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Personal History

‘Us’ and ‘Them’

At a preschool Hanukkah celebration—held in a nice liberal church—an atheistic Jew wonders where he fits in, and what to tell his daughter

By Thomas Beller|December 23, 2011 7:00 AM|24comments
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Riverside Church. (Collage: Tablet Magazine; parent and child: Andy Leppard/Flickr; Riverside Church: Anand Vivek Taneja/Flickr)

My mother told me this story about her mother. It takes place in Germany in 1918, after she’d read that article by Martin Buber:

That summer she worked as a counselor at a children’s summer camp. One fine summer day, she told me, she was sent with a cart and a donkey and the children’s shoes to the cobbler for repair. On her way she passed a house and saw a plaque saying, “Martin Buber.” So she left the cart and the donkey and the children’s shoes and went into the house and declared (to Buber): “Here I am!” Her words. And she stayed. She apparently offered to work as a secretary, but my mother was no secretary. She was a gardener—I think she was being trained at the time as a gardener, which was a very serious profession at the time—so she worked as a gardener, first at the Bubers’, then later also at his friends’ houses, on his recommendation.

Later on they all found themselves in Israel. Prof. Martin Buber, Prof. Hugo
Bergman, and others, living next door to one another in Jerusalem and teaching at the Hebrew University. They were all my mother’s friends. So was my father’s cousin, who lived in the next house there in Jerusalem, and in whose house I spent many happy childhood days, away from the maddening, unbeloved kibbutz.

7. The rabbi was telling the story of Hanukkah in the Riverside Church Weekday School. I love the Riverside Church Weekday School, and not because some of my earliest memories are of the playground on the fourth floor when I attended the school, at age 4, or because Riverside Church features in a short story of mine as a romantic, if phallic, prop, or how when flying over Manhattan one can see the church standing alone and far away from all the other skyscrapers of midtown, a moral beacon, or even that the church’s theater has for decades been host to progressive performances of dance and theater including dance performances of my mother’s dance company way back when. I love it because, its name notwithstanding, it has a Hanukkah celebration and posters in the lobby announcing its support for Occupy Wall Street and is about as progressive and affirming of liberal values as it is possible to be while occupying an enormous limestone edifice built with Rockefeller money. It is located on a street named after Reinhold Niebuhr, who once credited Buber as being “the greatest living Jewish philosopher.”

8. The rabbi wore a kippah and spoke in an open, sing-song voice, not patronizing but not oblivious to the nature of her audience. I was tuned in, trying to glean facts. I have always been spectacularly obtuse about the facts of Jewish history as they are relayed by religious rituals. For example at Passover, which I grew up celebrating and still do, we used editions of a haggadah that my mother had annotated. I was highly tuned to the pencil markings, especially where they vociferously crossed out the words “The chosen people.” And yet I must have sat through 30 of these ceremonies before one day saying, “Wait a second. Avadim hiyenu. We were slaves. We were slaves? Slaves? We were actually slaves?”

The rabbi had brought a menorah that sat behind her on the windowsill, the marvelous view out of the church’s sixth floor unspooling before us. I feel confident in saying there is no pre-school anywhere whose classrooms have more romantic and glamorous views. The rabbi stood with a large picture book in her hands, turning the pages and telling the story of the ransacked temple, the desire to restore it. She used the word “clean.” She said the temple was “very dirty.” This opened, for me, a previously unexplored dimension to the unfailing oil lamp—it was the light by which the temple was restored. For the first time I had a notion of Hanukkah as a celebration of tidiness, cleanliness, and good housekeeping, something that could be sponsored by Clorox and Purell.

9. The word flew by but I caught it, excited, as though it were the prize I was waiting for. Shouldn’t I have been standing there with an open heart? I was! I was! I swear! But here was a religious observance and I am not religious. I can’t help but litigate, feel contrary. Let’s call it a form of engagement. When I heard it I responded like a lepidopterist leaping with his net, and brought back the prized species, the word “us.”

Continue reading: Is my daughter ‘us’ or ‘them’?

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Thomas Beller teaches writing at Tulane University. His most recent books are The Sleep-Over Artist, a novel, and How To Be A Man: Scenes From a Protracted Boyhood, an essay collection.
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  • http://sehacecamino.com Nancy

    Well, it’s nice to know that I am not the only one that struggles with identity, though I am not an atheist. I am most decidedly a Jew, I just don’t know what kind and to what extent I am willing to practice. All I know is that my children are going to go to Hebrew School because I did, and they will have bat mitzvahs because I did. Our neighbors across the hall are observant and my eldest is envious of their Friday night shul ritual, so I will begin taking them to Friday night services, which is not something I did until I was made to do so in preparation for my Bat Mitzvah. Leave it to children to bring us back into the fold, whatever that fold may be.

