For my third fieldwork assignment in this class, I interviewed Hannah Helfman about her Bat Mitzvah—both about the event itself and about her memory of the event looking back on it. In addition to her description of the preparation for the Bat Mitzvah, I found it interesting that she mentioned how the event had grown in meaning for her in the years since it happened. Though 12 or 13 is certainly old enough to have an idea of the significance of a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, it is also likely that one’s ideas about religion and faith will continue to evolve and change in the years after one’s Bat Mitzvah.
This idea that memory of an important religious event is ever-changing in meaning seems to be a theme throughout the Jewish experience. Life cycle events like Bar and Bat Mitzvahs can become more meaningful to an individual years later as they gain more life experiences and tell and re-tell the story of their own Bar Mitzvah. For Hannah, this was symbolized in the special glass Yad that was a gift from family friends. She described how it made her realize that, not only was she now able to read from the Torah on the day of her Bat mitzvah, but that she would be reading from the Torah more in the future.
Based on class discussions and readings, it seems to me that the concept placing an event in time is important not only in an individual Jew’s life, but also in the broader Jewish experience. For Hannah, her Bat Mitzvah reflected the completion of a portion of her Jewish schooling, but it also signified the beginning of a new phase of religious education as well. I really liked this idea of “end” and “beginning” coming from the same event. While my own Christian confirmation was very special to me, I had no sense of a clear end or beginning as a result of the event. I didn’t really have to do anything to prepare for it, other than pick out a Bible verse that I felt spoke to me in some way. This Bible verse still means a lot to me, but I honestly have no recollection of the day itself. It seems to me that the memory of one’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah is almost as important as the event itself. Gifts like Hannah’s own Yad symbolize the event’s significance and serve as a physical reminder that will remain with her and be a symbol of her Bat Mitzvah for her now and for future generations in her family.

My education about Jewish artifacts was pretty much non-existent before taking this course, and throughout the semester it has become obvious that they are not just present in, but central to, the life of a Jew. All religions have symbols, but the church I grew up in only really used the image of the Christian cross. There was nothing tangible except perhaps the Palms on Palm Sunday, which were burned after the service to make the ashes for next year’s Lent. There is nothing I carry around with me and nothing in my house that announces that we are Christian to the pubic or even expresses our faith to ourselves in some small way.
Though I was familiar with the Menorah and the dreidel prior to taking this course, I had no idea about any of the other artifacts Professor Staub presented in his powerpoint before Thanksgiving. Seeing all of these physical symbols of the Jewish faith first made me think about the recurring theme in this course of assimilation, and how any Jewish community is almost always influenced by the larger, non-jewish community surrounding it. It would be interesting to see how each of these individual artifacts both link Jewish communities across the diaspora and simultaneously show how unique and separate they are from each other, perhaps due to an artifact’s design, colors, or materials used in its construction.
It was also an interesting experience for me to see the role of artifacts in everyday American Jewish life. I was able to watch my housemate Hannah Helfman and her mother put up a Mezuzah on the front door to our house on campus, and hearing the prayer and seeing the diagonal placement of the mezuzah reminded me of learning about the miniscule words from the Torah that are inside it and the significance of this artifact in class. Having it up on our house reminded me of how Professor Staub said that, though mezuzahs and amulets are very different, mezuzahs tend to have an amuletic quality. While I know that the mezuzah doesn’t literally protect our house, I personally feel like having it there makes the house calmer, and seeing it on my way out the door every day reminds me to say a little prayer and remember my own faith.
All in all, the importance of Jewish artifacts shows clearly the importance of tradition, ritual, and belief in a common history. A driedle one buys from a dollar store is nowhere near as meaningful as one that has been passed down through one’s family. I can imagine that seeing these artifacts around one’s home would remind a family of their religion and also of their identity, particularly at times throughout history when groups of Jews were being persecuted or if communities were facing huge pressures to assimilate.

