As a friend of mine who returned from a brief visit to Paris was telling me about the heavy mood of the Jews there, she added offhandedly that the kosher markets in Paris' Jewish areas had very few shoppers. On hearing this, I was struck with a feeling of amazement mixed with pain. I did not give the instinctive Israeli response: "Move here." I simply saw that fact as evidence of Jewish hardship lasting for many years.
As a secular Jew, I do not keep kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws (although for reasons that are hard for me to explain, I do not touch pork). So why did I feel so stricken? I believe in cultural and national Judaism, and I shrink from holding traditional Jewish opinions that do not match my liberal outlook.
I thought to myself: I am not the only one who has this irrational attitude. Even Theodor Herzl, Ahad Ha'am and Ze'ev Jabotinsky had "Jewish deviations" as part of their secular outlooks. A true Western liberal, Jabotinsky advocated the complete separation of religion and state and fought for equal rights for women. In his essay "The East" he wrote: "Many savage customs of true 'easternness' are preserved in the lives of Jews who hold on to outdated things -- hatred of free investigation, the involvement of religion in life, a bewigged woman to whom no unrelated man stretches out his hand. If we were to believe for one moment that these characteristics were part of Judaism's organic essence, the ideal of perpetuating that essence would of a certainty make us feel despair."
These are strong words. Jabotinsky is telling us that if this is Judaism, he wants no part of it. If he were to make such statements today, he would be put on trial for incitement against haredim, and the Beitar movement that he founded would turn on him in condemnation.
But secular as he was, Jabotinsky also kept some Jewish traditions. When his father died, he attended a small synagogue in Odessa three times a day. He reported that he did not acclimate to it, nor did he participate in the prayer services except for reciting Kaddish. Later on, he even wrote an essay praising the acceptance of one's fate that is contained in the Jewish Kaddish prayer, even though its wording did not match his outlook.
While Jabotinsky had respect for religion, he saw himself as a Jew in the national and moral sense. His example was also that of David Ben-Gurion, who opposed the Orthodox rabbis' conversion laws and saw his granddaughter -- the child of a non-Jewish mother who underwent a Reform conversion -- as Jewish in every way. Today, Ben-Gurion too would be pilloried by Habayit Hayehudi, the guardian of everything rabbinic and extreme.
The irrational choice
In my small way I, too, fought the Israeli government, together with Yair Tzaban, a former Knesset member and minister, for the establishment of secular cemeteries in Israel. Yet I have directed in my will that I be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Why? I do not have a full explanation.
Is this a contradiction, a paradox? Yes, it is the paradox of some Jews who not only feel close to the Jewish people with its culture and history, but also feel that they are part of the Jewish tribe with all its traditions. And perhaps Jewish responses of this sort are understandable in light of what is happening in the international arena. This is a reaction that faces the rising epidemic of anti-Semitism, which is fighting a holy war against anything and everything Jewish, and says to it: "You will never defeat us."
The Soviet-Jewish secular writer and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg said that he would remain Jewish as long as a single anti-Semite existed. Today there is no single anti-Semite, but rather a great army of Jew-haters. Most of them are Muslims who desecrate the name of their own religion in order to incite, curse and murder Jews, the sole remnant left after the Nazis' horrific act of mass murder.
Indeed, it is the Jewish spark, that undefined place that lies somewhere inside many secular Jews like me, who for good reason advocate freedom from religion and the elimination of the destructive monopoly of the Chief Rabbinate, with its anti-Zionist and, to me, also anti-Jewish emissaries. People like myself will fight for civil marriage and public transportation on Shabbat, become furious over the transformation of the public-school system into an arm of Orthodox Judaism, feel the pain of agunot and the humiliation of our LGBT friends. But we will also feel close to our ancestors' tradition and will not drive on Yom Kippur, without feeling that we have been forced to abstain from driving on that day (and, in my case, fast as well -- in an extremely odd way).
This inner spark is not uniform. It varies from person to person and there is no way to define it, since by definition it is the product of free thought. Some will say that not only is there no Jewish people -- that is already a banal, worn-out topic in the post-Zionist academic world -- but that there is also no Judaism. In the bizarre world of post-intelligence, anything goes, but what can we do when the facts tell a completely different story-
Even though most secular Jews share the ideas of Herzl and Jabotinsky on the separation of religion and state, they still want to remain Jewish, even if they do not see themselves as religiously so. The evidence of this is the strongest of all: They circumcise their sons. This is a chilling, difficult, cruel and highly daunting ceremony. I came close to fainting at my son's circumcision, but I made peace with it. I had my son circumcised not out of religious belief, but because of that same Jewish part inside me that demanded that I and my sons remain Jewish. No law forced me to do so.
The Jewish spark within me will not stop me from fighting for the values of a liberal society, free of the rabbinate's strangling noose. Yet people like myself will continue not only to heed the irrational Jewish spark within them, but will also feel that they are part of an odd tribe that is always in danger, and whose fellows' fate touches them personally.
They will do everything that they feel to be right, without coercion, to remain part of the Jewish tribe despite the danger from overseas that it faces in the form of growing anti-Semitism. That even includes Jews avoiding shopping in kosher stores, of which I myself have no need.
Professor Amnon Rubinstein is a writer and professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, a former education minister and a former Knesset member who was awarded the Israel Prize for Law in 2006.
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