Taking the Stand Read online

  None of these peripheral contacts with culture fully explains my transition from a home barren of books, records, and art to my home as an adult, which is filled with books, music, paintings, sculpture, and historical objects.11

  Nor can I explain why none of my three children has any real passion for the classical arts. They are by no means uncultured. They love popular music, films, current fiction, theater, and gourmet food. But they don’t have the same passion for classical music or fine art that my wife and I have. For someone who strongly believes in the power of nurture, exposure, and experience, this generational skip poses a dilemma. My passion may well have been a reaction to my parents, as my children’s lack of passion for what moves me so deeply may be a reaction to me. So be it.

  The family values that shaped my upbringing focused on Modern Orthodox Judaism, religious Zionism, political liberalism of the sort represented by FDR, anti-Nazism, anti-Communism, opposition to all kinds of discrimination, support for freedom of speech, a hatred of McCarthyism, opposition to the death penalty, a commitment to self-defense and defense of family and community, a strong sense of patriotism, and a desire to be as truly American as was consistent with not assimilating and losing our traditions and heritage.

  My father, who was physically strong but rather meek, wanted me to be “a tough Jew” who always “fought back.” He urged me to never let “them” get away with “it.” By “them” he meant anti-Semites, and by “it” he meant pushing Jews around. He taught me to box and wrestle and insisted that I never “tattle” on my friends, regardless of the consequences to me.

  One of my father’s brothers was a man named Yitzchak, whom we called Itchie. One day my uncle took me to a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball game that got rained out halfway through. We ran to the train station, only to find no one tending the token booth. My uncle had one token, and so the two of us squeezed through the turnstile on his token. As soon as we got home, he took a dime, put it in an envelope, and sent it to the transit authority, apologizing for temporarily cheating them out of their ten cents. A year later he did the same thing, but on a larger scale. My uncle stowed away on a ship headed for Palestine in order to participate in Israel’s struggle for statehood. He did not have enough money for passage, so he hid during the nearly monthlong trip, getting food from a friend who was paying his own way over. My uncle then swam from the ship to shore, evading British authorities. After working for several months, he then sent the full fare for the lowest class of service to the shipping company. Those were the values with which I was brought up. You do what you have to do, but then you pay.

  Religion in my home was not a matter of faith or an accepted theology. To this day, I have no idea what my parents believed about the nature of God, the literal truth of the Bible, heaven and hell, or other issues so central to most religions. We never talked about such theological matters. Ours was a religion of rules—of required acts and omissions. A cartoon I once saw perfectly represented my parents’ approach to religion. It showed a father dragging his young son in the direction of the synagogue and saying: “Atheist, Shmatheist, I don’t care—as long as you come to shul.”

  Our Judaism was rule-bound. Before every activity, there was a required brucha—a formulistic blessing appropriate to the activity. “Baruch ata Adonoy”—“Blessed be you our God”—followed by a reference to His creation: “who brings forth bread from the earth” or “wine from the grapes” or “fruit from the trees” or “produce from the ground.” Then there was a generic brucha that covered everything not included among the specific blessings: “Sheh-hakol Nihiye B’Dvaroh.” My grandmother Ringel, who was the religious enforcer in the family, if she saw me drinking a glass of water would ask demandingly, “Did you make a shakel?”—referring to the previously mentioned generic blessing. My grandmother, who spoke no Hebrew, probably had no idea of the literal meaning of the blessing, but she knew—and insisted that I know—you had to recite it (even just mumble it) before you drank the water.

  There were rules for everything. If you accidentally used a milichdika (dairy) fork on a flayshidika (meat) item, the offending item had to be buried in the earth for exactly seven days, which restored its kosher quality. After eating meat, we had to wait precisely six hours before eating dairy. After eating dairy, however, you had to wait only half an hour to eat meat, but a full hour if the “dairy” meal contained fish. When my parents told me the rules of swimming after eating—wait two hours after a heavy meal, one hour after a light meal, half an hour after a piece of fruit, and fifteen minutes after a Hershey bar—I thought these too were religious rules.

