I was in high holiday services this year next to the same friend I always go to high holiday services with. We were with our families back at the temple we had both gone to elementary school at, repeating the yearly tradition. When we go back every year and see our old principal and some old school mates, it appears to be the same experience for us, returning to our roots and celebrating our faith. But internally, our story is completely different. My friend, I’ll refer to her as Beth, is not only irreligious toward Judaism, but she carries around strong antipathy toward all religiosity. In fact, she hopes to marry someone Christian, she’s told me often, because she loves the tradition of decorating trees and putting up lights. I on the other hand had a very traditional religious Jewish wedding ceremony, I go to services monthly, and my husband and I have made a commitment to raise our children Jewish, and plan to become more involved with as time goes on.
I never bring any of this up with my friend. She’s felt like this a long time, and, as we all know, the worse kind of argument to have with anyone is one that involves religion, because reason and logic often hold no sway. But she likes to bring it up, to push my buttons I suppose, and this year was no exception. I usually just smile and ignore what she says; sometimes she takes such a hard line I wonder if she doth protest too much and perhaps is concealing a secret doubt in herself, but this year I pushed back slightly asking her why she comes to services at all if she dislikes religion and Judaism so much. Unfortunately, after answering the question and explaining that she likes tradition and it matters to her family and she likes seeing my family, she continued with a long critique of all of Judaism, some Rabbis, some sermons, but concluded by conceding that it might be nice to give her children some form of tradition or religion, however, as that is religion's only saving grace, it really doesn’t matter what religion she picks.
I just smiled and nodded. I had many points to make, but the old ladies in front of us had already turned around to tacitly disapprove of our whispering, and I didn’t want to spend Yom Kippur debating since it actually meant something to me. But as I let her berate Judaism, in temple on Yom Kippur, I wondered if because she is blonde and fair and has a small nose if maybe she, despite her full Ashkenazi background, thinks that she has the luxury of not caring about being Jewish. On the contrary, if they ever did decide to come for us again, I would be one of the first picked out, with my curly hair and prominent nose and biblical name. Maybe that’s part of why Judaism is so important to me – it has to be because I could never get away from it even if I wanted to. But my pallid friend could easily pass. And if she marries a gentile as she hopes, she can change her name and join his family for Christmas, and believe that if they come again, they will pass her over; and maybe they just might. But maybe not. But the real reason she thinks she has the luxury of ignoring her ancestry is not just because she thinks that if they come again, she will pass. She doesn’t think anyone’s coming again. Not for the Jews. Not in America. Not in these moderns times, with our modern mores and our just laws. But what if she's wrong?
Because that’s the real argument against secularization, isn’t it? You might be able to indulge not caring about being Jewish for now, but only for so long as no one else cares. For Jews who don’t believe in heaven or hell, for Jews who believe in Darwin and everything science, for Jews who live lives that mostly aren’t Jewish, and who believe in morality for morality's sake, and even for those who do believe, the real reason to care about being Jewish is that one day someone else might care. Or a whole lot of people might care and when they do, you won’t be able to self-indulge your penchant for ignoring Judaism. So then the question becomes could they come for us again?
The idea of someone coming for us is, of course, referencing the common post-war America refrain that many baby boomers grew up hearing. The belief that if “they” come for us again, we don’t get to decide who “we” are; they decide. Nazism didn’t care who was religious or who was ready to renounce Judaism. German Jews were some of the most secular and most integrated Jews, in the world, at the time, and when the Nazis rounded them up, their cries that they rejected Judaism didn’t matter. Most of my contemporaries and friends don’t think this could ever happen again, but in the 1930’s, the European streets were full of people who thought something as prehistoric as mass genocide couldn’t happen now, not in a modern world, with cars, and science, and planes. But of course it did. It’s easy to believe that today we really are living in a time when it couldn’t happen again but, as you know, just last century we were wrong.
So what would coming for us now even look like? Who would come for us today and what would they be coming for? The adage about them coming is originally a quote from the “> Pew Center study last year showed so many Jews turning away from Judaism. No one else cares what religion I am, it’s easy to think, and so why do I still care about something so archaic? But it’s not true that people don’t care. It's just that the tiny segment of the population you know seems to not care.
There are many segments of the world, where they do care that you’re Jewish and they might even hate you for it. The only thing protecting you right now from those people is that they don’t have the ability to come for you. But is it so inconceivable to think that one day, they might? Or even more likely, what if you find yourself amongst them? Lara Logan was a reporter who was raped repeatedly in Egypt's Tahrir Square and even though she’s not Jewish, she reports that someone yelling into the crowd that “>bunch of men in a mosque yelling to Death to America/ Death to Jews and this is a “>where anti-semitism is enjoying a popular resurgence. It might come if Iran were to have nuclear weapons or it might come homegrown within liberal groups that rightly sympathize with Palestinians and let that manifest as anger toward American Jews. It might come when people conflate Israel’s policy with anti-semitism and soon people are not only divesting and avoiding Israeli products, but telling Jews that they can’t build their new schools in certain places or that we’d all be safer at a relocation camp. It’s not alarmist to consider such a future when we consider that we’ve done such things to other groups before and not that long ago.
You might think that our laws and system protect us, but in law school, I realized quite the opposite. Bad law is often simply the result of popular whims. Eugenics, Japanese internment camps, and of course the mother-lode that is slavery have all been justified by American laws. And ongoing injustices continue to be perpetrated by the American legal system – the American government has been found multiple times to be engaging in illegal actions, be it covert spying on its own people or Guantanamo Bay or enhanced interrogation techniques. By choosing to not care about being Jewish, you are betting that in the future, nobody else will care either. And if there’s anything the long history of Judaism can tell us, it’s that Jews are historically just not that lucky.
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