Why I am a Jew… and Why I’m Not
This essay is part of a series where I look at various faiths and explore where they have inspired me and where I have issues. Although I am a Christian, I believe that God wants us to explore and learn from other traditions as part of our spiritual journey. This is my journey, no one else’s, and the articles merely record how I see things. They are not intended to offend or convert, nor do I expect you to agree with me. I do however, appreciate feedback, friendship and further learning.
Other essays in the series:
Why I Am A Sikh… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Sufi… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Catholic… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am An Orthodox Christian… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Pagan… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am a Hindu… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am a Buddhist… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am an Atheist… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am an Anglican… and Why I’m Not
Paul
Paul was my dad’s best friend. From my very earliest days, he was there. In fact, he often told a story about how, when I was born, he saw me before my dad, because he was at the hospital and my dad had popped out to the toilet or something and the nurse called him in to see the baby by mistake.
Until last year he was a constant presence in my life. He was my godfather and after my dad died, he was like a second father to me. I would go over to his house and chat for hours about politics, travel, history, and religion. He helped me in my career and the house I live in once belonged to him. At his funeral, I carried his coffin.
Paul was also Jewish.
Where I live, there aren’t many Jewish people. There’s one synagogue with a small congregation of a dozen or so. However, when I was a kid, Paul represented the only religious diversity I came into contact with.
Literally, he was the only non-Christian I’d had a chat with until I flew to Israel aged 19 in 1997 to go and work on a kibbutz. Paul organised that. In a monocultural world that is now long-gone, Paul was my only indication that an alternative to Christ existed.
Indeed, Judaism was the only real religion that was discussed much in school aside from Christianity. I recall doing festivals at primary school — Diwali and Eid — but aside from drawing pictures of a clay lamp and a crescent moon, that was about it. We did Passover too, and Chanukkah. But that was because Judaism was related to Christianity. Christ had been a Jew. The Old Testament was their scripture. You can’t understand the Son without getting to know the Father.
The Cross may have conquered the green and pleasant land of my youth, but in one house, there was a mezuzah on every doorpost.
Israel
Like I mentioned earlier, upon reaching adulthood, I went to Israel.
It wasn’t my first venture out of the walled garden of Stoke-on-Trent. My travelling life started with a school trip to Malta, then a package holiday to Greece which ended in me staying for the season after meeting a pretty girl from Rochdale with long blonde hair and tales of a life lived by the beach. But when the season finished, and I was back home longing to be anywhere else but, Paul fixed me up with a family he knew on a kibbutz in the Negev Desert.
I went over an excited child. Then I got culture shock. At first sight, Israelis were seemingly rude, the country crowded, and the architecture ugly. But, as I settled into kibbutz life and began to make friends, I started to love it. It changed me forever.
I still do love Israel… although I also hate it. It is still in my mind not the most aesthetically pleasing of places (honestly, whoever teaches architecture there should be incarcerated…) and the people are more blunt than British culture is comfortable with.
Plus, there is the politics. The settlements, the wall, the ongoing conflict. Yet, it also intrigues. Nowhere else on earth is there so much human drama, culture and history crammed into such a small space. Jerusalem, a city I have been to many times, never ceases to amaze and inspire. This is the Holy Land, the place where all those childhood Bible stories actually took place. And did those feet in ancient times…? Well, maybe they did get to Glastonbury, who knows, but there is no doubt about Nazareth and Jerusalem.
And on the kibbutz, a community built on the principles of equality and co-operation, where relations with the local Bedouin Arabs are excellent, I discovered a love for the desert, that vast empty expanse of stone where the prophets retreated and met their Maker.
Israel is also where I had my first religious experience.
A year after my time on the kibbutz, I returned. There was a girl you see, with the most beautiful chocolate eyes and ebony hair. We were friends and she was freshly divorced. I’d have loved something more, but I always knew it could never be. Still, on Christmas Eve we walked hand-in-hand through the Holy City until we came to the plaza by the Kotel, the Western Wall. And there we sat, for close to an hour, side-by-side, in silence, watching the worshippers come and go, entranced by the spirt of the place.
