Even Jewish atheists can still have a lot of ethnic pride, are often still wary about covert Christian conversion tactics and can still be annoyed at clumsy and disingenuous cultural imitation.
We’ve talked a lot about the distinction between ethnic and religious Judaism in this thread, but the truth is the lines are not always as clean as that. I think it’s an interesting cultural facet that simply being an atheist will not cause anyone to say you’re no longer a Jew. You may not be religious, but you haven’t become an apostate. Concerting to a different religion is seen as a more radical act than simply not being a believer. I think it’s seen as a kind of betrayal – a disrespect for Jewish history – that is not respresented by mere non-belief. I think it might kinda sorta like the difference between a wife who won’t go down on you, and wife who goes down on the mailman. Converting is cheating, while non-belief is just a headache.
And if you are going to convert to Christianity – something which is seen as essentially an abandining act – at least be honest about it. Don’t pretend you’re still married to you’re first wife when you’re fucking someone else.
You still don’t have to think this is rational or fair. I’m not even saying it’s universal. I think there are plenty of Jews who don’t give a crap if other Jews convert. But because of the history involved, converting still conveys a sting o a lot of Jews and is seen by many as being tantamount to wanting to leave the ethnicity.
They not only wanted to cleanse Greater Germany of inferior races such as Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs, but also to purge the “Aryan Race” of degenerate and defective elements.
Thanks guys (gals?). I’d missed some of the responses that came prior to my reply to Alessan. And you know what? They still didn’t make a lick of sense to me as they appear non-responsive to my own query. Sort of “you are not a Jew 'because…” Yet there was nothing definitive there.
However, after reading Dio’s post, specially this paragraph:
I am more able to wrap my head around the concept…intangible as I still think it is.
As I mentioned earlier, I am an atheist Jew. Like every other ethnic Jew in the world, I am descended from countless ancestors going back centuries who refused to convert and faced incredible hardships for not doing so.
Ethnic Jews who convert to Christianity and call themselves Christians annoy me a little. That’s mainly because the few that I’ve met have been surprisingly ignorant about the Jewish religion. They’re honest though so I can’t have too much of a problem with them.
“Jews for Jesus” and the like are another story. This is an organization that purposefully uses deception and lies to convert Jews. I will not give any leeway to liars whose sole purpose is to destroy my culture.
These tags can be maddening, can’t they. Sometimes, I think a culture, an ethnicity, and a religion are all facets of the same thing. I mean, I realize that things can be a lot more eclectic than that. Surely, somewhere in the world there must be a Black Hindu Lesbian Republican. But in many cases, from India to Israel, there seems to be more homogeny than that.
I think that in the case of Jewish identity part of the difficulty is that it once upon a time was exactly that, all facets of the same thing. The identity was tribal membership and tribal membership included culture, ethnicity, and religion. And laws. And if you left the tribe you left the tribe. Now though the different aspects of the identity just share some of the same space but are not facets of the same thing. There are Jews who have no understanding or interest in the religion or have even rejected it but are ethnically Jewish - or culturally Jewish - or at least ethnically and culturally American Jewish. There are Jews from all sorts of “fragile branches” - India, Africa, China, etc. - who share a Jewish identity and who share some religious beliefs and pray the same (or much the same) Shabbat Service - but who “ethnically” and culturally are very dissimilar to American Jews of Ashkenazi descent. And so on.
Is Jewish identity unique in this? I don’t think so. Who is “us” and who is “them”, what I call myself and what others deign to call me … I agree: many identity issues are maddening. (And I for one love the whole mishmosh complexity of it, but then I’m a bit meshugunah.)
When you say that some have “rejected” the religion, I become confused again.
I’m glad it’s you to whom I can ask this. Why is it that a Jew may reject G-d altogether, but not take up some other God? I guess I don’t understand how rejecting G-d outright is superior to rejecting G-d in favor of some other God. In fact, I think I would be more heartbroken if my child rejected me outright by disowning me, rather than simply got along with his step-father better than with me.
