skygiants

This is not quite a booklogging post. Or it is, but on the way to something else.

I didn't really plan on reading The Yiddish Policeman's Union, set in an alternate-universe Jewish settlement in Alaska that never existed, at the same time as I went home to my own Jewish family and extremely Jewish hometown for Rosh Hashana. It just kind of fell out that way. Whether that made me think differently about the book itself, I'm not sure - for the record, although the end felt sort of slapdash and improbable, overall I liked it a lot - but the two in combination did get me thinking about my Jewish identity more than either individually might have.

I guess what it comes down to is this: I have mixed feelings about religion, which means I have mixed feelings about Judaism. But I don't really have mixed feelings about being a Jew.

That might seem like a sort of contradiction, and sometimes I feel like it is. I am sure that there are people who would say that because I don't go to synagogue, don't keep kosher (except by vegetarian-default), and am not really sure how I feel about the concept of praying to a big man in the sky, I don't have a claim on the identity. I made the decision not to attend synagogue - except for family functions - several years ago, because I felt uncomfortable saying things I didn't believe, and nothing about that has changed.

But that doesn't make me any less Jewish, because - for me, at least - it's not about the religion. It's about the culture that I grew up in, and my family with all its Orthodox and Conservative and Reform and non-religious members, and the history of my family and the greater history that they're a part of - and so am I. It's about the fact that every year all the extended members of my family get together in one place for Rosh Hashanah lunch, and eat apples and honey and poached salmon and kugel until we burst, and then go over at dinner two hours later and do it all again. It's about the fact that I read The Yiddish Policeman's Union or The All-Of-A-Kind Family or Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself and even though the lifestyles described in those books are nothing like mine and they're not talking about me - in a way, they still are.

Just the other day, a new acquaintance at work, when introduced, looked at me and asked, "Are you Spanish?" (I am not sure why, but that is not the point of the story.) Automatically I said, "No, I'm Jewish." The point isn't that these are mutually exclusive identities, but that I think this will always be my automatic answer when someone asks 'what I am'. It's a heritage and a culture that's got more than a few issues associated with it - but it's one I'm glad to have nonetheless.

I'm not going to services on Yom Kippur in a week. I'm not taking off work and I'm not going home for a break-fast, although I wish I could. But I am fasting, because even though I'm ambivalent about the religious components, for me that's a part of my Jewish identity too.

L'shana tovah, everyone.