I’m not the Orthodox adherent my faith in God and ritual is too precarious, and my politics are incompatible with his practices. Yet I’ve grown less and less clear on what Jewishness might mean.
How, then, to decide what I am? As I’ve grown into adulthood, I’ve felt an increasing urgency to articulate answers. A spectrum spanning Jewish and goyish, on which one could plot qualities nearer to one or the other pole: Jew, goy.
If I am Jewish, what makes me so? The word-Jewish, that suggestive suffix-seems to signify not a stable identity, but a flux. I’ve attended synagogue once in the past two years, for Yom Kippur, the last refuge of the mostly lapsed Jew I fasted. I don’t follow halakhah-Jewish religious law-though I don’t eat meat and thus keep some kind of Kosher. Bush, I used the occasion to bash the war in Iraq before an astonishingly polite audience. I was Bar Mitzvahed driven by an American Idiot-level understanding of and disdain for George W. I have a Hebrew name (Natan Ari) but remember little from Hebrew school besides ceremonial terms and the word for fish (dag). So is my father-he gave me Goldman, the clearest marker of my Jewishness besides, perhaps, my nose-though traditionally, paternal lineage is irrelevant. The following essay appears in the current issue of The Scofield (dedicated to the life and writing of Clarice Lispector).Īm I Jewish? It’s a difficult question to answer.
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