Changing the Name of the Blog

From “Skeptical Jew” to “Skeptical Observations.”

I have to confess that I have always been somewhat uncomfortable with the title that I originally chose for this weblog—Skeptical Jew. As I noted in one entry (“Funny Word, Funnier Concept”), the word “Jew,” perhaps in some degree because of its rather curt sound, carries with it an echo of the scornful tone with which it has at times been uttered—so much so that many non-Jews shy away from using it for fear of sounding anti-Jewish. I was perhaps depending on the insider’s prerogative in entitling my blog “Skeptical Jew”: “Jew” is the standard classificatory term in English for one of such origins as mine, so I can use it with impunity. But I am suspicious on principle of reliance on such insider’s privileges. What is more, I could still hear that echo. So I retained a degree of discomfort with putting the word, as a description of myself, into the title of my blog.

Recently, another consideration has added to my misgivings. Although I have made more frequent entries to the blog of late than I was doing for several months, I have found myself with less and less to say about Jewish topics. This was perhaps inevitable, my knowledge of Judaism being as meager as it is (meager, I mean, not by comparison with what people in general know, but by comparison with what Jews of extensive religious education know). One of the aims with which I started this blog was to reflect on my perplexing condition of being a Jew by something more than descent and upbringing alone, yet less than belief. But since writing three rather inconclusive entries on this topic early on (“Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish,” “Reply to Comment on Jewish Identity,” and “On Being Skeptical”), I have had no new thoughts about it.

I have decided, therefore, to drop the “Jewish” theme from my title while keeping the skeptical one. “Observations” is a loose enough term to capture anything that I may wish to do here, while “skeptical” describes my temperament and my epistemological orientation rather than an object of concern. I hope that I shall have further things to say about Judaism and being Jewish. But I will no longer make any effort to bend my thoughts toward them any more than they are naturally inclined to go.

Judaism, Jewry, and Jews

The statement “Judaism is a people, not (just) a religion” seems like an important truth, but it is not even logically coherent. “Jewry is a people” is true and coherent, but banal. Here is how to capture both the truth and the importance without losing coherence.

GS on his blog OrthoModerndox posted an entry today with a title well calcluated to attract my interest: “Judaism as a nation, not [just] a religion” (the square brackets are part of the title). In this piece, GS offers some thoughts provoked by his reading The Body of Faith: God in the People Israel by Michael Wyschogrod. “One of his main themes,” he says of Wyschogrod, “is that Judaism is a people / nation rather than [just] a religion” (the square brackets are, again, in the original text). This is a topic on which I have written on this blog before (in “Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish” and “Reply to Comment on Jewish Identity”), and I’m not sure that there is anything new in what I have to say about it here. But that one sentence raised some thoughts in my mind of which I make an occasion for reviving my own blog. The new year (5771) seems like as good a time as any for doing such a thing.

Now, I don’t doubt that GS, like most bloggers, and in sharp contrast to me, writes quickly, without spending a lot of time recomposing his sentences, as I invariably do. The typing error in his first sentence (“intersting” for “interesting”) is sufficient evidence of that. Nonetheless, I am going to pick on the statement that I quoted from him, for the following reasons.

First, it is a very difficult matter to state the relation among the concepts of Judaism, religion, and peoplehood. One can’t just make an incoherent statement on that point and then say, “Well, you know what I mean.” If you can’t say what you mean, then you can’t assume that your audience knows what you mean, because you have not shown that you know what you mean.

Second, the statement “Judaism is a people,” given the now current meaning of the word “Judaism” (more on that qualification in a moment), is not a coherent one. The predicate term “people” and the subject term “Judaism” do not belong to the same logical category. Of course Judaism is a religion: that is what we have the word “Judaism” for, as contrasted with terms like “Jew,” “Jewry,” and “Jewish people” (as a singular or plural noun). To say “Judaism is a people” is as senseless as saying “Five is a color.”

Now I have to admit one qualification here. I recently learned from the Oxford English Dictionary that the term “Judaism” was at one time used in a sense corresponding to that of judaismus in medieval Latin, namely to mean “Jewry.” Thus, a source from 1884 (the latest example of this usage provided) says: “The revenue of the Judaism, as it was termed, was managed by a separate branch of the exchequer, termed the exchequer of the Jews.”

