Grose Agonistes

My open letter to a New York Times columnist about her Judaism

Dear Jessica Grose:

We have never met in person, I don’t think, but we have interacted in podcast world, and we once did a very fun Slate dialogue (back when Slate did dialogues) about Jews who had Christmas trees (you were pro-, I was anti-). I read your writing on parenting with admiration. I am a fanboy.

Today, you wrote a subscriber-only newsletter post for theTimes, “Lots of Americans Are Losing Their Religion. Have You?,” in which you announce a forthcoming series about religiosity’s decline in the U.S. (You include a form for readers to fill out, in which they can answer questions like, “Why did you become less religious?”) Near the end of the piece, your writing takes a personal turn, when you write, in part:

Since I started reporting this story, I’ve been asking members of my unobservant family what they’d say if a pollster asked them what their religious affiliations are …

None of us have set foot in a temple or church in years. My mother and I both said we would identify as Jewish. My father—who has two Jewish parents and was bar mitzvahed—said he’d identify as “nothing” and instead likes to joke about erecting a statue of Athena in his yard. My husband, who was baptized Episcopalian but didn’t always go to church regularly growing up, said he would identify as Christian. My 10-year-old said she didn’t know what she would say. These responses, especially my dad’s and my husband’s, were surprising to me.

… My own feeling is one of profound ambivalence. I have no interest in going back to temple and little trust or appetite for organized religion. But I feel passionately about being Jewish, and a little heartsick about not knowing quite how to pass along my ritual and history to my children. I do wonder about what may be lost by not having a community connected by belief, but I’m not quite sure what that is, or if replacing it is possible, or even desirable.

If people want to go down the rabbit hole of your writing on religion—and they should—they might click on the hyperlink under “profound ambivalence” in the prior paragraph, and they’ll read your piece “Teaching My Kids How to Be Jewish, One Plate of Apples at a Time,” where they’ll read your moving essay about trying to raise Jewish children; you write, in part:

My problem is—and always has been — that I have little desire to bring them to shul [synagogue]. I can be ambivalent about organized religion because it has, at worst, been used as a shield for sometimes ugly and hypocritical behavior.

I went to Hebrew school, and it certainly helped me gain a knowledge of and appreciation for Jewish traditions. But when I think back on it, what I remember most clearly about it is that my class was so unruly we couldn’t keep a teacher for more than a couple months at a time. My last memory of going to temple was for my opa’s funeral in my early 20s. The rabbi kept getting his name wrong, and at one point my oma leaned over to me and whispered, “This is a farce.” Still, post funeral, sitting shiva is one of the most profound and comforting collective expressions of grief that I know.

… Some of my fondest childhood memories are of rollicking Passover seders that involved a deliberately truncated Haggadah reading and a lot of delicious food. Growing up, I saw my oma and opa, both Holocaust survivors, every week. Though they barely spoke of their persecution until the very end of their lives, I can’t remember not knowing about what happened to them and their families.

These are all things I want to give to my children: a sense of togetherness and education, of a tradition that has stretched across time and continents despite a very concerted effort to snuff it out.

I was thinking about all of this on Monday as I was slicing apples with my 6-year-old [for the holiday of Rosh Hashanah].

There is a joke in the media world about how three instances of something is enough for a “trend story,” and I am going to jump on that wagon and say that we now have three Jessica Grose pieces (there may be more out there) about your love for Judaism—your warm, sometimes passionate love for Judaism—and how it coexists with your refusal to get involved with anything that might resemble “organized religion.”

I don’t understand what’s going on.

I get that your Hebrew school experience was less than edifying. Most of my school experiences, from age four to 29, were less than edifying. I also get that your grandfather’s funeral was ineptly run, by a rabbi who may have been out of his (or her) depth, or ill prepared, or just bad at the job. When I think about my grandmother’s Jewish funeral, the first one I was ever at, and how the rabbi (who had never met her) struggled to say something meaningful about her, I can put myself in your shoes.

But then you write, “sitting shiva is one of the most profound and comforting collective expressions of grief that I know.” And sitting shiva is a way more observant religious experience than just going to a funeral. What I mean is, lots of secular or barely observant Jews have a Jewish funeral, but far fewer of them “sit shiva,” with the rituals that entails. I don’t know how traditional the shiva was—if mourners covered mirrors to rebuke vanity, if they sat on low stools, etc.—but the mere fact that it was called shiva, and you found it so comforting, and so deeply Jewish, places you in a more observant, traditional camp of Judaism than the fact that your family had a Jewish funeral for your opa.

It’s as if you were a lapsed Christian who wrote, “Christmas Eve services always seemed to me a farce, but I found such comfort at the Epiphany service on January 6.” That person sounds like a pretty engaged, thoughtful Christian, no? They are attaching to the more obscure, less socially sanctioned practice. They are in it for the good stuff, the deep stuff.