  From my earliest days, I accepted these highly technical, rule-oriented religious obligations. It was a lot easier for me to obey rules—even if I didn’t understand the reasons behind them—than to accept a theology that was always somewhat alien to my rational mind-set. (And I suspect, to my parents’, if they even bothered to think about it.) Everyone in the Modern Orthodox community followed the rules. Few, I suspect, accepted the entire theological framework that included the literal truth of the Bible, the resurrection of the dead, heaven and hell (which were not in the Jewish Bible), and the incorporeal nature of a single God. What we cared about was the precise ingredients in a candy bar (no lard or gelatin), the number of steps you could take if your yarmulke fell off, whether you could wear your house key as a tiepin to avoid the prohibition against carrying on the Sabbath, whether it was permissible to use an automatic timer—a “Shabbos clock”—to turn on the TV for a Saturday afternoon World Series game, and whether you could ride in an elevator on Shabbos if it automatically stopped on every floor. The rabbis answered these questions, but they didn’t always agree. My mother had little patience with most of the local rabbis because her late father, who was not a rabbi, “knew so much more than they did” and always resolved religious disputes by accepting the approach that was “easiest” and most adaptive to the modern lifestyle. Even my grandmother knew more than these “phony rabbis,” my mother would insist contemptuously. My mother always said, “Respect people, not titles.” Then she was appalled when I showed disrespect for my frequently incompetent teachers!

  Most of the rules we were required to obey were negative ones: Don’t—eat unkosher, drive or work on Shabbos, eat anything on fast days, marry a non-Jew, eat ice cream after a hot dog, wear leather on Yom Kippur, talk after washing your hands but before making a “motzie” and eating the challah.

  My grandmother—the enforcer—had a favorite Yiddish word: meturnished—“it is forbidden to do!” She would shout it out in anticipation of any potential violation. If she saw you about to eat a Nabisco cookie (it bore no magic U that certified the item as kosher), she would intone the M word. If she saw you putting a handkerchief in your pocket on Shabbos, the word would ring in your ear. If you even thought about putting your yarmulke in your pocket, you would hear the word. Once I began to whistle a tune. My musical effort was greeted with a loud “Meturnished.” “Why?” I implored her. There’s nothing in the Torah about whistling. “It is un-Jewish,” my grandmother insisted. “The Goyim whistle, we don’t.” It’s now more than thirty years since Grandma Ringel died, but the M word still rings in my ears every time I indulge in a prohibited food or contemplate an un-Jewish activity (such as enjoying a Wagnerian opera). Freud called it the “superego.” He too had a Jewish grandmother.

  Of course we tried to figure out ways around these prohibitions—half of Jewish law seems to be creating technical prohibitions, while the other half seems to be creating ways around them. Much like the Internal Revenue Code. No wonder so many Jews become lawyers and accountants. It’s not in our DNA; it’s in our religious training.

  A story from my earliest childhood illustrates the extraordinary hold that religion—really observance of religious obligations—held over all of us.

  A few months before my brother was born, my father was holding my hand on a busy street, while my mother was shopping. She had just bought me a new pai
r of high leather shoes—they went above my ankles. For some reason, I bolted away from my father and ran into the street. My foot was run over by an eighteen-wheeler truck. It would have been much worse had my father not pulled me out from under the large vehicle. Fortunately, the new shoes saved my foot from being crushed, but several bones were broken and I was rushed to the nearest hospital, which was Catholic.

  My parents left me there. At about 8 P.M. one of the nurses called my mother and said that I was refusing to eat and demanding to go to Florida. My mother said, “He’s never even heard of Florida.” She was told to come to the hospital. She saw me sitting in front of my tray of food refusing to eat and screaming, “Miami, Miami!” To the nurses, that referred to a city in Florida. My mother understood that I was referring to my “yami”—which was short for yarmulke, the religious skullcap that every Jewish male must wear while eating. I refused to eat without my yami, even though I was only three years old. As soon as my mother made a yarmulke for me out of a handkerchief and placed it on my head, I ate all the food (the Catholic hospital provided kosher food for Jewish patients). I’m sure I mumbled the appropriate bruchas for each item of food.