If GS meant the term in this sense, then his statement is not logically incoherent at all. It was much as if he had written: “Jewry is a people,” “The Jewish people is a people.” But, for one thing, I find it unlikely that he had in mind any such rare and antiquated sense of the word “Judaism.” For another, if he did mean this, then his statement is banal and uninteresting. I prefer to assume that he was trying to say something both true and interesting.

I think that what GS was trying to say can be most exactly expressed thus: “The status of being a Jew is essentially a matter of belonging to the Jewish people rather than one of professing or practicing the Jewish religion.” This, I think, is an interesting statement, and a true one as well (subject, of course, to questions about the meaning of the crucial adverb “essentially”: more on that in a moment).

But the statement contains at least the suggestion of a falsehood. For it suggests that the connection of being a Jew with the Jewish religion is accidental: as if “Judaism” were the name of a religion that just happened to be practiced by a large portion of the Jewish population—as, e.g., Armenian Orthodox Christianity is practiced by a large portion of the world’s Armenians, but is not what defines them as Armenians.

As a matter of history, such a suggestion (concerning the Jewish people) is obviously false. The Jewish people have, through most of their history, defined themselves as the people of the Torah. In some sense, we still are so defined: that is, we are definable as the descendants of the people of the Torah, even if we are not all practitioners or believers of the Torah. Such a definition, whatever exactly it means, clearly depends religious terms.

The slippage between “Jew” and “adherent (by profession or observance) of Judaism” comes about because, according to the Torah that defines the Jewish people collectively, the individual Jew is defined as such by his or her birth. In terms of the category of “religion,” this means that it is a religious practice that defines that status, though it defines it in terms of birth rather than in terms of belief or observance.

So those who consider themselves Jews in something more than a purely ethnic sense but who cannot accept Jewish (or any) religious beliefs have the problem that their self-identification as Jews presupposes a religious practice whose fundamental beliefs they cannot accept. They are—that is, we are—in an inherently uncomfortable position.

This discomfort does not arise merely for those who are, like GS, “Orthoprax,” that is, observant of the ritual practices of Orthodox Judaism while rejecting most of the beliefs that support that practice (such as “TMS,” the doctrine that the whole Torah, oral and written, was given to the Israelites through Moses at Mount Sinai). It arises even for the “three-day-a-year” Jew, whose observances do not extend beyond partaking of a seder at Passover and going to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (something that I have bound myself to do every year by accepting a paid gig in the choir of a Reform temple), as long as he or she does so under some sense, however vague and unformulated, of an obligation other than an immediate social one. It applies to the unbelieving Jew who refrains from eating pork and shellfish for reasons that cannot be attributed to personal distaste or matters of health (false rationalizations notwithstanding). The unbelieving Jew who considers himself or herself under so much as one obligation—one mitzvah—merely because he or she is a Jew has this problem.

Funny Word, Funnier Concept

The word “Jew” is odd enough considered merely as a phonetic phenomenon; it gets even funnier when you try to figure out exactly what it means.

Jerry Seinfeld

Is not the word “Jew” somewhat—well, funny? That a religious identity with three thousand years of often tragic history behind it, the source of some of the founding texts of Western and Near Eastern civilization, should be signified in our language by a paltry monosyllable is, to say the least, incongruous. More than that, the word has at least a potentially humorous ring to it. Thus an elective class at the religious school that I attended as a boy was whimsically titled “Jews in the News.” (That is the kind of measure to which a Reform Jewish Sunday school—and yes, it was held on Sundays, not Saturdays—resorted in its efforts to avoid boring us: elevating the hallowed pastime of Jew-spotting to an academic subject.) My classmates and I were inspired by this title to add “Jews in Trees” to the list of classes on a bulletin board. But the impulse to play around with the word started with the grown-ups, not with us.

Of course, it may well be that I can say such things only because I had the good fortune to grow up without hearing the word “Jew” used in hatred and contempt, something that I imagine most Jews of earlier generations in English-speaking countries cannot say (to say nothing of Jews in countries of other languages). Even today, many people, especially non-Jews, shy away from using the word and substitute the dainty phrase “Jewish person” for fear of giving offense. I suspect that I am not the only one who finds something jarring in the designation of a rabbinical college in London as “Jews’ College.” (I suspect that that is one reason why in 1999 it changed its name to “London School of Jewish Studies.”)

