Was Moses A “Serious Jew”?
So, I subscribe to The Forward, the Jewish newspaper brought to you by The New York Times. I started reading articles from The Forward like twenty years ago. It used to be advertised regularly on a radio station that I listened to, and I thought, “Well, I’m interested in issues that concern American Jews, so I should be interested in this paper.”.
I wasn’t a subscriber back then, because it was fairly ridiculously expensive to get the print addition, but when I saw Forward articles online, I very often found them of interest and would usually read them (I also read a lot of articles from Haaretz and the Times of Israel). I signed up for the Forward newsletter about two years ago, and there were so many articles that I wanted to read that I paid the nominal online subscription fee. For a while, I was reading an article or two every day from the daily email they send with four or five headlines in it. These days, with everything going on in my life, I don’t read as many. When I’m dealing with being homeless on the street, its hard for me to get worked up about whatever Seth Rogen is doing that has them running so many articles about him.
I liked The Forward historically because it seemed to have a mostly female editorial staff and seemed to be coming from a perspective that was both liberal and feminine. Aside from my harsh life circumstances, I haven’t been reading as much lately also because, 1) the Covid outbreak seemed to drive you girls kinda crazy and move your editorial tone to the right and to the orthodox, and 2) you guys send out WAY too many e-mails. But I do usually glance to see what the headlines are, and a few days ago, one caught my attention. It said “Serious Jews don’t marry non-Jews.”.
Now, normally, in these emails, the headlines that are opinion pieces are so identified with the leader, “Opinion:...”, but this didn’t have that. So I want to talk about this.
It’s natural given how hard Covid hit the New York Jewish community, but The Forward seems to have become infinitely more “super-Jewish” these last several months, as if the staff has forgotten, or decided to disregard, that they do have an audience of non-Jewish, pro-Jewish readers like me. More and more, the articles seem to be targeted only to the interest of Jewish readers (and seemingly directed toward a more conservative, more religious audience than in the past). I always perceived the content as being the voice of liberal, secular Jews. Recently, a high percentage of the articles seem to concern a lot of real minutiae of Jewish life and super-religious stuff, and fewer broader stories of concern to any intelligent person interested in Jewish social and cultural issues. The world seems to be going right. Why not The Forward, too?
But this headline caught my attention, given my current interest in marrying a Jewish girl (still true even though Scarlett, Natalie and Amanda are all unavailable). I didn’t read the article, but I have some thoughts on this anyway. I actually agree with the headline, sort of, despite what that means for me. But I have a number of proposals for the Jewish community in order to protect and preserve Jewish values and culture. Here’s one...
So, as I’m sure most every Jewish person knows, but most Christians don’t know, Moses’s wife was Ethiopian, i.e. BLACK. You can read about this in your Christian Bible in Numbers, Chapter 12, where Miriam and Aaron get all butthurt about Moses being married to a non-Jew, and the God of Israel is not happy with Aaron and Miriam about that AT ALL. I’m pretty sure MOSES was a serious Jew. Now the Christian Bible doesn’t say if Moses’s wife was a practicing Jew religiously speaking, but I assume she was, given that Israel was traveling through the desert at that point in time, so being Moses’s wife and being a part of that community, it’s pretty safe to assume she would have been going along with the community’s practices and rituals. So the issue to Miriam and Aaron (and apparently others) must have been that she was not ETHNICALLY Jewish.
So here lies the tricky thing. Even before I realized that the Jewish MAT Girls were my heroes, even before I saw Scarlett Johansson in Vegas and decided I wanted to marry her and make her my BFF-LOML, even before I figured out how smoking hot Jewish girls are, I had given more than cursory thought to converting to Judaism for a wide variety of reasons. But I knew it wouldn’t work. What I really wanted couldn’t be done. I didn’t want to convert to the Jewish RELIGION. I’m not religious in that way period. Like most liberal American Jews, I’m generally a secular person, although I find Judaism less objectionable as a religion than the others. What I really wanted, conversions of ethnicity being impossible, was to convert to the Jewish social culture, specifically the culture of liberal, secular American Jews.
