What does it mean to be Jewish / a shift of perspective

I may well become the first ever Evangelical Jew. Actually I doubt that, but I am honestly coming to believe that many (if not most) of my Liberal Christian friends ought to stop trying to convince the world that Christianity means something different from what the vast supermajority of Christians say it is* and instead come join me on the Judaic side of the Force. There seems to be plenty of room for y'all over here, and besides, Judaism was good enough for Jesus...  (I'm not sure from which direction, but I'm sure I'll get hit with a lightning bolt for that one)

But before I could ever take up the project of persuading all of my friends to convert to Judaism, I would need to have a pretty clear idea of what I was selling. And therein lies the rub: how am I to tell my friends why they should become Jewish – or even what it is that they are becoming – when the old saw about "two Jews, three opinions" applies here more than almost anywhere else?

What does it mean to become, or at least to call oneself, a Jew? Note that I'm not talking about what a person must do externally for other people to consider him or her Jewish – traditionally that involves an oral exam, a bath, and a minor outpatient procedure for men – but what it is internally that is actually changing when a person decides to become Jewish: what we would notice in a before-and-after portrait, if you will.

Also note that I'm flat-out ignoring the opinion that being Jewish is mainly a function of ethnic-cultural inheritance; I'm not saying that opinion doesn't hold sway in certain circles, but it isn't all that useful to this discussion and besides, plenty of people (King David's grandmother, anyone?) have become Jewish by choice instead of by birthright throughout the history of the sport.

So, what does it mean to be/come a Jew? It means many things to many people, but all seem to agree that it extends beyond saying "yes" to a few religious beliefs or changing a few religious practices: Judaism is a whole-life orientation like few other religious-cultural systems that are being offered today in the North American "marketplace" of ideologies. For the rest of this post, I present a few things I have gleaned from a month or two of study (and I'm sure I will expand this list as I keep working on this blog) that most would agree are important aspects of Jewishness...

1. Taking seriously the sh'ma, that instruction to "hear" that God is One and that the One God is ours. That one-ness doesn't just mean calling God one, but insisting that God is indivisible (with, interestingly enough, liberty and justice for all). It may be a stumbling block for some, but for me leaving behind that whole Trinity mess for a clear and simple picture of God in search of us is actually surprisingly liberating.

2. Allowing one's life to stand and depend on one of several "tripods" of core ideas or practices. Perhaps the most common is God, Torah, Israel – where Israel seems to mean mostly that a person identify as part of the Jewish People historically called Israel, though the political entity called Israel comes up from time to time as well – though this fails to account for the great number of agnostic Jews and the many modern Jews who believe that their faith has evolved to be much more than just an interpretation of Torah.

Alternately, Shimon-the-Righteous claimed that the whole world depends on Torah-study, Prayer-and-worship, and Acts-of-loving-kindness. Especially if you accept Hillel's declaration that "the whole of the Torah" is basically the Golden Rule plus commentary, this sounds much like the prophet Micah's much earlier "tripod" that translates roughly as: "do/make justice and love kindness and humbly walk to/with your God".

Now, Jews seem to love letting contradictions stand (because, frankly, no one opinion ever holds the complete truth) but I will dare to summarize these three: being Jewish means walking with and toward God (however you understand that idea), as part of the people Israel, ever seeking to do justice and loving-kindness as you go along your way.


3. Reading enough Jewish literature – internet included – and/or hanging around enough other Jews that you begin to quote (or at least paraphrase) Jewish sages, start saying "typically Jewish" things almost reflexively (oy!), start recognizing Jewish ideas and cultural contributions everywhere you turn, and cap it all off by seeking out more Jews to hang out with or read from.

4. Ordering your life in a Jewish way, by keeping at least some partial form of kashrut and halachah; saying at least part of the bedtime sh'ma and saying b'rachot before each of your meals (and, really, whenever else you get a chance – starting to think in Hebrew whenever you are in a religious mood is a really good sign); eating challah on Friday nights, taking Saturdays off**, and drinking wine, well, pretty much whenever anything starts or ends.


5. Starting to add mitzvot to your life. While the stock translation of mitzvah is "commandment", mitzvot are understood by many contemporary Jews to be somewhere in the space between obligation and good-deed. On the one hand, mitzvot are not things we do just to feel good, they are "the right thing to do"; on the other hand, while each mitzvah is something God wants to see in our lives, God does not expect us to be perfect – God simply wants us to keep working on becoming better people. So, many of us work on one mitzvah at a time: hospitality, generosity (tzedekah), respect for the dignity of even those we can't understand, proper attention to our family members, weaning ourselves from pepperoni pizzas and cheeseburgers, the list goes on.

6. Observing a good number more (and, from many perspectives, better) holidays and festivals than the other leading brand – the most important of which happens every single week! More on that in an upcoming post.

Some would add that being Jewish also means dropping out of certain other holidays, such as that big hullabaloo in December with evergreens and stockings and manger scenes. 

Which brings me to...

7. Exiting the majority culture in favor of having "found your people". I think this really captures one of the most important things about what it means to be a Jew: to identify with the Jewish People, the Jewish culture and the whole history of Jewish civilization in the many meaningful ways in which they are still distinct from the mainstream of Western Culture. 

And this last point may be the crux of what it means to become a Jew: at the end of the day, it isn't so much about changing what holidays you celebrate or in what language you say your prayers or how you cook your food, it is about shifting the entire perspective from which you view the world. 

What I find amazing about this last point is how quickly I, personally, made the shift in perspective from "them" to "us." Seeing children's books in a bookstore this past weekend, I got all possessive about those stories from the Hebrew Bible that keep getting turned into cute children's books by Christian authors – who seem to think that, for example, when Ruth said "your people will be my people and your God will be my God" she meant the Christian people and their triune God (for the record, she didn't). I saw a friend calling a football play "unchristian" on Facebook and flinched – realizing for the first time how the use of that word as a  synonym for "morally objectionable" clearly implies that being anything but Christian is inherently immoral.

And the opposite is true. In the past, the internet ruckus about that Kentucky official who went to jail because she felt that her freedom-of-religion should allow her to legally deny other people their freedom of religion would have had me shouting from the rooftops that not-all-Christians-feel-that-way; this time, I'm thinking something much more like "I'm glad I'm not one of them any more!" Telling my son about a common interpretation of the Christian scripture Revelation, I said I disagreed with it "but who am I to interpret somebody else's book?"  Nuff said, I guess.

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* Yes, I know the line that much of common Christian belief and practice today -- the Trinity, praying to Jesus, that whole substitutionary-atonement thing, yadda yadda -- do not represent the "original" Christianity. I know that many Liberal Christians claim their beliefs and practices are a return to that "original" Christianity. I have two problems with that. First, all life evolves, including religious life: you just can't expect a religion -- any religion -- to be the same as it was in some good-old-days, whether they were 20 or 2,000 years ago. Second, the "original" Christianity as taught by Jesus and his immediate followers was a sect of Judaism, much closer (to my eyes) to today's Reform Judaism than to any present-day sect of Christianity, and if you like the teachings of Jesus why not check out the teachings of Hillel (and many others)? Sure, the apostle Paul might have taken a pretty sharp turn away from Christianity being a sect of Judaism, but if you are going to accept that change why not accept all of the others that have accumulated over 2,000 years as equally Christian and just admit that you are not, in fact, particularly hip to Christianity as it has evolved from then 'til now?

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** At first, I must admit I still felt guilty for "skipping" church on Sunday mornings, but now that the rhythm of Shabbat is starting to sink in, I find myself instead silently chiding my neighbors for mowing their lawns on the Sabbath!