We don't need tribalism, we have religion

an appeal to "secular" american jews

In this moment when Israel is at the forefront of the collective Jewish mind and global, non-Jewish media, many liberal Jews face an extraordinary challenge. Is there a place in American Judaism without political tribalism? How does one connect to their Judaism in a way that won’t brand them a traitor or a self-hating Jew or a genocidal nationalist or a snowflake or a morally bankrupt ignoramus? Naturally, they turn on Seinfeld, or flick through some Jewish cultural media, or have a pastrami sandwich on rye. In a rarer instance, they bravely pick up Philip Roth or Michael Chabon.

Fortunately, American Jewish culture is a sufficiently comfortable distraction from the issue of Israel and Palestine and other Tough Conversations, and just Jewish enough to qualify as “cultural Judaism.” Unfortunately, the spiritual and moral soul of the Jewish people is not sated by Hey Alma or Larry David or bagels (especially of the Pop Up variety), and there is a legitimate threat to the Jewish tradition in our refusal to admit that although American Jewish cultural ephemera might be made by Jews, enjoyed by Jews, and resonant with Jews, it ultimately is not Judaism.

David Mamet, in his 2006 book The Wicked Son, speaks to the Jews who would rather go to a “dogfight, to a bordello, or an opium den, but find ludicrous the notion of a synagogue…who are humble in their desire to learn about Kwanzaa and proud of their ignorance of Tu B’Shevat.” Mamet is addressing the Jew whose loyalties are misaligned. He speaks to the Jew who prefers to join the Black Power Movement or sympathizes with the plight of the Palestinians instead of supporting local Jewish causes or the IDF. In an interview for Jewish Journal shortly after the book’s publication, Mamet said the point of the book is not to criticize another Jew’s practice.

“That’s none of my business,” he claimed.

I agree with Mamet in his critical assessment of those Jews who hold the synagogue in contempt, who shirk their heritage and refuse to engage in the religion of their ancestors, many (if not most) of whom literally died, or at least suffered greatly, for their religious beliefs. But the problem today isn’t that those Jews favor non-Jewish political causes or have anti-Israel sentiments. It’s that there is a lack of Judaism in their lives entirely. And no, following a singular Orthodox woman who shares her life on TikTok for the fetishization and monetization of non-Jews does not suffice as Jewish learning, and you are no more equipped to defend your claim on Judaism because you can parrot how someone who is actually religious defends theirs.

To Mamet and others, a disloyal Jew poses more of a threat to our people than a secular one. Here, I diverge from Mamet. If the continuity of the Jewish people hinged on the political loyalty and cohesion of its members, we would have been in grave danger since the time of the Tanakh, and almost certainly would not have lasted thus far. The radical Zealots, famous for their alleged mass suicide atop Masada in the 1st century CE, caused political strife among the Jewish community for their nominal zealotry and rigid religious interpretations. Pro-Hellenistic Jews clashed with traditional Jews during Greek control of Judea. Even when the seeds of modern Zionist thought were planted in the hearts and minds of 19th-century European Jewry, dissenters were not only prolific in their own right but an invaluable part of the discourse and development of the State of Israel. “Dissent,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in 1971, “is indigenous to Judaism.”

Unlike Mamet, I take no umbrage with “disloyal” Jews. A Jew who engages in political debate on any side (in the Israel conversation or elsewhere) is as indispensable to our tradition as Hillel and Shammai. My concern, instead, is that for liberal Jews who want a Judaism that is not Israel-centric, the fibers that connect those individuals with their ancestors and with each other are stretched dangerously thin by the replacement of the Jewish tradition with non-religious culture. Katz’s Deli and Susan Alexandra will, for better or worse, erode as a binding agent over time. The self-hating Jew, the wicked son (or perhaps the one who does not know to ask, if we must extricate them so neatly) today is not the disloyal Jew, the political pariah or the anti-Zionist, but the one who rejects religious practice altogether in favor of Ashkenazi aesthetics, Jewish mother impressions, alter kaker comedy, and popular culture simulacra of the contemporary Jew.

Young Jews who are torn between their commitment to the proverbial peoplehood of the Zionist institution and their moral instinct don’t need to choose a camp in an effort to maintain their identity. (This is not to say they should not condemn Israel’s indiscriminate violence of Palestinians or the unflinching support of Israel’s military actions by American Jewish institutions.) Rather, Jewish Americans should recognize that pro-Israel Jew or anti-Israel Jew is a false dichotomy, outside of which lies the reality that an individual’s Jewish identity is not incumbent on their national loyalty or lack thereof.

The challenge for these conflicted Jews who neither want to endorse the implications of the modern Jewish state of Israel nor cement their Jewish identity in an anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian activist milieu is that without either, they find themselves culturally homeless. Where does an American Jew fit in the Jewish community if they reject both pro-Israel and anti-Israel as the essence of their Judaism?

To the chagrin of many contemptuous and/or atheistic Jews, the answer is religion. What?!?!? You want ME, a modern, progressive, intellectual young adult to OBSERVE a RELIGION?

