Recent studies of the Jewish population have confirmed what common sense already intuited: We are less and less different from the people around us. Our children attend the same preschools, the same public and private schools, the same dance classes or Scout troops and the same high schools.
On the weekends, they participate in the same athletic teams and they hang out at the same malls. When they select a college, their standards are pretty much the same standards as everyone else’s, and their choice of professions doesn’t differ much from that of our neighbors either.
Small wonder, then, that a majority of marriages since 1985 have involved a Jew marrying a non-Jew. Small wonder that approximately one million children with Jewish ancestry are being raised as Christians.
In America the walls of discrimination have come tumbling down, and our future existence is imperiled precisely by the fulfillment of our fondest dream: Living in a society in which Jews don’t have to be different. It’s killing us.
No one wants to be different. Line up any group of small children and ask them if they are different from anybody else. They’ll confirm that we all have a deep-seated drive to be similar, to fit in. Being different means being lonely, being hated, sitting apart.
Yet that is precisely what our tradition knew was the essential prerequisite of Jewish survival.
In this week’s Torah portion, the Gentile prophet Balaam sees that role as necessary for Israel to be able to make a significant contribution to humanity.
Looking over the throng of Israelites assembled in the valley beneath him, he exclaims:
As I see them from the mountain tops,
Gaze on them from the heights,
There is a people that dwells apart,
Not reckoned among the nations.
For Balaam, our essential trait is that we dwell apart, that being Jewish does mean retaining and cultivating a distinctive identity.
A good Jew ought to be different, ought to stand apart from a crowd. Rashi (11th Century France) recognized as much. He knew that distinction was not a punishment, not some badge of shame to be worn with sorrow. Rather, he knew that “this is what their ancestors merited for them, to dwell alone.”
Rashi sees our being different as something wonderful that we earned through the merit of our ancestors, of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebekkah, of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah. Their piety, their goodness, and their integrity earned us our right to be different.
But are we? Isn’t it striking that we are the generation of Jews least different than our neighbors and at the same time are the generation of Jews least capable of transmitting our identity to our children?
Many of us remember a grandfather who started each morning in tallit and tefillin, publicly sharing some intimacy with God. Will our grandchildren have that precious memory when they are adults?
Most of us can remember a Bubbe who baked a Hallah and set out the wine for Kiddush and the candles to bentsch licht. Will our children grow up with those beautiful building blocks to a healthy and full identity?
Starved for spiritual meaning, we run after fad and cult, so distanced from the rich spirituality of Jewish observance that we don’t even consider the mitzvot as the real cure for our sense of loss and emptiness.
At our best, we were a people apart, separated not by a smug sense of superiority, but by a passion for holiness, justice, and study. That three-fold path of Torah, mitzvot, and gemillut hasadim preserved us through the millennia and enabled us to become a beacon for the rest of humanity.
We abandon our distinction at our own peril, and at the impoverishment of humankind.
Shabbat shalom.