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Jewish Public Forum Archive
Welcome to the Jewish Public Forum Archive, where you will
find materials published under the auspices of the Jewish Public Forum, including articles
by, and interviews with, Forum participants.
For more information about the Jewish Public Forum, click here.
To access the Jewish Public Forum Archive, click here.
Interview with Dr. Shepard Forman
From its inception in 1999, the Jewish Public Forum was to be a different kind of Jewish
institution. Seeking to generate fresh thinking about the social, political, cultural and
technological trends affecting ethnic and religious identity and community, it is an
unprecedented effort to broaden the conversation about the Jewish future by engaging
leading figures in academia, business, the arts and public policy, most of whom have not
been involved in organized Jewish life.
Dr. Shepard Forman is Director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York
University. The Center conducts a program of policy research and international
consultations on the management and financing of multilateral obligations. Prior to
establishing the Center, Mr. Forman directed the Human Rights and Governance and
International Affairs programs at the Ford Foundation, where he also was responsible for
developing and implementing the Foundations grant making activities in Eastern
Europe, including a field office in Moscow. He has been one of the most active
participants in the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL and has served as an informal advisor to
the project.
In the fall of 1999, when the crisis emerged in East Timor, Shep wrote an article, A
Jewish Perspective on East Timor, that was published in Derekh CLAL and which was
distributed to CLALs network of traditional and emerging Jewish leadership around
the country.
Shari Cohen, Director of the Jewish Public Forum, sat down to talk with him about his
lifelong concern in his professional life and his personal life -- with the
universalist and particularist aspects of Jewish identity. In particular, the conversation
explores how the unusual experience of writing a Haggadah for the Makassae of East Timor,
as part of his field work there in 1973-74, led him on a path that helped him better
understand the place of Jewishness in his own life.
Dr. Forman received his Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University and did post-doctoral
studies in economic development at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex,
England. He conducted field research in Brazil and East Timor and authored two books and
numerous articles, including several papers on humanitarian assistance and post-conflict
reconstruction assistance (available on the Centers Web site at www.cic.nyu.edu). He
is co-editor, with Stewart Patrick, of Good Intentions: Pledges of Aid to Countries
Emerging from Conflict, Lynne Rienner Publishers and, with Romita Ghosh, of Promoting
Reproductive Health: Investing in Health for Development, Lynne Rienner Publishers. An
edited volume, Diagnosing America: Anthropology and Public Policy, University of Michigan
Press, examines the application of anthropological studies to social problems in the
United States.
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SC: You were called to participate in the Jewish Public Forum as a so-called outsider to
Jewish institutional life. And you have expressed several times that you have repeatedly
had ambivalent or even negative experiences with Jewish institutions. Yet you have also
said that something brings you back and compels you to keep coming to the Jewish Public
Forum meetings. I wondered if you could talk about your experiences with Jewish
institutions and your vision of how your Jewishness might in fact be served by
institutions.
SF: I guess my anti-institutional feeling goes back some time -- really to my childhood.
And I guess the most vivid memory that I have of reacting sharply to it was when I was
about 9 or 10 years old. My parents decided to move from the place that we lived in Boston
to Brookline, Massachusetts because they thought it was a better community and had a
better school. One way they convinced my brother, sister and me that moving was a good
thing was to tell us that the apartment that they were renting was in front of a
playground, with open space, playground equipment, sports fields and an ice skating rink
in winter. Then we moved and I started school and immediately realized that I had also
been enrolled in Hebrew school to start preparations for bar mitzvah. I would go to school
in the morning, get out at 1:30 and then hang around at the school and candy store
--Irvings candy store -- next door in order to cross the street and go to Hebrew
school from 2:30 to 5:00 every day of the week. And so there was no playground in my life
there were interrupted friendships and a duality of my life that got defined for me
very early on. And there is a continuity here in my thinking about services at the
synagogue. The Hebrew school was non-informative and non-educational. It was rote learning
and totally devoid of content.
SC: What year was that?
