Judaism – Experience Has Made Me Rich

Dear Z: Thank You

A friend’s reaction after October 7 forced me to abandon comforting illusions about morality, progress, and Jewish identity. What looked like betrayal became clarity: civilization is thinner than I believed, old hatreds return under new moral language, and my atheism does not make my Jewishness any less real at all.

Dear Z,

I am writing to you today to express my gratitude. I will not use your name, because this is not really about your identity. It is about what you came to represent. You have been and continue to be a clear representative of the black fog that is consuming the left and right from the edges. I did not expect to thank you for this. But you have played a role in my evolution as a human being. As an atheist. As a Jew.

Your delusional rage, so righteously expressed, emerging from someone who had previously seemed well-grounded, shattered perceptions I would have deemed unassailable: The idea that morality could be absolute. The idea that civilization could evolve. The idea that Judaism is just a religion.

There is no sarcasm in my gratitude. Living under false perceptions is not something I will ever choose. Reality might suck, but delusion leaves one vulnerable to a kind of narrative-shear, where the fabric of your understanding can be violently rent by the force of truth bearing down on your fantasy. It is always better to know the truth. It is better to know you have cancer so that you can treat it, rather than to live as if you don’t as it kills you.

Here are some of the truths you, and the mob you embody, have helped me discover.

There may be something like absolute morality, but we are nowhere near orienting practical morality toward it.

I always believed that there is a Platonic ideal morality. Just as we can never actually see a perfect circle, yet can still recognize what prevents actual circles from being perfect, I believed we could also tell when something or someone was objectively immoral by comparing it to an ideal – which is to say an absolute – morality. In this way, I believed if we were being precisely and accurately honest, we could all agree when something is immoral. You have helped me see that this is not true. You have shown me in real time how morality is actually defined post hoc in order to justify a more basic instinct that may have been previously suppressed under a different moral framework. I see now that while the need to belong to the mob trumps any notion of an absolute morality, the need to feel moral must still be met. Therefore instinct precedes morality, and not the other way around, as I had believed. In other words, people will decide what they hate, and then assemble a moral framework that decrees that hate to be righteous.

Antisemitism sits squarely in the centre of this phenomenon. For reasons I can’t begin to claim to understand, Jew hatred appears to be one of the most durable cultural reflexes in human history. It is not biological, but it is culturally deep enough that, under the right conditions, it returns with astonishing speed. Since we can also be taught to suppress immoral instincts, there are times when Jew hatred is suppressed because it is deemed immoral. I thought that suppression was something else – I thought it was erasure. A progression toward a morality where hating Jews simply for being Jews was a relic of a less evolved humanity.

You have shown me how easy it is to transition from those times into the opposite. I have watched, through you, the mob simply reconstruct a morality that now requires that in order to be moral, you must dehumanize and then vilify Jews. All while you still claim not to be antisemitic, by redefining words like antisemitism, and even redefining the word Jew. It is fascinating to me that you don’t see the contradiction: I am not a Real Jew unless I agree with your vilification of Jews; and because I am not a Real Jew, hating me is, by your logic, not antisemitism. It is an interesting, and admittedly frightening, workaround: your new morality creates the loophole it needs to avoid looking like a betrayal of the one it replaced.

I thought humanity was on a progression toward absolute morality. I was incorrect. You helped me see that baser instincts are not erased by morality; they are temporarily suppressed by moral frameworks. Like dormant volcanoes, they remain quiet for a time, only to erupt when too much tension has built beneath the surface. When they erupt, new moral frameworks are constructed to make the eruption seem ethical. That is why you and so many like you seem to me to be behaving so poorly while believing yourselves righteous. I am still operating on the moral framework of my youth. You are not. And what is objectively most jarring is that you think you are, not noticing the diametric path you are now on.

Civilization does not evolve. It cycles.

