“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind”. Krishnamurti
Home from school in a Philadelphia suburb during second grade in the early 1960s, I had been confused by all the terms used on the playground. I asked my father about the term “Hebe”.
“Dad, what’s a Hebe?”
“You are one.”
“Me?”
My father told me that he was Jewish, but my mother was Lutheran, and therefore to prevent the possibility of a split identity, it was decided that I would be raised in just one faith, the Lutheran.
It wasn’t until I began college that my years of following Israel in newspaper reports, my reading of Philip Roth and other Jewish writers in an attempt to paper over the identity crisis instituted by my father’s avowal of his secret Jewishness were again scissored in half. Watching the news one night, we saw that a trial judge had been indicted for graft.
My father said half-sarcastically, “What do they expect? He’s Jewish”.
I was startled and offended. “But dad, we’re Jews”.
My dad didn’t remember telling me I was Jewish. Apparently, it had been done so that I wouldn’t torment others by calling them “Hebe” and also, perhaps, for fun. I told the Jewish Romanian writer Andrei Codrescu about this and he said all Jews are Jews by mistake, in that God, the father, must have been kidding to make them the chosen race. Chosen for what? Chosen for extermination?
Did my father destroy my life when he told me one summer evening sixty years ago that I am a Jew? Even today when people meet me they often ask: are you Jewish? When I’m walking through Manhattan, young Jewish people have been known to hug me out of the blue. I hug them back. I have always had Jewish friends. Even after I realized I wasn’t a Jew, I still thought of myself as Jewish.
Creating a possibility of identity through the inheritance of a tradition is part of the job of paternity, but what if, through a sense of universal solidarity, parents told their children they belonged to enemy traditions? Identity is fragile, mysterious, and ultimately a kind of hallucination, and yet can lead to a militant insistence on us vs. them. As one grows up, there is the choice to join a tradition, and then join ranks with those within the tradition and to march in step with them. Ultimately, as one chooses an identity one chooses an army and hopes to rise in rank. However, if one were to choose the other army, and if parents consciously turned their children into enemies, then could all traditions vanish, so that we could all be friends? I think this is wrong. A person needs to belong to a tradition, and I myself ultimately returned to the Lutheran faith. My dad was a Lutheran, and the inside of the only church I knew as a child was Lutheran. My dad is long gone, and didn’t even remember the Hebe incident in his later years, but I am fairly sure his own Lutheranism had vanished. He told me one afternoon, after he had stopped attending church, that God only exists in the brains of relatively stupid people. He was a math professor at a local college, and logic was his strength. But logic without faith is circular.
Creating a possibility of identity through the inheritance of a tradition is part of the job of paternity, but what if, through a sense of universal solidarity, parents told their children they belonged to enemy traditions?
I remembered in kindergarten how the genders policed one another. Girls had their games with dolls and pretending to have families, and boys had theirs which consisted of proving their power to kick or catch a ball. I thought the boys were too rough. They wanted to knock each other down and throw things at one another’s heads. I wanted to quietly paint watercolors. I don’t know what the girls did, but my favorite moment in the entirety of kindergarten was quietly drinking milk with one girl while our legs dangled off the stage in the school auditorium.
This isn’t to say that I couldn’t compete with the boys. In kickball, I was always picked first or second, and in tag I could run faster than anyone else. We had a horrible game where we had to knock down the girls as hard as we could on the pavement. I hated to see their bleeding knees. I wanted to beg the other boys to please stop, and I had enough social capital to possibly make it stop. I had to choose a day when our general wasn’t there so that I could perform the coup. It was a scary moment because at first I didn’t know if they would kill me or not. The other boys looked at me as if deciding. The game had been started by a mixed-up kid named Walter who told me his mother beat him up and forced him to wear dresses because she had wanted a girl. He kept trying to run away. Walter had not come to school that day. I saw my chance. One very big kid named Leo decided to stand next to me, and said, yes, that game is over. Then another stood with me, and then another. When Walter came back, we simply told him he was no longer the top general. I didn’t want to be the general, so Leo became the general, and I backed him as Walter’s former second-in-command. It ended well except for Walter. He disappeared after that day from school. Some kids said his mom was a prostitute and beat him senseless and he hit the girls on the playground as a way to stay even. We moved at least five times after that, so I have no idea if any of that was true.
While I don’t mind having a phantom identity as a Jew, I think it would be far worse to have had a phantom identity as a serial killer or as a Nazi or as a Marxist. Some traditions live by attacking others. My dad taught me as he let me out of the car for kindergarten that I should watch out for the kids who weren’t fitting in and try to make sure they had at least one friend. After this event, however, no one wanted to be Walter’s friend. I wish I had an easy answer, but the actual answer was that he was a creep. My dad had lapses, but at least he wasn’t as bad as Walter’s mom was said to be.
While I don’t mind having a phantom identity as a Jew, I think it would be far worse to have had a phantom identity as a serial killer or as a Nazi or as a Marxist.
My dad never hit me and never swore at me. The main problem with my dad was that he didn’t talk that much, so whatever he said became something I held on to for years. I am still holding on and trying to make sense of what he told me. He was a decent dad, and I will never let go of him. What he said did broaden me, and I am grateful for all the Jewish friends I have had over the years. I still root heavily for Israel in all of its conflicts, and I still root for the Israeli women and children that Hamas knocked down in the dust of October 7th.
