My post yesterday about Being a bad Jew is really, as a friend pointed out, about being a secular Jew and feeling guilty about it, and the political consequences of that guilt.
Later yesterday I remembered when I first felt that I was not as good a Jew as other Jews, and felt guilty about it. My parents knew many religious Jews in Baltimore, and one year we were invited to the house of Leon "Levi" Gordis for his seder. Gordis was a scientist, like my father, and the son of a famous rabbi, Robert Gordis, who was head of the Rabbinical Assembly (the Conservative rabbinate); and people called Levi Gordis "machine-gun Gordis" because he delivered the Passover service rapidfire but did the whole thing. There was no cutting of corners, as there was in my parents' house.
I must have been 7 or 8, and I was stunned by how perfect and formal their seder was, and correct. And I felt then that I was a bad Jew–because our seder was kind of helterskelter.
It is interesting to think that Leon Gordis's son Daniel was surely at that seder. Gordis is today a big Zionist, who lives in Israel and is mobbed up with the Conservative Jew and Ambassador Michael Oren, among others. Judging from the one book of his I have, I doubt Daniel Gordis has ever felt guilty about being a bad Jew. And his Zionism speaks to the fact that there is an orthodox religious atmosphere about Zionism, which the Rabbinical Assembly was touting in my last post. And in turn, that secular Jews have granted those Jews political power, because they are "good Jews."
And meantime this website is an advocate for a more open Jewish identity– so that secular Jews can play a larger role in shaping Middle East policy.
Getting past the guilt seems to me important. In this connection, I'd like to quote from my rabbi, Franz Kafka, and his Letter to His Father, written when he was about 36 to answer his father's question, Why are you afraid of me? In one passage, Kafka says that his father had made young Kafka feel guilty about his lack of religious observance.
As a child I reproached myself, in accord with you, for not going to the synagogue often enough, for not fasting, and so on. I thought that in this way I was doing a wrong not to myself but to you, and I was penetrated by a sense of guilt, which was, of course, always near at hand.
Later, as a young man, I could not understand how, with the insignificant scrap of Judaism you yourself possessed, you could reproach me for not making an effort (for the sake of piety at least, as you put it) to cling to a similar, insignificant scrap. It was indeed, so far as I could see, a mere nothing, a joke—not even a joke.
Kafka points out to his father that his loss of religious observance was something that many, many Jews were experiencing as they moved to the big cities and took part in modern life. And it is interesting to me that Kafka also mentions seders, saying that his family's religious observance was limited to
the first Seder, which more and more developed into a farce, with fits of hysterical laughter, admittedly under the influence of the growing children. (Why did you have to give way to that influence? Because you had brought it about.) This was the religious material that was handed on to me, to which may be added at most the outstretched hand pointing to "the sons of the millionaire Fuchs," who attended the synagogue with their father on the High Holy Days. How one could do anything better with that material than get rid of it as fast as possible, I could not understand; precisely the getting rid of it seemed to me to be the devoutest action.
Beautiful writing. We are still bedevilled by the millionaire Fuchs. And Kafka is a reminder that a religious life, which was one of Kafka's abiding concerns, has very little necessary connection to organized religion.