History is not a story about the past. It’s a user’s manual for the future. The saying “history always repeats itself” tries to encapsulate that, but it’s not accurate enough. And for those of us lucky enough to be born at certain parts of the cycle, we can maybe be forgiven for thinking of history as something that happened before we evolved into something better. I certainly thought so. I was taught about pogroms. I was taught about Kristallnacht. I was taught about the Holocaust. I was taught “never forget.” But the lesson I did not take in was that these are not stories about terrible times we grew past. They are demonstrations of what humans can and will do. And they happen again and again and again. The point is not to learn from them because knowledge guarantees prevention. We are meant to learn from them so we can recognize the pattern when it returns, even if recognition does not grant us the power to stop it. I didn’t understand that.

If someone had told me when I was 12 that in my lifetime I would see people in Canada and the U.S. openly and publicly rejoice at the rape and murder of Jews in 2023, and be celebrated as righteous for rejoicing, I would have been certain they were wrong. If they had told me that the fringes of the political left and right would unite on any idea, let alone that Jews are the world’s most significant problem, I would have been certain they were insane. If they had said that people would blatantly and remorselessly rewrite history to the point of claiming that the Holocaust was fabricated, or that Jesus was Palestinian, I would have been certain that there was no way the society we live in would tolerate that level of absurdity. We had advanced past that, right? Past intolerance, past witch trials. Past pogroms.

Nope. You have taught me that we don’t get past anything. We just cycle.

Being an atheist Jew is not a contradiction.

This is the thing for which I am most warmly grateful to you. I am an atheist, but I did not grow up that way. It’s something I came to realize as I aged and studied and gave thought to things like God and religion. And I thought my atheism separated me from Judaism. That I had stepped away from my roots. Your behaviour has helped me see that my being an atheist does nothing whatsoever to alter my status as a Jew, or my belonging with Jews.

See, I was born to a Jewish mother. Therefore I am Jewish. That’s it. I can’t turn it off any more than you can turn off being born a person with brown hair. A brown-haired person who dyes their hair blond has not changed what grows from the root – they are just living in a way that the world can’t see that part of them … until the roots start to show. To be sure, some Jews dye their metaphorical hair so well and so often that nobody knows they are Jewish. In some cases, even they have forgotten. The hair-dyeing has become so much a part of their life that they have forgotten that it’s not something natural blondes have to do. But it doesn’t matter. If you are born Jewish then you are Jewish. You can opt in by converting, but you can’t opt out. History has shown us that even when some of us have believed we could opt out (or were forced to), we couldn’t. Judaism is immutable.

So how is it that you helped with this? When, after October 7, I found myself reflecting on, and sometimes explaining to you, Jewish ties to the land of Israel, I at first felt like I needed to qualify that I am not religious in any way, and am in fact an atheist, so as to distance myself from a religious viewpoint, as if that somehow coloured my perspective one way or another. Thanks to you, I was compelled to examine that deeply, and thus discover something profound. Jews are not bound together by a religion. Jews are a people. We don’t choose who is a Jew and who isn’t. We don’t proselytize, and we do not treat being (or not being) Jewish as a measure of human worth. Of course, there are religious Jews who follow their sect’s interpretation of the laws of the Torah – and there are many sects! But that’s only a subset of the Jewish people. A Jew can be religious, secular, atheist, observant, non-observant, culturally Jewish, historically Jewish, or some complicated mixture of all of these. None of that makes Jewishness less real. It makes it more obviously a peoplehood. Because it’s an immutable characteristic, you can layer whatever you like on top of it without changing it.

Because of you, dear Z, I feel secure again owning my Judaism, and no longer struggle with any inherent contradiction in the fact that I am also an atheist. I love my people. I love being with them. I love the traditions, the history, the unrelenting emphasis on learning and questioning and challenging and then learning more. I love our ties to Israel. I love Israel.

This has been your gift to me, even though you didn’t think you were giving me one.

Z, I am sincerely thankful. Your real-time metamorphosis, likely driven by the hope that somehow I would be shamed, remorseful, or even outraged, has instead brought me to a place of greater peace and acceptance. You did not shame me. You clarified me. You helped me understand that civilization is thinner than I believed, and that Jewishness cannot be explained simply as religion. I can see now that the world is not as I thought, and that is sad.

