The New Old Jew

"Who am I?" -- the first three words of Nadja, the surrealist novel by the father of the movement, Andre Breton. Even if you've never read these words, said them out loud, or thought them explicitly, they still feel intimately familiar.
 

"Who am I?" is the individual's question, the poetic question, and, consequently, the surrealist's question. It's the question a person asks when he's been given no framework to understand the world and so sees life as an unsolvable enigma, yet imagines the purpose of living to be finding the solution. It's the question of an orphan, of someone with no inheritance, of a wanderer. Many Jews are asking this question of identity today and, unsurprisingly, the Jewish People is wandering.

The most recent response to the question of Jewish identity is the concept of the New Jew, which presents itself as a way to fuse multiple identities of young Jewish people. It answers the many questions of "Am I this or am I that?" with an enthusiastic "You're both!" It goes further and attempts to show that Judaism itself is fluid, undefined, and open. "Judaism," says the New Jew with a pertness that sounds like he's talking about papier mache, "is whatever you want it to be."

Those who have explored the New Jew concept know its love of I'm-a-Jew irony, its penchant for poking at Jewish ideas and traditions, its need to flash multicultural credentials, and most of all, the endless, almost desperate desire to prove that we, too, are cool. My own exploration of the New Jew was made with the hope that underneath its essentially un-ironic irony there's a philosophy, a current of fresh ideas or a viable paradigm for the Jewish nation. Unfortunately, the exploration reached a different conclusion: the Jewish People is still wandering and the New Jew is a whistled melody to distracts from the long journey.

The characterization of Jews as wanderers began with Abraham. It eventually degraded into an epithet of Crusader Europe, which looked scornfully at the drifting, rootless Jewish People as it tried, often in vain, to eek out a physical and political survival in hostile lands. In terms of Breton's question, however, the ghettoized Jews of Europe were not wanderers at all. Abraham was still less a wander; though he wandered physically, morally and spiritually he was on a journey. From the first step, through the greatest crisis, and to the last breath, he knew exactly who he was. The Jews of pre-Haskalah Europe the same: for all the hardship they endured, they didn't suffer the doubts of identity, and when they did, they knew how to seek the answers.

Is it ironic that we, the Jews of today, with our own state, our own military, our own justice system and roads, know ourselves less and wander more than those who lived before the state? It's not. People often speak about how incredible it is that the Jewish People survived through so much suffering. This kind of survival would be incredible for any other people since no other people has a purpose as its essence. For the Jewish People, whose purpose is to serve humanity by example, the unlikely survival was not in spite of the suffering but because of it.

This driving purpose is different from the purpose of other religions and other nations. It's not the individual's purpose of salvation through repentance or reunification with the spiritual all. Nor is it the universalist purpose of advancing humanity as a species. Rather, the individual Jew's purpose is the fulfillment of his role in the community of the Jewish People; the purpose of the Jewish People is to grapple with, interpret, explore, but in the end dedicate itself to the Law, the Torah.

In order to reclaim its identity, the Jewish People must find its purpose. To do this, both on an individual and on a national level, Jews need to re-ignite the exploration of Judaism and the great dialectic which created an equilibrium of values and identity for centuries. But this exploration has to occur from within Jewish tradition and looking out at the world, not the other way round.

For individual Jews, especially of the emerging intellectual generation, beginning to understand the orthodoxy of Jewish thought and belief is essential. This might in the meantime stop short of a life fully devoted to Jewish observance. But it must mean treating the Torah and Talmud as not just important but critical intellectual-spiritual works. Thinking that Jews of our generation devote themselves to picking apart Kant and the Western philosophical tradition in elite universities, or delve into the spiritual labyrinths of the Vedas or Buddhism, or learn to negotiate popular culture and art deftly, how can we -- as Jews, who came from Jews, and benefit daily from our heritage -- think the foundational moral, metaphysical, and religious texts of this civilization aren't worth our time?

Study is the first step, but it needs to be unprejudiced study -- not a deconstructionist effort to build up and then tear down, not a mystical kabbalist groping, but an effort that's humble and recognizes that we need first to learn the alphabet of Jewish thought and belief before we undertake criticism.

Another part of individual exploration is observance. Again, this doesn't require that we throw ourselves into ritual observance. It means we wonder what's the value of Shabbat? And we who pride ourselves on the diversity of our experience and our willingness to try new things attempt, just once, to observe it and see what it brings and what it means.

If we in any serious sense can talk about ourselves as “new” Jews it's in the sense that for the first time in 2,000 years a Jewish state exists. There's nothing more new; Israel is the place where the individual's exploration merges with the national one. But as the fractures of the Israel-Diaspora line grow, it;s clear that Zionism defined only as the creation of a Jewish political state is incomplete and inadequate. Ahad Ha'am warned that political Zionism which lacks a spiritual counterpart is brittle, a lesson we're now learning firsthand. 

It falls to us to continue to build, beginning with understanding Zionism not as the establishment of a political state (an idea that invites today's self-destructive trends of “post”-Zionism) but as the basic truth that Israel is the homeland of the Jewish People. Israel as a country must accept this and build it into its constitutional concepts of national sovereignty, political membership, social character, lawgiving and even adjudication. Without this basic acceptance of right and obligation of Jews to be in Israel, we have nothing. With only the argument of necessity, that Jews have nowhere else to go, Israel is the unjust “entity” that her enemies accuse her of being.

Many people reject these ideas and argue for a re-creation of Jewish life and identity. In these cases, we have to acknowledge that re-creation is also rejection, not embrace, of what previously existed, and a rejection of the past is also a rejection of its sum -- the present. This is what post-Zionism, sects of renovated Judaism, and the very concept of the New Jew have done -- rejected and then re-created.

Instead of rejection and re-creation we need acceptance and continuity. A serious exploration of Judaism, as outlined above in only the most basic sense, provides a beginning. As a methodology and a lens to see the world, it shows us more than we ever thought possible --about things as diverse as Western philosophy, Eastern spiritual systems, concepts of political existence and, most importantly, our daily lives.

Yaakov Hasdai wrote in Truth in the Shadow of War, "Each generation remained true to the past and added something of its own; a combination of loyalty to tradition and continuous innovation was always one of the main characteristics of Jewish civilization. Tradition adjusted itself to the needs of life, and innovation did not cut itself off from the roots of tradition."

With this in mind, the original question of identity, "Who am I?", dissolves into a surrealist landscape and gets forgotten. In its place, a more definite, more creative, and more Jewish question emerges that in itself contains answers. It asks: Where does our tradition lie and what innovations will we create to enrich it?