  We learned these rules first at home and then in the yeshiva—Jewish day school—which nearly everyone in the neighborhood attended. As is typical in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, there were two competing yeshivas: One taught Yiddish, the other Hebrew.

  I started out in the Yiddish-speaking, more traditional school, named Torahs Emes (the Truthful Bible), where my grandma Ringel wanted me to go to learn the mamma loshen—“the mother tongue.” But after two years, my parents switched me to the Hebrew-speaking, more modern yeshiva named Etz Chaim (the Tree of Life), which I attended through eighth grade, when I shifted to a yeshiva high school, where I stayed until I finished twelfth grade.

  My yeshiva education was a decidedly mixed blessing. The hours were long: elementary school went from 8:30 A.M. to 4:30 P.M.; high school from 9 A.M. to 6:10 P.M. We had only one full day off, Saturday, but it really wasn’t a day off, since we spent much of it in the synagogue—9 A.M. to noon and then afternoon and evening services, which varied in time depending on when it got dark (two stars had to be visible to the naked eye). On Friday, school ended at 1 P.M. to allow us to prepare for the Sabbath, which included Friday evening, when we also had to go to shul, before enjoying a home-cooked Shabbos feast. And Sunday was also a half day, though this compromise with secularism engendered grumbling from some of the old-fashioned rabbis, who wanted us to spend the entire Christian day of rest in class, as the more religious Jewish schools required.

  Mornings in school were generally devoted to religious subjects—Bible, Talmud, Ritual Rules, and Ethics. Afternoons were devoted to the usual secular subjects—Math, Science, History, English, French (for the smart kids who wanted to become doctors) or Spanish (for the rest of us) (no German or Latin), Civics, Gym, Art, Music Appreciation—as well as “Jewish secular” subjects, such as Hebrew, Jewish History, Zionism, and Jewish Literature. Then there was debate, student government, basketball, and other “extracurricular” activities. Lunch “hour” separated the religious from the secular classes and was the only time we ever discussed the conflict between what we were taught in the morning, such as the creation story, and what we were taught in the afternoon, such as evolution and genetics. No attempt was made to reconcile Torah (scripture) and Madah (secular knowledge). They were simply distinct and entirely separate worldviews (or as my late colleague Stephen Jay Gould put it in his always elegant choice of words, “separate magisteria”).12 We lived by the rule of separation between church and state, and for most of the students it raised no issue of cognitive dissonance. In the morning, they thought like rabbis; in the afternoon like scientists; and there was no need to reconcile. It was like being immersed in a good science fiction novel or film: One simply accepted the premises and everything else followed quite logically.

  For a few of us, that wasn’t good enough. I recall vividly our efforts to find—or contrive—common ground. For some, this quest took them to wonder whether the God of Genesis could have created evolution. For them there was an abiding faith that both religion and science could be right. For me, the common ground was an abiding conviction that both could be wrong—or at least incomplete as explanations of how we came to be. I was skeptical of both religion and science. Genesis, though elegant and poetic, seemed too simple. But so did evolution—at least the way we were taught it.

  The apparent conflict between religion and science moved me to search for doubts, for holes, for inconsistencies not between religion and science—that was too easy—but rather within religious doctrine and within scientific “truth.” I loved hard questions. I hated the easy answers often given, with a smirk of self-satisfaction, by my religious and secular teachers.

  I recall one day inventing a new bracha for skeptics. It began with the traditional “Baruch atta” (“blessed are thou”), but then substituted doubt for God. Here is how I recall it sixty years later:

  Barch ata i don’t know

  Barach ata i deny

  Barach ata im not sure

  Barach ata show me why

  Barach ata maybe so

  Barach ata why not try

  Barach ata still not sure

  I didn’t show my blessing to my teachers, just mumbled it under my breath in lieu of the traditional bracha.

