On Being a Jewish Atheist in Cornwall
Ever since we moved to Cornwall, my partner, Ida, and I have blended in as neatly as a loaf of multigrain bread in a dry-stone wall. Our village has been accepting and wonderful and the wall hasn’t collapsed, but we’re, um, noticeable.
Cornwall’s the southwestern, and very rural, tip of Britain, and we’re American — by birth, by accent, and by noise level. If that isn’t enough we’re a very short same-sex couple. And I’m Jewish. The only Jew for miles in any direction, including up, down, and straight out to sea.
Most of the time, I forget this. Being Jewish isn’t the center of my life. But a while back, for reasons I can’t even begin to reconstruct, I mentioned to J. that I’m a Jewish atheist. It would’ve had something to do with whatever we were talking about because I don’t run around looking for places to drop that into the conversation. But I’m comfortable here, and sometimes I forget what a tangled string of Christmas lights I’m bringing down from the attic.
Yes, I just said, “Christmas lights.” Bear with me.
“But I thought being Jewish was a religion,” J. said.
J.’s a reasonable person. It’s a reasonable comment. From her point of view, I just told her that I’m a vegetarian meat eater.
Welcome to the messy world of Jewish identity.
At times when I lived in the U.S., I traveled in circles where Jews were scarce, and I had some strange and memorable conversations about what it meant to be Jewish, but since I moved to the U.K. a surprising number of those conversations focus on the definition of Jewishness itself. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s made me review what I think I know and remember how uncertain it all is.
Judaism is a religion, but I wasn’t raised in it and never felt I’d missed anything. Still, if I’m calling myself a Jewish atheist, there must be enough Jewishness left in the tea leaves to caffeinate my atheism, even after you pour the religion away.
What about culture, then? Is being Jewish a culture? Yes again, but I wasn’t raised in that either.
I don’t go out of my way to be difficult, it’s just my life. Dry-stone wall. Multigrain bread. Butter and jam.
I have friends who call themselves secular Jews. They carry the Jewish traditions into the secular world because they find something fine and beautiful there and they want to preserve it. I have no quarrel with them. Me, though? I know what a few of the holidays are and if you ask I’ll explain them with all the depth and accuracy of a twelve-year-old’s school report, but only if you happen to hit on one that I know. The holidays I’m most reliable on are Hanukkah and Passover, and it helps that they’re close to Christmas and Easter.
What can I tell you? In my family, we decorated a Christmas tree and dyed Easter eggs. We considered them secular holidays and we loved them.
It’s true that religious references snuck into our lives, mostly on the backs of Christmas carols. One year I was struck by the line “round yon virgin mother and child” and asked my mother what a virgin was. I pictured a mother and child sitting in front of a fire. Cold night, pretty tune, warm fire. Light in the darkness.
She said it was a young woman who hadn’t had a baby.
It was not one of her more enlightening answers. Why would a mother and child be sitting around a young girl who hadn’t had a baby? What happened to the fire?
In fairness to my mother, she wasn’t being deliberately obscure. She had no idea what was going on in my head.
If my family considered Christmas and Easter secular, we considered the Jewish holidays religious, which was why they weren’t part of our lives.
My partner, Ida, and I do own a menorah. She was raised by Southern Methodists in the brimstone, bible-thumping, and everything fun will send you to hell tradition, so she loves Hanukkah and I gave her the menorah as a present one Christmas. That kind of sums up our lives. Every year, she scouts out a source of Hanukkah candles and we light them during as much of the holiday as we manage to catch, which is never quite all of it. Since we moved to the U.K., the calendar on our wall no longer mentions the beginning of Hanukkah, so some years we don’t overlap at all.
One year when my niece was young and she and my nephew were visiting us during the holidays, she taught me the prayer over the candles. They were raised as secular Jews. We’re a complicated family. The prayer goes like this, according to my niece at that age, and you’ll have to allow me some leeway on the spelling: “Baruch atoi Adonai, eluhainu melech ha’alom and after that you just mumble.”
Ida and I don’t say the prayer, even in that form, and if it was up to me I’d skip the whole thing, but what the hell, the candles are pretty. And it brings joy to Ida’s recovering-Methodist soul.
I’ll admit to enjoying a sense of the familiar around some Jews, but not all Jews, only subgroups, but I feel the same way about some non-Jewish subgroups, so I’m not sure what that proves about Jewish identity. Not much, I suspect. I do get dewy-eyed about some Jewish foods and eastern European accents that remind me of the ones my grandparents’ generation had. But that’s pretty limited stuff. A person who grew up in, let’s say, small-town, white Missouri could feel the same way about people and food and accents and we wouldn’t be discussing whether that’s a culture or a religion.
So I’m not a secular Jew but I’m still a Jew. What’s left? Are Jews an ethnic group? Well, what’s an ethnic group? It’s not like you can draw a clear line around any set of people except the most geographically isolated ones. As far back as I can trace my family (and it’s not that far), everybody’s Jewish — the descendants of a long-ago Mediterranean tribe. But somebody stirred foreign flavorings into the genetic soup because I ended up with blue eyes. So we’re not talking about genetic purity here. And what about my friends and relatives who have a traceable mix of Jewish and non-Jewish ancestry? Get yourself born to a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish father named, let’s say, Cohen, and by Jewish law you’re not Jewish, no matter how culturally Jewish your upbringing is and no matter how much your last name convinces the rest of the world of your Judaism. Get yourself born to a Jewish mother and an African-American father and by Jewish law you’re Jewish, even though the cop who stops you for driving while black (as the bitter American joke has it) will see a black driver and react accordingly.
If ethnicity is about culture — well, go back a few paragraphs and see if I haven’t confused that effectively enough.
There. I’ve run through all the definitions of being Jewish that I can think of and thrown out every one of them, but here I am anyway, still calling myself Jewish, with all the conviction of someone who knows what that means, although clearly I don’t.
I had a much older cousin who said, years ago, “As long as there is anti-Semitism, I am Jewish,” and I’ve been turning that over in my head ever since. Did he mean that he’d identify himself that way only as long as the identity was under attack, to defy the anti-Semites? He might have. He was that kind of guy. But it may also true that anti-Semitism is what holds the Jewishness of a non-religious, non-cultural Jew like me in place.
What does it mean to be Jewish, then? Everything. Nothing. It’s a highly charged identity and we don’t live in a world that allows us to be neutral about it. Other people, Jewish and otherwise, seem happy to tell me what the bread recipe for my life should be — multigrain or rye, the heaviest whole wheat or the blandest white. Or matzo. I’m happy to ignore them. Any choice, I suspect, involves some gain and some loss. But it’s not simple. Ever.
Ellen Hawley is the author of The Divorce Diet (Kensington Books, 2014), Open Line (Coffee House Press, 2008), and Trip Sheets (Milkweed Editions, 1998). Her blog, Notes from the U.K., explores the spidery corners of the British culture.
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