievements of generations separated from us by centuries. We teach our children stories first told to ancestors whose names have been forgotten. And we welcome converts who choose to make those memories, responsibilities and hopes their own.

That is the remarkable character of Jewish peoplehood. It is inherited, but it can also be entered. It is rooted in ancestry, but not confined by blood. It is sustained by religion, but survives even among those who struggle with belief. It binds together people who may look different, speak different languages, worship differently and disagree profoundly, while still recognizing that somehow we belong to one another.

California may ultimately give us another box to check. There may be good reasons to check it and good reasons to remain cautious about what any government does with that information. But no government form can fully describe what that box is trying to name.

Jewish identity is not simply a statement about what I am. It is also a declaration of whose story I have inherited, whose fate concerns me, what responsibilities I carry, and what I am obligated to hand forward. That is what we mean when we say Am Yisrael. Not simply people who share an identity, but a people who share a memory, a covenant, and a responsibility for one another across generations. And that has never fit neatly inside a box.