Our class discussion this past Thursday about the ways in which the holocaust has developed a mythic quality made me think about the different ways in which people, Jews and non-Jews, approach thinking about this horrific event. I do agree with the idea that the holocaust has, to an extent, become a Jewish myth similar to other stories throughout history of Jews who were persecuted, escaped oppression, or overcame adversity. Though many define a myth as necessarily fictitious, I believe that a story becomes a myth as soon as it begins to take on a meaning greater than itself.
Though the Holocaust was certainly a huge event even at the time it was happening, since the end of World War II it has grown even larger in its sphere of influence over the global Jewish community in the half-century since. Jews who suffered in Nazi concentration camps and Jews who directly felt the effect of Nazi rule were quickly outnumbered by the millions of Jews on a global scale who sympathized with them, venerated them, and made them collectively into heroes or martyrs. Now, the sphere of influence has grown even more as Jews closest to or directly affected by the Holocaust have come to represent something broader than themselves. The Holocaust has, to an extent, become a Jewish story, a Jewish experience, and a source of both pain and inspiration for the Jewish community worldwide, regardless of an individual’s actual proximity to the event. Its importance to Jewish life and identity has almost become a phenomenon that is removed from the actual historical event.
On the whole, I think that the development of the Holocaust myth over the years since World War II is a positive thing. It was such a horrific event and affected the lives of so many that giving it qualities of a myth both makes it slightly less painful for Holocaust survivors to remember it and also ensures that this event will never be forgotten. It would be unrealistic to think that the story would remain static, and that in retelling the story to generation after generation it wouldn’t change slightly in meaning each time. The down side to the Holocaust taking on the title of a cultural myth is that there is a tendency to overlook how many millions of other people were affected by the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Especially in the states, we place the most emphasis on the Jewish experience, and we forget how much it affected everyday European life for years after it happened, both for Jews and non-Jews. However, I think it is possible for this story to become a myth in ways that deepen its importance to Jewish identity and the Jewish experience while it still maintains its historical importance as an event that drastically altered the lives of everyone who was touched by it.

In class, in response to Leo’s blog post, we discussed how Jewish music was Jewish in its very essence, regardless of whether it was sung by a Jewish singer or an Italian opera star. I completely agree with this, and I think it applies to aspects of Jewish culture as well. Our discussion of Jewish music reminded me of “reader-response criticism” in literature, in which the experience that matters is that of the audience. The author, his or her intentions, even their reasons for writing the book are disregarded; what matters is the audience and their individual reaction to the book. It is a highly subjective form of criticism and therefore, in my opinion, the most interesting because one literally projects meaning onto a text. It lets a work of art stand on its own, an entity unto itself, and puts all interpretive power in the hands of the audience. The result is that the work takes on its own meaning—it literally changes with its audience.

I think that this applies to many aspects of Jewish culture—food, music, dress, and more. For example, I think virtually any food can be considered a “Jewish food,” so long as there is someone to whom it represents Judaism in some way. In class, we mentioned that all it really takes is three generations to begin a tradition and “create” a new Jewish food for a family. The reason there are certain foods that are considered Jewish, like matzo or gefilte fish, which begin to embody Judaism even for non-Jews, is because so many people over time have perceived them as Jewish and have, in effect, given them their Jewish essence and permanently changed their reception.

In a similar way, I think certain objects like amulets also rely on the essence they acquire from their users. Lowenstein mentions that rabbis were “ambivalent” about the use of amulets (104). “One the one hand,” he writes, “Judaism could not tolerate calling on any power other than God,” however, “they [rabbis] did not generally reject the idea that amulets served a purpose and that the supernatural forces could be called upon to fight the evil eye or evil spirits” (104-105). Though this is very different than the idea of music being Jewish because it holds Jewish meaning for its audience, it still involves something of religious significance, but something whose significance is different for different people. Like so many of the “little traditions,” amulets, and even mezuzahs, which can be given an amuletic quality, carry meaning that is unique to each person who uses them.

As I re-read Ronald Hendel’s article “Israel Among the Nations,” his frequent use of the phrase “cultural narcissism” jumped out at me. This was partially because of the negative connotation the word “narcissism” carries, but it was also his use of this word in an anthropological context that grabbed my attention. A common theme I noticed in a lot of our readings about Jewish cultures throughout history has been Jews’ persistent attempts to make boundaries between themselves and other cultures as clear as possible. Even in, for example, Hellenistic Jewish culture where Greek influence can be seen everywhere from language, to symbols, to forms of artistic expression, Gruen’s article suggested that there remained a sense of Jewishness and Jewish superiority.

