MEMOIR: RELIGIOUS INQUIRY
Am I a Jew? by Theodore Ross (Hudson Street Press)
The story is told that a group of Jews from New York, on a trip to China, wanted to see the synagogue at Kaifeng in China, where there had been Jews since the 10th century. After some searching, they found the beadle, descended from a long line of indigenous Chinese Jews, who asked them why they wanted to see the shul.
"Well," they answered, "we are Jews from New York, and we are fascinated by the history of the Jewish community here in Kaifeng."
"That's funny," replied the beadle, "you don't look Jewish."
It was, of course, Pontius Pilate, at the trial of Jesus, who first uttered the words, "Am I a Jew?" and since then, at different times and for different reasons, both Jews and gentiles have asked the question: "Who is a Jew?"
The debate reached an unspeakable climax in Nazism, but the debate itself is as old as the community. Every religious group and every culture, as the group or culture grows, matures, struggles, and is renewed, faces continuing questions of identity. There is not just dispute over who is a "real" Jew in our world today. There is violent debate even in contemporary America about who is a "real" Christian or a "real" Muslim, and few Jews today want to allow Hitler to continue to define who is, and who is not, a Jew.
"Am I a Jew?" is the provocative title of Theodore Ross' reflections on coming to terms with an identity that was hidden from his childhood. When he was 9, his divorced Jewish mother from New York took him to Mississippi and raised him as a Christian of sorts. She hated being Jewish, and thought that her son would never have a chance of being a "real American" (there's that word again!) if he was Jewish. Ross always knew that he was Jewish, but this early forced assimilation distanced him from his Jewish roots, roots to which it is now hard for him to be reconnected.
This engaging book is the tale of Ross' wanderings in some of contemporary Judaism's less well-known byways in search of just that reconnection. His writing is fresh and immediate, and he carries the reader on the journey easily. Even in the face of complexity, Ross is never dense. Nor does he avoid the hard issues, especially in confronting his mother about her decision to distance him from Judaism as a child.
So Ross visits the "Crypto-Jewish" community in the Southwest, a tradition that traces its heritage back to forced conversions in medieval Spain, and Sukkah City at Union Square Park in Manhattan, organized by a group that is committed to revitalizing this symbol from the desert for modern urban (and other) American Jews, and a whole range of other people and communities that help to make up the complex picture of contemporary Judaism.
Perhaps most fascinating is his chapter on Ethiopian Jews and their struggles for a new life in Israel. Today Ethiopia remains an extraordinary, if on the whole pre-modern, culture: both the Judaism and Christianity that are practiced there are deeply foreign even to Jews and Christians from other Eastern regions. But there is no beating the story.
According to ancient tradition, Judaism, and by extension Christianity, came to Ethiopia via the Queen of Sheba, who went up to Jerusalem to visit Solomon and who returned to Ethiopia pregnant with Solomon's son, Menelik, who would found Ethiopia's first dynasty. Both Jews and Christians in Ethiopia guard this foundation story jealously, and the famed Ark of the Covenant, which tradition says Menelik brought to Ethiopia, and which is kept, they say, in a church in Axum, seen only by the priest who guards the shrine, is the relic that links Ethiopia to its Solomonic heritage.
Ross falls, possibly, into the category of tinok shenishbah, a so-called "captive child," who is raised by non-Jews and is unacquainted with Jewish life. And he says, towards the end of his exploration, that "Judaism — whether understood as faith, identity, or ethnicity — would never come to me. I would have to move toward it." This is a law of all such identities: They embrace us more than we embrace them. The challenge is always whether, and to what extent, we are willing to give ourselves up to that embrace.
Perhaps Ross has done this, almost unwittingly. In the end, he says, he has "asked the question." "I will continue to do so," he asserts, "That will have to be enough." It is indeed enough. After much searching, especially religious searching, so many people, like Ross, in recognizing at last the holiness of their questioning, find that they have in fact arrived at the goal of their longing.
For, as Saint Thomas Aquinas liked to demonstrate, God is the question, not the answer.