ANCESTORS IN TRAINING

I am planning a discussion with an older to elder group I participate in about the legacies we want to leave behind. Here’s the specific question I asked of us (it’s a group of 4 diverse and committed Jews). “Given that we are ancestors in training, what parts of our ancestral legacy do we want to pass on, what parts have we passed on that we wish we hadn't, and what parts don't we want to pass on?”

Here are some random and not meant to be exhaustive, thoughts.

I am what might be called an “amcha” Jew, a Jew who belongs to a people, whatever our varied beliefs might be. I’m not a Jew because we have a path of following law to the divine, or because of our ethical monotheism or because we made the desert bloom or we are start up nation or our ancestors worshipped Asherah or we celebrate Passover—I am a Jew because this is the people to whom I belong. I’m an American by an accident of birth, but I’m a Jew because what else could I be? If I am reborn as a tree in my next lifetime, my bet is that I’ll be a Palestinian oak, or maybe a red oak on a farm stewarded by a Jew

I want this sense of belonging to pass onto my children, even though they were not born Jewish. I want this sense of belonging past onto anyone who has ever heard any words of Torah from my lips. I want this sense of belonging for the kids who went to day schools on whose boards I served.

I’m also a huge fan of being Jewishly literate. The education I received as a Reform Jew in supplementary school was sorely lacking, and the situation is even worse today. I was lucky that there was a Hebrew High School associated with a Conservative shul 3 days a week, filled with future Rabbis and other intellectuals.

I want Jews to engage with the Torah and know something of what they are reading. I want the next generations to know who Rambam and Rashi were, even though I’m not a fan of either of them. They should feel comfortable with the flow of the Jewish prayerbook, to have at least a passing familiarity with Psalms, to know some Hebrew, to know something of our history of exile, our prayers for the return to the land and our prayers for redemption. Then they can choose what to accept and what to reject, what to practice and what to ignore—but please God, have this be a conscious choice rather than something decided by their ignorance.

The ways to be authentically Jewish are infinite. I walk a path of an Animist Earth Based Judaism, a path that isn’t particularly well populated. I would wish for our descendants that whatever path they walk, they walk it in a committed way with a full heart.

I want to talk about ancestral Jewish trauma. I’m not what category it belongs in. Part of that is because I’ve not a clue how to pass on being a Jew without ancestral trauma, because the trauma has been such a part of our history. Maybe the trauma is a sacred wound, the kind that if we let ourselves dwell with it can lead to great spiritual growth. Or maybe it is just pain that only hurts us and we’d be less neurotic if we hadn’t been so brutally violated for so much of our history. And God forbid that we take our trauma as an excuse to inflict trauma on others. That I definitely don’t want to pass on.

One thing that I’ve probably passed on and wished I hadn’t is our citified life. Our ancestors were farmers and shepherds and close to the land as our calendar testifies to. But we lost a lot of that connection in our exile and later on in being prohibited from owning land. Thus we too often made our living not by the sweat of our brow, but by our cleverness, by our literacy and numeracy. Being literate, being clever, understanding numbers—all those are good things. I just wish they didn’t come at the cost of knowing how to start a fire, forage for dinner, grow and heal with herbs. I wish personally that I had lived a life closer to the land, and that I had passed that on to whomever I could influence in younger generations.

One thing I don’t want to pass on is our inferiority/superiority complex. It’s obviously not true of everyone and I’m painting with a broad brush, but I certainly think it is recognizable. It’s deep rooted; there’s a reason we call ourselves the chosen people. Sure some of us interpret that as we’ve chosen to take on more commandments, and that this doesn’t make us better than anyone else. But the theology of YHVH was that He was the only God who should be worshipped, and that morphed into He was the only true God and we were the only people that recognized it. It’s not exactly a leap for us to say in our imagination that therefore we are better than all the other people who weren’t chosen by the one true God. Of course, that’s all compensation for our small numbers and relative powerlessness as ancient Israel and Judea were always under threat and have been ruled by other people for most of our history.

We are all ancestors in training. For those of us who are older (I’m 67) this kind of exercise is mostly a retrospective stock taking. If you are younger, you have more chance to forge answers that you believe in and make them happen.

May we all be blessed to be part of a chain of being that stretches back beyond imagination and hopefully stretches just as far forward.