What kind of Jew am I?

Kreiss’s Kvetching Korner

By Joel Kreiss

Because of the pandemic, I have become involved in three Torah study groups in three separate cities. It has been a wonderful experience, interacting with Jews from different backgrounds and experiences, discussing similar and conflicting views on a word or passage.

All these Jews with all disparate backgrounds made me wonder, what kind of Jew am I?

I got in touch with just how many interpretations there are of “being Jewish.” For instance, the Moment magazine I’ve subscribed to for eons has a column called “Ask the Rabbis.” A question is posed, and rabbis of the various movements give answers based upon their understanding of Judaism. When I first started reading Moment, there were four or fi ve listings. The latest edition has 10 listings! And, of course, not every member fully agrees with the other.

There is an old joke — how many shuls do you need for two Jews? The answer is three! Each one the other wouldn’t go to and the third they both can agree upon.Based on that, I figure there are about 15 million Jewish movements, each one just slightly different from the other and all correct — and oh, one huge one for all to attend, called outside under the stars!

An example from my own life is the tradition of keeping kosher. My mother kept kosher and so did her sister. I called my mother’s kosher, “farkockter” kosher. We had kosher meat and didn’t mix milchik (milchedikg) with flayshig (flayshedig). Our small glass plates and small utensils were for the milk meal, and the larger porcelain plates and large utensils were for meat. As an aside, there is a small, obscure passage in the Jerusalem Talmud, written in some foreign manner that only my mother understood, stating that bacon can be considered kosher if cooked on a fire at least four feet below ground. We just happened to have an old stove in the basement that fit that description.

My mother’s sister, my Aunt Gert, who lived around the corner, also kept kosher. She was so kosher that she had two soaps, two towels, a dish rack in the sink to keep the milchig dishes from touching the surface where the flayshig dishes touched, or vice versa. She and her husband, my Uncle Barney, would never eat in our home because it was not kosher enough!

In Brooklyn, where I grew up, Sunday was usually the “eating-out-day” and two of our favorite places to go with Aunt Gert and Uncle Barney was Joy Fong, the Chinese joint around the corner, or Lundys seafood in Sheepshead Bay. Neither of these places had the “O-U” designation. Based on this fact, and the aforementioned, we were seven different kinds of Jews, each with their own concept of kosher. My family was four and my aunt had a daughter, so they were three.

And then there was a friend whose family was so frum that they not only had the shabbat gentile who turned on the lights, but on Friday, before Shabbat, also tore and folded the day’s supply of toilet paper lest they had to possibly commit a violation of ripping or working or whatever on the sabbath. So, who is right and who is not? My answer is all are right and, yet, it just seems to this writer that we Jews inflict some kind of intimidation on each other. There appears to be a process of judging, not that you are Jewish, but how Jewish.

Is there some magic number one has to achieve to be Jewish or at least be considered a “good Jew?” Is pride of one’s Judaism and good deeds sufficient to erase the “sin” of eating traif? Are four kitchenswith their attending implements the only way to keep kosher, or is keeping kosher a requisite for being Jewish?

I recently visited the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, and I highly recommend this beautifully presented history of our arrival to this “Promised Land.” A statement caught my eye that I think encapsulates my feeble attempt to express my thoughts. It is basically that we Jews all worship, recognize or accept the concept of the one God, or none, and have embarked on our own journey towards fulfilling that goal.

What a mitzvah it would be if all of us could use our energy in helping others reach their particular goal.

And yet, that is not what makes a Jew. For me, the essence is captured in the writings of two prophets, Amos 5:21-24 and Micah 6:6-8, with Micah writing the most beautiful passage of all. Study with others, freely exchange the thoughts these passages evoke, fi nd your favorite and “teach them diligently to your children, and talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise up…”

Joel Kreiss is a retired dentist from New Jersey, who moved to Venice, Florida in Nov. 1997. He always loved to write but in retirement discovered poetry and, just recently, painting. “We are more than what we once were, and in retirement we have a chance to find out what…”