Well, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but that’s what your ancestors signed up for! Remember the Torah? That dusty old thing from your bar mitzvah? I know it might not seem as riveting as Broad City, but I have firsthand knowledge that you can be a devoted scholar of both.

Halakha, the word for Jewish law, comes from the Hebrew world l’lechet, or ‘to go’. Judaism is a system that teaches us how to go in the world, how to respond to challenges, how to ask questions, how to grieve and mourn, how to celebrate and appreciate, how to make ourselves better and how to make the world better. It’s an amazing feat of human resilience, moral persistence, and intellectual curiosity that halakha is still being observed and passed down after thousands of years, and even more incredible that it is by nature ever-evolving and flexible and thus can be applied to meet contemporary needs.

Much of halakha is difficult to reconcile for a progressive Jew, but we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. For those who critically engage with those issues (see: every woman rabbi ever), or at the very least disregard those issues altogether and choose to observe what is meaningful to them, it can provide a deeply enriching structure in which to live and guide ethical, existential, and even mundane decisions in life. To the Jew who rejects their religion I ask: do you know that it is for you? Unlike the sitcoms and cynical stand up routines, made kind of for you but mostly for the masses, this tradition is yours. It is for you to learn and to question, to make your own and incorporate into your life in your own way. But to reject it altogether is to take for granted the thing that has sustained Jews and is the operative feature of the heritage you’ve been given – a way of going. In a time when tribalism is the dominant mode of community, your tradition gives you a way out.

It does not escape me that embracing religion is difficult for many simply because it relies on the language and imagery of God. Theism is a challenge for this generation, and understandably so. Our hostile and volatile world can seem uninhabitable for God. It just so happens that the world was as hostile and as volatile, if not more so, in the ancient world from which we received the Torah, and in the classical era in which the exegeses were compiled, and in the Middle Ages out of which came the commentaries of some of our greatest sages, and in the modern centuries in which some of the richest Jewish literature developed out of pogroms and the Holocaust. To think our situation is unique and as such negates the need for our tradition, to which theism is not a secondary component but an intrinsic one, is not only narrow-minded but self-sabotaging.

It’s not my prerogative (not here at least) to excogitate a path to belief for an atheist or agnostic. But I will share something I’ve heard one of my rabbis say many times that will cover this base: if we act as if there is a God, even if we don’t believe it, we will all be better off. If we only act as if there is some exalted judge, a watchful arbiter of accountability, or a divine interlocutor whom we can approach with anything from our deepest troubles to our most trivial moments of gratitude, we are bound to behave differently – better, to be sure.

One of the ways we are different if we live under that premise, is that we are beholden to the tradition our ancestors laid out for us. Fortunately, that tradition has evolved and taken the shape of institutions with differing goals, which means we don’t all have to be fundamentalists. Liberal Judaism in twenty-first century America does not include the subjugation or exclusion of women or gays; it does not require a grand sacrifice of agency or individuality; it does not even require the fulfillment of mitzvot or adherence to halakha as the primary authority in our lives.

Judaism is in fact extremely malleable, and a life of minimal but deliberate observance is not only normative in American Judaism but good for the individual and crucial for the community.

If you are among the millions of American Jews who, in the weeks after October 7, returned to a Friday night Shabbat service for the first time in years, perhaps since childhood, I ask you to turn inward and investigate the nature of your visit. Many have said it was to feel part of a community. For that elusive feeling of belonging that flickers in your heart when chanting the words of the shema in a chorus of voices and when you turn to your neighbor and shake hands and say Shabbat Shalom.

Could it also be that truthfully, the reason you turned to Judaism in the wake of a tragedy was because there was a hint of a whisper of a glimmer of longing for something bigger than yourself? That something like God or even the three-thousand-year-old transmission of a tradition by an unbroken chain of mortal man, though tragedy after tragedy, could help to explain or console the loss on October 7, the horror of indiscriminate violence, the dearth of human dignity in war, the confusion of values in the subsequent Israeli response?

It strikes me that many of my peers either don’t know or don’t care that the feeling of solace and nourishment they got from attending Shabbat services the week after the October 7 attacks can also be achieved in their own homes, in their everyday lives. The warmth of Shabbat candles can penetrate the anxieties of a week, the recitation of a prayer of thanks can ground you in the beauty and singularity of life. Embracing the Jewish calendar in its abundance of holidays big and small can instill meaning in the weeks and months when so much feels mundane and stressful. Learning Jewish texts, especially in community, brings clarity and perspective to your secular life. Add on top of our ancient tradition the varied ways to observe Judaism in a modern world, like disconnecting from technology on Shabbat, and you can build a modern, fulfilling life that is not resistant to religion, but entrenched in it.

For millennia, Jews have fallen on opposite sides of political issues. If it feels like the Jewish community is facing a uniquely difficult divide now, it is not because of the nature of the debate but because we have lost the cohesion of our tradition. Tribalism is not inevitable; it is a symptom of a loss of identity in the American Jewish community. The choice we face now is not whether to be pro-Israel or anti-Israel, but rather how all of us, on all sides, will use this time of strife and collective trauma to shape our tradition and our identities like our ancestors did for us. There is a chance, then and only then, that we can emerge from this moment with more clarity, compassion, and wisdom than before.