As far as its origins are concerned, the curtness of the word “Jew” says more about the eliding tendencies of the French language than about the sentiments of those who have used it. It was in French that the word for one belonging to the tribe or the kingdom of Judah, transmitted in trisyllabic form from Hebrew (y’hūdī) by way of Aramaic (y'hūdāi), Greek (ioudaios), and Latin (iūdæus), was reduced to a monosyllable, variously written giu, gyu, or giue, before ending up in English as “Jew.” (Source: Oxford English Dictionary.)

And yet, the very word that is innocent in one language can become a slur in another. In English, “Yid” is an ethnic slur; in Yiddish, it is just the word for “Jew.” “Zhid” (жид) in Russian is an offensive term, while a word of identical sound and origin in Czech (žid), Slovak (the same), and Polish (Żyd) carries no derisive connotation. 

Whatever the oddities of the word “Jew” and its monosyllabic equivalents in some other languages, they are superficial compared to the oddities of the concept expressed by the word. In my first entry in this blog (“Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish,” December 27, 2009), I considered three possible ways of understanding what a Jew is: (1) one who belongs to the Jewish people, (2) one who practices Judaism, and (3) one who adheres to the Jewish faith. That last phrase, “the Jewish faith,” makes me cringe somewhat, as it so strongly suggests attempts to assimilate Judaism to a Christian, and more specifically a Protestant, model of religion as “faith.” Of course, Judaism is a religion and does involve faith, both in the sense of a body of theistic and eschatological beliefs and in the sense of trust in a divinity (at least in most of its varieties). But it would be an error to presume that the beliefs define the religion or that they are more fundamental than the observances.

The relation between belief and observance in Judaism is subject to endless disputation. Yet it is merely one “funny” element of the concept of being a Jew. Let us simplify the matter by distinguishing between only two rather than three aspects of Jewishness: belonging to the Jewish people on the one hand, and accepting—whether that means practicing, professing, or both—Judaism on the other. Now it seems plain that the first of these has priority; for one who is born into the Jewish people is a Jew, regardless of whether he or she accepts Judaism, while someone not born into the Jewish people and not converted by a rabbi is not a Jew no matter what practices or professions he or she may make.

Is the term then an ethnic designation, or a term of descent? Not at all. In the first place, one can become a Jew by conversion. There is no such thing as converting to an ethnic membership, and while one may be adopted into a family, one does not thereby acquire a new descent. In the second place, it is religious practice that determines membership in the Jewish people (a.k.a. Israel), not in the sense that you have to practice Judaism to count as a Jew, but in the sense that it is Jewish practice that determines the criteria for so counting. Traditionally, the primary criterion is that one is born of a Jewish woman. Reform Judaism also accepts patrilineal descent under certain conditions as sufficient for membership. Whatever the specifics, the important point is that the criteria of belonging are themselves a matter of religious practice. The Jewish religion determines both a religious condition (conversion) and a non-religious condition (descent) for belonging to the Jewish people; and the non-religious condition is the normal or default condition. A Jew is, by and large, such by dint of being the child of Jewish parents.

So the term “Jew” compresses into one syllable at least two pairs of divergent but mutually inseparable aspects of Jewish identity: religious belief and religious observance on the one hand, religious practice and descent on the other. Anyone who tries to impose an either–or on these matters and make the term unidimensionally a matter of, say, religious profession or observance or descent—just one and not any other—does not even understand what the word means.

Is this logically incoherent? Of course not. It merely refuses to conform to certain a priori expectations. Face it: it’s a funny word.

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Reply to Comment on Jewish Identity

There is more to belonging than just a sense of belonging: the entity to which you feel that you belong must really exist, and you must really be included in it. I belong to the Jewish people even though I do not accept Jewish beliefs, but only because of a practice that rests on those beliefs—which leaves me in an uneasy position.

Source

A few days ago, Rogueregime posted some comments on my first three blog entries to which I think any adequate reply would have to be somewhat lengthy. So here, as another entry rather than a mere comment, is my reply to one of them—his comment on my first entry, “Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish.” (I expect to reply to his other comments in subsequent entries.)

