Who is a Jew? Part Three

JC: We are not meant to live in ghettos. It was our enemies who forced us into ghettos.

Rabbinic Judaism today is so concerned with halachic matters, Without Jewish morals and ethics they are meaningless. Rabbi Jeffrey Cohen

NG: Some people are comfortable in that environment.

JC: But it is not natural to the Jewish ethos to have a ghetto mentality.

NG: You tell that to the people living in Barnet. Do you remember the controversy about the eruv? This group of people living in Barnet fought so hard for so long to have this device, this piece of wire wrapped around Barnet, not wrapped around the M25 which would have given Jews throughout Greater London the right to push prams or carry keys on Shabbat, but just the people of Barnet.

HJ: I would have thought there is a great deal of evidence that we do like ghettoising ourselves, or else why are they all doing it? Why else would you go to live in bloody Barnet? There is a pull in us. One way is to gather together and enjoy the community of one another, and our particular sense of humour. The other is to go out. The going out, the leaving, the whoring after strange gods, has got a thrill. It has sin attached. I wonder if this whole business of gathering together and then breaking out goes with being a monotheistic people. We are the first monotheistic people. When you have a God instead of lots of gods, you have the thrill of apostasy. He even says it Himself: “I am your one God and you mustn’t go whoring after others.” Hang on a minute, there aren’t any others! He invites it. He is a jealous God and he invites us to betray him. Is this contradiction not built into the business of not just that we are monotheists, but we are the first monotheists?

GJ: Jeffrey, since you have been trying to get the system changed for 40 years, do you, as a distinguished Orthodox rabbi, believe that conversion to Judaism should be simplified, perhaps to the extent that Jonathan is advocating, which is just to repeat Ruth’s words?

JC: Not only do I believe it but I can prove it, because one only has to read the laws of conversion in Shulchan Aruch Yoreh Deah, chapter 268, in the great Joseph Karo’s formulation to see how conversion can be such a simple thing. This is what he says: “Someone comes to become converted. You circumcise him and you dip him in the mikveh. You tell him some of the light precepts of Judaism and some of the more weighty precepts of Judaism. But you don’t overdo it.” That is what he said. You don’t overdo it. “Then you say to him: ‘Why do you want to become a Jew? Don’t you know how oppressed we Jews are today?’ Then you say to him: ‘The reason why we are oppressed is because, if God gave us all the reward in this world for being his chosen people, the enjoyment of it might send us astray. Therefore God keeps it for the future.’” Why we do this? In order, says the Shulchan Aruch, not to deter him. It then states: “If he says, ‘I understand that and I accept it,’ you accept him.” The Shulchan Aruch also says that a non-professional, lay Beth Din can do this.

There is another, later authority called the Taz, and he is more stringent. The later Ashkenazi authorities could afford to be stringent because they were talking theoretically. How many non-Jews in Poland wanted to become Jews? Karo had a broader, Spanish perspective and, as far as he was concerned, he was writing in the spirit of talmudic Judaism. We have to go back to Karo’s formulation.

GJ: I would like to turn to the question of Jews being a race. After all, they are often perceived like that. People say: “He looks Jewish, she looks Jewish”. And all races are impure — no race is a pure race. But Jews are prone to certain diseases, for example.

JF: But there will be a qualifier to what you are saying because I am sure you are talking about Ashkenazi genetic diseases, like Tay-Sachs. To me, that blows apart the notion of Jews as a race. And even when we talk about humour and everything else, so much of it applies to Yiddish and Ashkenazi sensibility.

Plus, I have become a subscriber to that view that sees race as entirely a construct. There is no racially pure group. It is a disreputable idea. And we are a very good illustration of how flawed that idea is because we are so diverse — there are black Jews, there are Mizrachi Jews, there are Jews who look utterly unlike each other who have no genetic history in common.

GJ: It seems to me that the logical outcome of this discussion could be that there is no such thing as a Jew.

HJ: I think we are right to say no to race but I don’t think that leaves us nowhere, because I want to reach for a word like “culture”. We either don’t have the language or we just have to go on sifting through the language because it is not going to be one thing or another.

JF: I agree with Howard. I don’t want to give up just because “religion” doesn’t capture it, or that “race” does not capture it. We are something unique. There is even a dream that maybe other peoples will live like this in the future. Thanks to globalisation, people will be diasporic. We have been in this game a long time. Apparently, the Dalai Lama sends people to Israel all the time saying: “I want to know how you, the Jews, developed a portable culture in exile for a long time because my people may be in exile for a very long time.”

