Reconstructing Yiddishkeit 12 Ben Weiner

RECONSTRUCTING YIddISHKEIT 12 Ben WEIneR Among recent attempts to define “a yearning for a more authentic way “Jewish authenticity,” I find one of being Jewish.” Here, for a move- characterization of its absence most ment founded to diminish ritual for intriguing. In an essay titled “The the sake of a socially palatable ideal- Imaginary Jew” that appeared in ism, authenticity means combating an The Nation three years ago, literary identity crisis with a dose of authorita- critic William Deresiewicz analyzed tive tradition – solidifying a tenuous the failure of contemporary Jewish core by wrapping hoary leather straps fiction to produce hard-nosed explo- around arm and head. In contrast, Jay rations of the present, and noted its Michaelson, an author and spiritual- tendency to rely instead on whimsical ity teacher, struck a cautionary note exoticism. This, he claimed, could be in the Forward last year. “Meaningful contextualized as part of a larger social authenticity isn’t about an old reli- trend. “Over the past three decades, gious form,” he wrote. “It’s about when the dense particularity of American a religious, literary or cultural form Jewish life has, outside the Orthodox speaks to the depths of what it means community, largely disappeared,” he to be human.” Advocating “a personal- contended. “American Jewish experi- ized notion of authenticity measured ence is now, by and large, simply by integrity and individual coherence,” American experience.” In other words, Michaelson also warned against the the lack of a coherent Jewish present kind of nostalgia that distorts history to serve as the basis for, among other and handicaps the present, arising, for things, a compelling novel, bespeaks instance, out of repeated screenings of an American Jewish community “beset Fiddler on the Roof. by a deep banality and inauthenticity.” Others have worked the issue dif- JUdaIsms ferently. A Reform rabbi recently Although Michaelson and the Reform explained his denomination’s growing rabbi effectively represented two embrace of Jewish practices such as primary definitions of “authentic- laying tefillin by telling me it reflects ity” – compliance with tradition and G adherence to the soul – Deresiewicz of the Jewish people. Our curriculum UCTIN R seemed to be offering something more. centered on the progression from the Twentieth-century writers like Philip biblical era to the present, proving the Roth and Cynthia Ozick, he argues, “Judaisms” claim by demonstrating RECONST YIDDISHKEIT were shaped (or maimed) by cohesive variations that occurred in response to 13 Jewish experience, whether the homo- the undulations of history. This served geneous Jewish neighborhood or to justify our own latitude in confront- EN WEINER persistent anti-Semitism. This cradle ing the circumstances of today. But it B afforded them a source of distinction also placed limits around the notion later drawn upon “with a power and that “anything goes,” emphasizing virtuosity that brought them to the that personal experience emerges out front rank of American letters.” Such of social context. Rather than being authenticity, that is, whether mani- extensions of untainted will, we live festing in forceful literature or other in relation to our origins and sur- signs of deeply embedded identity, is a roundings, working with the materi- measure of formative immersion in an als at hand. Though this may render environment, in Deresiewicz’s phrase, inapplicable terms like “normative” of “dense particularity” – one in which and “corrupt,” it does not preclude a critical mass is involved in the cre- an analysis of Jewish history accord- ation of Jewish meaning. Without ing to its moments of coherence and this milieu, which others might call disintegration. Yiddishkeit, “American Jewish experi- I plot facets of my own existence ence” is simply “American experi- on a trajectory beginning in the last ence.” This is also my position as a extended period of stable Ashkenazi Reconstructionist rabbi. identity, in the kehillot (communities) My Reconstructionist rabbinical of medieval Europe. The implosion of training stressed two interrelated these semi-autonomous, intergenera- points. The first was the fallacy of hold- tional communities, where Jewish life ing any one form of Judaism as ulti- was largely overdetermined, ushered mately normative. Instead, we spoke in a prolonged destabilization that led of a plurality of “Judaisms” – overlap- eventually to my great-grandparents’ ping structures of belief, behavior, and immigration to America in 1905. The belonging clustered around a common assimilation of my English-speaking heritage of symbols. The second, the grandparents followed, though miti- historical approach, meant viewing gated by residual communal bonds and Jewish material through the lens of the lingering barrier of anti-Semitism, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s description both of which burst wide open for my of Judaism as the evolving civilization parents’ postwar generation. G UCTIN DIM SUM Jews beneath a