I. Why Be Jewish?
THE CORE IDEA
In the last days of his life Moshe renews the covenant between God and Israel. The entire book of Devarim has been an account of the covenant – how it came about, what its terms and conditions are, why it is the core of Israel’s identity as an am kadosh, a holy people, and so on. Now comes the moment of renewal itself, a national rededication to the terms of its existence as a holy people under the sovereignty of God Himself.
Moshe, however, is careful not to limit his words to those who are actually present. About to die, he wants to ensure that no future generation can say, “Moshe made a covenant with our ancestors but not with us. We didn’t give our consent. We are not bound.” To preclude this, he says these words:
“It is not with you alone that I am making this sworn covenant, but with whoever is standing here with us today before the Lord our God, and with whoever is not here with us today” (Devarim 29:13–14).
As the commentators point out, the phrase “whoever is not here” cannot refer to Israelites alive at the time who happened to be somewhere else. That condition would not have been necessary since the entire nation was assembled there. Moshe can only mean “generations not yet born.” The covenant bound all Jews from that day to this. As the Talmud says: We are all mushba ve’omed meHar Sinai, “foresworn from Sinai” (Yoma 73b, Nedarim 8a). By agreeing to be God’s people, subject to God’s laws, our ancestors obligated us all.
Hence one of the most fundamental facts about Judaism. Converts excepted, we do not choose to be Jews. We are born as Jews. We become legal adults, subject to the commands and responsible for our actions, at the age of twelve for girls, thirteen for boys. But we are part of the covenant from birth. A bat or bar mitzva is not a “confirmation.” It involves no voluntary acceptance of Jewish identity. That choice took place more than three thousand years ago when Moshe said, “It is not with you alone that I am making this sworn covenant, but with…whoever is not here with us today,” meaning all future generations, including us.
QUESTIONS TO PONDER
1. Is it fair that we are born Jews and have no say in whether we want to be part of the Jewish people?
2. What else is decided for us before we are born? What choices do we have in life or is everything predetermined for us from birth?
IT ONCE HAPPENED…
In May 2016, Rabbi Sacks was awarded the prestigious Templeton Prize. At the award ceremony, Rabbi Sacks’s daughter, Gila Sacks, surprised him by giving a moving and personal speech about what she and her siblings had learned from their parents. This is an excerpt.
I was asked to say a few words about what my father taught us, his children. I thought that would be easy. But it turns out that it is next to impossible to separate what a parent has taught you from the “you” that you are. To know where to start; to find the words. So let me just tell you three things about our dad.
Ben Zoma famously asks in the Mishna (Avot 4:1): “Who is wise? One who learns from everyone.” And that’s the first thing I want to tell you about my father. He learns and learns and learns from everyone. His excitement about discovering new ideas, meeting somebody interesting, and discovering a great book hasn’t lessened with time in any way. The more he knows, the more he wants to learn. He is absolutely committed to learning everything, to seeing all knowledge as important, to taking as seriously a conversation about business as one about ethics or science or art, to taking the search for excellence in any field seriously. When I was younger, no matter what I was studying at school or university, no matter what the essay topic, if I mentioned it to my dad, he would immediately walk over to the bookcase and pick out the exact book I needed. He learns from everyone. And we learned this from him.
Ben Zoma continues: “Who is rich? One who is happy with what he has.” When I thought about my father and what he has taught me, I don’t think I expected happiness to be what came to mind. I’m not sure his happiness is what most immediately stands out about him or what many people see.
And yet, the more I thought about it, the more I realised that he has, in fact, taught me some crucial things about how to be happy. He taught me that happiness is as much something we choose as something we find. That it can be hard work, but it can be worked at. And I learned from the happiness he finds in the world, even when the world is a difficult place to be. His joy at a beautiful view, a great walk, a moving piece of music. His undiminishing joy in spending simple happy times with my mum, and the happiness he gets from each of his grandchildren.
To be happy with what one has, teaches Ben Zoma, does not mean settling for what you have – but rather finding happiness where you are, enjoying the fruits of this world each day. And that is the second thing we learned from my father, and perhaps something he also learns from us.
Thirdly, and most importantly of all, we have learned from his faith; not just in God, but in the ability and responsibility of each of us to make a difference in some way. Not to accept the world as we find it, but to always believe it can be different. And to believe that there is no reason at all that that difference can’t be something to do with us.
This was not for us some grand calling to go out and change the world. It was simply a way of looking at the world, to always see in it the potential for good, the potential for change. And to always see ourselves as having the ability to make a difference, that we must never be passive observers.
My father’s faith – in the ability of things to change and of people to change them – is what I am most grateful for.
QUESTIONS TO PONDER
1. What do you think is the most important thing for parents to pass on to their children?
2. What are the most important lessons you have learned from your parents?
THINKING MORE DEEPLY
But how can all future generations be bound by the covenant at Sinai? Surely a fundamental principle of Judaism is that there is no obligation without consent. How can we be bound by an agreement to which we were not parties? How can we be subject to a covenant on the basis of a decision taken long ago and far away by our distant ancestors?
