Be inconvenient

Being Jewish is rarely convenient, and that is unlikely to change in 5783.

Photo by Crystal Berdion on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I was pulled into a conversation with a group of Jewish articling students about what we would do about the High Holidays. We are all the epitome of young professionals - many of us working our first serious adult job, desperate to impress. But now, we were being confronted with a challenge, or more specifically, an inconvenience. 

Being Jewish in the fall has always been something of an inconvenience. The lunar calendar rarely has the forethought to place the High Holidays on the weekend, which means that every year they have come with the burden of explaining to professors, managers, and friends that we will be absent on those days while we observe the start of the new year. By our mid to late twenties, we have outgrown begrudging our schools, and now our offices, for being open on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when they close for Christmas and Easter. We have accepted that we will have to manage this reality every year for the rest of our lives. And we will. Because we are Jewish. First and foremost. Even when the duties that come with being Jewish feel particularly inconvenient.

If it were easy, everyone would do it. Right? When we refer to ourselves, as Jews, as the “chosen people,” we mean not that we have been chosen to have wealth and opportunity lavished upon us - the Jewish experience, even stories of success, quite clearly prove this incorrect. When we say that we are chosen, we mean that we are chosen to bear the inconvenience of being a Jew. To today, we carry the weight of the suffering of our ancestors, distant and not. We carry with us the experiences of landlessness felt after the Jews were first expelled from Israel, when they returned from Concentration Camps, and when our families made the journey overseas to North America, where we live. We carry with us the struggle for Jewish emancipation in the Diaspora and the restrictions limiting Jewish life for so long. We carry with us the hope for peace in Israel, whether or not we want to live there. But to be Jewish and proudly so means being Jewish, even when any other choice would be easier. If we had made any other decision at any other moment, we would no longer exist. 

It is not always inconvenient to be Jewish. I look forward to Friday evenings when I can turn off my phone, step away from work, and spend time with family and friends or in nature, preparing for the next week. Being part of the Jewish community kept me getting sick from water for the second time in India because I could rely on access to a Chabad. I have received more business cards and offers for dinner or help whenever I was travelling or alone than I can count. For all of the times, it has been inconvenient or felt dangerous to be Jewish; I can think of double the number of occasions when I would hate to be anything else. 

That’s the thing about it, though. We can a la carte our Judaism as much as we want to a certain extent. We can choose whether or not we go to synagogue, keep Shabbat, or keep kosher. But we can’t treat it like a light switch that we flick on when it’s convenient and dim in moments when it’s not. Too often, I see precisely this taking place. 

It is so easy to give in to the temptation to be the “acceptable Jew.” The acceptable Jew is the one who is more often than not willing to stand apart from their people, blend in with the majority and make others feel comfortable. They sever immutable parts of themselves to be more like everyone else. Or, and this is the one I see too often these days, they leverage their Judaism to defend the wrongdoings of the majority with the hope of gaining acceptance. 

Many of us have likely borne witness to this last version of acceptability in recent years. I have seen it far too often when individuals who did not stand with the Jewish community in the face of violent Antisemitic threats and harassment play their Jewish heritage like the king of hearts to defend those who seek to spread misinformation and disinformation about Israel. To do this is to fall prey to the temptation only to be Jewish when it is convenient or advantageous. 

Being Jewish is inconvenient. 

Whether you were born Jewish or are chosen by choice, you are part of a community that has stubbornly survived every attempt to wipe us off the face of the Earth because being us is inconvenient, but never for a moment would we be anything else. 

On Sunday evening, we will begin welcoming the new year. Many of us will navigate missing work and school on Monday, and on Tuesday or Wednesday, we will start wading through the backlog of the days we were absent. Ten days later, we will postpone meetings and lunches to stand tired, hungry, and irritated in a room of similarly afflicted individuals. 

Again this year, we will be tempted to play it fast and loose with our Jewish identity. We will feel the pull to tone it down or pretend it doesn’t exist when it would just make it so much easier. We will handle the pull to behave like the acceptable Jew, whatever that means in the circles where we find ourselves, be it disavowing Israel or playing down the significance of what it means to be Jewish in our lives. It’s easier. It’s more convenient. 

Be inconvenient. 

Be proudly Jewish. This means being Jewish not only when it wins us brownie points with the gentile world or when it gets us actual brownies at synagogue. Be Jewish when it’s hard, when it means making difficult decisions or standing apart. 

We are here because generations before us refused to be something else, even when it would have saved their lives. 

This year, we owe our ancestors, ourselves, and future generations to be Jewish when being Jewish is inconvenient. Because even when it feels like the most challenging thing to be, we are doing it together. We were chosen for this.

L’Shana Tova.