shock of curly dark hair, was R Born into an arc of Jewish renewal, Russian-Jewish poet Peretz Markish, I was raised in a havurah and sent to killed thirty years later in a Stalinist RECONST YIDDISHKEIT Jewish day school and Camp Ramah, purge. The disdainful intensity of his 14 my Judaism sustained by enough expression struck me, almost instantly, life-support to render it reasonably as totemic of the Jewishness that was viable, but at the same time not still, in the early 1920s, shaping his EN WEINER B entirely organic. Coming of age in an being and aspirations even after he had unprecedented riot of opportunities abandoned tradition for the sake of for self-expression, I gravitated toward modern authorship. My semi-optional the category of what Heeb Magazine Judaism seemed comparatively paltry, founder Jennifer Bleyer calls “dim and it occurred to me, really for the sum Jews,” a demographic for whom first time, that I had grown up in the Jewishness seems one morsel, and not ruins of something. necessarily the most succulent, on the I parsed this epiphany more meticu- crowded plate of a Chinese buffet. lously later on, after reading the fol- From time to time, I grasped that lowing quotation in a Mussar manual Judaism could be more encompassing, from the early 1970s, the exhalation often during visits to more traditional of a young Jewish bohemian: “A single communities, whose greater cohesion niggun (wordless song) of an old Jew was impossible to deny. But a more carries more depth and emotion than provocative intimation came from an all of our synagogues, choirs, sermons, entirely different source. I began study- etc. How can we recapture that spirit?” ing Yiddish in college, discovering it to Here was a statement vulnerable be a satisfying Jewish outlet during a to Michaelson’s charge of nostalgic prolonged secular period. A few years distortion, the old and traditional later, as I was sitting in a lecture hall at privileged from the vantage point of a a summer program in Vilna, a black- seemingly inadequate present. and-white photograph splashed across This is actually an ancient trope: the screen: a group of serious young the doctrine of yeridat ha-dorot (the men bunched around an outdoor decline of the generations), which table. This was “Di Khalyastra,” “The stretches back to the Talmud, declares Gang,” a circle of avant-garde Yiddish that the further we are from Sinai, the poets in Warsaw, including I. J. Singer more benighted we become. But this (older brother of the legendary I. B. particular lament may not have lacked Singer), and Uri Tzvi Greenberg, who validity, and may have had as much to went on to fame as a Hebrew poet do with 20th-century disintegration – and as the laureate of Revisionist arising out of the same desire or anxi- Zionism. Slouched in the middle, ety that makes a Reform Jew put on G tefillin – as the congenital worship of post-denominationalism, against the UCTIN R an idealized past. The choirs and ser- ideological divisions of the American mons of the mid-century synagogue scene, its programmatic goal has have been excoriated by a number been articulated as re-infusing liberal RECONST YIDDISHKEIT of spiritual activists as a present too Judaism with Yiddishkeit. 15 soulless or diffuse to sustain its own What is meant is a particular revelation. Yiddishkeit, however, perhaps best EN WEINER This does not mean, however, that exemplified by Rabbi Abraham Joshua B the past is inherently superior. The Heschel’s The Earth is the Lord’s, which niggun of an old Jew is not necessar- portrayed the Eastern-European ily closer to a primal core beyond Jewish experience exclusively as one our reach, and neither did I perceive of transcendent spiritual engagement, any such esoteric connection in the with nary a reference to Yiddish lit- wry countenance of Peretz Markish. erature and political revolution, let Markish himself, after all, was no tradi- alone fornication and horse thievery. tionalist, but a foot soldier in the revo- It would be appropriate to call the lutionary (and tragically short-lived) book hackneyed (in contrast to the campaign of Yiddish literature. His bulk of Heschel’s searing oeuvre), were thorough Jewishness resulted from an it not so obviously a heart-wrenching immersion in a Yiddishkeit, a viscos- elegy. The present neo-traditionalism, ity of culture and language, which although it offers much of value, does was itself on the verge of a cataclysm seem to lean rather heavily on this ide- that left corpses and dim sum Jews on alized strand of the Jewish experience, the other side. His, in a sense, was an and in doing so exhibits the kind of authenticity of quantity rather than exoticism that Deresiewicz noted in quality, of “dense particularity” and current Jewish fiction and read as the not innate holiness. I do not believe symptom of a constitutional decline. the Judaisms of the past were inevi- K a p l a n , w h o f o u n d e d tably better than mine, but I began to Reconstructionism, was born in the suspect that they were thicker.

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