Generation Ger

Somewhere in the back of my mind I always remember writing these papers for Mrs. Steinberg’s English class: a book review of Elie Wiesel’s Night, a reaction paper about the documentary Shoah, and a term paper on the Holocaust. I can recall the emotion more than the content: the shock, the disbelief, the sick emptiness in the pit of my stomach, the indignant anger, the tears welling up from a deep, deep place.

Until eighth grade world history class, I had remained utterly ignorant of the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II). And then at age fourteen, I read obsessively—angry and weeping—about the cattle cars and the starvation, the selections and the gas chambers. The sheer information overwhelmed me. How could that have happened, then? But it was in Mrs. Steinberg’s class that I first saw the haunting images and started thinking about the Shoah in broader terms. Why? I asked, and the deeper question, How? How could human beings come to despise other human beings so, to ignore their humanity? There is no doubt that Mrs. Steinberg’s classes on the Holocaust left their mark on me, confirmed some things I knew about myself and my values and changed me, too, changed me down to my soul.

I’ve been thinking about those classes and those papers lately, reading an essay by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweiss called “The Stranger in our Mirror” and some other materials I read in preparation for a rabbinical school retreat on conversion and “outreach” (a term usually applied to Jewish efforts to include interfaith families in community and religious life). I read the materials alongside that week’s Torah portion, Toledot, a section that highlights the conflict between twin brothers Jacob and Esau. Rabbi Schulweiss notes that the Holocaust no longer unites the Jewish people as it had in the past; indeed, we spoke about this in our rabbinical school history class last year—the increasing personal distance from the Shoah, the aging and death of survivors, and the dilemma that seems to present for Hebrew School curricula. What happens to Jewish identity and Jewish memory when there is no longer a biological, generational connection to the formative events of the Jewish past?

So it was strange to have these ideas floating around in my head when I climbed up to my parents’ attic to clear out some of my childhood mementoes. Among the stuffed animals and the She-Ra action figures I found a box stuffed with writings—fraught, overworked, terrible poetry and essays on Steinbeck… and my paper on Night. So strange, to see my own concerns about the dehumanization of the Shoah laid out in prose upon paper, when I know the panic and the disgust I felt in even considering that slow and insidious process of transforming human beings into vermin. More surprising still were Mrs. Steinberg’s comments at the end of the paper, in red pen: “I’m reading [this essay] in the cafeteria of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where my father was given new life by the opposite of the monsters who could supply only death. […] How joyful I feel to read an essay like this from someone who will be on the side of good, not evil, to accomplish rather than destroy. L’Chaim!”

I’m sure I had no idea what “L’chaim” meant—my Yentl and Fiddler on the Roof phase began later, sparked in part by this class, no doubt. L’chaim—to life! Reading it now, that “L’Chaim!” takes on a different significance. In a way, it becomes part of my ancestry.

In Toledot, finding one’s place in the ancestry of the Jewish people is a complicated struggle. Jacob and Esau bitterly battle over the birthright; Esau even vows to murder his usurping young brother; the two are not reunited until later in the tale, after Jacob has been reassured by God that the fate of the Jewish people lay with him and his sons. Before the twins are born, Rebekah learns, “Two peoples are in your belly, two nations shall branch off from each other, from your womb. One people shall prevail over the other; the elder shall serve the younger” (25: 23). These verses became proof texts in the generations of conflict, suspicion, and hatred between Jews and Christians. And in this week’s parasha we also read of Esau’s marriage to two Hittite women—women who “were marat ruach—a bitterness of spirit to Isaac and Rebekah” (26:35). Esau’s pain reaches us through both his actions and his words. In an effort to win his parents’ approval, he takes another wife, one of the daughters of Ishmael, son of Abraham (28:6-9). And when he learns that Isaac has already bestowed his blessing on Jacob, he pleads, barcheni gam ani, avi—“Bless me—me, too, father!” (27:34).

Esau, a Jew born to a patriarch and a matriarch of our faith, feels left out of the story of our generations. I can identify with that, as I am sure many of us can. It is difficult to hear that even the Sages are suspicious of any taint of non-Jewish family creeping into the line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They argue, in Genesis Rabah, that Rebekah, daughter of idolatrous priests, might not have been bothered so much by Esau’s Canaanite wives because she herself had non-Jewish family.