But continuing to believe otherwise would be sadder.

Sincerely yours,
Rich

“How Does it Feel to be Jewish?”

I’m Canadian. I was born in Montreal, spent time living in Calgary, and now reside in Toronto. My first language is English, which I speak with a weird fusion of Montreal and Calgarian accents. I’m white. I don’t “look Jewish”.

But I am.

I went to Hebrew school until the end of grade 9, when I entered the public school system. The public high school I went to was in a neighbourhood that had a high density of Jewish families, so even though I was no longer in Hebrew school, there were still plenty of Jewish kids around, though we were not the majority at the school. My friend group in high school was about 50% Jewish. We were all very close. It was a good time. We shared holidays. We experienced teenage angst. We learned to drive and we learned to derive (calculus joke – not sorry). We would not have said we were “tolerant” of each other. That would have made no sense to us. We were friends. We enjoyed our friendships. We enjoyed sharing our experience. I didn’t know how rare that was for a Jew in the diaspora because it’s all I had known. Then I went to university.

I studied mathematics at The University of Waterloo. It was, and still is, a great program. A lot of my Jewish friends chose to go to universities based on the Jewish population there, but I did not. Waterloo had the best math program, and math was my thing, so that’s where I went. Waterloo had almost no Jewish students. In all my time there I only met 3 others. And in my specific program, the Math Teaching Option, I was the only one. It didn’t bother me. I made a lot of great friends. I actually thought it was cool to experience a world outside the Jewish bubble I’d grown up in. It felt more real, because it was.

For better and for worse.

This was the first time in my life I would hold the designation “the Jewish person I know” in the eyes of many of my friends and acquaintances. Definitely not the last though. As a Jew living in Canada, you learn that’s very often what you are. You become the representative for an entire religion which has many sects, exists in many cultures, and has that country in the middle east that is in trouble all the time. People don’t generally discover that I’m Jewish right away because my Judaism is not discernible by my looks, demeanour, or dress, and I don’t lead with my name and religion anymore than anyone else does. But once they do find out, the questions start. Here are some of the questions I’ve been asked. I know you are going to think some of these are not true. I assure you they are.

“Is it true Jews love money?”

“So what’s the whole story of Israel and the Palestinians anyway? Why don’t they want peace?”

“Your nose looks normal. Did you have a nose job?”

“Do Jews really have horns and a tail? Do you shave your horns down?”

“Do Jews really use Christian blood to make the bread they eat on Passover?”

Crazy, right? But you get used to it. Sometimes I answer patiently. Sometimes I play it off as a joke. Sometimes I use sarcasm. It depends on who is asking and how I am feeling. But of all the questions I’ve been asked, the one that I always think of first when this comes up, and the one whose answer I’ve thought about most often, came from a fellow student in the Teaching Option at Waterloo. I think she was waiting for a moment when she could ask the burning question she was trying to wrap her head around. We were at a barbecue with a large group, and found ourselves sitting next to each other. She looked at me with a kind of confused wonder and asked

“So how does it feel to be Jewish? Like, to not have the love of Christ in your heart? That must feel so weird.”

I was struck right away with the understanding that to her, I was an alien. More than that, that I was an alien who knew it and knew what it would be like to be a native, was choosing not to be, and could therefore explain how it “felt” to not be something I had never experienced being. We had both grown up in Canada. We both spoke the same language and were both interested in becoming high school math teachers. We took the same classes and had occasionally worked together on the same assignments. My perspective to that moment had been that we were peers. It shifted immediately when I realized what her perspective was.

My answer at the time was to play it as a joke. I said something like “Feels amazing. Like a party in your head that never stops.”

But I wish I could go back in time and answer her properly. Here’s what I’d say.

When you’re young, it feels beautiful. You learn songs and prayers that children all over the world are learning. Every Friday night you have dinner with your extended family at your grandparents house and the food is amazing and there is so much love.

When you get a little older, you learn that there are a lot of people who will assume you’re Christian and wish you a Merry Christmas, and you should say “Thanks! Merry Christmas to you too!”

