Identity Is a Complex Thing
Rabbi Ron Shulman
Shabbat Vayishlah 5772
Identity is a complex thing. A little boy tries to get his napping father’s attention. He calls out, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” Daddy remains sleeping. Thinking for a moment, the boy whispers “Abba.” His father wakes up immediately and smiles, happily recognizing his identity as Daddy in Hebrew.
If this scene sounds familiar, that’s because it is one of three advertisements produced by Israel’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption to lure Israelis back home. Aimed at Israelis who have emigrated from Israel to live here in America, the ads play on long standing fears. The ad’s tag line states, “They’ll always remain Israelis. Their children won’t. Help them to return to Israel.”
There were two other ads like this one. One depicts a young Israeli woman wanting to skip a party and reflect on Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, a date about which her American boyfriend is unaware. The third shows Israeli grandparents video chatting by computer with their granddaughter in America who seems more aware of Christmas than Hanukkah.
After a great deal of noise and upset claiming that these video clips denigrated American Jews and Jewish life in the Diaspora, the Israeli government pulled the ads. That’s probably a good thing, but not because the ads were insulting. Rather, they were misguided.
I don’t have a problem with the ads’ content, which are accurate, or even their goal, which is important. It just wasn’t a good strategy. The video ads stir some emotion, but they do not address the compelling and positive reasons why a person chooses to live, or return to live, in Israel. The videos are too simplistic. They reflect incomplete stereotypes. Identity is a complex thing.
Through the ages, Jewish identity has been determined by two forces: the internal definitions of each Jewish community and the external perceptions of others. Personal identity evolves in much the same way. We each identify by self understanding and other peoples’ awareness of who we are. To his family, our patriarch is Jacob. To God, he is Israel.
I am Ron to myself, a son to my parents, a husband to my wife, a father to my daughters, and a rabbi to most of you. By Ron, I understand all of these roles and many other aspects of my personality, character, background, temperament, interests, and identity. By rabbi, you refer to one aspect of who I am. You may even hold different feelings about me as a rabbi than I do about myself. Likewise, if we substitute you in your life for me in mine, these same limited observations apply. Yet, neither how we self describe, nor how others describe us fully explain who we are, what we do, or why. Identity is a complex thing.
Here’s what’s not difficult about who we are. We don’t have to knock others down in order to build ourselves up. Though, unfortunately, we do this all of the time. It’s one thing when a political campaign portrays its opponent in negative terms so that voters will choose its candidate. It’s quite another when we criticize someone else or their best effort in order to make ourselves look better.
Rooted in Israel’s history and culture is “negation of the Diaspora.” Ever since the days of Theodore Herzl, Zionist thinkers have warned, and some continue to fear, that assimilation or annihilation are the only fates awaiting Jews in the Golah, the exile outside of Israel. History certainly offers some supportive evidence of this thesis. These recent ads for Israelis to return home are rooted in this sentiment.
To my mind, concerns over these ads miss a deeper issue. It’s not wrong to point out that the children of Israeli parents who grow up in America will not be Israeli. Culturally, if not nationally, they will be the American children of Israeli parents.
As well, it is certainly not wrong for Israel to seek to bolster its ranks and try to hold onto its next generation. As I said, it needs to do so by emphasizing the many positive and compelling reasons for life in and loyalty to the Jewish state, especially since the ads assume that Israeli nationality subsumes Jewish identity.
I would market this. In Israel a person is fully rooted in the consciousness of Jewish being, identity, and purpose. No other land and no other place allows for this completeness. It is a very emotional and a very personal bond. In Israel, personal identity is expressed by a complete sense of Jewish consciousness and values.
In Israel, in Baltimore, and everywhere else Jewish people live today this is the question we must all answer. What different meanings and models of Jewish identity engage us, inspire us, or define us?
Aware that identity is a complex thing, answering this question is what Hanukkah is all about.
On Hanukkah we celebrate Jewish identity. We remember the Maccabee’s dedication to Temple worship, their desire to maintain Judaism’s distinctive ritual practices, and their rejection of Hellenism. We recognize that the Maccabees liberated Jerusalem and purified the Temple so that our ancestors could worship God according to their Jewish customs.
Marking the eight day re-dedication of the second Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BCE on Hanukkah, we also know that Temple was destroyed by the Romans 235 years later in 70 CE. How do we continue to celebrate the re-dedication of a destroyed Temple? How do we continue to honor our people’s covenant with God in a world very different from that of the Maccabees? We do so by focusing less on the past and more on the dimensions of Jewish identity we find relevant today.
We know that the challenge for the Jews of antiquity was to establish a working relationship with Hellenistic culture, to preserve Jewish identity while simultaneously partaking of the riches of the larger world. Substituting Western culture for Hellenistic, all of us seek the same thing. Our happiness on Hanukkah comes from consciously celebrating the nature and significance our Jewish identities while living fully in a larger social context.
The German Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig wrote, “Just as Jewishness does not know limitations inside the Jewish individual, so does it not limit that individual himself when he faces the outside world. On the contrary, it makes for his humanity.”
No advertising campaign can possibly express this for anyone. Like I said, identity is a complex thing.
© 2011 Rabbi Ronald J. Shulman
