Goy on the Wall

Posted on July 20, 2010 in Morals & Ethics Travels - So Cal

Last week, I attended a film festival held in conjunction with a Jewish Genealogy conference at the L.A. Live Marriot. No, despite my eminently semitic name (Joel Sax), I am not Jewish. Lynn was there because she has long suspected that she has [[Sephardim]] ancestors from the vicinity of [[Constantinople]] or [[Thessaloniki]]. Wednesday was rich in workshops on the subject, so she paid for a one day conference pass and bought a film festival ticket for me.

I saw only four of the movies during the eight hours I was around. The only fictional piece was a short about a Hungarian Jewish mother in hiding who rescued the son of another Jew from a firing squad. The standard Holocaust theme done in black and white caught the heart. The contents of the next film were forgettable. After it, I ate lunch and took a walk down to the L.A. Public Library and back ((I was frustrated all the way because I did not have my Nikon to catch the street scenes. My d40 had died and I was waiting for a new d60 to replace it. What photos I did capture were taken with my Droid camera phone. Some interesting material resulted, but I was limited by my battery’s power.)) before the next two.

A film about [[Felix Mendelssohn]] and his descendants raised the question raised the question “Can there be anything especially Jewish about his music? I laughed aloud when I heard a Nazi claim that he lacked depth and soul. That his music could be considered “Jewish” caused one man to vocally argue against it. How can music be measured as Jewish or not, he cried. Music is music. The whole concept struck him as ludicrous.

There was also the question about the many German Jews who converted during the 19th Century. This had made no difference to the Nazis who rounded up Mendelssohn-Bathory family descendants wherever they could find them, but it also annoyed many Jews who saw this as treasonous and uncalled for.

The plight of South American [[Crypto-Jews]] also touched on this theme. To be a Jews in these times — especially in Catholic-dominated Latin America — invited discrimination, hatred, and even violence. The biggest hurdles for the handful of men and women who wanted to recover the religion of their ancestors, however, were not set in their path by Catholics but by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who had come to South America to escape the ultimate pogrom. Whose Judaism was more authentic? asked the [[Reform_Judaism|Reform]] rabbi who performed the conversions: the ones who had been given it by birth and only perfunctorily lived a Jewish life or these who had embraced it with passion? The worst discrimination the new converts — who were the descendants of men and women who had lost their faith in the aftermath of the Inquisition — came from other Jews who did not want to recognize their conversions.

I didn’t stay for very long afterwards, but I made these observations. First, I found myself moved by the story largely because as one who had been raised a Christian, I accepted the idea of being drawn to a religion and affirming a connection to it by an act of faith. Second, though it annoyed me at the time, I have since come to realize the source of the hurt that led some in the audience to lash out at the aspersions of Kansas City based Rabbi Jacques Cukierkorn ((The film showed Rabbi Cukierkorn conducting a mikvah in an Ecuadorean river. The symbolism of this is so close to baptism that I can appreciate the audience’s nervousness.)) . “I’m only a Jew by birth”, one woman prefaced her attack during the question and answer period led by the filmmaker.

Every one of the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — experiences among its own controversies as to who is a member and who is not. Many of the Jews who the rabbi criticized spent all of their lives struggling to be good people by learning to read Hebrew, reading tracts on theology, and living the life of charity that the religion calls for. Are they less authentic because they have not undergone a conversion experience? It has been part of their lives all along. Yet I continue to feel compassion for those whose families were cut off by political matters, who are only now finding it safe to learn about the faith of their fathers and return to it. I don’t think racism is the word I would use to characterize the attitudes of those reared as Jews, but it has a similar effect in bringing down the person. You are damned because of the choices your ancestors made is the way some Jews interpret rabbinical law. There is no going back no matter how deep the longing, how appropriate and authentic the faith. I kept my mouth shut in the room, but I am opening it here. Like the other religions, some of the concepts driving traditional Judaism are just plain wrong and are in need of reform. Ties broken by centuries of persecution should be reforgeable.

So speaks a goy.