Or is this more of the culture/ethnicity stuff? Because, it seems reasonable to me that an atheist Jew cannot be called a religious Jew. Right? And so, isn’t there some equivocation when we say that an atheist can be a Jew, but a Muslim cannot? Is it that we mean that an atheist can be ethnically a Jew, but a Muslim cannot be a religious Jew? Doesn’t it matter which sort of Jew we mean?
Christianity doesn’t have the same identity issues (which is not to say that it has none of its own.) I’m not sure whether there is such a thing as a cultural or ethnic Christian. Maybe so. Greeks and Greek Orthodox, for example? I don’t know. I took your word for the fact that “one” is a metaphor in one verse, but not in another. And now I appeal to you to clear up for me whether there is not some equivocation when we talk about Jews.
The Jewish community has decided that a lack of faith does not place one outside the tribe. As it’s our tribe, we’ve decided what places one outside of its bounds and what does not. This is the reason that all the those Holocaust survivors who have no use for religious belief are still Jews, but becoming a Muslim/Hindu/Christian/Scientologist/Cargo Cultist places one outside of the tribe.
Trying to ‘reason’ your way through it doesn’t help. It’s just the way things are.
While there is certainly a non-rational component to the accepted Truths of any culture, I think that this one is not so arbitrary as you would assert, here.
Let’s switch the analogies from parent-child to spouses. Would most people prefer that their beloved throw them over to become hermits? Or throw them over to take another lover?
Lib, you might prefer that your child switch his or her allegiance to another parent, (thus ensuring that the child will continue to receve the benefit of some parental love, protection, nurturing, etc.), but I am not sure that every person would share in your feelings. There is an element to rejection that is very much bound up in the wounds associated with why the rejection occurred and a deliberate substitution of allegiance or love to another object would, I believe, inflict more pain on most people than you might be reckoning.
Well, ultimately we could probably spend an entire thread on the evolution of various beliefs about the divine within Jewish culture/religion over the last, say, 100 years. Let alone the last several thousand. While it’s a bit of an oversimplification to say “it is because Jews say it is”, I do contend that it’s accurate enough for these purposes. For instance:
While that’s a better analogy, we’re still going to be dancing around the issue (at best) due to the imprecise nature of any possible analogy. In a nutshell, Jews don’t believe that atheism places one outside the tribe for any number of reasons, from some sects allowing a great amount of wiggle room in what someone believes about any sort of divine being (Reform, Reconstructionist), to a tradition that says that God is essentially unknowable and undefinable (so what does it matter if someone still identifies with the Jewish people but doesn’t believe in any specific God that cant’ be specified anyways), and so on…
But at the core of matters, there’s the fact that almost all Jews view converting to another religion as leaving the Jewish people and turning one’s back on them, while not believing in God simply makes one an atheistic Jew. Added to that, of course, is that it’s perfectly possible to be a religious Jew without an iota of belief in God. One would be hard pressed to argue that Mordecai Kaplan was not a religious Jew.
I think part of it is that, in Judaism, in the Jewish religion, at least, worshiping a false god is worse than not worshiping God at all. I think with your analogy, it might be closer if the choice is between your son rejecting you outright and your son rejecting you outright and inventing a “perfect father” that he then goes on to tell everybody about how great he is. Because the Jew who converts to another religion is also rejecting God…he’s just also, on top of that, creating a fake god to worship.
There are some great lines in the movie Gentleman’s Agreement, that I sort of love. For those of you who don’t know, Gentleman’s Agreement is a movie from 1947, starring Gregory Peck, and based on the book of the same name, about a magazine writer who pretends to be Jewish to experience antisemitism first hand. There’s a scene early on where Peck’s character, Phil Green, talks to a character named Professor Lieberman, played by Sam Jaffe, about his proposed article.
Claiming to be a Jewish Christian is like being a baseball fan who says he prefers the National League while at the same time thinking the designated hitter rule is the best thing that ever happened to the game.
This analogy makes no sense. Are you saying it’s like being a nilbog who asks for cure light wounds to be cast on him and who denies his FF statpage?