Today, I was reminded that it’s Yom Kippur. I was reminded of said fact by perusing other’s entries on LJ.
For the sake of confusion and arguement; I was raised Jewish. The nose is a dead giveaway. So, the question came up recently… “Are you Jewish?”
The question came up from someone who’s known me a while who heard me talking about ordinations and mass and bishops and foo.
I got thinking… “What makes someone Jewish?”
And after 3 or 4 attempts to continue this line of thought and having deleted several paragraphs… I figure I’ll just leave this post there.
Wrestled with this one myself. Are we talking, culturally, religiously, other? In some ways I can’t stop being a Jew any more than an Irishman can stop being Irish. That said, I certainly don’t practice the religion of Judaism, nor do I feel myself constrained by a covenant with deity that I did not myself enter into (arguing over my Bar-Mitzvah being an entirely new topic).
I think the issue is that there are both religious and cultural implications in Judaism. For me, the religion is meaningless to me and for many years, I rejected it as a cultural identity. But I’ve found that in my (recently ended) relationship with my Jewish (ex) partner, that there is a certain “sympatico” there due to sharing that cultural background and recognized that it is something I want to keep as a cultural identity.
And urm, I didn’t know it was Yom Kippur either, so don’t feel bad.
There are lots of dimensions to being Jewish, including religion, ethnicity, peoplehood (which is different from ethnicity), culture, and probably others. Different people mean different things by the term “Jewish”.