The Sages, after all, raised a similar question about the wilderness generation in the days of Moshe who were actually there and did give their assent. The Talmud suggests that they were not entirely free to say no.
The Holy One, blessed be He, suspended the mountain over them like a barrel and said: “If you say yes, all will be well, but if you say no, this will be your burial place” (Shabbat 88b).
On this, R. Aḥa bar Yaakov said: “This constitutes a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of the covenant.” The Talmud replies that even though the agreement may not have been entirely free at the time, Jews asserted their consent voluntarily in the days of Aḥashverosh, as suggested by the book of Esther.
This is not the place to discuss this particular passage, but the essential point is clear. The Sages believed with great force that an agreement must be made freely in order to be binding. Yet we did not agree to be Jews. We were, most of us, born Jews. We were not there in Moshe’s day when the agreement was made. We did not yet exist. How then can we be bound by the covenant?
This is not a small question. It is the question on which all others turn. How can Jewish identity be passed on from parent to child? If Jewish identity were merely racial or ethnic, we could understand it. We inherit many things from our parents – most obviously our genes. But being Jewish is not a genetic condition, it is a set of religious obligations. There is a halakhic principle: “Zakhin le’adam shelo befanav,” “You can confer a benefit on someone else without their knowledge or consent” (Ketubbot 11a). And though it is doubtless a benefit to be a Jew, it is also in some sense a liability, a restriction on our range of legitimate choices, with grave consequences if we transgress. Had we not been Jewish, we could have worked on Shabbat, eaten non-kosher food, and so on. You can confer a benefit upon someone without their consent, but not a liability.
In short, this is the question of questions of Jewish identity. How can we be bound by Jewish law, without our choice, merely because our ancestors agreed on our behalf?
In my book Radical Then, Radical Now/A Letter in the Scroll, I pointed out how fascinating it is to trace exactly when and where this question was asked. Despite the fact that everything else depends on it, it was not asked often. For the most part, Jews did not ask the question, “Why be Jewish?” The answer was obvious. My parents are Jewish. My grandparents were Jewish. So I am Jewish. Identity is something most people in most ages take for granted.
It did, however, become an issue during the Babylonian exile. The prophet Yeḥezkel says, “What is in your mind shall never happen – the thought, ‘Let us be like the nations, like the tribes of the countries, and worship wood and stone’” (Yeḥezkel 20:32). This is the first reference to Jews actively seeking to abandon their identity.
It happened again in rabbinic times. We know that in the second century BCE there were Jews who Hellenised, seeking to become Greek rather than Jewish. There were others who, under Roman rule, sought to become Roman. Some even underwent an operation known as epispasm to reverse the effects of circumcision (in Hebrew they were known as meshukhim) to hide the fact that they were Jews.
The third time was in Spain in the fifteenth century. That is where we find two Bible commentators, Rabbi Isaac Arama and Rabbi Isaac Abarbanel, raising precisely the question we have raised about how the covenant can bind Jews today. The reason they ask it while earlier commentators did not was that in their time – between 1391 and 1492 – there was immense pressure on Spanish Jews to convert to Christianity, and as many as a third may have done so (they were known in Hebrew as the anusim, in Spanish as the conversos, and derogatively as marranos, “swine”). The question “Why stay Jewish?” was real.
The answers given were different at different times. Yeḥezkel’s answer was blunt: “As I live, declares the Lord God, surely with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with wrath poured out I will be King over you” (Yeḥezkel 20:33). In other words, Jews might try to escape their destiny but they would fail. Even if it were against their will, they would always be known as Jews. That, tragically, is what happened during the two great ages of assimilation, fifteenth-century Spain and in Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In both cases, racial antisemitism persisted, and Jews continued to be persecuted.
The Sages answered the question mystically. They said that even the souls of Jews not yet born were present at Sinai and ratified the covenant (Shemot Rabba 28:6). Every Jew, in other words, did give their consent in the days of Moshe even though they had not yet been born. Demystifying this, perhaps the Sages meant that in their innermost hearts, even the most assimilated Jews knew that they were Jewish. That seems to have been the case with public figures like Heinrich Heine and Benjamin Disraeli, who lived as Christians but often wrote and thought as Jews.
The fifteenth-century Spanish commentators found this answer problematic. As Arama said, we are each of us both body and soul. How then is it sufficient to say that our soul was present at Sinai? How can the soul obligate the body? Of course the soul agrees to the covenant. Spiritually, to be a Jew is a privilege, and you can confer a privilege on someone without their consent. But for the body, the covenant is a burden. It involves all sorts of restrictions on physical pleasures. Therefore, if the souls of future generations were present but not their bodies, this would not constitute consent.
Radical Then, Radical Now/A Letter in the Scroll is my answer to this question. But perhaps there is a simpler one. Not every obligation that binds us is one to which we have freely given our assent. There are obligations that come with birth. The classic example is a crown prince or princess. To be the heir to a throne involves a set of duties and a life of service to others. It is possible to neglect these duties. In extreme circumstances it is even possible for a monarch to abdicate. But no one can choose to be heir to a throne. That is a fate, a destiny, that comes with birth.