SF: Late 1940s 1947 or 1948. It was a conservative synagogue. In contrast to
my secular education, this meant being contained in this other universe, which was in some
ways thrust upon me it wasnt anything that I asked for. It was dry and rote
and it meant learning a language that I thought had no utility. If I was going to learn
another language, I imagine I should have learned Yiddish or Russian so I could
communicate with my grandmother. But Russian and Yiddish became secret languages and I was
asked instead to learn this other language that had no meaning for me.
SC: How did you see this paralleled in the synagogue?
SF: In truth, I have found a tremendous need to go to synagogue and each time I have moved
somewhere, I have always become a member of the local synagogue. I start out with the
intention of going to services -- beyond just High Holiday services -- and getting
involved in the synagogue. But it always comes up empty for me.
I know enough Hebrew so that I can follow whats written and phoneticize it to a
degree -- not 100%, probably 60% -- but I can't understand the language and so I end up
reading the English text when I am in shul. But it has no meaning for me. And so I try and
I go, but it does not reach me either in the head or the heart where it is supposed to be.
Now there are also a couple of institutional instances that left me very, very cold. I can
remember once when I was younger on the High Holidays with my father. It was a very bad
period in my fathers life and he was struggling to stay out of bankruptcy. He had
missed his membership payment at the synagogue -- the same one where I went for these bar
mitzvah lessons -- and no one had advised him, of course, of what was going to happen. But
he and I went to synagogue and there were other people sitting in the seats that my father
had for 10 years they were given away or sold to someone else and my father was so
humiliated and embarrassed that he never went back until after my mother died 30 or 40
years later, when he was well into his 70s. Then he started going to a neighborhood
shul again, but obviously some of the institutional antipathy stayed with me.
Years later, when my father died, not only did I not get a call from the synagogue to
which I then belonged to find out about how to put together a minyan, but we actually got
a computer-printed letter of condolence. The side with the holes in it that goes through
the printer had not even been ripped off! My reaction to this cold and unsigned letter
was: "What do I need this for?" It just brought back old memories and thoughts
and I dropped out.
SC: You were rather reluctant when we first called you to participate in the Jewish Public
Forum. We were asking you to contribute to this Jewish conversation based on your
professional life. Can you reflect on that?
SF: I was actually pleased with the call because I thought I had run my course with the
Torah study classes I was taking with CLAL; I didnt think that there was much more
that I could get out of that, and yet I liked CLAL I liked what I was seeing and I
liked the kind of conversations around the edges. So when I got the call, I thought this
might be interesting. But I was not so concerned about how the Jewish community dealt with
itself as I was about how the Jewish community engaged the world. I think the religious
community in general and the Jewish community in particular is not sufficiently engaged in
the world at large. And the Jewish community had been more engaged in this way in the
past. So I was really interested in how the CLAL discussion in the Jewish Public Forum
could be externalized and how more outsiders could be brought into the conversation. But I
was concerned about the balance between public policy within the Jewish context as opposed
to how Jews and Jewishness could relate to and inform and improve on policy on the
outside. I was also concerned about how religious, as opposed to multidisciplinary, the
conversation was going to be. I think I said to you at the time that, in fact, if you were
going to engage in larger issues, I would be interested. But I would not if it was going
to be an internal Jewish conversation.
SC: By "internal" you mean a conversation that would be merely about Jewish
continuity for its own sake?
SF: Exactly. And you probably remember that one of the things that I kept raising
throughout that first year was what was the real objective here? Was the real objective to
position CLAL within a cluster of Jewish organizations? Or was it trying to do something
more than that? But behind all of that -- and this is where I very much come down with
what Nancy Abelmann said in your interview with her -- I obviously had this intense desire
to connect and to connect with my own Jewishness. ( Click here to access the interview
with Nancy Abelmann). I also feel more and more overtly about this than I ever have in my
past and there are reasons for that.
I grew up in a place where the restrictive covenants were still in place. There was at
least one apartment building I walked past that explicitly excluded Jews as tenants. My
father was at that time contracted by the Town of Brookline to run the waste system, and
he would leave the towns incinerator and drive out the gate and right across the
street was something called The Country Club which if I recall
correctly actually had a sign on the gate that said No Jews. So I grew
up with some ambivalence in this community going to Hebrew school: Did I really want to be
Jewish, or might it be better to be something else? But it also made me realize over time
that we dont choose to be Jewish we are Jewish and we are also
identified by others as so being. So you might as well figure out your place within that
universe which both defines you and is being defined for you.
