Epilogue

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED on my way to finishing this book: I became more Jewish.

I’m not saying I now keep kosher or daven every morning. What I mean is that I’ve become more stirred by Judaism—more impatient to understand it, more surprised by how preoccupying it is, less baffled by those who prioritize it. Judaism became a richer piece of my life.

Over the course of the last two years, as I listened to one prominent person after another describe how onerous Hebrew school was, how readily they left religion behind after their bar or bat mitzvah day, how boring they find synagogue, how unaffected they are by prayer, the more I felt drawn to understand the religion myself. The more I heard Jewishness described as a gut connection, a shared history, a value-system, a vibrant culture, but not in terms of ritual or liturgy, the more I felt pulled toward exactly those things: the scaffolding of this obstinate tradition.

During these many varied conversations, I never felt disapproving when someone told me they were indifferent to the religious aspects of being Jewish; on the contrary, I related to the sentiment. But it also made me want to investigate what so many people, including myself, had rejected or never opted to explore.

I trace this bend in the road, in large part, to Leon Wieseltier. I walked out of his Washington office at the New Republic feeling dazed and provoked. I took his rebuke of “slacker” Jews as a personal challenge: How could I make choices regarding my faith, let alone pass on a legacy to my children, when I knew so little about it? I’ll never forget his response when I pointed out that for many of the people I’d interviewed, observance takes a lot of time out of already busy lives. “Oh please,” he’d scoffed. “We’re talking about people who can make a million dollars in a morning, learn a backhand in a month, learn a foreign language in a summer, and build a summer house in a winter . . . We’re talking about intelligent, energetic individuals who master many things when they wish to.”

I know I can never hope to make a million dollars in a morning, but I also know I manage to make time for things that count. I schedule my life around my son’s baseball game, my daughter’s art class, a particular yoga instructor. When Wieseltier said, “It’s all about what’s important to you. It’s about motivation and will,” I felt the proverbial lightbulb go off over my head: “You should make time for this,” I told myself.

So I started studying Torah. Every Thursday morning, a young rabbi named Jen Krause—a brainy, spirited, and blessedly unpretentious teacher—met with me and a friend over coffee and for ninety minutes we dissected the Torah portion of the week. The process was demanding and emboldening, not just because I grasped the Jewish chronicle in its entirety for the first time, but because I realized that simply reading the story of the Jewish people was the key to the club. Keeping up with each week’s chapter—being guided by a scholar and discussing it with a friend—was my entrée into a world that had long felt closed and overwhelming. Suddenly, I had a place at the table, and no question was too simple or sacrilegious. I realized I was entitled to this narrative, too—it was mine as much as anyone else’s—and by wrestling with the text, I watched it come alive. What I’d assumed would be heavy lifting (an assumption that had kept me from taking any first step) wasn’t arduous at all.

I discovered for myself why the Bible narrative endures: how each chapter is packed with upheaval and spectacle, how every verse can launch a conversation, why there’s so much room for disagreement. I’m sure veterans of Torah study will roll their eyes at my elementary Eureka!, but the juiciness of the text was, frankly, news to me. The missteps of the patriarchs and matriarchs were also resonant; it was instructive to look at ancient self-interest and selflessness with a contemporary eye.

When the Passover holiday arrived, I actually felt equipped to tell my kids the Exodus story. I went to the West Side Judaica store and bought a “Bag O’ Plagues,” which included a plastic locust (God sent pestilence as one penalty for Pharaoh’s intransigence) and a frog that hops (God also sent a barrage of frogs). I prepared a playlet for the family seder, with my nephew playing Moses, my son Pharaoh, and my daughter and niece Israelite slaves lugging fake bricks in the desert. As we rehearsed, minutes before the seder began, my brother-in-law’s seven-year-old niece announced she wanted to join in. Inspired by her red tights, I assigned her the role of the Red Sea. When she parted her knees for Moses’ passage to freedom, relatives rolled with laughter, and I realized we should probably find a more G-rated simulation next time.

