TRIBALISM AND REFLECTIONS ON A BANOT MITZVAH II

I had the pleasure this weekend to attend an unusual Banot Mitzvah (plural of Bat Mizvah) of twin girls who are the granddaughters of a friend of mine (yeah, I’m old). I served as a kind of Jewish resource for my friend, and I wanted to see what eventuated.  This is the second of the blogs, a reflection on tribalism and Jews.  The first one can be found at insert the link.

Judaism for me is this incredibly tribal phenomenon.  I’m what they call an amcha Jew, someone who identifies with the peoplehood.  I’m not a Jew because I believe in Rabbinic ideology—in fact I find it completely difficult and my problems with it led to a lot of wandering around in Buddhism in my younger days.  I’m not a Jewish mystic and I don’t identify with any Jewish religious movement.  I am an amcha Jew. Being Jewish is who I am, my core identity over any set of beliefs or commitments.  I am a Jew.

Tribalism is a mixed blessing.  If your version of tribalism lets you rape, kill or otherwise dehumanize other human beings, that’s a HUGE problem—and most tribalism is like that. It’s why Jews feel free to bomb Gaza to smithereens, why Bashar Al Assad has no compunction about gassing Sunni Muslims in Syria because he’s an Alawite Shia Muslim, and most Syrian’s aren’t, why Putin can attack civilian targets in Ukraine because while they are both Slavs, only one people is Russian, why European settlers felt free to enslave blacks and kill Native Americans, why before European settlers came to this continent, there were plenty of wars between tribes of Native Americans.

But tribalism is also how most of us meet the human need to belong to a group bigger than ourselves.  A person who isn’t connected to something bigger than themselves is a lost soul—and we have too many lost souls in our world.

My being an amcha Jew left me feeling sad when I left the Banot Mitzvah.  The ritual didn’t feel as Jewish as I would have liked it to have felt.  Now, I’m not blaming anyone, I want to be crystal clear about that.  Look, I’ve raised two kids with a committed amcha Jewish partner.  We sent them to day school and one of them to summer camp.  We did Shabbat rituals every week and celebrated every holiday, we have tons of Jewish books and Jewish music in the house—and my kids don’t feel nearly as tribally Jewish as I wish they would or as I and my partner are.  It is incredibly hard to raise kids who strongly identify as Jewish in a non fundamentalist way. I certainly have not succeeded.

And it makes me sad when Jewish kids or Jewish events don’t seem to have that kind of deep connection to the tribe, as long as its not the kind of connection that reeks of racism (that makes my skin crawl as well).  I think we do a better job of raising kids to feel more connected to all of humanity than we do to raising tribally connected Jews who don’t embrace the bad parts of tribalism.  And that makes me feel sad, because I want more people in my tribe, not less.