I think that leaves me constantly wanting to connect in some meaningful way. In some ways,
the CLAL experience has been the most meaningful way that Ive connected because it
engages me not at a level of learning of the religion per se (which would be more
important if I wanted to be a Talmudic scholar, but that is not my purpose). It engages me
at a level where I think I can make a contribution. It helps me understand the
relationship between my Jewishness and the dominant secular part of my life.
SC: Theres the very interesting case of when you came to us when the East Timor
situation was emerging in fall 1999. That is when Indonesian sponsored militias were
devastating the territory after its vote for independence. You basically said: "This
is outrageous that the High Holidays are coming up and there doesnt seem to be any
Jewish response to this. Can CLAL write something?" We then put it back to you and
said: "Well, youre a Jewish voice on East Timor. Why wouldnt you write
the thing yourself?" I just wanted to ask you to reflect on that experience.
SF: I think that was very important for me, and I think very important in my relationship
with CLAL. In some sense I was testing you, and you tested me back, and that was very
useful because I was saying: "Well, if you really believe that the Jewish community
can say something about these policy issues outside of Judaism, heres an opportunity
to do so. Heres one where you can make a critical difference." In fact, you
came back to me and said: Well, Im you Im the Jewish voice. You could
give me the channels to express it, which I didnt have. But, you were saying, here
is where I could fit in relation to a Jewish institution. I thought it was really quite
remarkable. And I have to say you also had a tremendous impact because you did give me a
space to articulate this, which I otherwise wouldnt have had. Its not the kind
of thing that could have been done as an op-ed piece. Because you not only published it,
but sent it out to Jewish organizations with a request for them to take some action. And
they did. A Jewish delegation actually went to Australia and, I think, had a significant
impact.
But besides confirming for me that there was something meaningful and authentic that I
could do with CLAL, I came to the decision that this was a way for me to think about my
Jewishness in relation to the rest of the world and in relation to my own professional and
other interests. There are two things about the experience that moved me very deeply. One
was the number of comments I got back from East Timorese saying that I understood what
they were going through. And, of course, I had understood them because I was understanding
them through my own experience.
SC: How did they see the piece?
SF: Because it got reprinted on the East Timor Web site. They picked it up and reprinted
it and so that was very moving. The second thing that happened was that I got a call here
one day just before Passover from a man in Canada who wanted to know if I ever finished
the Makassae Hagaddah (see below) because he was planning his Passover seder and he
thought it would be a nice thing to use. It sent me into a little bit of a guilt trip
because I have not gone back and done the Haggadah although the East Timor piece will make
some contribution. But heres how things can come full circle. Heres something
that you had said to me: "Well, you are a Jewish voice." I had done something
that I thought would be a Jewish contribution to something external and here something
external was turning back in to make a contribution to that traditional Jewish ritual
which, incidentally, is the only one that ever had any meaning for me. Passover was always
very important to me because we did it with my extended family. It was always a very warm
and wonderful occasion. The story of the Exodus does have meaning and, in some ways, it
has influenced the choices that I have made in my career and who I am. It enables me to
connect with people like the East Timorese and others who are suffering.
SC: Can you reflect back a little bit on the experience of the Makassae Haggadah project?
How did the idea come to you? What was the process like?
SF: We had gone to Australia in the spring of 1974, in a break from my 15 months of
fieldwork in East Timor. While traveling in Australia, we realized we were there at
Passover time and happened to be in Canberra. The Israeli consul actually convened a seder
for Jews in Canberra. It was done in a public hall and there were a couple of hundred
people there. We went with our kids who were three and five at the time. Something
fascinating happened. We were sitting across from an elderly couple and inevitably got
into a conversation -- about who we are, where we come from, what we were doing in
Australia, etc. My wife Leona said shes from Brazil and that she was born in China.
It turned out that this couple sitting across from us was also from China and they were
friends of her parents! So there was this connection which is in many ways a very Jewish
connection.
