To be “culturally Jewish,” as I often refer to myself, is a nebulous, ever-evolving label. At home with my family, I’m “Jewish Jewish,” where we attend services for the High Holidays; my sister and I went to Hebrew School; I was bat mitzvahed; we light Shabbat candles (while I’m on my laptop, my sister is in another room and it’s still light outside).
But when I’m away from the Jewish community I grew up with, be it my family, my synagogue, or my childhood Jewish friends, my faith feels far away from me, spiritually as much as physically. My Judaism stays with me in that I relish babka and rugelach sent to me from home, but I’m not praying about it.
Instead, I take on what I’ve come to define as my cultural Jewish heritage, as though growing up Jewish gifted me with a set of life skills and personality traits unbeknownst to gentiles. I feel Jewish as a survival instinct, wherein I’m surrounded by so many non-Jews in my day-to-day life, whether at university or abroad, that I feel compelled to be A Jewish Person to represent myself and others.
What surprised me the most about Judaism coming to college is how little it would define my experience. Hillel didn’t fit. Chabad was different. My Jewish sorority — excluding my dear friends — was not the “type” of Jewish person I felt I was. All I’ll say is I identified with the New Yorker Judaism of Seinfeld and Larry David perhaps more than my “sisters” … and the fact that I was essentially told I wasn’t “Jewish” enough to represent our sorority during recruitment was further proof. Sisterhood moment!
The opportunity to define my own Judaism in a new place, and to define it for those I encountered who had never met Jewish people or had Jewish friends, felt like a personal challenge. But at the same time, distance between my Jewish community at home and my effectively areligious life at school — apart from being in a “Jewish” sorority and fasting on Yom Kippur during class — made me feel like I wasn’t even Jewish anymore, let alone an expert on the subject.
In the past few years, as I become less religiously connected to faith, I’ve noticed that I feel most strongly Jewish when this identity is invoked by others. What I mean by this is when I’m surrounded by non-Jews, I feel more Jewish than ever. Or, as was the case numerous times in France, visiting one cathedral after another served as a stark reminder that my Judaism was a point of difference, not belonging, and hence, I felt constantly reminded that I was A Jewish Person in a religious space for others.
In Paris, the predominant Jewish community is much more religious than my own upbringing was. Synagogues exist but are far and few, or rather hidden and discreet. While walking through a new neighborhood one day, I decided to run a quick Maps search to see if I was near a synagogue that I could, at the very least, see from the outside.
I happened to be a short walk away, so after a few minutes, I was standing in front of the Grand Synagogue of Paris. Outside was a security booth, a police officer and a metal barricade, along with a congregant standing outside.
While I wasn’t surprised to see police protection — even my own synagogue in New York has armed guards — standing across the street and staring up at the most explicitly Jewish building I had yet come across overwhelmed me with a sort of homesickness; a reminder that here being Jewish meant being “different,” whereas in New York, it feels like the norm.
To walk into a cathedral in France is easier than walking into a museum, a library, a school or really any building, ever. The only hurdle is opening a heavy door.
To walk into a synagogue in Paris is to know the congregation and prove you’re a member of the community — I’ve heard. So there I was, staring at a synagogue not with curiosity but with a new sense of longing that I had never felt towards anything Jewish before, as though I was an unwelcome visitor of my own faith.
I had never resonated more with being Jewish than this moment where I felt I could not be. Not that I really made so much of an effort to break down the literal and figurative barricades in my way, but again, walking into a three-hundred year old cathedral in the middle of Paris is like walking into a public park.
Simultaneously, I couldn’t help but wonder why it bothered me that I couldn’t enter this one synagogue. The last time I had stepped foot into one at all was maybe three years ago, and the last religious thing I had done was “repent” on Yom Kippur by fasting until late afternoon.
Even on the one occasion I went to a service at Chabad freshman year, in which I did not recognize a single word of any prayer or any traditions from a more religious service than I was accustomed to, I still felt like an outsider. I was so disconnected from Judaism at school that I didn’t even know where to begin to rebuild any semblance of faith I could recall from my childhood.
It was as though something that was inherent throughout my entire life, like breathing, was somehow taken away from me. No longer could I breathe without thinking, but I had to make a concerted effort to do so and ensure there was oxygen around me. Whether that was intentionally seeking out Jewish friends — which felt unnatural to me — or actively reminding myself when each holiday was that I would presumably celebrate alone, I no longer had the kinship of my like-minded Jewish family there with me — my oxygen.
In these moments, where I felt the most “Jewish solitude,” did I actually feel more Jewish. I was an outsider among the “types of Jews” I was surrounded with at school, and one among people sharing a majority religion that will always be publicly recognized. Not to judge, but the right to Christmas break might as well be in the Constitution.
To a lesser extent, my Judaism as a result lies effectively dormant until invoked by others, whether that is being asked to respond to the latest global instance of antisemitism to explaining why bagels in Madison, Wisconsin aren’t real bagels.
As much as I still feel Jewish on a day-to-day basis as opposed to any other religion, it is admittedly hard to maintain it as an active identity when the world around me does not recognize it. You could argue that religion is a private choice, but to go from mandated school breaks on Jewish holidays to starting the school year on the holiest one is jarring in a society where certain religions are well-woven into public and political life.
Yet, despite my waxing and waning Jewish faith, to myself, I’m a New York Jew. To everyone else, I’m A Jewish Person without distinction. To other Jews, apparently I’m not that Jewish at all. But at the end of the day, I can stand outside a synagogue in a foreign country and feel a personal connection that Cathédral Notre-Dame doesn’t really spark within me, and for me that’s Jewish enough for now.