And then there’s the fact that you do apples and honey for Rosh Hashanah; that’s not a practice most secular Jews even know about. (I didn’t, growing up.)

So, my point is, it’s perplexing. You seem to really love Judaism, and you badly want your children to love Judaism, too. And you’re not, by temperament, a Hanukkah-and-Passover Jew, in it only for the big feasts and the presents. But your mistrust of, or distaste for, “organized religion” keeps you from wanting to affiliate with other Jews, whether through synagogue, or Hebrew school for your children, etc. It seems to be affiliation that you resist.

(I’m just trying to understand. If I am getting you wrong, and you have the time, please let me know. I want to get this right. There are lots of secular or unaffiliated Jews whom I understand, and I don’t try to talk them out of their way of life, which may be entirely right for them. I count my parents in this camp, by the way, and many close friends and relatives. But I don’t think that’s you—indeed, you write that that’s not you.)

Meanwhile, you live in New York City, home to more creative, thought-provoking, progressive, welcoming, outside-the-box rabbis and Jewish educators than perhaps any city in the world, perhaps in the history of the world. And yet you have never investigated any of their events, services, etc. One gets the feeling that if a friend invited you to dinner for a joyous Jewish holiday like Shavuot, or Passover, you would happily go—but if a rabbi invited you to such an event in her synagogue, you would say no, because then it would look like you were affiliating. What’s more, as I read your writing, if a rabbi invited you to such an event outside the synagogue, maybe in somebody’s home or in a community garden, you would still say no, because it would look as if you were affiliating.

If I had gone to a bad school (I went to several), and felt ill-educated (and I do), but valued school, I’d look for better schools for my children. It sounds as if you went to a bad Hebrew school, and maybe an uninspiring synagogue, yet you write about how much you value the traditions and texts that are taught and transmitted by synagogues. I wonder why you don’t look for a better one?

I think you misunderstand “organized religion.” You write, “I can be ambivalent about organized religion because it has, at worst, been used as a shield for sometimes ugly and hypocritical behavior.” This is a truism. Every human institution or creation has been used badly (government, military, the NFL, socialism, markets, the internet), so ambivalence should be the rule, of course. But that’s the beginning of a discussion, not the end; the interesting thing is how to find institutions that work well, especially if they are custodians or purveyors or guardians of something we value. There are people who would have no interest in institutions that transmit Judaism well, but you have written more than once about your interest in transmitting Judaism, so I am perplexed by your seemingly firm belief that there are no institutions that would help you—or simply be fun, engaging places for you to know.

“Organized religion,” after all, is only what happens when home-based religion, or outdoor religion, or spontaneous religion, gets popular enough that it needs a building, or a tax-exempt status to raise money, or a paid professional to help run programming. You may be surprised to know that a Jewish community does not need an ordained “rabbi,” not the way Catholics need a priest, if they want to celebrate the Mass. Jews can do everything with laypeople: read Torah, get married, celebrate bar and bat mitzvahs, have Passover seders, bury the dead, etc. We have rabbis because it’s good to know who in a community knows the traditions and rituals—they are keepers of the lore—and because, given that people like me and you have other full-time jobs, it helps that there is someone whose job is to know the religious stuff.

Sometimes Jews who hate organized religion decide to have monthly Shabbat dinners—totally chill, no clergy, no oppressive hierarchy—and then the dinners are so much fun that they decide to do Passover together, and then this group of people decides to get together for prayers and songs on Rosh Hashanah … and then somebody says, “What if we pulled our money and hired a part-time rabbi to help run this stuff, or a cantor to sing the songs? Or an educator to teach our kids one afternoon a week, so they know the songs?” And then—presto—you have “organized religion.”

Which is just to say that the term is meaningless. It’s just a word for the religion that you don’t like. It’s not the thing you accuse it of being. It’s not that straw man. I think that if you went and looked at some of the organized religion, some of the communities people affiliate with, within 20 miles of your front door, you’d have your mind blown.

I hope you will, for your readers. You have just announced an upcoming newsletter series in which you’ll “explore the contours of our current relationship with religion, and try to unpack how we got here and what’s changed over the past several decades,” and while the series is about declining religiosity, I think it would be a shame if you never investigated what living religion is like.

The series I hope you’ll do next is one in which you do religion, with the open mind and curiosity that you brought to this amazing piece, for, say, six weeks. On Friday nights and Saturday mornings, go to synagogue. Then, during the week, have coffee or tea or bagels with rabbis and cantors, rabbinic students and laypeople, Jewish nursery-school teachers and other people who are somehow making the communities run. Go with synagogue members from different congregations as they visit the sick in the hospital, cook for the parents of new babies, teach Wednesday-afternoon Hebrew school, bury the dead, and do other incredibly moving, beautiful things. And at the end of it, maybe you’ll still reject it all. But I know you’d get some great writing out of it, and you’d have a lot to teach us.

Happy 14th Day of the Omer,

Mark