Responding to my having written, “It may be, for all I know, that my sense of belonging is in fact illusory and superstitious,” Rogueregime asks me:

I’m curious to know more about what you actually experience when you say you feel a “sense of belonging.” Certainly it can’t be illusory if you feel something, right? How does your sense of belonging to the Jewish people differ from, say, your sense of being an American? Is there a difference, and if so, what is it?

I will answer the rhetorical question in the second sentence first, because I think that it will clarify the other matters. Perhaps my expression was not as clear as it could have been, but I take it that someone may have a sense of belonging to some larger entity when in fact he does not, either because the entity does not include him or because it does not exist. Such a possibility is what I meant by an illusory sense of belonging: it is a sense of belonging that does not rest on an actual fact of belonging.

The application to my own case is that I feel that I belong to the Jewish people, but the veracity of that feeling is problematic for me because of my religious doubts. If the grammatically singular term “Jewish people” merely signifies the totality of those who are Jewish by either matrilineal descent or conversion to Judaism, then my belonging to that totality is a natural fact of which I may be assured, but it is hardly a matter of life-shaping importance. Why should it matter that I belong to a group that is defined in such an oddly disjunct manner? Why should a group be so defined?

The only kind of belonging to the Jewish people that could have what I called life-shaping importance, as far as I can make out, is one that derives from religious tradition. For instance, if I accepted the doctrine that the Jewish people (or the nation of Israel, of which the Jews of today are the surviving remnant) is constituted by a covenant with God made at Mount Sinai, then I would have no difficulty attributing a real basis to my sense of belonging, and explaining why and how my belonging matters to the conduct of my life. But I don’t accept that doctrine, and it seems to me unlikely that I shall ever do so.

What actually obtains is the following rather complicated arrangement: I am counted, by a Jewish tradition founded on beliefs that I do not share, as belonging, by virtue of a natural fact of descent, to a people constituted by a hereditary supernatural bond. The fact of my descent provides me, so to speak, with my membership; experience provides me with my sense of belonging; but in what way I actually do belong, and to what exactly I belong, are questions that I have not been able to answer. If this convoluted reasoning gives you a headache, I am sorry, but I can tell you that it is no easier to be the source and object of it!

Rogueregime also asks me what experiences I have in mind when I speak of this “sense of belonging,” and how it differs from my sense of being American. Well, in both cases I regard certain chapters of history to be in some sense “my” history, because they concern an entity to which I belong; in both cases, though there are things in that history that appall me, I tend to prickle when outsiders find fault with my “people”; in both cases, I recognize that my membership conditions my ways of thinking, feeling, and acting; so there are a lot of similarities. But, for one thing, I can imagine circumstances in which I might trade the political part of my American identity, that is, my citizenship, for another national identity, while I cannot imagine circumstances in which I would trade the religious part of my Jewish identity—even though it remains largely, so to speak, unused—for some other religious identity. I don’t know that I can honestly say that I would sooner die, but the feeling seems to me to come pretty close to that. More of that on another occasion, perhaps. The main point is that the Jewish identity, by my subjective estimate, goes deeper.

Finally, Rogueregime posed this question about my proposed three ways of looking at what it is to be Jewish:

Is there not a sense in which one is Jewish not because of anything you think, say or do, but because others see you as a Jew? The fourth “way” would then be “One who other Jews says is a Jew."

Well, the definition (if it can be called that) has an obvious circularity, though an analogous circularity has not deterred some philosophers of recent times from using similar tactics in formulating so-called conventionalist definitions of art. In my estimate, though, this way of looking at Jewish identity, like those definitions, achieves a tidy outcome by trivializing the question that it purports to answer. You illustrate the application of the definition with the case of an Israeli-born friend who recognizes that she counts as Jewish because her mother is Jewish, but to whom the identification has no value or significance. The proposed definition is well suited to the outlook of such a person, but it evades the question of why “other Jews” call someone Jewish. To say that they do so because the person’s mother is Jewish takes us to the question: why do they do that? The answer then must be in terms of Jewish tradition and Jewish law. And then we have to ask what kind of authority such tradition and law have. So if we are seriously trying to explain what a Jew is or what makes someone Jewish, we can’t avoid those difficult questions.

