Say No to Identity! Say Yes to Acts of Being! A Few Thoughts on Election Day

By Yaakov Mascetti*

Identity is an implanted concept in my formation which has caused me many, many problems in the last few years. When my father was diagnosed with cancer in 2008 and it looked like, in 2010, he was going to die, I had rabbis tell me that for the halacha he was not my father and that I was not required to mourn for his passing – my dad is not Jewish, but I am. That, you may understand, had quite an impact on my (then) troubled consciousness. Who was I? Why could my dad not be mourned with the tools I had acquired through my conversion? And if I couldn’t do so, did that mean I was still his son, or did it mean that I had to choose between being Jewish and not being so?

Thank Gd he did defeated cancer – but I totally lost my faith in orthodox halacha, on the one hand, and in those specific rabbis on the other.

So – that’s the anecdotal trigger to talk about identity. Jewish identity. National identity. On Monday, March 2nd, in Israel we voted for the third time in a year. And there has been a whole lot of talking on the question of ‘zehut’, Hebrew for identity. Zehut Yehudit, Jewish identity. Zehut israelit – Israeli identity. The word Zeh-ut, is composed of “this” or “it” and the suffix “-ness”. When one refers to zehut, one literally uses a word to frame, permanently, the identity of the individual – what is your Jewish it-ness? How do you define your being something alone, and not something else? Is it actually possible, I wonder, to state that we have a strong and healthy Jewish identity?

My answer to this question is, of course, no. We cannot define ourselves as one thing and one thing alone. Nothing truly defines the individual – and nothing should be used to box the individual, neither from the national perspective, not from the religious perspective, and definitely not from the perspective of gender. And I also think that Jewish rabbinical tradition has a space for extreme statements of identity, but it also has a special place for those who will not surrender to a definitive framing of their life. There is, in this sense, space for those who move around, change, mutate according to the actions they decide to perform. There is space for those whose identity, so to speak, is manifested by actions. The action is the identity – the mitzvah is the identity and the identity is in the performance of the mitzvah. There is not framework, no inherent spirit in the individual which forces him to perform in that manner – the act is what gives life to being. Human actions, so to speak, cannot be framed as things, as it-ness, or as thing-ness.

At a lecture given by Rabbi Daniel Epstein at a friend’s house last night, I heard a beautiful anecdote. A yeshiva student asked his rabbi one day why we say, every single morning, the blessing “Blessed art thou, Lord of the Universe, for not making me a gentile” [I’m ignoring the non-PC issues at stake here, but I am conscious of their existence]. Why do we have to say that every day? We were born Jewish! We should say that blessing once, and once alone, and then move along with our lives. The rabbi’s answer came after a few seconds of silence: “We are not born Jewish every day – we are born as human beings. It is the blessing, the mitzvoth we perform every day, it is the acts of charity that characterize our daily life, that define who and what we are. We do not awake to this life, every day, as Jewish, but as human beings.”

So – identity, my identity, your identity, dear reader, depends on actions. We perform acts – those acts define and manifest our being. Jewish-ness does not exist – Jewish acts do.

To those who have been calling for Jewish identity, for Israeli identity, for the uniqueness of one forma mentis, we wish to say with a clear voice: “Say no to Identity! Say Yes to Acts of Being!” Perform acts of kindness, pursue justice, and do not exploit the weak and the poor.

So no, I do not have a well-wrought Jewish identity – and I am definitely not Israeli. The acts I perform define me – and I live with joy in the fluidity of this existence.

I would like to conclude this rambling post with a long quotation taken from one of John Donne’s most beautiful sermons, preached at Whitehall on February 29th 1627:

“When God plac’d Adam in the world, God enjoyned Adam to fill the world, to subdue the world, and to rule the world; when God plac’d him in Paradise, He commanded him to dress Paradise, and to keep Paradise; when God plac’d his children in the land of promise, he enjoyned them to fight his battails against Idolatry, and to destroy Idolators; to every body some errand, some task for his glory; and thou commest from him into this world, as though he had said nothing to thee at parting, but go and do as thou shalt see cause, go and do as thou seest other men do, and serve me so far, and save thine own Soul so far, as the times, and the places, and the persons, with whom thou doest converse, will conveniently admit. Gods way is positive, and thine is privative: God made every thing something, and thou mak’st the best of things, man, nothing; and because thou canst not annihilate the world altogether, as though thou hadst God at an advantage, in having made an abridgment of the world in man, there in that abridgment thou wilt undermine him, and make man, man, as far as thou canst, man in thy self nothing. He that qualifies himself for nothing, does so; He whom we can call nothing, is nothing: this whole world is one intire creature, one body; and he that is nothing may be excremental nailes, to scratch and gripe others, he may be excremental hairs for ornament, or pleasurableness of meeting; but he is no limb of this intire body, no part of Gods universal creature, the world. Gods own name is I am: Being, is Gods name, and nothing is so contrary to God as to be nothing. Be something, or else thou canst do nothing.”

Jewish-ness, zehut Yehudit is nothing but an idol of the mind, a dangerous reification of an otherwise fluid idea. Being is the performance of acts.

*Yaakov Mascetti (PhD) teaches at Bar Ilan University.