I am no 9/11 remembrance fetishist, far from it. I delighted four years ago in The New Republic lament that nothing about our society changed and am tickled when our friends on the Commentary blog are outraged at casting the memory of that day as a "feel good national unity celebration." I hate to break it to you, but that is how most of us look back on that period, and the outrage at the Republicans and neocons for robbing us of that is, frankly, the thing that Barack Obama so brilliantly tapped into.
Nevertheless, this anniversary calls for reflection, in that September 11, 2001– when I was still in my teens– was the single day that most shaped my Jewish identity. Like Max Blumenthal, I was profoundly affected by seeing the Jewish community completely enamored of the idea that "we were all Israelis now", in other words, that Israel’s war was our war.
One can imagine what it was like then several months later going to a talk by Israeli Army refuseniks and seeing coeds wearing t-shirts that read "we are all Palestinians". And leave it to my old Lubavitch rabbi to give an appropriate and spiritual Rosh Hashana sermon the week after the attack–and only a year later, give a bizarre messianic-neocon sermon that turned me off to Judaism for long thereafter.
I won’t bore readers here with an exposition of my simultaneous dalliances at the fringes of both the Lubavitchers and the pro-Palestinian scene, only to feel dead to both sentiments by the time a year had passed. But to bring it up to the present: my own sense of fairness dictates that I could either completely cease to regard myself as Jewish and thereby forfeit any interest in "the problem" as my recent biography subject Rabbi Elmer Berger came to call it, or I could somehow find a way to return to Judaism with unscathed anti-Zionist convictions.
I ultimately chose the latter path. I think the Lebanon War was what basically shook me into realizing I couldn’t just forget about Israel/Palestine, and ultimately I discovered my beloved little platoon in Park Slope. Only with my discovery of the anti-Zionist rabbinical history behind the book I recently finished did all the pieces finally fall into place in understanding my own position and the relevant history. I ultimately decided that there was enough worth redeeming in Judaism and Jewish identity to stick with it.
The funny thing is that I cannot for the life of me figure out why. I detested my Conservative religious school. The New Jersey Y Camp I went to when I was 8 and 9 was just miserable. Both my sister (now Orthodox) and I felt positively liberated when my father left home and we could, among many other things, eat pork – something which, incidentally, I continued to do with gusto even when I attended the Lubavitch shul.
I felt very good about being Jewish when, starting in 6th grade, my mother relented to my hatred of religious school and allowed me to have a private tutor through my Bar Mitzvah and for the year after. Also coinciding with this was the era when my whole social life revolved around the Scouting troop sponsored by my shul. But all of that vanished by the time I left middle school. I look back on that whole era with great bitterness.
In short, the only Jewish experience I have genuinely fond memories of growing up is Passover with my father’s parents in Florida. Go figure.
I have today a fairly robust intellectual rationale for sticking with Judaism, and a nice little lefty shul to go to which, if absolutely nothing else, beats the alternatives, both with respect to religion generally and the options in the Jewish world. Real emotion, yes, follows, as I expect to be reminded at High Holiday services this year, but why? Should I even try to analyze it?
With all the upheavals of these last eight years, not least of all for the Jews, it is good to see the generation given voice by this site rise up. But whether or not the blog is the right forum for it, and it may not be, we will fail if we do not also enact a positive agenda for a Jewish future.
