Edging Toward Judaism

By CAROLINE LEAVITT

Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-Loathing Jew
By Neal Karlen
224 pages. Touchstone. $23.

Maybe it’s because I grew up the granddaughter of an Orthodox rabbi but never went to Hebrew school myself. Maybe it’s because I grew up one of a handful of Jews in a community so Catholic that my second grade teacher tested our class on Jesus’ lineage (I got an A). My parents pressed me to be proud of being Jewish, but I wanted to belong to the larger world, one in which you had Christmas trees and went to Catechism—and as soon as I was old enough, I did my rebellious best to never date a Jewish boy if a Christian one was available.

As I read and understood more about my heritage, however, I outgrew those yearnings along with my tie dyes. I was happy being culturally Jewish, if not religiously so. I married a Jewish man. I write about Jewish books for a Jewish web site—much to my mother’s delight. But now my son is approaching Hebrew school age, and I want him to have the chance to feel a part of his culture, to feel pride and connection. And because of that, suddenly I’m becoming more interested in Judaism, too.

This later-in-life interest in religion is the subject of Neal Karlen’s furious, funny and moving memoir about religious identity, Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-Loathing Jew.

In the beginning, Karlen is the epitome of a self-loathing Jew. A man whose relatives had been gunned down by Nazis, raised to be a Rabbi, he presents himself as a Jewish Uncle Tom, a man yearning to be so assimilated, he’s disappeared. In a Portnoy’s Complaint fever to be noticed, he not only makes sure everyone knows he’s Jewish, but he insists they know how much disdain he has for his culture, with offensive borscht belt jokes. He makes me cringe as I read, because I’d never have called myself self-loathing—but he forces me to think again about my own upbringing and why I resisted the call of my own culture for so long. Like Karlen, it had a whole lot to do with a yearning not just to belong, but to belong to the right—and most popular—tribe of people. And to his credit, he’s smart enough to know what he’s doing, and to figure out he needs to stop. Because in rejecting his community, he finds he belongs nowhere. And in hating the Jews, he’s hating one particular Jew—himself.

Shanda is written in a sort of Tuesdays with Morrie format. A young man gains instruction, friendship and insight from an old man and has his life turned around—and instantly, because it feels formulaic to me, I’m rebellious. I don’t want to be spoon-fed dogma or lectured by a kindly older man. And I don’t want the adjective “heartwarming” brought to the reading table. Lucky for me, Karlen’s book isn’t like that at all. This series of conversations, between Karlen and Rabbi Manis Friedman, a Chasidic scholar, is full of twists and turns and downright revelatory surprises. Every week the two men meet and talk and grapple with religious issues and become better friends. And the only worry needling me is whether Karlen’s going to become Chasidic simply because it’s another quest to belong.

But Karlen’s hilarious riffs about religion aren’t so much about what it means to be Jewish, as they are about what it means to be human—and there’s where he really hooks me, because this isn't just a Jewish concern, but a concern of every person. What does it mean, and what does it take, to be a mensch—a good person? How do you fit into the larger world? I’ve always thought of the Chasidic faith as being one of the most restrictive, but here, Friedman gives Karlen lots of room to move and to interpret. “I believe you can be reincarnated in your lifetime,” he says, and who wouldn’t embrace that promise of change? Friedman tells Karlen that it’s okay to argue with your feelings about God, to look for God in different ways. “A Jew,” he says, “considers himself a Jew by his own standards.” And Friedman is the first to admit that he doesn’t know the answers, describing himself as “an old goat who doesn’t know what he’s talking about”—which makes me instantly like him. Yes, he pushes, but gently. Yes, he prods. But he never expects Karlen to believe in God or to even believe in what he himself believes. And that gift of freedom, of free will, to me, is exhilarating.

The only religious thing Karlen does, at the rabbi’s request, is to buy and to wear tefillin, which makes him uncomfortable. Gradually, though, he begins to like wearing it; the ritual makes the beginning of his day brighter. But does he become a Chasidic person? Nope. What does happen is by embracing his past, he’s able to forge connections with his future, both with the Jewish community at large and with his own family. And he’s a happier man for it. And as the shtick leaves his writing, the book takes on depth. And that’s more interesting, too. In the end, Shanda is not so much about religion as it is about how to better live in the world.

I don’t know what my little boy’s going to believe. I hope he’ll be proud that he’s Jewish, that he’ll know about his culture and appreciate it. And I hope he’ll question everything and find his own answers, something even Rabbi Friedman approves of. Unlike Karlen, I’m probably not going to start going to services and keeping the Sabbath every week. But if I’m not engaging in Jewish rituals, how do I justify feeling Jewish? What accounts for my pride? For me, Judaism is so much larger than ritual, than a religion. It’s a sense of belonging to a group of people who have lasted for centuries. It’s a framework for living in the world and being a good person. I carry that DNA. And that’s what I want to pass onto my son.