We went back to East Timor with a Haggadah from that seder. It was a very well designed
Haggadah: the Hebrew was very well designed in terms of the type. The English was much
simpler, but also nicely designed. There were drawings of the ancients and they looked
very much like people in East Timor wrapped in their ikat cloths. I brought this back with
me to East Timor, and I was sitting with my language teacher -- who was the ritual
specialist, although I did not realize this at the time. We were sitting at my work table,
and this Haggadah was there. My teacher was totally illiterate, but he began to look at
the pictures and wanted to know what the book was. I explained to him that it was the book
we use to teach our story to our children -- generation after generation. I said that it
was done in two languages in the ritual language and in the daily language that we
use -- hence the two different scripts. I said that it was done that way so the children
who did not know the ritual language could learn and understand the ritual. He got very
excited with this and asked more questions and then left and disappeared for a day or so
before showing up again at my house. We sat down to study (I was doing language learning
with him), but he clearly didnt want to talk about anything but this book. Then he
said: Could we teach you our language so that you could write it down so that my son
could learn the rituals?
Up until this point, I was having a difficult time doing traditional anthropology with
these people. I wanted to do a genealogy, but the Makassae have a taboo about naming the
dead. And I wanted to go and see their rituals, which are very elaborate, but their
rituals are very secretive and they wouldnt take me. They kept talking to me about
agriculture and household stuff, but they wouldnt talk to me about the essence of
what I was there to study.
And so when they made this offer, I said: "Of course." If I could record the
ritual language -- and I knew his son was studying Portuguese in school, since all kids
were forced to by the Portuguese colonial authorities then I would be able to
translate the ritual language into a language that the son could read. Makassae was an
unwritten language so, although the son could speak it, he couldnt read it. This
suddenly opened up a whole world for me. They invited me to learn the rituals -- to attend
their marriages, their burials and their mortuary rituals. While they would bury the dead
in a somewhat elaborate ritual, about thirty years later there would be a lavish mortuary
ritual in which they dispatched the soul of the dead to the land of the ancestors. They
agreed to let me do a complete clan genealogy on the condition that at the point that they
thought it had gone far enough and said it was over, I would acknowledge that it was over.
Then I would get a ram whose horns turned twice and sacrifice it at their holy
site and thereby conceal the names again.
This went on for about four or five months. It was very rich, but a couple of things that
happened were problematic. We had a wonderful dog he was very attached to me. On
one occasion, I was going up to one of these mortuary rituals. It was a very mountainous
climb up there. So I tethered the dog at home and I went up to the ritual. But the dog
chewed through the rope and followed me. He got there just as they were putting the
offerings down on the tomb and he ate the offerings! One of the people said what I thought
was a joke at the time: "Oh! He, too, wants to go to the land of the ancestors."
A few weeks later we made a trip to Dili for a few days and when we came back, the dog and
our two cats were gone. We paid to get the cats back we offered a reward to get
them back. But we never got the dog back. And I realized that the cats were a mask for
what happened to the dog. It turned out the dog was eaten by our gardener. When we
confronted him, he said: "well the dog was sick and he died." They eat dogs in
this part of the world.
It turned out two things conspired to end my lessons both involved doing the
genealogies. I suddenly realized that our gardener was the most direct lineal descendant
of the man whose soul was being dispatched and whose offering the dog had eaten. So they
were clearly taking back whatever this ritual substance was by re-devouring the dog. I
mentioned to my teacher that I figured out this genealogical connection. Then, the very
next day, there was a man taking a goat or water buffalo somewhere and I said to my
teacher: Oh! He must be going to such and such a village. And he said: Yes. And I said:
And this must be his relationship to that person in that village. He then said: Now you
know what you need to know and you can write it all down. Of course, I wasnt really
ready to write it all down. I thought I was just beginning to learn what I needed to know.
But thats how it ended.
They made me sacrifice a ram at a place that was said to be their place of origin. It was
a very awesome place. Its really interesting how powerful religious beliefs can be.