Explorations
Over the years that followed, I explored Judaism more. Returning home, I got a volunteer job with a local newspaper writing a column about different faiths in the area. One of my first interviews was with the leader of the synagogue. I’m still friends with his son who now runs the congregation and I attend Passover and other events there. They’re a friendly bunch and I feel welcome.
My main teachers though were two people, one I knew and the other I have never met. The familiar one was Paul. We’d chat about religion candidly and, when I was exploring different faiths, he’d offer a Jewish perspective, often rather bluntly.
He’d make no secret of the fact that he saw Islam as a bit of an Arab rip-off of his religion whilst Christianity… well, they really just didn’t get the concept of a Messiah. I enjoyed his take; it was nice to listen to someone informed and not afraid to offend. Some of it stuck with me. I was talking about how legalistic and seemingly harsh Judaism can appear, an eye for an eye and all that. “Harsh?!” exclaimed Paul. “Not harsh, but just! Justice matters, otherwise, where are we? Love thy enemies you say? A nice thought, but is it realistic? How many people actually manage to practice that? No, Judaism is not harsh, it is a religion of justice. It is fair.”
And another piece of advice, given to me when I went to work in prisons:
“In Judaism we believe that man is made in the image of HaShem (God). But what does that actually mean? Well, God is good — it’s where the word comes from — so the way I see it is that within every purpose there is some good. Your job is to find it and work with it. Forget about the rest; it’s irrelevant.”
More than any other piece of advice that someone has given me, that one has stuck. Its truth is overwhelming, and it has come in vital on countless occasions during my professional and personal lives.
My other teacher was Karen Armstrong. Her majestic A History of God opened my eyes in two ways. Firstly, in that in Judaism, to study is to pray. Rather than accepting a standard line, in Talmudic study the commentaries of different rabbis are given and these often contradict one another. Through wrestling with debate, one gets closer to God. I really liked that.
And the other lesson, which relates to what Paul taught, is that Judaism is a separate religion. Of course, rationally, I’d always known that, but for a Christian, Judaism is both the hardest and the easiest faith to understand. The easiest because so much of it is included in Christianity, but the hardest because, despite how the Church presents it, it is not just some legalistic precursor to the latter revealed truth of Christ. It is its own thing, as well thought-out and complex as any other world faith and, in some areas, quite distinct from Christianity indeed.
I also had another teacher during that period. A much darker one. Back in my school years, I’d learnt about the Holocaust of course, and I’d visited Yad Vashem in Israel. But it had never really struck home. Then, in 2012, I visited Auschwitz and Krakow.
Seeing the place where it happened, the legacy of a people wiped from the face of the earth due to man’s intolerance to man, the reaction of Israelis who sang songs in the huts where their ancestors had starved, really affected me. I read up on it and visited other sites until there came to a point where I felt myself going numb. Then I put the books down. Sometimes, it is not healthy to continue.
I put the books down, but not the friendship, the interest, or the glass of wine at Passover in the synagogue where I am still welcome and where I still find spiritual nourishment.
So, have I become a Jew?
Erm… no.
There are several reasons why I have never considered becoming a Jew and I’ll outline them now.
The first is the obvious one. I can’t. The end. Orthodox Judaism is a faith that passes down through the matriarchal line. My mum wasn’t a Jew so I can’t be one. End of.
Well, not quite. Some synagogues accept converts, Reform and Liberal congregations. It is a long and difficult process, but it can happen if you are determined. Most don’t though and, to be honest, as someone who abhors exclusivism in any form, that is an issue for me. It would be a constant battle to be accepted across the board. A battle that I simply don’t need in my life. Plus, there is the painful reality of circumcision. No thanks.
The second reason is related but it goes far deeper. I understand why the Jewish community is not a proselytising one and why interfaith marriage can be quite problematic for certain people. I understand, but I don’t agree. I believe in a God that loves everyone, that sees no nation or creed. I need a religion that aspires to universalism.
