Shoshana Smith

Claiming a Seat

My first name constructs a perceived identity. To a confused few, I am black—no blonde white girl has been asked if she’s black as often as I have; to most, my name denotes me as a Jew. My parents both love to tell the story of my Great-Aunt Ethel’s reaction to the news of my birth. An old-fashioned woman of Kentucky, she’s famed to have said, “Shoshana? Isn’t that a He-brew name?” My father in particular loves to screech this out, while my mother rolls her eyes.

Labels comprise a great deal of our lives; we identify ourselves by them, just as we identify others, and others use them to relate to us. While in theory, the prospect of taking each individual you meet and seeing them as simply that: a person comprised of a plethora of subtly unique traits, is an ideal and fair way to look at the world, in reality it is an overwhelming task. It’s impossible to not generalize. Even in the cases of dear friends and family, I know them well enough to know they are all complex people. However, I sometimes need to sequester them into boxes: white, Chinese, male, female, Jewish, Christian, artist, writer, blonde. And even while I’m doing it, I’m aware it doesn’t do them justice as individuals.
To label me a Jew could create a whole series of misconceptions about me: primarily that I believe in God. However, to simply call me an atheist sells my identity short as well, because I am a Jew. Every member of my mother’s family, down to the dogs, is Jewish, and so by Jewish law, I am part of the community. I am an atheist Jew.
It isn’t an easy concept, for some. In most cases, I try to explain my relationship to Judaism as a cultural thing: there’s food, a language, and a particular “mother-type;” that seems to be enough to create a culture, and most accept my explanation. Some ask me if other Jews accept me as one, even as a nontheist, and the truth is that they do, for the most part. No one understands the idea of the atheist Jew quite as well as the Jews themselves. Perhaps it’s because the “Jewish nation” works so hard to cultivate the idea of being a nation that they are slow to alienate anyone who could be connected. But I think there is something unique about Judaism that makes it more than a religion, and turns it into an identity. Even my very-Orthodox extended family accepts me and my similarly-atheist mother as Jews, even while I’m sure they despair over our nontheism in private.

It is, in fact, non-Jews who are often eager to tell me I cannot be a Jew. Asking Jewish friends of mine if the concept of an “atheist Jew” is a valid one, or one they understand, they respond with solid affirmatives; so solid, as if they couldn’t imagine it not being so. Gentile acquaintances, however, react to the concept with confusion, or even attempts to refute it. In a recent religious debate with a Christian-raised friend of mine, he said, in the midst of proving a separate point, “It’s like, well—you’re not actually Jewish—”

He never made his point, as I cut him off immediately.

“Of course I’m Jewish.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You don’t believe in God, Shoshana, so you can’t be a Jew.”

“Don’t fucking tell me what I am. By Jewish law, I’m a Jew.”

“But you’re not really. Your parents being Jewish doesn’t make you a Jew.”

“I’m sorry. Where do you get off telling me the parameters of Jewish law?.”

And so it went. In the end, he dropped the subject.

Few try and tell me so blatantly that I “can’t” be a Jew, but many have implied it, or expressed doubt in my connection with Judaism in light of my atheism. After all, how can it be that I affiliate myself with a religion, while at the same time believing God is a social construct created both to keep people in line, and to serve as an emotional crutch? But the truth is, the majority of Israeli Jews identify as secular, and a good portion of them consider themselves agnostic or atheist. And yet, still Jewish.

As most do, I come by my Jewish identity through my family; converting to Judaism is, traditionally, a difficult process, often requiring processes of petitioning and judgment by rabbis. In some ways, the Jewish community exhibits itself as more welcoming toward its atheist (or otherwise religiously deviant) natives than its converts. As a result, my family has never made motions to exclude me from their religious identity; in fact, all exclusions have been choices of my own. I do not go to synagogue with them when we visit, I do not join in during the prayers that surround meals, and I struggle not to giggle as my father whispers to me that he has snuck in bacon from this morning’s breakfast out. I even turn the lights on and off for my cousins on the Sabbath; during my childhood, I felt proud to be useful to them in a way no one else among us could. Being able to manipulate electricity on those occasional Friday evenings we spent together felt like a special power, and I enjoyed the brief flash of superiority. It wasn’t until we grew older, and my cousin Deana spit out a candy I gave her because it wasn’t marked as Kosher that I realized how much my atheism really did serve to separate me as well.

