“I hate that question!” the woman cried out after I asked her husband whether he was Ashkenazi.
The woman was offended that I would ask that. “We’re all Jewish,” she told me. “We don’t need labels.”
Who knew such an innocent question would trigger such emotion?
I was making small talk with people I didn’t know at a synagogue BBQ in Montreal. “Sephardic or Ashkenazi?” is a convenient icebreaker to get to know people. Indeed I’ve always been fascinated by ethnic diversity among Jews.
So why did the woman’s response throw me for a loop?
Upon reflection, my first thought is that I must be living in a Jewish bubble. In my neighborhood of Pico-Robertson, and especially with my friends, “Jewish labels” is a source of endless curiosity. It means, among other things, that we have plenty to share with one another.
My Ashkenazi friends ask me to sing Sephardic songs at the Shabbat table, just as we regularly sing Hassidic and Ashkenazi melodies.
We exchange recipes and family stories. My Moroccan ancestors lived totally different lives than those of the Polish and Russian and German ancestors of my Ashkenazi friends.
I find their stories fascinating.
There are probably a hundred different Jewish nationalities in this neighborhood, from Russian to Persian to Tunisian to Israeli to South African and on and on.
In other words, what the woman in Montreal saw as labels, I see as stories. As a journalist, as I explained to the woman (who agreed), these stories are the Jewish gift that keeps on giving.
When I think about my ancestors in Casablanca who were surrounded by only one Jewish label—their own—I count myself blessed. Jews are living in an era of our grand family reunion. After 1900 years of wandering the world, now we can all meet up at Pico Glatt.
That said, I have to give credit to the Montreal woman for one crucial point. I don’t know if she realized it, but when she exclaimed, “We’re all Jewish!” she touched on one of the miracles of the Jewish story.
Simply put, how is it possible that we can be separated for 1900 years and when we meet up again, we’re all reading from the same Torah scroll?
If it weren’t for our differences, for our different customs and accents and melodies and traditions, the fact that we’re still reading from the same Torah wouldn’t be such a miracle.
But today, on any given Shabbat, you can hear endless different melodies in different synagogues while the words stay pretty much the same.
So different, and yet so similar.
The Jews I met at the synagogue in Montreal all looked like they’d feel right at home in Pico-Roberston. So the woman was right—we’re all Jewish.
But given that we come from so many different places and so many different cultures, if I see her again, I would add one word to her answer.
We’re all Jewish, I would tell her, but with all of our many labels, the miracle is that we’re all still Jewish.
Her husband, by the way, was Mizrachi, from Iraq.
