Identity Stuff

When I was young I went to synagogue to reinforce my Jewish identity, never because God meant anything to me. Then, when I first came to Israel, still rather young, I thought: Here you don’t need a synagogue to be a Jew. But later on, still a total unbeliever, I wanted to be Jewish actively, not just by default, so I became an unbelieving orthodox Jew. But after many years of that, I realized that wasn’t who I am either. So now I’m a floating Jew, not quite by default, certainly not orthodox, no believer in God, not capable even of imagining belief in God (which is all it ever is anyway). But those ceremonies mean something to me. Maybe defining that “something” would explain who I am as Jewish person.

Everybody has to be something. But we are wrong if we think of “something” as one thing that can summarize and encompass a whole. For everyone is necessarily many things. Some of what we are is virtually inescapable. Some of what we are is accepted without question. Some of what we are is intentionally chosen. Sometimes we intentionally choose what society wants to impose on us in any event - “society” taken in the broadest possible sense – and some of us intentionally reject what society tries to impose on us. Our lives are spun out between objective and subjective constrains. Are we free? Did we choose to become what we have become?

I wanted at one time for the word “Jew” to define me most completely. But that didn’t work out. So I tried the adjective “Jewish” and called myself a “Jewish man.” But I wasn’t so much deciding who I am as putting myself into categories. “Jewish” cuts me off from almost everyone else in the world, those who are not Jewish, and it places me in a category that appears to be much clearer than it is, because the boundary between people who are Jewish and those who are not is a fuzzier boundary than many people on either side of it would care to admit.

“Man” is a huge category, distinguishing me from sentient beings who are not human and from human beings who are not mature males of the species. Though, on closer scrutiny, we see that the boundaries between men and boys and that between men and transgender people are fuzzy in their own way.

I am this, and I am that. I am sometimes this and sometimes that. I was once that, and now I am this. In the future I might be neither this nor that – and I certainly will be nothing at all some day.

Sometimes, like right now, I think about issues. Does that make me a thinker? Sometimes I write poems. Does that make me a poet? I do many different things: I play saxophone, I translate from Hebrew to English, I walk my dog, I make ceramics, I go to the movies, read books, listen to music, attend religious services, have intercourse with my wife, have sexual fantasies about other women, sign petitions, go to an occasional protest demonstration, eat, drink, piss, shit, fart, sleep, dream... The list is not endless, because my life is not endless (or beginningless), but it is very long and varied. Just now, as I looked at what I wrote, I thought of many activities I’d left out. But my point was to be illustrative, not exhaustive.

No matter how long the list might be, one knows that some of the items on it are expressive of who feels that one is, while others are not. Not everyone who plays an instrument is a musician. Perhaps the test is negative: if you stopped playing your instrument, would you lose so much of what you feel yourself to be that you would no longer be yourself?