Hendel describes how Jews regard other cultures as integral to Jewish self-definition. He writes that Israel “asserts in its genealogical stories that it is a righteous and civilized people, in contrast with the foreigners who…are seen as creatures of nature: wild, stupid, sexually licentious, or violent” (Hendel 50).  At first this seems like a self-centered, unenlightened way of regarding one’s cultural neighbors. The more I thought about it, the more I considered that maybe a certain amount of cultural narcissism is necessary. When you are part of a culture that is constantly on the move, exiled, expelled, or searching for new opportunities, you don’t just live side by side with foreign cultures. There is a definite threat that they will outnumber and surround your culture, and ultimately make it unrecognizable, permanently changed.

The idea of cultural narcissism not only implies boundaries, it explains how Jewish cultures self-perpetuated these boundaries and kept their culture distinct and separate from cultures surrounding them. It’s possible that by encouraging the mentality that Jews were innately superior to those around them, this reconciled members of a community to the inevitable fact that their community would not remain entirely uninfluenced by the surrounding culture. No matter what symbols, language, or rituals they adopted from other cultures, they infused them with a Jewishness that, to quote Hendel’s description of ancient Israelite mentality, “made [their] uniqueness a historical reality. The fact of its being alive today, roughly three millennia later, seems to ratify Balaam’s perception that this is a people apart” (Hendel 44).

After reading so many interviews in which interviewees tried to pin down exactly how they feel they are “Jewish,” I realize just how much definitions of Judaism vary and how subjective they are. Having gone to nursery school at a Jewish Community Center, my exposure to Judaism came so early on that it registered in my young mind as a more or less uniform religion. As I grew up, I continued to consider it, and my own religion (Presbyterianism) for that matter, as contained, clearly-defined, well-organized “systems.” I went to Sunday school, my Jewish friends went to Hebrew School. They felt comfortable cheering me on when I was a sheep in our Church’s Christmas pageant, I felt comfortable inviting myself to Purim festivals and attending Camp Shalom each summer.  Jewish people, as far as I was concerned, led religious lives that were parallel to my own, with traditions, services, songs, and holidays that revolved around celebration of a higher power.

Of course, as I grew older I realized just how multifaceted every religion is. Not only do traditions vary from person to person within any given religion, but people of every faith approach religion differently. My faith has always been very God-centered. Going to church every week and observing holidays were a reminder of God’s presence, but services and traditions were never as important as keeping God at the center of one’s life. For me, interviewing people who identified themselves as Jews but were ambivalent about the existence of God remains shocking to me. One of my interviewees explained how he was brought up to question things around him, and he talked about how the important thing is to debate God’s presence and not simply assume either that a higher being definitely exists or doesn’t exist. It made much more sense once he explained it to me, but hearing this opinion definitely changed the way I think about Judaism and religion in general.

As I grew up, I realized another important way that Judaism differed from my own religion. There is no such thing as “Presbyterian culture,” but for Judaism, often the culture means much more than faith. Not until I was in high school did I realize that, as often as people referred to “Jewish food” and “Jewish humor,” my own religion did not have much that distinguished it that wasn’t related to theology or liturgy. Though Christianity as a whole has music and a history, it has so many sects that the religion as a whole does not have a common history that unites everyone. As we read in Lowenstein, there is no food, music, language, or history that is actually universal for Jews, however, from my interviews it seemed like the simply the idea of a “Jewish nation” and “Jewish homeland” is a powerful unifier among all Jews throughout the world.

This notion of community made me consider how I would feel if my religious community were broader than my small church of 300 people in Connecticut. Many interviewees noted that they loved that fact that they can travel anywhere and immediately feel a connection to the Jewish community nearest to them. While this sense of international welcome makes many Jews feel at home, I remember one interviewee writing about how he actually didn’t appreciate how virtual strangers expected to feel a connection to him simply because he was Jewish. Putting myself in the shoes of a Jewish person, I can understand where this student was coming from. There is so much that distinguishes us as individuals, and our religion is just one component of our identity; assuming that two people are similar on multiple levels simply because they both define themselves as “Jewish” does seem a bit superficial. However, I can also imagine how powerful it must be to be part of a global community.