HJ: I think exile is a terrifically important word to bring up here. Something happened to us in exile. Strictly speaking, the Babylonian exile should have been the end of the Jewish people. The Jewish God had done none of the usual, practical things for which people of that time might have revered a God. Yet somehow or other, something was held on to — I think it was a kind of masochism, actually, which brings us back to comedy. The minute we decided that God had not abandoned us but we had abandoned God, we hit on something unique and it is at the centre still of the art that we make. It is at the heart of the Jewish joke — probably one of our greatest contributions to civilisation.

JF: I would say civilisation is rooted in religion. “Rooted” I think is a useful term because when you take the fruit off a tree you don’t dig up the roots. The fruit becomes a new thing that doesn’t even look like it is the root. But you have to acknowledge that it is rooted. And in order to live a Jewish life, particularly outside Israel, you will find yourself falling back on religious forms. I find it tremendously meaningful to make Shabbat on Friday night with my children and wife, and candles etc. I don’t need to feel there is a theological statement being made. I don’t feel that that would be rendered hollow if I can’t answer a set of questions about belief in a supreme deity.

GJ: But the connection with religion is important?

JF: It is hugely important and in a world where there is a dizzying pace of change and globalisation, the notion that you are doing something that both connects you to previous generations going back a millennium, and simultaneously with other Jews around the world, is a hugely powerful gift. I feel I am giving my children some ground on which to stand in a world that is shaky. This is an amazingly powerful legacy we have. It is rooted in religion but it has evolved beyond that in the same way that a peach has evolved into something different from the root of a peach tree.

NG: I want to go back to a touchy subject — circumcision. More and more boys are being born to non-Jewish fathers where the mother is Jewish. We live in a wider culture where it is no longer fashionable to circumcise. These uncircumcised boys could go to JFS. They can marry under the chuppah, but are they properly Jewish?

JC: We go back to Abraham. There is no reason for it. It is called “a sign” in one’s flesh, and that is in the Torah. We may not like it, though a surgeon once said to me that, when you cut into soft tissue, you really don’t feel a thing. Thank God, babies survive it, and we have all had it done. It is not a terrible thing.

NG: Halachically, is a Jewish man less Jewish if he is uncircumcised?

JC: We are self-defining. We are defining ourselves as Jews in terms of children of Abraham, that we entered into the Abrahamic tradition. We are affirming that we want to acknowledge him and his way of life and the revelation that was given to him.

NG: But this has no meaning, for instance, for the fourth-generation Jew raised in Soviet Russia where circumcision was frowned on. He could still be halachically Jewish without the conformities.

JC: Yes, halachically, he would be Jewish, but this would still be required to be done. As soon as he regains his liberation from the Soviet system — I am thinking about the refuseniks who want to be identified as Jews in every way. If they come to a rabbi and say: “What do I have to do?” he would say: “Get circumcised”. Don’t forget, this was the revelation to Abraham before the revelation at Sinai, God’s word and God’s wish. This is the most characteristic and predominant way in which we demonstrate that we are the children of Abraham.

HJ: There is a wonderful piece by Philip Roth where he talks about how angry he gets when he hears gentiles not getting circumcision. It is about how people do not realise that the physical life, the life of the body, entails all kinds of commitments and curtailments and that the covenant is an immensely serious thing. It fascinates me because I am apparently irrational about circumcision. Even in the days when I would have said: “I am in no way, in any of these areas, Jewish”, I was immovable on the question of circumcision. I had one son and there was never a question of him not being circumcised. When I see an uncircumcised person, I feel I am seeing something that belongs to another universe.

NG: And yet, you know that if you hear about female circumcision, I assume, like me, you would be appalled because it sound like genital mutilation.

HJ: Well, it does sound like genital mutilation and I am a modern, liberal man, and why on earth would you do that? There do not seem to be any religious reasons for doing that.

JF: I want to pick up on the question of unity. I was speaking at Limmud when I first got into this argument on conversion. People said: “If you don’t want these rules, why don’t you just join the Liberals? They are fine and have much looser rules”. But the idea shouldn’t be, OK, you don’t like the rules that govern most of the Jewish people, so adopt a set of rules that govern only a small fraction. Orthodoxy has to settle this question. It just requires a degree of vision and leadership.

But there is this terribly fatalistic impulse. Maybe it is just a Jewish thing, or maybe it is just in our contemporary Jewish leadership, to think that these rules are bigger than us. As opposed to seeing ourselves for what we are, which is a fairly small people who make our own rules. You can choose whether you go to Karo or to Taz. We must grab this opportunity. The Court of Appeal decision will be heard around the Jewish world.

GJ: Can identity be something one acquires from within, or by choice, or does an individual’s identity have to be defined by others?

JF: Our enemies have shaped Jewish life. People say: “Because they hate us, because we survived to defy Hitler, those are the reasons why you have got to stay Jewish”. A number of people’s Jewish identity is formed out of persecution stories — we can’t duck that.