When you get a little older still, you learn that there are times when you should deliberately hide your Judaism, because even though we are proud Jews, you don’t have to advertise. You also develop an instinct for when to hide it. It’s a gut feeling. Sometimes you get it wrong though, and then you get blindsided by a visceral hate you can barely comprehend. The day I got beaten up by two kids who wanted to see my tail is a particularly painful example. I had zero clue what they were talking about. I didn’t know there were people who believed Jews had horns and a tail. I was so bewildered and scared, that if I could have shown them a tail to make them stop, I likely would have. I was 12 years old. I never told anyone.

As you get older you begin to understand that there is a significant segment of the world population that hates you. They never met you, but they hate you. They hate you so much they want to kill you. They believe once Jews are dead their problems will go away. You learn about the holocaust. You learn that’s why your uncle never talks and has a number tattooed on his arm. You learn that’s why your father has no cousins, and so you have no second cousins on your father’s side. Because even though his father was one of ten children, he was the only survivor of Hitler’s drive to exterminate Jews. You learn that during the holocaust, most non-Jews did nothing to protect their Jewish neighbours, and often betrayed them. You learn that during the holocaust, nations denied Jewish refugees entry. You learn that Canada was one of those nations. You learn that it’s history, but a history that we should never forget.

Then you learn that there are organizations whose charter it is to kill all Jews. And although they are in the Middle East, you learn that they have visible support in this endeavour all over North America. You learn to live with the low thrum of fear that someone will target you, or an institution you frequent, because of this hatred of Jews. You see it happen regularly. You learn that over the last few years in Canada, religiously motivated hate crimes have declined overall, but hate crimes against Jews have been increasing. According to Statistics Canada, they have increased by 52% since 2020.

Suddenly being the “only Jew someone knows” becomes complicated. You have a responsibility to represent all Jews. To explain Israel. To show that we’re human. I’ll say that one again: In interactions where you are the only Jew, you consciously make efforts to demonstrate that you – and by extension all Jews – are human. It’s a heavy responsibility. But you take it on. You have no choice. It’s literally about survival.

Then one day, in 2023, over 1400 Jews are massacred in a single day. Babies are murdered in front of parents. Parents are murdered in front of children. Families are burned. Woman are gang-raped and taken prisoner. It is all filmed by the people doing it so that they can share their victory with the world on social media and news sites. And in the days that follow, you watch people celebrating that it happened. You see further calls for death to Jews. You see this in Canada. Friends tell you to be balanced. Celebrities cheer the murderers. Elected politicians in North America call an event during which a terrorist is filmed cutting a Jewish child out of its mother’s womb, thus killing them both, a heroic act of resistance.

And next, the world starts accusing Jews of genocide.

That’s how it feels to be Jewish. I wish I’d told her. Though I doubt she’d have understood.

That’s Our Daughter

That girl who did the diaper waddle-run to greet me at the door when I got home.
The one who I caught and pulled up into a hug.
Who smelled like baby and joy.

That’s our daughter.

That girl who carefully arranged all the stuffed animals on her bed.
The one who gave a name to each one, and a backstory to explain their relationships.
Who cried when the dog ripped the arm off one but forgave the dog immediately.

That’s our daughter.

That girl who agonized over the dress she would wear to her grade 8 graduation dance.
The one who wore her grandmother’s earrings, even though they didn’t quite match.
Who said that it’s more important to have a piece of family with her than to be perfect.

That’s our daughter.

That girl who was so excited to go the concert with her friends.
The one who danced to the music with her eyes closed and her heart open.
Who heard the trucks approach but didn’t understand the sound.

That’s our daughter.

That girl we watched pulled by terrorists from a jeep, shirtless, with her head bent low.
The one who had blood running down her arms, and pants soaked in blood at the crotch.
Who stumbled numbly as she was herded away to choruses of “God is great”.

That’s our daughter.

That girl whose capture and rape is being celebrated as some kind of victory.
The one with family that had to watch that video.
Who we may never see again, except in our nightmares.

She has parents. She is their daughter. She is a daughter to us all.