When the High Holy Days arrived the following autumn, I found myself volunteering to run the children’s services for our congregation in Connecticut. As I spent weeks designing the kind of ceremony I’d been trying for years to find for my own kids at other synagogues, I became a bit obsessed. I pored over Internet High Holy Days lessons, ordered twenty plastic shofars online for the kids to blow, found painted wooden apples for the children to pretend to “slice,” and purchased every Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur storybook listed on Amazon.com. When I couldn’t find a children’s song that explained the holiday in fundamental terms, I wrote one: “The Sorry Song,” so named because the theme of the holidays is atonement. (“Oops, I had a tantrum. Oops, I threw my food. Oops, I didn’t listen to my parents and was rude.” You get the idea.) The kids ended up learning the lyrics with my rudimentary guitar accompaniment, and after children’s services we were invited to sing my new composition for the entire congregation.

At the Kol Nidre service, I was given the honor of opening the Torah ark. It didn’t matter that the ark in our provisional temple is pint-sized; I was trembling when I wrapped a tallis around my shoulders for the first time in my life and approached the bimah.

I RSVP’d yes for the first time to a Sukkoth gathering one week after Yom Kippur. I’d never helped build a sukkah before, let alone eaten under one, and two years earlier the idea of devoting a Saturday morning to that enterprise would have been unthinkable. But there I was, feeling choked up as I watched my children take the lulav (branches) and etrog (citron) that were passed around and shaking them toward the four corners of the world.

I started reading my son a chapter from the Children’s Illustrated Jewish Bible (foreword by Rabbi Joseph Potasnik) each night. Its compact, dramatic storytelling and stormy illustrations are perfect for a second-grader. Ben is riveted by the stories, and I’m not surprised: Few other children’s chapter books are as action-packed. What novel offers an evil serpent, a deadly flood, brother killing brother, father sacrificing son, son tricking father, stone spouting water? I’m glad to see that Ben is turned on by the Bible, but I’m also a little relieved: This isn’t medicine, I think to myself—he likes it. This is a road we can take together. Where it leads doesn’t matter to me—only that he and my daughter become engaged in the Jewish story sooner—and more naturally—than I did.

The final rung on this strange ladder was my decision to become bat mitzvahed when I turned forty last May. With Jen’s help, I boned up on my hazy college Hebrew, learned the singsong melodies used to recite Torah, and prepared a brief talk about the Emor portion of Leviticus. I’m sure some of my friends thought I’d gone off the deep end, but for some reason this didn’t strike me as extreme. It felt as if I’d been unwittingly headed toward this rite of passage, albeit at a glacial speed, for a long time.

When I first met the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, he asked me why I’d chosen this book topic, and I stumbled over an explanation, admitting that I myself was struggling with the same questions of identity that I was probing with famous Jews. “So this is therapy for you,” he said. “We’re therapy.” I balked at his comment at the time. But maybe, in a roundabout way, he’d hit on something: I may not have consciously conceived this project to confront my own confusions, but it certainly has had that effect.

I started this book because I was genuinely curious about how being Jewish—that unique amalgam of ritual, Israel, Holocaust, matzo, Torah, and Seinfeld—sits with people who live public lives, who are among America’s success stories. But every person I spoke to made me look at myself: my childhood, my children, my marriage, my faith or lack of it, my education or ignorance, my connection or indifference. Every one of these conversations was a prick at my conscience. I personalized each person’s story. And no matter the gulf in stature between us, each person felt fundamentally linked to me.

I realize this epilogue is personal: Even after talking to more than sixty Jews, I don’t think it’s my place—nor am I equipped—to make broad, authoritative summations. I could proclaim that most Jewish public figures aren’t publicly Jewish; that most have abandoned customs, intermarried, or don’t seem very worried about Jewish continuity; that all of them feel unshakable Jewish pride. But I don’t know any of these things with any scientific or sociological certainty. What I do know is that being Jewish is powerful and, in a sense, unavoidable—whether one embraces it or leaves it on the shelf, whether one lives a visible life or an anonymous one. And that, in the process of writing this book, it’s become more vital to me than I ever expected.