I have grown up surrounded by a strong Judaic presence that clings to the periphery of all aspects of my life. In addition to the influence of my maternal kin, I grew up in a town with a prominent Jewish community; my classmates’ bar and bat mitzvahs were the high social events throughout the sixth and seventh grades, and I spent the time feeling grateful that my mother had not forced such a tedious public-speaking ritual on me. Some time in fourth grade she had offered, and I refused, preferring to keep my afternoons free of the Hebrew school horror stories I’d so often heard. Truth to tell, compared with many of my peers—a slew of Katzs, Shapiros, and Berkowitzs—my surname and I came off as somewhat shiksa-ish. At the same time, one of my classmates’ mothers bore the name “Shoshana,” and so did I.

To say I don’t sometimes enjoy walking the line between Jew and gentile would be a lie. In fact, which side I tread on often depends very much on my environment. Encapsulated in my Brookline grade school, or surrounded by my Orthodox family members, I take pleasure in my heathenism. While my mother stands near her siblings during prayer, I stand to the side with my father, the only two still pairs of lips in the room. I enjoy the freedom to eat what I want, and flush any toilet on Friday nights, particularly when juxtaposed against my cousins’ restrictions. However, upon coming to college and finding myself surrounded by people who had never attended a Seder—never even heard of one—I became a Jew. Not only in name and vague senses of family loyalties and heritage, but in identity. And my sense of myself as an atheist Jew, something I had always taken for granted and had never had to explain, came under the scrutiny of confusion.

It would have been impossible for me to go eighteen years of my life never questioning the logistics of being an atheist member of a religion-based community. I had. Standing apart at family prayer sessions; staring at the incomprehensible stencils my cousins used to practice Hebrew; unable to understand the words of my grandfather’s funeral: I knew it as a world I was forever joined with, but never part of. And until I separated from it—transplanted myself to somewhere unfamiliar, where familiar conventions did not reign—did I develop the urge to forge a stronger identity of myself as a Jew.

When I was very young, my grandmother gave me a silver Hamsa necklace, a turquoise stud set in the middle of the charm. Being very young and unaware (and, likely, uncaring) of its significance, I bent the thin silver out of recognition soon after I discovered its pliability. After beginning my first year of college, I asked my mother for a replacement, which I received for my birthday. Brightly beaded and heavy, it doesn’t much resemble my first charm—perhaps she worried I would bend this one, too—but the symbol is the same. I took to wearing it immediately and in its first week around my neck the man behind the counter at the falafel restaurant asked after my heritage. Pride fueled my reply; pride in the answer, but also in the visual label the necklace provided for me.

A symbol of protection in Jewish and Arabic culture, the Hamsa is a hand, often two-thumbed, usually set with an eye in the center of the palm. It can be worn, or hung in a decoration, and is used to ward off the evil eye. Like the Christian cross, the Star of David, and the Star and Crescent, the Hamsa is a religious or superstitious symbol. Essentially a bit of worked wood or metal, it garners its power from what it represents. To many it represents the mystical protection of a higher power; to me, it exists as a personal symbol representing my Judaism. No higher powers are involved.

To what extent are non-believers allowed to connect themselves to a culture that hinges on belief in God? One key aspect of the Jewish faith revolves around the special relationship between the Jews and God. Any cultural trappings—rituals, ceremonies, and even languages, attitudes, and foods—stem from that central conceit. Can someone who doesn’t have that relationship with God truly integrate himself with that culture, while maintaining his atheism? And if so, is it fair to?