And maybe the more primitive they are, the more powerful they are. But you go to this very
remote site in the mountains and there is nothing but a huge tomb in the middle made up of
flat rocks. There are three or four rudimentary thatch houses on stilts and one of them
belongs to Uru-Uato (Moon-Sun) who is their supreme deity, and the others were of
Moon-Suns various descendants. One houses a caretaker who looks after this sacred
place. The Makassae origin myth is of a rock wren who kicks back the flood-waters and
breaks his leg and lands in a tree. There is this tree that actually has a rock nestled in
the crotch of a branch that looks like a bird. Its quite amazing. Its just an
awesome feeling of something -- I think its the power of belief, whether its
your belief or not you just feel that awesome power of belief.
SC: Well, its a wonderful story. It is so interesting that the Haggadah was actually
a tool for you to get your work done. How did you feel about this idea that they were so
thrilled with the Haggadah as a technology, and about using this technology? Earlier in
the conversation you mentioned that the seder was always an important aspect of Jewish
ritual for you. This clearly could have been a moment of real pride for you, to have this
technology that you could pass on. What did it feel like to be actually shaping the ritual
of this other people?
SF: There were several things involved there. One I had the technology and I knew
the technology worked because I tested it. I took some of the rituals that I had taped and
I transcribed them phonetically. I gave them to his son to read and his son was able to
read them back to the father. The father was very moved and very excited about that and so
I knew the technology worked. I knew that I could transcribe and convey some of the
rituals and interpret them. I did some articles as an anthropologist in which I described
these peoples beliefs and rituals and translated their ritual texts into English to
make my case about what I called their paradigm of life what their
religious and ritual beliefs were. But while I could do that in English I never had
the command over the Makassae language to be able to do that in Makassae. What I thought
that I would do was simply transcribe the rituals phonetically and give that transcription
back to them. In fact I did some of that but it wasnt in any order to tell a story
like the Haggadah does. I did it ritual by ritual. If I was attending a ritual, I
transcribed it and gave it to my teacher. I never reconstructed it as a narrative in
Makassae. I wasnt able to do that. In any case, I suspect that none of it exists
anymore -- that it was destroyed either in the invasion or afterwards.
I have no way of knowing because my teacher was killed in the invasion. After I left East
Timor, I had one communication from him which was written in Makassae by his son -- so the
technology worked. But the message was terribly sad a two-line letter: I forgot
most of my Makassae, but Ill never forget this the translation was:
Please help us. We are hungry, everyone is dying. There was really nothing we
could do we sent boxes of seed you do whatever you can. But Im sure it
never reached them in the midst of war in which a third of the population was being
killed. I was discouraged and sort of gave up on writing the ethnography of the Makassae,
which meant giving up on writing their Haggadah, and it was a real mistake because if you
ever need a Haggadah, it is when someone is trying to destroy you as a people.
I became an activist and worked on human rights questions and never got back to finishing
the Haggadah. But as I started to say earlier it was very presumptuous of me to
think that I could do a Haggadah: I had the technology, but I didnt have the
knowledge. I understand the system and how its constructed, but in an abstract and
analytic kind of way. I could do that in English I dont think I could do it
in Makassae. And I didn't know whether the order was right. All I could give them back in
Makassae was the transcription of what I had actually heard, but without contextualization
without any format that could tell a story. This was OK for an anthropological
audience, but would not provide them with a narrative that could be passed down. And so it
was probably a bit of chutzpah in thinking that I could do it.
SC: You said earlier that the thing about Passover that motivated you was the liberation
story. In this case, though, what you were imparting from Passover was a technology for
continuity. What did that feel like in terms of your Jewish identity -- to be imparting
this technology which was going to have the effect of potentially perpetuating the
existence of this people?
SF: I think for me Passover was always very important because of its family content and
because it was a ritual that I could understand. I knew what the story was about and
its so explicit that we are telling this in order to pass the essence of our being
on to our children. Being at the seder in Australia, and the connection with my in-laws
that came up in that context, gave me a further sense of the meaning of Passover and
Jewish life. I realized that the seder really is intergenerational transfer, but its
also about community and identity. I think if theres anything that defines us as a
people, its the Exodus from Egypt and the return to our Jewish roots.
Thinking about the Haggadah in relation to the transference of culture and identity from
one generation to another generation, and having it described so starkly in those terms
regarding another culture, probably made me better appreciate what Passover means in
Jewish life. It just depicted it very starkly for me. It is really a very functional
instrument but one that does not require an extraordinary amount of analysis or
interpretation to appreciate. Its saying very simply: Here is a people that lost
their identity they were kept captive and they were being returned. What
they are returning to, of course, is identity and Jewishness, and thats a very
simple and very powerful message. I began to think about it in terms of the conveyance of
identity to a people who are rapidly losing it.