  • Liz

    A beautiful piece–thank you, thank you, thank you from an agnostic on a good day Jew living on the Upper East Side.

  • Alex

    Its stories like this which make it more and more clear that the future of the Jewish people rests in Torah observance.

    Another tale from Tablet about intermarriage and the resulting anguish and confusion. These stories are truly tiresome but indicative of the pit we’ve dug ourselves. So many Jews want to fit in but always know or eventually figure out that we are, in fact, different.

    Please publish a story sometime about normal, happy Torah observant families. I don’t care if they’re Sephardi or Ashkenaz. New York, Chicago, LA, Baltimore, or wherever.

  • Sara Ivry

    Alex–the fact that someone grapples with identity and history and future doesn’t mean they are not happy or not normal. In fact, there is nothing, in my reading of this piece, that suggests the writer is not normal or happy. Being married to someone with a similar background does not ensure anything.

  • bucky

    No need to worry my intellectual friend, your children are not Jewish according to normative Halacha, and almost all studies show taht children brought up in mixed marriages almost always choose atheism or Christianity.

  • Bennett Muraskin

    There is an alternative to religious ceremony and ritual for secular Jews. Secular Humanistic Jews celebrate holidays like Chanukah in a humanistic spirit full of Jewish songs, sayings, symbols etc.

    For you atheist/agnostic/non-observant Jews out there, it is worth checking out. NYC, for example, has the City Congregation, the Queens Center for Cultural Judaism and the Workmen’s Circle.

  • Alex M

    Sara Ivry – Sorry, but it won’t fly. 1st: you can’t get around my first point. Torah observance is what has given the Jewish people the strength to survive and will continue to give us that foundation. He isn’t observant. He married a non-Jewish woman (lovely, I’m sure) and has non-Jewish kids. He made his choice. Game over.

    2nd: he clearly is torn. Marriage partners and shared values matter. Choices have consequences. Just read the title and subhead over and over. “Us and Them: At a preschool Hanukkah celebration—held in a nice liberal church—an atheistic Jew wonders where he fits in, and what to tell his daughter.”

    Lets dissect this. He admits Jews and non-Jews are different. He is at a church. He says its nice which means its inviting. Assimilation, anyone? He wonders where he fits in which means he has questions about what he’s doing there. He doesn’t know what to tell his daughter which means he has issues about celebrating a Jewish holiday in a Church let alone that his daughter isn’t Jewish since his wife isn’t. He is an atheist but finds some value in being Jewish. Whats that about? If its all garbage, then why bother with the charade? Its his Neshama struggling, that’s whats going on.

    Tonight millions of observant Jewish families around the world will celebrate Shabbos and the 4th night of Chanukah, lighting candles early. The men will go to Shul. The women will prepare for Shabbos and create an atmosphere which only women, the backbone of the Jewish people, can in a celebration worthy of HaShem. The men will sing Aishes Chayil and we will fill the air with discussions of Torah. In the morning the Torah will be read as it has been done since Mt. Sinai. We’ll devote the day to HaShem, family, learning and rest. Sounds nice, right?

    That’s the future of the Jewish people, not stories from gentlemen like Mr. Beller. Sara Ivry, I understand where you’re coming from and I’m sure Mr. Beller is a nice, normal person. But committed Jew he is not.

  • henry gottlieb

    ALL jews pick ang choose what they wish to observe …..
    consider meat and milk 3 or 4 hours
    the rear half of the cow or the sciattica nerve
    moses married a gentile
    don’t be so fast in your rule gathering
    MEANWHILE we both christians and jews are celebrating NYROT
    the soltice ……..

  • Alex M

    I yearn for the day when the biggest question on Jews minds are whether to wait 3 hours or 6 hours between meat and dairy!

  • PaulaM

    This essay is infused with regret and longing but Mr. Beller needs to act on those feelings – Judaism is an active, doing religion and I suggest that he set aside issues of non-belief, they are really not germane to teaching his daughter how to live Jewishly. She is young and there is still time,unless his wife is opposed; however, the author needs to climb on the first rung of the ladder of observance and play an active role in his own learning and observance in order to lead his daughter. Pick something, anything, and do it. If it matters to him, it will matter to his daughter. In an intermarriage especially, religious identity is the responsibility of the person to whom it matters enough to act on it. He can’t stand in the back of the room and only watch.

  • http://onbeingboth.com Susan Katz Miller

    Oh! So lovely. We, the interfaith children, embody both the Us and Them. Somehow, we find we can do this, and even draw creative energy from our double-belonging. The dissonance sounds musical, like jazz, to me.

