Identity: When Is A Jew Not A Jew? A Tale of Two Jews...
Is this some kind of conundrum, some mystery question: when is a Jew not a Jew? Well, to hazard an impression, a guess, an apprehension: When he/she is not a Jew. What, after all, is a Jew? Someone born of a certain ethnic certainty? Irrespective of religion? Someone born into a tradition, a history, a culture, a mind-set, and just incidentally a religion? Someone born into a religion, and all the rest is incidental?Someone born a Jew who decides to no longer identify as a Jew is then perhaps no longer a Jew. Or are they? Can Jewishness be shed like nothing more than a public persona? Or as a snake sheds its skin, no longer sufficient to house its maturing body? Does one forget or forfeit all that accumulated history and tradition, that belief in belonging? What about that other dimension, sometimes called the spiritual, with or without religion?
Well, if someone is determined enough to shed an original identity because it's felt to be ill-fitting who could possibly object? One's own destiny, is, after all, one's own choice. But then what of someone who insists that despite leaving behind what the world perceives as a core allegiance to embrace another, seemingly antithetical to the original, yet insisting that they are still what they were, what then?
What of the case of former French archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, aka Aaron Lustiger born of Charles and Gisele Lustiger, of France and of Poland? A Jewish Christian? Apart from the early days of Christianity and Saul's conversation on the road to Damascus, what is a Jewish Christian? A Jew who brings the light of Christianity to the world? The second coming of the Messiah?
Adolescence is an incredibly vulnerable period in a child's life. The child approaches adulthood, is uncertain and confused, and ripe for persuasion. When a ten-year-old child discovers exactly how murderously hostile the world can be, and discovers too that his parents upon whom he has been dependent have become powerless to protect him, delivering him into the kindly hands of another who, not being Jewish, but rather Roman Catholic, can deliver the assurances of protection, this becomes a powerfully-patterning message.
Jewish children, doted upon by loving parents, treasured for their blossoming humanity, their keen intellect and ability, their discerning irony, sometimes tend toward blessing their unprepared parents with the gift of rejection, the adoption of an ideology/religion completely foreign to their experience. Is there then, total irony in a modern Jewish male embracing the religion that an ancient Jewish male is so widely celebrated for - delivering unto the world two offshoot religions from Judaic belief in a Monotheistic presence resulting in Christianity and Islam?
The Abrahamic religions, as Muslim friends would have it. There is much in common and much, much more that sets them apart. But he did very well, this man, in his spiritual dedication, his avocation, his choices, his urge toward interfaith dialogue, his assertion that he was and would always be a Jew, albeit one baptised and dedicated to the consecration of a One True Faith whose intention it is to embrace all who believe. Is that even possible?
Born in France in 1926, fled from Nazi-occupied Poland back to France, which, when later occupied resulted in his parents wearing the infamous yellow star, and his parents deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
And here is another man, born in the very same year in Vienna, fled to the United States with his family after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, in 1939. Later celebrated as an American historian, one of the world's leading scholars of the Holocaust.
Professor Raul Hilberg did not desecrate the memory of his forebears, nor devastate his parents' expectations. He was conscripted into the U.S. army at the age of 18, returning to Europe as a soldier with American troops, where he fought until the end of the war, in 1945. Peacetime studies in the United States led him to political science and the law. He joined the War Documentation Project, analyzing wartime German documents.
He wrote of the administrative, bureaucratic and industrial aspects of the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany on the Jews of Europe in their determined attempt to wipe world Jewry off the face of the earth. In 1955 his findings were published as a doctoral thesis, then later reworked and re-published in 1985 and 2003, incorporating new materials as they were made available through released Soviet archives.
Both men, born in the same year, suffering similar early experiences of traumatized childhood went their separate ways, discovering themselves and their place in the world, through a series of happenstance events and accidents of geography at an unsettled and personally unsettling time in world history. Both were informed by their ancestry; each responded in his own way.
So, when is a Jew not a Jew? Who are we to judge?
Labels: Realities, Religion, That's Life
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, August 09, 2007
<< Home