Initially, I was anxious about going to a new synagogue, partly because it was new, and partly because it was a synagogue and my only experience of one had been weirdly disturbing. But as soon as our car turned into the blacktop driveway, I sensed this would be an entirely different proposition. The building was purpose-built and sleekly modern. The parking lot was crammed with station wagons. Dad escorted me to my classroom, where at once I felt relief. The room was filled with kids I knew from school. There was the one who played quarterback, the one who made funny noises, the one who had all the Batman comic books. So they were Jewish too. I hadn’t known that. There was a map of Israel alongside a map of the USA, but apart from that it looked like the classrooms I knew from school, with colorful posters and a big blackboard.
I felt at home. We all did. We were the most comfortable Jews that had ever walked the planet. Not for us the longing of exile, the pain of dispersal. We were Americans in America. And we were, in particular, suburban American Jewish kids in the early 1960s, blithely self-confident about our privileges and our position in the world. Sublimely safe. That was the beginning of my eight years of Reform Jewish education, which sputtered to an end when I was fifteen and declared, in my confirmation speech, that God was dead and man was condemned to be free.
For the most part, I enjoyed Sunday school. It combined history, literature, philosophy, and politics, the subjects that excited me even before I knew their names, a world of abstract ideas and compelling narratives in which I revelled. I rarely studied but excelled at the exams. Once I was accused of cheating, or rather helping a friend to cheat. He sat next to me, and, without thinking much about it, I had allowed him to copy the answers from my test sheet. The two of us were hauled before the rabbi, who pointed out that we had given identical answers to all the questions. I insisted, and actually believed, that I hadn’t cheated, since I hadn’t benefited, and was astonished when the rabbi refused to swallow this and held me equally guilty of the crime.
Ritual, even in its diluted Reform version, always left me cold. It was something to be squirmed through. (The boy who made funny noises imitated the cantor’s nasal tenor.) But the stories intrigued me, those weird Old Testament tales of sons cheating fathers, brothers selling brothers, spurned wives and martyred daughters, heroic figures who were also incongruous and flawed. Moses was forever irritated with both his people and his God. David and Jacob were deceitful men. Abraham was near murderer of his own son, Isaac. The lessons embedded in these tales were often hard to unravel, but I liked the sweep of them: the history of a whole people and its vexed but special relationship with God. We Jews kept getting it wrong and had to be corrected, and the voices of correction came either as destruction from without or dissent from within. Usually, it was the refusal to heed the latter that led to the former. The prophets warned and were ignored, but in the end they turned out to be right. Somehow all this perversity—on both sides—was for a purpose, testing and shaping us. From Ur to Canaan to Egypt to Canaan to Babylon to Canaan. From Europe to the USA. And back to Canaan. Dispersal and return. Suffering and redemption. We were taught to see this cycle of persecution and survival as more than a tale out of the Bible. The drama of Exodus had been re-enacted in modern times, with the holocaust and the state of Israel, and an end of Jewish history in the twin Zions of America and Israel.
We should have distrusted it from the beginning. It was too rounded.
We learned about the holocaust, the monstrous climax of a centuries-long saga of intolerance. We read The Diary of Anne Frank. We were shown a documentary: trenches in the death camps filled with naked emaciated bodies, piles of gold teeth, skull-faced survivors. “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Even the kids who never paid attention, the kids who couldn’t resist a wisecrack or a giggle, were rapt, solemn. When the film ended there was silence. The teacher then explained in a quiet voice that the lesson of all this horror was that “never again” should such a thing be allowed to happen. When I heard this, I assented with my whole being. It seemed the most undoubtedly truthful big truth I had ever heard, or maybe it was just the first one I had really grasped. Back then I thought it meant “never again” to anyone, anywhere, not just never again to the Jews.
Only twenty years separated us from the events in the film, yet they seemed to have taken place in a remote past. The victims, we were told, were people like us, but we could not imagine ourselves in their place. How could we? We were the most comfortable Jews the world had ever known. We knew Jews as powerful, as achievers in every imaginable field, as world leaders, as inventors and reformers, as leaders in business and champions of democracy and tolerance and the higher civic virtues. The notion that we were or could ever be taken for anything other than bona fide Americans never occurred to us. It never occurred to us that there might be any reason to deny you were a Jew. We were senators and governors and Nobel Prize winning scientists and novelists and movie stars and even baseball players. (Sandy Koufax wouldn’t pitch on the Sabbath.) It was, self-evidently, a good thing to be a Jew—a blessing, an advantage, especially as it seemed you could be a Jew without actually having to follow many prescriptions or proscriptions. The Catholic kids had a much tougher regime.
The goods of the world were accessible to us as to none of our forebears. The dominant culture was our culture. The synagogue molded itself to this world, blending with the suburban landscape, streamlined with its sloping roof and giant windows. Poor Jews were a memory, a postcard image from a Hollywood past. We were taken on a Sunday school outing to the Lower East Side, the land of our forefathers. The Jews in the street didn’t look like us. We were taken to Katz’s delicatessen. We ate and ate. Jewishness, as much as anything, was food—tastes of pastrami, pickles, rye bread, gefilte fish, chopped liver, smoked fish. Our view of the shtetl was Chagall-tinted. The modernist Jewish folklorist with a passion for Jesus was a strange transmission belt for the only certified Jewish imagery we knew. (It was not until many years later, when I saw Chagall’s earlier, hard-edged fantasies, that I came to savor his mordant poetry.)
Then there was Fiddler. A number of the kids had already seen it, it had been plugged in Sunday school, and I was charged up with anticipation as I arrived with my dad at the theater, only to discover that the star of the hit show, Zero Mostel, was indisposed for the evening. That meant more to my dad than to me: he was fully aware that the role of Tevye had completed Mostel’s public rehabilitation after he had languished on the McCarthyite blacklist for more than a decade.* Even without Mostel, I was entranced. The book and the presentation had a clarity and gentle humor that made the plot and its social implications easy to follow, even for an eleven-year-old. The sets themselves were apparently evocative to older members of the audience, who sighed in recognition at the customs depicted on stage. “Tea in a glass!” a woman sitting near me intoned, an observation that returned to me many years later, when I traveled in Morocco, Turkey, and Afghanistan.
Fiddler on the Roof was an origin story for American Jews, a recollection of the world left behind in eastern Europe, an account of the upheavals that had brought us to where we were and made us who we were. Anti-semitism (depicted in a highly sanitized pogrom) was the context, but the real drama derived from the incursions of modernity and secularism into shtetl provincialism. As Tevye’s pragmatic-fatalistic faith is tested by his daughter’s marriages—to a poor tailor, a socialist agitator and finally, unthinkably, a gentile—his adaptability reaches its limits. Fiddler was easily digestible yiddishkeit for the 1960s, but I suspect if it were written today, its approach would be different. The threats of Bolshevism and rationalism, of intermarriage and women’s freedom, might not be depicted with such equanimity, and the near-complete absence of any references to Palestine or Israel would surely be remedied.
From an early age I conceived of myself as a rationalist and though I made spasmodic efforts at belief, I never felt a divine presence. During “prayer,” I was acutely aware of the gap between what I was supposed to be thinking and what was actually going through my head. But in the end what alienated me from the synagogue was not the make-believe of the after-life or the all-seeing omnipotence of an invisible God. Not in this synagogue. Here the absolutes were kept in the background. God was there, mentioned in the prayers, but he had been discreetly updated