  • http://icouldbewrong.blogspot.com Dan Simon

    Poor Thomas Beller–as a secular atheist of Jewish descent, he’s spent a lifetime as a Jew feeling smugly superior to the majority culture, and as a secular atheist feeling smugly superior to his own Jewish heritage. But now he has a daughter, and he suddenly realizes–having raised her in a secular atheist household in a secular atheist social environment, he has denied her the most important gift of all: something she can feel smugly superior to…

  • Rocky

    Thomas is dealing with more than just intermarriage. I suspect that there are a number of Aryans in his family tree and that his grandmother and mother were considered Mischlings (mixed race Jews) in the eyes of the Third Reich. In January 1933, an estimated 500,000 Mischlings lived in Germany, whose only link to Judaism may have been as little as having one Jewish grandparent. His grandmother’s move to Palestine (in 1936, I’m guessing) probably saved her life and that of her daughter. She was certainly not moving to live a Jewish life. I wonder how much influence his father and grandfathers had on his life. Were they even Jewish?

  • Bill Pearlman

    Alex is right. he married a non Jewish woman and has a daughter that goes to a church school. The Jewish part of his family history is done, finished. Now he has what, regret, angst, guilt. Who cares. The other posters are right. These stories are boring already.

  • http://roquenuevo.tumblr.com/ Roque Nuevo

    I’m an atheist Jew whose children are the product of (what would be called) and intermarriage with a lapsed Catholic. If I have any belief at all, it would be Roman Stoicism. Or Taoism. Or paganism, as the author.

    I have a Menorah on my doorpost, as the Holy Scriptures enjoin, but that’s because my mother gave it to me and I don’t have the heart to either put it away in a drawer somewhere or to throw it away. Nobody where I live knows what it is, even if they notice it. When they do and when they ask me about it, I tell them it’s because I’m Jewish and the Menorah is a public announcement of my Judaism, even if I’m atheist.

    I will never hide my origins but I won’t hide my atheism either.

    My moment of truth came when my youngest daughter was around five years old. One evening as I was preparing her supper she just looked at me and asked, “Does God exist?” What to tell her? That some people believe (like her maternal grandmother), but I don’t and that’s OK? That nobody knows, but a lot of people believe (like her maternal grandmother)? Why confuse the little girl even more? I just said, “No.” And that was the end of the discussion. I was surprised and gratified how easy it was to affirm my atheism.

    My oldest daughter got herself baptized a Catholic in secret when she was a teenager (I think). The two younger ones are atheists, thus confirming the commenter above who says that children of intermarriages turn out atheist.

    As for spiritual belief, I’m with the author who believes in “the gods.” This induces humility, since the gods play with humans for their own reasons, letting them win if it serves them, but most of the time making them lose. Is this a Jewish attitude towards the Deity? Like the song says, “You win a while, and then it’s done—/Your little winning streak.(L. Cohen)”

  • June

    I came away from reading this story with the feeling that Thomas Beller indeed does have regrets. He regrets that he does not know what it means to be Jewish other than as some sort of classification. For some reason he seems to yearn and cling to this classification. I feel for him. If he wants his daughter to want to identify with a part of her being Jewish, he should start to learn something about Judiasm himself. He would feel better and he would be in a position to share this gift with her.

    Coincidently, I met a very nice person last week who happily told me he was 1/16th Jewish. He did not have a clue what that meant.

  • http://www.zoharme.com Alexdro

    ‘Happy Hanukkah’
    http://www.thedailyzohars.com
    Graphic Commentary on Hidden Spark

  • FromReformtoMasorti

    actully Mr Bailers daughter is almost certainly not Jewish even according to Reform. the official Reform position is that children of an intermarriage (regardless of which parent is jewish) are Jewish IF they are raised as Jews, with a jewish education at a synagogue religious school. While his daughter is still young enough that that is a possibility, it does not sound like this family is headed in that direction.

  • http://www.englishquickly.com Reb. Moshe Zalman

    B”H It might be said that the traiditions associated with Chanukah are meant to preserve the willingness of the Jewish People to survive throughout the history that saught our destruction. One need not obsess with civil rights where survival is concerned; doing Tradition is the answer to those who profess a diety we believe is not the Lord Our G-d the Lord is One.
    researech the books available at http://www.englishquickly.com and glean the depth of Jewish Identity in the Modern Era

  • george

    I had an overwhelming sense of sadness reading this article – the writings of a man whose grandchildren have a 1 in 10 chance of considering themselves Jewish, who was given the gift of Judaism and who threw it away, who sends his child to a Christian school yet somehow hopes she will retain vestiges of her Judaism. Which raises the question why he cares – if Judaism meant something to him he would have married Jewish, his child would be attending a Jewish School. Bagels and lox are not worth fighting for and isn’t it racist to want to continue a tribal connection when there is no agreement with the core beliefs of the Jewish religion? Thomas, perhaps you have thrown away the changes for your progeny to be Jewish, but it’s not too late for you; find a shul, join, and find yourself.