  The mission of our Modern Orthodox yeshiva was to integrate us into the mainstream of American life while preserving our commitment to Judaism. Torah and Madah were the themes. Torah, which means “Bible,” represented the religious component. Madah, which literally means “knowledge,” represented the secular. They were thought to be reconcilable, though little explicit effort was directed at reconciling the very different worldviews implicit in the relatively closed system of Orthodox Judaism and the openness that was required to obtain real secular knowledge.

  When it came to culture, however, there was little conflict, because becoming good Americans—including immersing ourselves in mainstream culture—was part of the mission of our schools. We were taught to be patriotic to the goldena madena, the nation that was “so good to the Jews.” We were also taught to hate America’s Communist enemies, who were “bad for the Jews.” As a teenager, I sometimes delivered the dvar Torah—the commentary on the Bible portion of the week in our local synagogue. My mother saved one of them in which I contrasted three distinct biblical words for “law” in an effort to show why American democracy was superior to Soviet Communism:

  Three words—chok (“divine decree”), mishpat (“a rule based on justice”), and g’zaira (“a despotic human decree”)—have played a major role in the political evolution of many nations. The concept of g’zaira has been the basis of the absolute monarchy of the past and the totalitarianism of the present, while mishpat has been the essence of democracy. But g’zaira, the despotic decree, could not exist for long without help. The people as far back as the fifteenth century realized that the proclaiming of decrees without apparent reason is the sole privilege of G-d and not of mortal kings, and so in order to rationalize their despotic actions the monarchs utilize the concept of chok, the G-dly decree, and so there came to be the divine rights theory of monarchies, which claim that the law of the land was actually the chok of the Almighty, but that the king as the direct messenger of G-d could execute his desires without question as chok rather than g’zaira. Communism sought also to rationalize its totalitarianistic principles by chok rather than g’zaira, and so they invented their own pseudo-gods, their Lenin or Stalin, who then acting as G-d of the Russian people could execute his own chukim.

  In our own United States, however, with the help of G-d, political evolution has always been based on the concept of mishpat, justice or, as we prefer to call it, democracy. We … demand that all law be opened to the checks and balances of mishpat.

  My teachers and rabbis didn’t even approve of my using the Bible to make the case for American
democracy, because I went beyond the traditional sources and demanded a reason for everything, rather than an unquestioning acceptance of God’s decrees, as interpreted by the rabbis.

  I hated anything the rabbis tried to imbue us with, because with a few exceptions, they taught by rote and memorization. Although I was good at memorization, I rebelled against the authoritarianism implicit in religious teaching.

  As much as I hated my teachers, they hated me even more. I loved conflict, doubt, questions, debates, and uncertainty. I expressed these attitudes openly, often without being called on.13 I was repeatedly disciplined for my “poor attitude.” My sixth grade report card, which I still have, graded me “unsatisfactory” in “deportment” and “getting along with others.” I received grades of D in “effort,” D in “conduct,” D in “achievement,” C in spelling, D in “respects the rights of others,” D in “comprehension,” C+ in geography, and A in “speaks clearly.” One teacher even gave me an “unsatisfactory” in “personal hygiene.” My mother, who was meticulous about cleanliness and scrubbed me clean every day before school, complained. The teacher replied, “His body is clean, but his mind is dirty; he refuses to show respect to his rabbis.”

  To be sure, I was a mediocre yeshiva student—actually I exaggerate: I was worse than mediocre, once having received a grade of bayn ani minus, which literally means “mediocre minus.” I couldn’t even quite make it to mediocrity. At least I had something to which to aspire!

  When I was in sixth grade, the school decided to administer IQ tests to all the students. The school called my mother and said that I had gotten one of the highest scores. At first the principal thought I had cheated, but when he was persuaded that in fact I had a high IQ, he decided to put me in the A class. We had a track system that divided students into the A, B, and C classes. I had always been in the C class. My mother was worried about my having to compete with all those smart kids, so she persuaded the principal to compromise and put me in the B class, where I remained throughout elementary school, getting C’s until I graduated.