Being Jewish isn’t just about a faith. It’s an ethnoreligious group. The Jewish people are a tribe — a diverse one with varied religious beliefs (atheist to ultra-orthodox) and varied cultural backgrounds (with ethnically Jewish members of diverse cultures and converts too).
It’s a diverse community — a tribe of people. That’s great — but I am not a member of that tribe.
More than that though, I have other issues.
Some are basic. Take circumcision. Why? What’s the point? Perhaps, several thousand years ago, it served a purpose as a health measure. Now, no. Similarly, with the dietary restrictions. I believe pork meat may have gone bad quickly in the desert heat and so it was best to avoid, but we have fridges these days. Its prohibition is simply illogical. So too the shellfish and the meat and milk, and so on.
On one level, I am a rationalist. If I am to do something, I want to know why. So, when a Buddhist or Hindu says they are vegetarian because animals are sentient being and they don’t wish to kill them unnecessarily, I get it. That doesn’t mean I will follow them, but I understand the rationale. The kosher restrictions, I don’t.
More than that though, some of what is taught in the Jewish Bible (note, despite what I was told in primary school, “The Old Testament” is not a cool phrase to use in this context), simply isn’t true.
We are told that the Hebrews were monotheists, yet there is archaeological and textual evidence that their God had a wife named Asherah whose statue was in the Temple; the historical accounts in Kings and Chronicles are clearly biased and tell a one-sided account and as for Abraham, Moses, Joseph and so on, well, it turns out they probably never existed!
The Torah, the first five books of the Bible in which they are discussed, and which is traditionally believed to have been authored by Moses is now considered by most historians to have been written between the 7th and 5th centuries BC perhaps as a response to the Babylonian Exile.
It is hard to believe in stuff that is well, according to historians, not exactly true.
Equally, how do we know that the Judaism of today is, well… the right one? In the Bible we hear much about the Samaritans, the shunned other people of the Holy Land who pray in a temple on top of Mt. Gerizim rather than in Jerusalem. Intrigued, in 2019 I went to visit their last surviving remnants in a village just below the ruins of that temple. What I found was an intriguing alternative Judaism that believes the mainstream went off-course (around the time of the Babylonian Exile) and which has preserved the true path of the faith.
Who is correct? Both, either or neither?
And there is also one other factor that I think it is worth discussing. One that few people ever truly understand, and I don’t think I did until I went to Auschwitz.
The Jewish world, over the course of the last few thousand years, been shaped by many factors. Perhaps the most powerful of all though, has been trauma.
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How can we sing the songs of the Lord
while in a foreign land?
If I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget its skill.
May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
my highest joy.
It was the pain of exile to, the ache of separation which caused the psalmist to sit and write those words that have echoed throughout time. It was the exile to Babylon that formed the religion we know today. Prior to that, it was just another Near Eastern belief system. Afterwards, it was unique with its devotion to One God and His Law.
Nor too did the trauma cease there. The rebuilt Temple was again destroyed in 70AD when the Jews revolted against Roman rule. This time the exile was to last for much longer, almost two millennia. And in exile, things weren’t always much better. The Inquisition and the Expulsion from Spain, pogroms in the east and west (including mediaeval England until the Jews were expelled completely), largely due to the Church falsely blaming them eternally for “crucifying Christ”.
And then, of course, the awful reality of the Holocaust.
That is what caused the State of Israel to be born, a safe-haven for the Jews of the world to gather. Yet even there, violence has been a constant factor. Two days before writing this piece, Hamas militants crossed over from Gaza and butchered residents of a kibbutz and attendees of a music festival.
And the reaction of much of the world was to celebrate.
And that is something that I cannot understand. Unless you have been targeted that way, unless you have suffered that awful collective trauma, not over decades, not over centuries, but over millennia, then you can never understand.
No, my life experience is different to those of my Jewish brothers and sisters. I cannot truly comprehend but I can for my cousins in faith, befriend them, empathise with them and pray for them.
Written 13/10/2023 Smallthorne, UK
Thanks to Liz Arif-Fear for the edits
Copyright © 2023, Matthew E. Pointon