The people of whom God Himself said, “My child, My firstborn, Israel” (Shemot 4:22) knows itself to be royalty. That may be a privilege. It may be a burden. It is almost certainly both. It is a peculiar post-Enlightenment delusion to think that the only significant things about us are those we choose. For the truth is that we do not choose some of the most important facts about ourselves. We did not choose to be born. We did not choose our parents. We did not choose the time and place of our birth. Yet each of these affects who we are and what we are called on to do.
We are part of a story that began long before we were born and will continue long after we are no longer here, and the question for all of us is: Will we continue the story? The hopes of a hundred generations of our ancestors rest on our willingness to do so. Deep in our collective memory the words of Moshe continue to resonate. “It is not with you alone that I am making this sworn covenant, but with…whoever is not here with us today.” That means us. I believe we are each a key player in this story. We can live it. We can abandon it. But it is a choice we cannot avoid, and it has immense consequences. The future of the covenant rests with us.
QUESTION TO PONDER
How will you continue the story?
FROM THE THOUGHT OF RABBI SACKS
The fact that any of us is born a Jew is no mere fact. It happened because more than a hundred generations of our ancestors decided to be Jews and hand on that identity to their children, thus writing the most remarkable story of continuity ever known…. Jews knew that theirs was the work of many generations and that therefore they must hand on their ideals to their children so that they too would be part of the journey, letters in the scroll. To be a Jew, now as in the days of Moshe, is to hear the call of those who came before us and know that we are the guardians of their story….
I am a Jew because, knowing the story of my people, I hear their call to write the next chapter. I did not come from nowhere; I have a past, and if any past commands anyone, this past commands me. I am a Jew because only if I remain a Jew will the story of a hundred generations live on in me. I continue their journey because, having come thus far, I may not let it and them fail. I cannot be the missing letter in the scroll.
A Letter in the Scroll, 46–47
AROUND THE SHABBAT TABLE
Do you feel bound by the covenant at Sinai? Why?
What are the biggest challenges you face to remain Jewish today?
Do you feel a responsibility to previous generations? Do you feel a responsibility to future generations?
EDUCATIONAL COMPANION TO THE QUESTIONS
IN A NUTSHELL
This last speech involved a renewing of the covenant, including Moshe delivering the final two mitzvot of the Torah – Hak’hel and writing a sefer Torah (which are both a way to continue the process of commitment to the covenant). It is critical that we realise that the entire people were present, just as they were present at the original covenant event (the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai) because the covenant is for all the people. It is a statement of inclusivity.
THE CORE IDEA
We are born with a lot of identities that we have no say about until we become adults (when we can choose to reject or take on new identities). Every parent has the right and responsibility to bring their children up within a specific tradition and to cultivate specific identities. (They also have the right to give their children the space to question these and empower them to build their own identities if they so wish.) The question is what we as children decide to do with these identities when we reach adulthood and can make decisions for ourselves.
We cannot choose which family, nation, or religious identity we are born into. We can however decide what these are going to mean to us, and what we are going to do with these identities. Later in life we can also decide to embrace other identities, including professional and cultural, and even change national and religious identities if we so wish. But when we are young these things are largely decided for us.
IT ONCE HAPPENED…
As parents we pass on so many important things to our children, including identity, values, and education. (These are in addition to the other needs a child has that it is a parent’s responsibility to provide, including their physical and emotional well-being, and most important of all – love!)
This could be a really interesting discussion to have as a family around your Shabbat table!
THINKING MORE DEEPLY
Rabbi Sacks spoke and wrote often about each and every Jew being a “letter in the scroll” and our responsibility to write a chapter in the book of the Jewish story. He expands on this idea fully in his book A Letter in the Scroll.
AROUND THE SHABBAT TABLE
There are many ways to approach a commitment to Torah and the covenant. For some, it is the word of God and therefore there is no question at all that it should be followed and fully committed to. For others, the Torah represents the highest values a human can live by and they are left with no question as to why they should be committed to it, and they connect to a Jewish national mission that is to improve the world. For yet others, they hear the call to responsibility, to continue the chain of tradition and transmission, to our ancestors, and to our future descendants. What do the people around your Shabbat table feel is the most compelling reason to be Jewish?
There are always challenges to being a Jew. These could be antisemitism and other social forces in society, including the desire to assimilate and fit in. Some people feel there are intellectual challenges to living a Torah lifestyle. And others struggle with their faith. Rabbi Sacks describes specific time periods in history when living as a Jew was difficult. Do you think the current day is another such time period?
Some people feel a responsibility to previous generations, whether more recent (parents and grandparents) or more distant (the unbroken chain of tradition until this point). Some people feel a sense of responsibility to future generations, and to not being a broken link in the chain. It is interesting to hear different perspectives from the different ages present around your Shabbat table.