All of which partly—but only partly—explains why, when he lowered the boom on me in the autumn of 1967 by suggesting I was a self-hating Jew, it came as an uncushioned blow, an attack out of nowhere, or out of a place of which I was previously unaware. For my parents, as for others of their generation, the post-World War II realization of the scale and nature of the holocaust had prompted a return to organized Judaism. They felt a duty to respect and preserve this entity that had come so close to extinction, a need to embrace Judaism more explicitly, more positively, coupled with shame at the very idea of trying to escape one’s Jewishness—when the Nazis had shown that it was inescapable. It was decided that I would be sent to Sunday school and receive the kind of Jewish education of which my parents themselves had no experience. Like others of my generation, I was expected to pay the price for their renewed sense of Jewishness. As a result of this, I quickly came to know more about Judaism than they did.
The first step for a young couple newly resident in the suburbs (we lived in Westchester County, twenty miles north of New York City) was joining a temple. Interestingly, my parents’ first choice was a Reconstructionist congregation. This fourth major branch of organized American Jewry, the only one born and bred entirely in the USA, defined Judaism as an evolving religious civilization, left ultimate beliefs about the deity up to the individual, and stressed Jewish “peoplehood” and the centrality of building Israel. Crucially for my parents, it also embraced an ethic of social responsibility.
Reconstructionism was then in its infancy, and the congregation we joined was a small one, housed in an old mansion in a neglected neighborhood. I remember it as dark and cavernous, with creaking wooden floors and classes held in rooms without blackboards. The guiding spirit here was the rabbi, portly and smiling but nonetheless in deadly and perpetual earnest. I knew my parents respected him as a man of ideals and integrity. I was enrolled not only in Sunday school, where we learned Torah stories, but also in Hebrew classes. These were taught by an Israeli woman with a heavy accent and a heavier hand. I suspect we were even more incomprehensible to her than she was to us. When one of my classmates just couldn’t fathom the difference between ch as in church and ch as in chutzpah, she berated him and he broke down in tears. I remember feeling profoundly relieved that I had been able to master this alien sound and had escaped, for the moment, the verbal lash.
In contrast to my own weekly routine, the only synagogue activities my parents took part in were the High Holidays, Passover (Reconstructionism favored a communal seder) and occasional meetings with our Sunday school teachers. It must have been in the course of one of these that complaints about the Israeli teacher’s methods were voiced, and subsequently we had a visit from the jolly rabbi, who tried to explain to us that different cultures had different expectations of behavior. The teacher had been spoken to, but the students also had to do their part.
Sometime after this, my parents decided to leave the Reconstructionists and join the local Reform temple, the most popular in the area and the one whose approach to religion was least likely to disturb our family priorities. (“It was also all tied to being a giver to the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and the United Jewish Appeal,” my mother wrote.) The Reconstructionist rabbi asked for a chance to talk my parents out of the switch, and they must have felt they owed him at least a meeting. He came to our house with his usual smile, shook my hand, and joked with dad. Then I was sent upstairs to my room while the adults met downstairs in private. I was aware that for my parents this was an unpleasant task. And I felt complicit: in some way this was being done for my sake, to give me an easier life, because I’d chafed under the Israeli Hebrew teacher. But years later, I learned that I had nothing to do with it. “The rabbi decided that John should be bar mitzvahed,” my mother recalled. “He was then in his mid-thirties and the idea intrigued him, mostly because he would enjoy being a novelty, but you couldn’t get away with this unless you actually studied, and John was not ready for that kind of discipline.”
Initially, I was anxious about going to a new synagogue, partly because it was new, and partly because it was a synagogue and my only experience of one had been weirdly disturbing. But as soon as our car turned into the blacktop driveway, I sensed this would be an entirely different proposition. The building was purpose-built and sleekly modern. The parking lot was crammed with station wagons. Dad escorted me to my classroom, where at once I felt relief. The room was filled with kids I knew from school. There was the one who played quarterback, the one who made funny noises, the one who had all the Batman comic books. So they were Jewish too. I hadn’t known that. There was a map of Israel alongside a map of the USA, but apart from that it looked like the classrooms I knew from school, with colorful posters and a big blackboard.
I felt at home. We all did. We were the most comfortable Jews that had ever walked the planet. Not for us the longing of exile, the pain of dispersal. We were Americans in America. And we were, in particular, suburban American Jewish kids in the early 1960s, blithely self-confident about our privileges and our position in the world. Sublimely safe. That was the beginning of my eight years of Reform Jewish education, which sputtered to an end when I was fifteen and declared, in my confirmation speech, that God was dead and man was condemned to be free.
For the most part, I enjoyed Sunday school. It combined history, literature, philosophy, and politics, the subjects that excited me even before I knew their names, a world of abstract ideas and compelling narratives in which I revelled. I rarely studied but excelled at the exams. Once I was accused of cheating, or rather helping a friend to cheat. He sat next to me, and, without thinking much about it, I had allowed him to copy the answers from my test sheet. The two of us were hauled before the rabbi, who pointed out that we had given identical answers to all the questions. I insisted, and actually believed, that I hadn’t cheated, since I hadn’t benefited, and was astonished when the rabbi refused to swallow this and held me equally guilty of the crime.
Ritual, even in its diluted Reform version, always left me cold. It was something to be squirmed through. (The boy who made funny noises imitated the cantor’s nasal tenor.) But the stories intrigued me, those weird Old Testament tales of sons cheating fathers, brothers selling brothers, spurned wives and martyred daughters, heroic figures who were also incongruous and flawed. Moses was forever irritated with both his people and his God. David and Jacob were deceitful men. Abraham was near murderer of his own son, Isaac. The lessons embedded in these tales were often hard to unravel, but I liked the sweep of them: the history of a whole people and its vexed but special relationship with God. We Jews kept getting it wrong and had to be corrected, and the voices of correction came either as destruction from without or dissent from within. Usually, it was the refusal to heed the latter that led to the former. The prophets warned and were ignored, but in the end they turned out to be right. Somehow all this perversity—on both sides—was for a purpose, testing and shaping us. From Ur to Canaan to Egypt to Canaan to Babylon to Canaan. From Europe to the USA. And back to Canaan. Dispersal and return. Suffering and redemption. We were taught to see this cycle of persecution and survival as more than a tale out of the Bible. The drama of Exodus had been re-enacted in modern times, with the holocaust and the state of Israel, and an end of Jewish history in the twin Zions of America and Israel.
We should have distrusted it from the beginning. It was too rounded.
We learned about the holocaust, the monstrous climax of a centuries-long saga of intolerance. We read The Diary of Anne Frank. We were shown a documentary: trenches in the death camps filled with naked emaciated bodies, piles of gold teeth, skull-faced survivors. “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Even the kids who never paid attention, the kids who couldn’t resist a wisecrack or a giggle, were rapt, solemn. When the film ended there was silence. The teacher then explained in a quiet voice that the lesson of all this horror was that “never again” should such a thing be allowed to happen. When I heard this, I assented with my whole being. It seemed the most undoubtedly truthful big truth I had ever heard, or maybe it was just the first one I had really grasped. Back then I thought it meant “never again” to anyone, anywhere, not just never again to the Jews.
Only twenty years separated
