re: #575 Obdicut

Well, on the last part: it may be that the reason they can’t say a prayer in Hebrew or know the holidays is that they never felt fully embraced by the Jewish faith or comfortable with their specific role in it. It may be that what they’re expressing is a sadness contorted into critique.

I know a friend of mine’s daughter is going through that phase right now, where she’ll either accept that she has a specific, female-oriented role in terms of Jewish faith or she’ll reject the faith.

Of course, I’m a Jewish atheist who was raised Catholic, my grandmother denied she was Jewish and came from a long line of crypto-Jews, and my grandfather came from a semi-Crypto carribean Sephardic tradition, so my perspective on Jewish life and faith is from a very warped angle.

Ob, you raise an amazingly valid point.

I do not deny that the observant community has failed the rest of the Jewish worlds tremendously by not reaching out enough.

It is one thing to know something about the Tradition and say it is not for you. That is obviously a personal choice and it is not my place to judge you if you decide that.

However, before that call is made, I think many owe it to themselves to actually find out what the Tradition is and says. So many views of it in the non observant community are just false. They are ultimately based on hearsay in many cases. The hearsay ranges from assuming the tradition is anti-woman (clearly they never read ayshet chaiyel) to mistaking a glance through a Gideon Bible as Torah study to whatever crazy things they have heard about those orthodox - and of course the story they heard is an inflated one by a crazy fringe group. This is compounded by a smug sense that being observant must be backwards and that only unthinking religious cretins ever are religious. It is made worse by a notion that the non-observant Jew already knows everything about it anyway.

The reality is that the Tradition is truly one in the books. You can dedicate your whole life to studying it and never make an end. We have over three thousand years of writing stuff down and debating it and thinking it over.

The other big issue is the Holocaust and Israel. Jewish identity is too often based on a certain trauma caused by thinking about the Holocaust or trying to replace the identity with a certain love of Israeli issues.

Fear and loathing is from the Second World War is nothing to hang a positive Jewish identity on and however much I love Israel, and I do, I am an American.

However, there is a beautiful, brilliant and philosophical Tradition that I would put up against anyone else’s to be explored. We have philosophers that can hang with Plato. We have mysteries as deep as mystical as those in Buddism. Unfortunately we do not tell other Jews about that enough.

We don’t give them teh real meat an bones of why bother.

This is a long way of saying if you have not looked into it, it is yours and it is waiting for you to explore. If you do not want it, you do not have to keep it. But it is yours. And you should look at it before discounting it.