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Three Ways of Looking at Being Jewish

My first version of the title of this post was “Three Ways of Looking at a Jew.” The parody held some charm for me (if you don't get the allusion, look here), but I chose to replace it with a title that better reflects the actual content to follow. The three aspects are: belonging to the Jewish people, practicing Judaism, and adhering to Jewish beliefs. Relations among the three are complicated.

Kahal Shalom Synagogue, Rhodes

Here are three ways in which one might think of what a Jew is:

1. One who belongs to the Jewish people.
2. One who practices Judaism.
3. One who adheres to the Jewish faith.

It would be nice, wouldn’t it—I mean, as far as intellectual comfort is concerned—if these three descriptions invariably coincided. For if they did, then any question of what it means to be a Jew would be, in the end, academic: a potentially interesting matter to think about, but not an urgent or a necessary one, and above all not a troubling one. But I cannot imagine a world in which those three descriptions invariably coincide—other than, I suppose, a world without Jews.

I could not define any of those three items without entangling myself in controversies that would soon take me out of my depth. Nonetheless, I believe that I fit the first description—“one who belongs to the Jewish people”—and that this by itself makes me a Jew. Or perhaps I should say that my being a Jew makes me a member of the Jewish people rather than the other way around. In any case, the fact that I practice almost no Jewish observances and accept none of the theistic and eschatological beliefs of Judaism does not raise any doubt in my mind about my Jewish identity. (I suppose that in the eyes of Orthodox Jews I would be a kind of virtual goy; but, since I was born of a Jewish mother, they would still count me as Jewish under halakhah.)

It may seem, then, that for me the question of what it means to be a Jew should be academic after all. For if I am sure that I am Jewish, regardless of my being without Jewish observances and beliefs, then what need is there for me to perplex myself about these various aspects of being Jewish? Let the believing Jews worry about such things!

But the matter is not so simple. For one thing, although the primary criterion of belonging to the Jewish people, and thus of being a Jew, is that one is born of a Jewish mother, this criterion is itself a product of religious law. So one who takes himself to belong by birth to the Jewish people, as I do, is thereby appealing to religious law, and thus to religious practice and belief. To be sure, one can belong to the Jewish people without believing or practicing Judaism, as one can believe without belonging or practicing, or practice without belonging or believing: the three items can occur independently of one another. But they cannot be conceived independently of one another. So the non-believing, non-practicing Jew who considers himself to belong to the Jewish people is thereby entangled in a problem that is anything but academic: how can I belong to a people defined by a religious law that I do not myself accept? If I don't accept the law—if I neither observe it nor accept the beliefs on which its authority rests—do I in fact belong?

One possible response to this problem is simply to give up the idea that one belongs to the Jewish people. Indeed, to be consistent, one would have to deny that there is any such thing as the Jewish people. One would not deny, of course, that there are Jewish people, that is, persons of Jewish descent, most of whom happen to profess a certain religion called Judaism; but one would have to deny that they constitute a people in any serious sense—a sense weighty enough to generate an obligation to continue the traditions of that people, for instance.

I know that many Jews do take this route. For them, being “Jewish” is purely a matter of descent, like being “Irish” or “Italian” as Americans commonly use those terms, meaning that one has forebears of the nationality in question. Such a way of regarding Jewish identity seems coherent and rationally defensible, at least on its face. That is more than I can say for the option that I have taken, that of regarding myself as a member of the Jewish people without accepting the religious beliefs or, for the most part (more on this qualification later), the practices on which that identification seems to rest.

It may be, for all I know, that my sense of belonging is in fact illusory and superstitious. But it may also be that it is not, and that I have simply been unable to figure out what it does in fact rest on. It could rest on accidents of personal history and emotional association, or it could rest on something immeasurably precious that I have so far failed to comprehend. The best bet for me, in my estimation, is simply to press on with my inquiries. A skeptic, as I use the term, is not simply one who doubts, but one who requires sufficient reason for any proposed conclusion in a matter that admits of reasonable doubt. In the present instance, that includes requiring rational substantiation of my own doubts: they may be founded on insights, or on blind spots. Thus I remain a skeptical Jew.

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