The Makassae are a traditional society. After long periods -- 500 years -- of colonial
rule, little by little, the cultural content has been wiped out. The children are learning
another language and being acculturated to an alien system. And this man was so desperate
to be able to convey something to his son that is so fundamental that he asked me -- the
stranger -- to lend him this technology. It just brought the purpose and
meaning of this very simple communal event into very sharp relief.
The experience of doing a seder outside of our home was another facet of this. And it was
convened by the consul of the State of Israel to allow Jews from all over, who didnt
know each other, to share this very important and central ritual of Jewish life.
SC: One of the things that I was thinking as you were speaking is whether you would feel
as free to write your own Jewish Haggadah as you would feel to write a Haggadah for
another people. The analogy isnt perfect because, in this case, you were recording
something as it was and what Im asking is how at ease would you feel re-writing the
Jewish Haggadah for yourself, which is an act of interpretation? That is in some ways what
we asked you to do in writing the East Timor piece.
SF: This is the arrogance I was referring to before. I actually thought that I could write
their Haggadah because I thought I understood their ritual and symbolism. And I think I
probably do understand more about the ritual and symbolism of Makassae life -- because I
studied it so intensely -- than I do about Jewish life. So I think I would feel much less
capable of writing my own Jewish Haggadah and thats very paradoxical in a way. The
chutzpah that I would have for writing someone elses and the humility that I would
feel in terms of writing my own are peculiar. Im not sure I know how to explain
that, but maybe its explicable by some of what has always troubled me in terms of my
Jewishness. It was Jewishness without content it was something that was defined for
me by my parents, by who I inevitably am, and by the identity that others imposed on me.
But it never had any palpable meaning for me.
I think I also told you once that my mother used to light the Shabbos candles by looking
out the window to see when our neighbor lit hers, and for a long time I thought that was
just hypocritical. Then I suddenly realized: all she had to do was turn on the radio or
look in the newspaper to see what time sundown was. I honestly think that my mothers
going into my bedroom to look in our neighbors kitchen window was her way of
connecting. I wish I had appreciated that more when she was alive because then maybe we
could have talked about some of this and it would have had some meaning for me. It was
part of growing up in America where I learned there are two very distinct kinds of Jews.
There are Jews who pride themselves in their Jewishness and who seek continuity. They are
religious -- frum Jews. And then there are Jews like me. While my parents did not
hide their Jewishness --they didn't change their name, they didnt try to be
something else -- they emptied the Jewishness out of their lives and filled it with other
things. I am a victim of that, but I dont feel victimized by it. But I certainly am
a product of it and maybe, subliminally, the choice of anthropology was to lead me on this
path of discovery in an attempt to understand that. Margaret Mead once said that the best
way to understand your own culture is by studying another one. And yet she never turned
herself to the formal study of American society and culture, but she had insights that she
gained from her studies elsewhere. I dont think Ill ever turn my attentions to
the study of Judaism. I tried it some ways and it didnt work for me, but I think
working with the Makassae has given me insights into how Judaism has influenced my life. I
understand something more about myself through this other thing. As I think about it,
Nancy Abelmann's decision to go to study South Korea was part of a process of discovering
who she was through the other. I think I took that same journey hers is a bit more
complete than mine in some ways.
SC: Whats interesting is you actually took a different pathway -- going into human
rights work and doing some of the other stuff that you did subsequently. Earlier you
linked it also to Passover and that seems like a very significant expression of
Jewishness. My impression from talking to you on different occasions is that your human
rights work often happened in a context with a lot of other Jewish people, with a lot of
Jewish colleagues. And you were doing Jewish stuff in one way or another you were
doing stuff that came out of your Jewishness. Is that the way you thought about it?
