Funny and Ironic Stuff

One of the staples of the paranoid reactionary Catholic circle is the Jewish conspiracy. One is constantly seeing from these people the terrible fear that the Jew is make hugely successful inroads into the Catholic Church, undermining everything, destroying all, virtually omipotent in his successful post-Vatican II campaign to corrupt and destroy the Church. Like some relentless plague, INJEWCON marches forward in its cold and implacable plans for to wipe out Catholic faith–at least in the fertile imagination of the paranoid reactionary.

But then, every once in while people send me articles like this, written by actual Jews. And they include passages like this:

One December afternoon, my precious four-year-old niece Jodi* walked into my mother’s suburban New Jersey kitchen and asked, “Bubbie, are you Jewish?”

“Yes, I am,” my mother answered proudly.

“So am I,” Jodi confided, “but don’t tell Santa Claus.”

I laughed when my mother told me this story, and I chuckled every time I thought of it –for twenty-two years. Last week, Jodi got married, in a Catholic church, kneeling in front of a huge gilded cross. I stopped laughing.

Apparently, Jodi’s perception of Judaism as a liability grew with the years. At the age of four, being Jewish made her a persona non grata to Santa Claus. At the age of sixteen, growing up in a town whose century-old bylaws stipulated, “No Jews or Negroes,” Jewish identity must have been a social non-starter. At the age of twenty, as a sophomore at Boston University, being Jewish must have threatened her budding romance with a handsome Catholic senior.

But was there nothing on the asset side to balance Jodi’s Jewish ledger? After all, her Bubbie and Zeydie were committed Jews. Her Zeydie was a life-trustee of his Conservative synagogue, an ardent check-writing Zionist, a lover of everything Jewish, from Mollie Picon to Bernard Malamud. Her Bubbie spoke Yiddish, made blintzes from scratch, and devoutly attended Friday night services every Shabbat. Was there nothing of nostalgia or Jewish tradition to stay Jodi’s knees from kneeling before the cross?

Jews who defect to the religion of secularism are not a shanda, a disgrace. Why couldn’t Jodi and Brian* have celebrated their nuptials in the neutral precincts of City Hall, or at the Botanical Gardens, or on horseback?

Obviously Brian felt strongly enough about his Catholicism to insist on a church wedding. Was his grandmother’s mince pie more delectable than Jodi’s Bubbie’s knaidlach? Were their Christmas dinners more festive than our Pesach seders? Was his catechism class less boring than her Hebrew school? How were Brian’s parents able to transmit to their son an allegiance to Catholicism which washed away Jodi’s loyalty to her own Jewish heritage like a wave dissolving a sand castle on the beach?

SHOCKING DEFECTIONS

The problem is not idiosyncratic to my family. According to the American Jewish Identity Survey 2001, out of approximately 5.5 million American adults who are either Jewish by religion or of Jewish parentage and/or upbringing, nearly 1.4 million say they are members of a non-Jewish religion.

We are not talking here about secularism, not about Jews who opt out of going to synagogue in favor of a baseball game or the movies, but rather in favor of church. Since the vast majority of American Jews are of Ashkenazic descent, this means that 25% of the descendants of European Jews who resisted the blandishments and threats of Christianity for some sixty generations, often at the cost of their lives, are now voluntary apostates.

American Jews have been occupied for four decades in a desperate attempt to stay the tide of assimilation and intermarriage (not to even speak of their more hideous confrere: conversion). I remember as a teenager in the early 1960s sitting through sermons where our rabbi pontificated on the various solutions to The Problem. Yet exactly what is the Jewish leadership trying to perpetuate? Jewish genes? Jewish culture? A fondness for kreplach and klezmer and Isaac Bashevis Singer?

If so, no wonder the Catholics are winning. They don’t strive to inculcate in their children a love for Catholic culture. They don’t try to whip up enthusiasm for the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day nor spend millions to make sure that every Catholic child decorates an Easter egg. They are propagating a religion, complete with God and soul and afterlife. We are pushing a culture, complete with Sholem Aleichem and dreidels and lithographs of the Western Wall. But for a culture, no matter how engaging, no one is ready to sacrifice one’s life — nor the love of one’s life. Against Christianity we have pitted not Judaism, but Judaica.

Two things really stand out here. First, while the paranoid reactionary Catholic is sweating about Jews tunneling under his Church, the author of this piece is sweating about the fact that so many Jews are becoming Christian and Catholic. (This reminds me of something Rabbi Daniel Lapin remarked on in one of his numerous expressions of irritation with the panic-mongers who run the ADL and keep it funded by sending out scary letters about the alleged “rising tide” of anti-semitism in the US every few months. Quoth the rabbi: “The danger to Judaism in the US is not that Christians want to kill us. It’s that they want to marry us!” Talk about being a victim of success!

The other thing that stands out is how much the author sounds like many a committed Catholic, lamenting how these kids today don’t appreciate their religious roots because they’ve been so poorly catechized by people who direct their attention to the window dressing but don’t instruct them on the interior reality of the revelation. Meanwhile, Catholics are seen as spiritual dynamos, offering a tremendously soul-enriching and meaninful religious experience (much the way Catholics often lament that Evangelicals are “winning” because their vibrant communities contrast so well with our empty catechesis rote rituals). In a funny way all this “grass is greener” lamenting stuff gives me hope. I’m not sure why that is.