  • shlomo

    If the author is confused not only about religion he is confused about history and especially about Jewish history.

    IF his mother took him to a kibbutz, did she have a choice of were they would end up during the Nazi period?

    HE SHOULD BE GRATEFUL THAT THERE WAS A JEWIH COMMUNITY THAT COULD. AKE THEM IN.

  • Susan Kane

    Wow, folks. You know, there is something between not-knowing much of anything about Jewishness and being a Torah-observant Jew. Most self-identified American Jews live in this middle space and it’s not such a bad place to be.

    The reality is that it is almost impossible to pass down to one’s children anything that is not clear to you. If you have vague, conflicted feelings about something, it’s not something you’re going to be able to convey to a child.

    A lot of us have conflicted feelings about being Jewish — it comes with the territory. But those of us who want our children to actually continue being Jewish have given up on vague. What we didn’t know, we learned. (We can read.) What we didn’t believe, we made some decisions about, decisions we can live with and explain.

    We do not rely on Chanukah and Passover to save us, not in America and certainly, my friend, not in the American South.

    Being a Jewish atheist is an honorable and proud identity, but will the children of a Jewish atheist be Jewish atheists? Will they bother to take a stand against something their families consider irrelevant? Will they take a stand for something their families are confused about? Probably not.

    In Israel, those kids would still be Jewish b/c they’ve got a whole country full of Jewish atheists before them. Not the case here, so you do the math.

    I’m not going to tell you that you’re a lost cause nor that you should start lighting shabbos candles. I’m just going to tell you that sustaining a minority identity — of any type — requires some work on your part.

    In short, stop being so lazy. You want your kid to care about her roots? Figure out what they mean to you. Do some intellectual work here.

    And no, writing about your angst doesn’t cut it — not with the five year old set. They’re a tough crowd and they ask tough questions. I’d get started sooner rather than later.

  • ben

    Alex
    “The men will sing Aishes Chayil”

    No they will sing Ishat Hayil. Please speak Hebrew, the Jewish people language, and not the deformed Yiddish accented version – like all Ashkenazi haredi Judaism, a perversion of normal, traditional Judaism – not less than Reform or Conservative Judaism.

    Anyway – Judaism is not a religion. Jews are a Nation with its land, its laws – the Torah -, and its language. Jews in the USA are in exile and should come back to their country or disappear. Which is exactly what is going on.

  • Alex

    Ben,

    Your response is very unfortunate. Instead of finding common ground, and I am sure you and I agree on a lot, you decided to pick on pronunciation.

    Not only that, but you decided to denegrate all Ashkenazim. I observe Shabbos. You observe Shabbat. Its the same thing and we do it for the same reasons.

    Reform and Conservative have created terrible problems for the Jewish people. To equate them with Torah Judaism as done by Jews whose ancestors have been in Europe for the last 2000 years, give or take, is flat out wrong. You should know better.

    We have to be brothers and if we aren’t united, then only problems will follow. Personally, I don’t care if Jews have a Sephardi, Ashkenazi, or any other minchag. All I care is that they be observant, and if they aren’t, I care that they see flashes of beauty from the Torah which we both believe is truth. I also want non observant Jews to see that many observant Jews are good people and not the problematic and violent hypocrites on display in the news today.

    Ben, we celebrate the same holidays and have the same ancestors at Sinai and going back to our forefathers Avraham, Yaakov, and Yitzhak.

    Focus on that before you insult Jews who live to connect with HaShem just as you. You are correct about the dangers of assimilation although it is less of an issue for the Orthodox. Still, the waves of American culture are relentless. There are also problems of assimilation in Israel away from the Torah. At least they won’t physically disappear but many Israeli friends of mine are atheist. What a tragedy! Jews living in Eretz Yisrael and atheist! We can both find this saddening, right?

    When I make Aliyah in a couple years after yeshiva in Yerushalayim, and we ever meet, I’ll invite you over for Shabbos. Call this holy day whatever you like, but we’re on the same team.

    Alex

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‘Us’ and ‘Them’

At a preschool Hanukkah celebration—held in a nice liberal church—an atheistic Jew wonders where he fits in, and what to tell his daughter