About six weeks ago, I submitted my saliva to 23andme. Yes, I did the spit test. That means in any day now I will receive information as to whether I am, well, Jewish.
In truth, all my life I have been waiting to find out. No, there is no question about my family’s heritage going back generations. My grandmother’s grandmother is Jewish. My grandfather’s grandfather is Jewish. We are from Poland and Lithuania on my mother’s side, Germany and Russia on my father’s. We have records and pictures, but can anyone know for sure? Will I have true Ashkenazi blood, a little Sephardi, or perhaps something altogether? After all, while my nose is long, my hair curly, it is also red, and my eyes a little more oval shaped than many other Jewish families. Am I really Jewish?
I say this partially in jest, however genetic testing has opened up a new avenue to discovering ancestry. And people have responded. Every few months I get a call or have a conversation with someone who discovered Judaism within their family heritage. They want to know more, to discover more about who their great grandparents were, and possibly to convert to Judaism.
For me, as a rabbi, it has presented a challenge about who is in fact in, and who is in fact out of our communities. Should someone with Jewish ancestry, but absolutely no connection to their Jewish roots, someone that communal surveys label as a “none” (i.e. checks the “none box” under religion even though their parents are Jewish), still be counted as Jewish? Or how about the active member of another faith, a Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or Messianic Jews, who none the less attends our services regularly, be considered part of the Jewish community? Where is the dividing line?
The word Jewish itself is tricky. It is part religion, part nationality, and part ethnicity, all in one. This leads to all sorts of confusion. For example in Israel, we have Jewish-Arab gatherings, not Jewish-Muslim ones. Judaism here is an ethnicity. On international days at schools, Judaism is linked with Israel, and becomes a nationality. In interreligious gatherings, rabbis sit at tables, with Imams, Priests, and Ministers. There, Judaism fits in a religion category.
But, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Judaism is also a historical tradition, a faith, a philosophy, a cultural heritage, a way of life. Mordecai Kaplan, who founded Reconstructionist Judaism, coined the phrase “Judaism as a Civilization.” By this he meant something that “includes the nexus of a history, literature, language, social organization, folk sanctions, standards of conduct, social and spiritual ideals, and esthetic values” (Judaism as a Civilization, 177). In this way, being Jewish was closer to being American than to being Muslim or Christian. Oy va voy, as my former colleague at Temple Beth Zion, Rabbi Gary Pokras, used to answer when he was asked what kind of Jew he was, he would always say, “Reconfusadox.”
We, in short, do not fit easily into any category in identity testing. Let’s take the obvious racial category that is asked in almost every survey – are Jews white? Yes and No. Rachel Cowen who died a month ago, who was born a WASP from New England, but eventually converted and became a rabbi, was told way back in the 1980s that she did not look Jewish, to which she replied: “Funny how Jewish looks these days, isn’t it?”
As I have spoken about previously on High Holy Days, the Jewish community is actually fairly diverse these days with increasingly larger percentages of people who would check off Asian or Black on the race box. If white refers to our ability to assimilate into American society, than the answer is only partially yes. Do we have “white privilege” as a community? The answer is yes and no. We have reached many of the highest offices in the land, and yet, according to the Anti-Defamation League, Anti-Semitism in America is on the rise, surging 60% in 2017.
Judaism and Jews are unusual to say the least. We have lived every corner of the world, with the exception possibly of Antarctica. For the majority of our history, we have lived as a distinct minority culture, able to govern ourselves, but still at the whim of the locality where we lived. Rarely have we been in full control of our own destiny. This has bonded us a group, and created an intense fear for our survival. Rarely, in our long history, have outsiders wanted to become Jewish, to join the fold. This often was illegal or extremely dangerous. This led to potential converts being turned away three times before being accepted as members. Conversion itself is not built into our DNA. Jews have never really proselytized except among their own adherents.
Only in America of today, where ninety-three percent of American Jews like being Jewish, has being Jewish become a good thing and not a status killer. Finally, after all these years of being pariahs, we are wanted. This, as well as genetic testing and other ways of discovering ancestry, has opened up our community in ways not seen since Biblical times.
Just, to be clear there is no Jewish gene. Instead as Dr. Harry Ostrer, a population geneticist and author of the book “Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People” says, it is more of a tapestry. As he told the Jewish Forward, “it is a collection of genetic sequences that scientists have come to identify with a certain community that originated in the Middle East before migrating around the Mediterranean region.” (https://forward.com/news/world/377499/can-23andme-tell-us-if-jews-are-a-race-and-is-that-a-good-thing/)
Identity is more of a feeling than anything definitive. You are Jewish because you have been told by your parents that you are, or because a rabbi or group of rabbis has sanctioned it and made it official. You are Jewish because it is an identity that speaks to you. When Ruth, known as the first convert, told her mother-in-law Naomi, “Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God,” she did this on her own accord. Mikveh, ritual emersion, was not part of the process. When potential converts ask me when they will be ready to complete their process, my answer is always when they feel ready for it.
Coming to services on Yom Kippur, fasting, participating in the age old rituals, cements are Jewish identity. We are doing what ages of Jews have done before us. More than a genetic test, it is a kishkes test, as in “do you feel it in your kishkes?”
So back to 23andme – Will the results of the test change me? Perhaps, but, probably not. We have a spit test ever year – Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, Purim, Passover. Are you here with me today? That is all I need to know. You are Jewish. And, I am glad you are here.
Tzam Kal, an easy fast, and a Happy
Last Updated on 12/20/2018 by Marc Slonim