SF: I think part of it has been the search for something. For example, Ive always
protected my time, and have not done very much in the way of social service that is extra-
curricular, perhaps because that is how I defined my professional career. But its
interesting that I chose to do CLAL and that I also was on the Board of the American
Jewish World Service for several years, which was a way of expressing my beliefs and
values through Jewish organizations. There were many organizations through which I could
have chosen to do this, but I chose to do it through Jewish organizations.
Ill come back to that question. First, I want to go back to something about Nancy
Abelmanns interview and the generational question. Nancy makes a very important
point at the end of her interview that is very closely related to what we were talking
about in terms of the intergenerational passage of identity. She connects her search
regarding Jewish identity to her young children. Her children give that search
significance, and thats a very important point. Because I was thinking as I read
that: If I had been more consciously aware of this when my kids were younger, might I have
conveyed something more to them than I have? I mean my kids are experiencing Judaism much
the way I did when I was their age a great deal of ambivalence regarding feeling
Jewish, not knowing how to engage, not knowing how to deal with it. Judaism is
intergenerational and Nancys connecting her own quest to her children I think will,
in many respects, define how she thinks about her Jewishness in the future. This has come
to me at a much later point in life, when my kids are grown. And so it was not a
reflective part of my early parenthood and, therefore, they grew up in a household very
much like the household that I grew up in. And, as I said, they have the same or similar
sets of ambivalences and questions about their Jewishness and how it relates to their
lives. This is compounded by the fact that they are both in interreligious relationships,
and thats something that I think about a great deal continuity. I dont
worry so much about Judaism disappearing Im not on the number counting side
of the equation. But I am concerned about the way in which it does put meaning into
peoples lives. For a long time, it didnt put meaning into my life, and I
wonder how much meaning it puts into my kids lives in face of all of the alternative
sources of ideas and information and beliefs and feelings that people now have. Thinking
about this -- in an explicit way with regard to her children -- gives Nancy something that
I didnt have when I was working this through.
SC: What you say does relate to the other piece of the question: I would suspect that you
imparted a great deal to them by virtue of the work that you were doing. I am just curious
to have you reflect a little bit on whether you have thought of that in Jewish terms and
whether in fact you might have imparted more to your children than you think. Its
just a matter of how you name it.
SF: Ive always believed that it was a simple matter of how you name it. I wonder
about this now -- and CLAL has made me wonder about it. But I dont have the answers
for it, that is, whether there is something specifically Jewish in the content of what I
do. I think there is a set of values that I was raised with conveyed to me by my parents
which ultimately comes from a Jewish background and tradition. And I probably conveyed
that to my children, and it leads us to be socially committed people. But I always looked
around and thought to myself: Well, there are lots of socially committed people out there.
I have Christian friends who are socially committed and Muslim friends who are socially
committed, and so what is the particular religious content of what we do?
There are people that share a general sense of values that come out of the Judeo-Christian
tradition. These became near universal values. And its the universality of those
values which provides meaning and respectability and acceptability, and allows us to work
on them in a common framework, which I think is important for humanity. And so I start to
worry a little bit when we begin to define things in particularistic terms. Ive
never quite articulated this before, so I have to think about this as I am saying it. If
we define our values and what we do in a religious idiom, or as having been framed and
informed by religion, or as being derived from religion -- and I know youre not
asking about Judaism only in religious terms, maybe even less in religious terms than
others -- but if you connect it with something so particular, does it get you into a
relativistic position in which ultimately the universality gets fragmented and you have a
breakdown into a Jewish philosophy of rights, or a Christian philosophy of rights, or a
Muslim philosophy of rights, or a Hindu philosophy of rights? You might search for the
commonalities, but find more differences and specificities than commonalities. That would
leave me intellectually unhappy and personally unsettled, and so I have to think about
that a little more as a problem. The world in which I expressed my values has been the
world of human rights and development, and I like to think of those as universal values
that give everyone a stake in them. If you specify those values too much in terms of
emerging from something particular, we might lose something important. Im sorry to
end on this ambivalent note, but that something important might just be an amalgam of a
bunch of things rather than something specifically Jewish.
SC: I think that as a society we are currently trying to figure out a different way of
thinking about the relationship between the particular and the universal -- whatever you
call it: pluralism, multi-culturalism. I think were actually in a period where we
need to try to figure out, once again, how the combination is going to work. I dont
think we have it yet.
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