Surrounded by family, it’s easier to excuse. Dueling identities aside, heritage does play a part: even the most traditional forms of Jewish law state that having a Jewish mother is enough to qualify one as a Jew. No awkwardness rears its head when attending a family Seder; in fact, it’s one of the more enjoyable traditions, I’ve found, to sit and eat with family and friends, sharing both the retelling of history, and the singing of songs no one knows the words to.

But outside that circle of familiar faces, it’s less easy to claim a place at the table. For two years running I have flirted with the idea of attending Knox’s Hillel, particularly during the high holidays. During Passover, even more particularly. But each time I conclude that it would feel too awkward; unfamiliar with the school’s Jewish community, I’m reluctant to venture out. Just thinking of the scenario, I feel as if someone has inscribed the word “ATHEIST” onto my forehead. Even despite reports that the members are largely secular, I acutely sense a gulf between “secular” and “Godless heathen.” I cannot imagine sitting at a Passover table and exposing myself as a Jewish fraud, not even knowing more than three words of Hebrew and half a memorized prayer that belongs to either the bread or the wine.

But even as I shy away from this community, anxious over my reception, I know it’s something I want to be part of. Somewhere, if not at Knox. One of the greatest appeals of being Jewish for me lies in the sense of community; the fact that “Jew-ness” transcends a belief in God, and extends into an ethnicity, creating a people that bond through a common history and a particular, internal feeling that defies articulation.

God is not part of my Judaism. Whether I am justified in my picking and choosing, I choose to anyway. I choose to be a Jew without the devotion to a deity I don’t believe exists, and without the petty rules and trappings that come with various levels of observance. I have no intention of surrendering my freedom to turn lights on and off when I choose, and I am determined to keep shellfish and cheeseburgers in my diet until the day I die.

But in my particularity, I shed more than just prayers and a vigilance for that Kosher K. I am choosing who I emulate. I prefer to distance myself from the religious blindness and prejudices of my extended family. I want no belief, however fervent and comforting, to lead me to temporarily disown my child because she decides to date someone who is not a “nice Jewish boy;” nor do I want to be my cousin, who has to be wary of who she dates, lest his religion offend her father or her rabbi. I never want to harbor a sense of anger like that in my aunt, who lashes out at my mother, still angry at her for a hundred points of separation, and berates her for marrying outside their family’s faith. Nor do I want to support traditions that segregate women and men inside a place of worship, or deny a grieving daughter the right to speak at her mother’s funeral on the basis of her gender, or who she has married.

There are some aspects of community I want no share of.

Instead, I prefer to emulate my parents: my father, who left the Methodist ministry in favor of scorning all religions equally, but can nevertheless maintain a civil conversation with his Orthodox brothers-in-law, or his Christian nephew; and my mother, who holds proudly to her Jewish heritage without believing in God, and without the religious anxieties of her family. From her I learned to put on a Seder full of friends—some not even Jewish—where we manage to recite the story of Moses in under an hour, and stumble through a boisterous rendition of “Dianu,” singing the chorus at least twice more than required.

Instead, I prefer that community, where the words don’t quite count, and everyone is allowed to read from the Haggadah.

Like my mother’s Seders, I want to uphold cultural Judaism in my life. I want to wear my Hamsa, not to protect me from the evil eye, but to carry that aspect of my identity to me all the closer, defying its presumed alienation by my atheism. I want to keep family recipes for brisket, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, and haroset in a box and be able to, as my mother does, tell visitors about the foods’ connection to my heritage. And most important, I want to retain the sense of pride and community that comes with the shared heritage of Judaism as best I can, while coping with the fact that my atheistic beliefs—which I hold to as firmly as any theist has his doctrines—will always set me apart just a little, leaving me standing to the side during prayers. But I don’t mind that much, as long as I end up sitting at the table in the end.