Tangents

Her time in liberal New York, she said, emboldened her with a strong sense of acceptance. “You can’t go 10 city blocks in New York without running into a lesbian rabbi,” she said.

Rabbi Grushcow’s inclusive approach was apparent on a recent day when she went to offer condolences to a family in mourning. There were not enough people to say kaddish, the prayer for the dead, so the rabbi rang doorbells in the apartment building, looking for worshipers to join them.

According to Orthodox Jewish tradition, 10 men — known as a minyan — are needed to say the mourner’s prayer, and several older women apologized that their husbands weren’t home. When the rabbi invited the women to join the minyan, she recalled, several had tears in their eyes.

“They felt for the first time that they counted,” she said.

It's partially the idea of shifting identity that drew me, all these years later, to a character who is American but Israeli, who is both patriot and traitor, who inhabits more than one self, by virtue of being a spy.

That's what I latch onto when thinking about contemporary American Jewish novels engaging with Israel, the ideas revolving around fluidity, of borders drawn and redrawn, of changing landscapes and altered realities. As for my initial discomfort with being labeled, I don't know if it's age that has changed me as much as the current climate here, in America, my home. But I'm telling you, with white supremacists resurgent and wielding power, this pulled-pork-loving, drive-on-Saturdays secular Jew has never been happier to be called a Jewish-American Novelist. One yarmulke isn't even good enough for me, these days. I'm writing this with a half-dozen stacked, like pancakes, on top of my head.

As Israeli artists, inventors and youth claimed [Tel Aviv], the culture they began to pump out was the antithesis of the one at large that grew out of a diasporic, Ashkenazi, religious, post-Holocaust idea. Instead, it was a modern, secular, Middle Eastern reality without cultural precedent. For the first time in the country's history, there was new Israeli music, food, art and humor that reflected the physical and emotional reality of a fraught and urgent Jewish existence whose context is Arabic rather than European. It's no coincidence that Israeli society hijacked the narrative of itself around the time that modern Hebrew, also forcibly willed into fresh existence, fully caught up with the complex conditions of the lives of its native speakers: For language itself is generative, and to be able to describe is to be in the possession of creative power.

So it is that diaspora Jews find, for the first time in 2,000 years, that they can’t claim Israel as their idea, or its reality as an extension of their own. However related, it is something authentically other now, and the Jews of America and Europe, most of whom don't speak Hebrew, have only narrow access to the inner conversation of Israeli being, and can only look upon it from the uneasy position of being neither inside, nor yet entirely outside, beyond the range of its consequences. Israel, which is making sense of itself, has confused our own sense of being, and the novel goes straight toward that confusion, just as it will always go toward heat, toward what is still undecided and so most alive.

Jews in America are always being called upon to declare their loyalties--which of our identifiers do we put before the hyphen, and which do we put after: "Jewish" or "American"? This recurrent query--which Jews in America ask themselves with all the breeziness of an online test, and anti-Semites in America ask with all the gravity of an Ellis Island examination--is inevitable but pointless. Jews are more secure in contemporary America than they have been in any other country in Jewish history. This is because America is a country in which the citizens define the ideologies, not the other way around. This, ultimately, is what the fundamentalists hate: America’s constitutive capacity for change, which they regard as the evil face of self-determination. Nazis, Klansmen, ISIS--all fundamentalists resent the mutability of human life and the fact that, in a technologized world, no manner of racial or ethnic or religious or cultural purity can ever be guaranteed, as if an "inalienable" right.

The country I dream of is a place in which all humans are free to take their indoor voices out into the streets, both as proud members of families — however myriad, however defined — and as their own liberated individual selves. America has been this country only rarely; Israel has been this country almost never. The one country I've ever lived in that's consistently fulfilled this dream has been the Novel.

Sarah: We had no religion at all, but we were Jews in New Hampshire, and my sister--who is now a rabbi--said it best: We were, like, the only Jews in Bedford, New Hampshire, as well as the only Democrats, so we just kind of associated those two things together. My dad raised us to believe that paying taxes is an honor.

Judd [Apatow]: How does your sister talk about Judaism?

Sarah: It's funny because sometimes I'll get cunty with her, and I'll be like, "Oh, so you believe there's a man in the sky?" And she'll go, "Well, I like to live my life as though there is one." And I'm just like, "Oh, you're beautiful."


Judd: I wish I could convince myself to believe the way your sister believes because I'm so exhausted from not believing.

Sarah: I actually don't think that she believes in God, necessarily. I think she just loves the ritual of religion and finding meaning in every little thing. She loves living her life that way.

Judd: She doesn't believe in a God that is actively involved in people's lives, making choices?

Sarah: She doesn't believe that God is rooting for the Giants and not the Patriots. She's not fucking ridiculous.

In the busyness of the everyday, taking time to nourish the soul doesn't reach the top of the 'to do' list as often as it should. What nourishes your soul? How would you like to incorporate more of this into your life in 2015?