I’m not sure I want Rebekah, or Isaac for that matter, to have been so very upset about their son’s marriages, but what also bothers me is the Sages’ assumption that anyone with non-Jewish family ties (like Rebekah) is inherently less invested in the future of Judaism. It’s the same argument about the constant “threat” of intermarriage and a dwindling Jewish population. I know there are piles of statistics about “the children of interfaith marriages” and the lack of Jewish observance in interfaith households, but those statistics have been changing, and in part any lack of observance might stem from the marginalization of interfaith families in our synagogues and communities. And, indeed, those statistics blur the fact that we’re talking about people—and I mean really, concretely, people we know. Me. So many of my classmates, colleagues, and friends who are ourselves converts or the children of converts or proud Jewish descendants of one Jewish and one non-Jewish parent. Moreover, I saw in the readings for the retreated I attended that so many researchers lump together the children of converts and the children of interfaith families, and both are a source for “alarm” because we lack a biological connection to the generations of the Jewish people. Schulweiss, for example, writes, “[H]e who chooses for Judaism one day may opt to choose out of Judaism another day or else his child may. In halakhic [that is, Jewish legal] terms the infant of a Jewish womb, whatever he/she may later choose, is irrevocably Jewish.”

What does it mean to be “irrevocably” Jewish? How does it feel to be the child of an interfaith family or a convert to Judaism and hear those words? Or to ask a related question, is biology destiny? Can we connect to the generations of the Jewish people—of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, of Sarah, Rebekach, Rachel and Leah—no matter our blood or our heritage or our family name? What of the emotional connection I, and others like me, felt when learning about the Shoa?

I would not deny that biology is important. My parents, my Italian-American heritage, my sincere and at least for a time nourishing Catholic background—these affect me, shape me, and neither can I simply will them away, nor would I want to. And biology matters in the history and the future of the Jewish people—a Jew by birth who denies his Judaism can still fall victim to bigotry, as we know all too well. But, in terms of the future of the Judaism I love, the Judaism we teach, I think biology is emotion, at its root. The biology we care about, at least. That biology, those generations, are the stories and memories that we tell and inherit and claim. That biology is about relationships and values far more than it is about blood and pedigree.

Being a part of the generations of the Jewish people is about the smell of Bubbe’s challah baking in the oven, the tzedakah [literally “righteousness” but related also to the modern notion of charity] projects children and parents create together, the response to schoolyard bullying that stems from the knowledge that all people are created b’tzelem Elohim [in the image of God], the conversations we have as a community about Kosher laws and other ritual commandments. Judaism emerges in community, through lived values.

A Brandeis study we read on outreach and inclusion urges Jewish professionals to consider conversion “the first, rather than the last step in creating a Jewish identity.” I would argue that birth, too, is simply a first step. There is nothing inevitable about how a Jew-by-birth will live the values of Judaism in her life—just as there is nothing inevitable about how a new Jew, newly named and emerged from the mikveh, will live the values of Judaism in hers. Both need the support and the prodding of a community of Jews who struggle to figure out what these ancient texts and longstanding practices mean.

Our teacher Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman puts out a call to the leaders of the Jewish communities of the very near future, leaders whose approach to living Judaism will affect converts and prospective converts, interfaith families, and born Jews. In his book Re-Thinking Synagogues, he adamantly urges that Judaism must be a religion for us, and not “ethnic nostalgia.” By “religion” Dr. Hoffman means a combination of spirituality and ethics that speaks to the realities of our contemporary lives. He writes, “The only question that counts for us is ‘Why be Jewish?’”

The answer to that question cannot be only, “I am Jewish because I am the son of Jacob and of Isaac and of Abraham.” It cannot be solely, “I am Jewish because my blood is Jewish.” When the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional organization for Reform Rabbis in North America, asks converts to commit to establishing a Jewish home, it points to “the presence of items such as Jewish books, Jewish music, Jewish art, a tzedakah box, and mezuzah, as well as adopting Jewish practices” like saying certain prayers. But the presence of ritual objects and the recitation of prayers say little about the deep, emotional, and resonant concerns of people’s lives. Objects and prayers are empty without the values and the ethics that underlie them. I want to have a conversation about those values; I want that conversation to be what carries me and my classmates through our relationship together as colleages, as rabbis, as cantors, as educators, as Jews, and as descendants and heirs of the generations of the Jewish people, bound in a covenant that leads us to act in the world in loving-kindness and in justice.

V’eileh toldot Yitzhak ben Avraham, “And these are the generations of Isaac, son of Abraham” (Genesis 25:19). What are our generations? A list of names tracing blood and biology, egg and sperm? Or something more? Stories that take time to unfold and reveal. The light in our students’ eyes when they make a connection between the Torah and their daily lives. These are our generations. V’eileh toledotai, and these are my generations: Nicole Lyn, daughter of Janice and Bob, granddaughter of Emma Rose, Dvora Nechama bat Avraham v’Sarah, and a child, too, of Mrs. Steinberg.