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Shalom!
I am extremely keen on doing this course because all my life I have had an intensely emotional, fraught, yet highly ambiguous attitude about myself as both a Jew and not a Jew.
You could say that I am one of those human duckbill platypuses, if you will, who straddles the line between two (cultural) species.
According to Orthodox religious determinations, I am clearly not a Jew because my mother was a gentile. However, since my father can be considered a Jew according to a rabbinic court (and the State of Israel)Â – my maternal Russian grandmother having been a full-blooded Ashkenazi Jewess from an assimilated, bourgeois family who had converted to Christianity in Imperial Russia, my paternal line is strongly Jewish … but only racially! If you saw the nose on my dad (not to mention my Babushka), as well as their other facial features, and even their whole attitude to life in general, you would not see anything but a pure Jew.
Moreover, culturally I have considered myself fully Jewish. “How can I be an anti-semite when some of my best friends are Jews?” Isn’t that right? Because all of my most important relationships and cultural, artistic, literary, and philosophical proclivities lean toward Yiddishkeit, there can be little doubt the lion’s share of what makes me “me” is Jewish. And even though a rabbinic court would refuse to recognize me as a Jew, I have always felt the “Jewish soul” stirring in me.
I guess the perfect emblem of my conflicted relationship with myself as both a Jew and not a Jew is the fact that I am circumcised, not by a mohel, but rather by a gentile Navy doctor back in 1967 when it circumcision was recommended as a “hygienic” medical procedure for all male newborns in the U.S.A.
So, in light of all of the above, you can imagine how excited and thrilled I was to learn about the way that the Wisdom of Kabbalah defines a Jew. The fact that being a true Jew, for the Wisdom of Kabbalah, comes down to the essential spiritual quality of yearning and working for true unity among friends – this is the best news I think that I could have ever received … better even than any Christmas present or Chanukah geld. 🙂
Hinei ma tov umanaim shevet achim gam yachad!
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