I always admired Sammy Davis Jr. as someone who had broken racial barriers in the exact way that I wanted to. If you understood Sammy’s story, you knew he wasn’t “white-washed” or an “Uncle Tom”. Sammy never repudiated his roots. He was simply a sophisticated, modern Black man who had won the freedom to be himself, and had gained widespread acceptance in mainstream society for his talent and character. When I talk about wanting to form my “MAT Pack”, it’s not just because it rhymes. I was inspired by the fact that Sammy was able to be a member of a group of entertainers and friends with whom he shared a lot in common despite their differences in skin color during a time in America where skin color differences were everything. Likewise, today, differences in race and gender notwithstanding, I believe I’m a whole lot more like Natalie Portman and Amanda Seyfried than I am like Will Smith and Denzel Washington. I’m sure of it, in fact. I’m not sure how much like Scarlett I am, but I’m curious.
In our current era, in some respects, the gulf between men and women might be as big as the gulf between Black and White was in the Sixties. Perhaps bigger. Martin Luther King Jr. and others were marching across the South, but to someone like me, for Sammy Davis Jr. to be able to march through Las Vegas with Frank, Dean, Peter and Joey was an equally important victory for racial justice. It would be the same kind of victory today if I could march through the lobby of the Aria with Scarlett, Natalie, and Amanda. Not like if I could make them do it as a corny photo op, but if they were actually my friends that I hung out with. Of course, Vegas is probably not at the top of the list of where these girls would hang out (I wouldn’t think), if they even relate to the concept of hanging out at all, hard as they are all working all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if Natalie’s never had fun in her life, and Scarlett might be the same way. I have an idea! Why don’t we (i.e. you and your rich friends) get together and buy a mall (I like South Coast Plaza, myself...or the Glendale Galleria). Then we’ll close it to the public one day a month for a celebrity-only shopping and hangout day. Westfield is in deep trouble financially, so we can probably get a nice mall cheap right now. There has to be a strict maximum on the number of (straight) boys allowed in, though. Or at least you girls have to make sure it’s only the ones who won’t ruin it. That would be fun, wouldn’t it?
And...hey, I always forget Joey Bishop and think the Rat Pack core was just four, but there were FIVE of them!
GEORGE CLOONEY
(Ocean’s Eleven)
You think we need one more?
We need one more Jewish MAT girl! Maybe, since Scarlett’s getting married to Colin, there is a SINGLE Jewish MAT Girl out there who would like to be the fifth member of the MAT Pack and my girl! Is Kat Dennings married?
I think I was focused on the four number because we fit nicely in a Mercedes coupe or any number of other luxury cars, and I like to drive. But since these girls are so rich and powerful, maybe they can help me get Mercedes to bring back the CLK with me as a design consultant. Step One: center-placed driver’s seat like the McLaren F1, two side front seats, two rear seats, so there’s room for FOUR MAT Girls and me! What if there was a girl-fight over who gets to sit in front?!?? That would be so hot. Maybe we should pick a Gentile MAT Girl as the fifth, you know, to show we believe in equality. I’m already working in my head on an updated version of the 300SL gullwing design and trying to figure out the best way to execute this five-seat thing. Obviously, if I’m going to drive around with two billion dollars worth of smoking hot girls in it, it has to be the safest car ever built.
But back to reality, today’s reality at least. I propose to my Jewish friends that intermarrying forever will only lead to more and more problems for your community because it will ensure you remain a tiny minority, and on that basis, you’ll always be vulnerable. Instead, create an official pathway for Gentiles like me to convert—not to the Jewish RELIGION, but to Jewish cultural VALUES. I’d sign up for that TODAY. I want an Israeli passport! I’d even go do my two years in the IDF, because hey, I want to be ready to help out if some more Nazis show up, and I’ve never even touched a gun. I don’t know if I could actually finish it at my age, but I’d be curious to try. I might die, but I’d never quit. You know why? Because if I did IDF service, I could tease Natalie Portman about that FOREVER!
It’s mighty convenient for me to say this, but I think it’s certainly more okay for a Jewish girl to marry a non-Jew than a Jewish man. Why? Because Jewish culture is matrilineal. If I marry a Jewish girl and we have kids, those kids will be Jewish by the predominantly accepted definition, and I would encourage them to embrace that identity. I’d be as disappointed as any conservative Jewish father if my Jewish kids didn’t want to embrace their Jewish identity. I don’t have to have kids, but I use this just as an example. I want to marry a Jewish girl to be a Jewish family, not to take a Jewish girl away and make her something else. But I also agree with an article I read in the Forward arguing that Jews need to embrace those with a Jewish father and Gentile mother...so long as they are committed to Jewish values.
So rather than saying, “Serious Jews don’t marry non-Jews”, I propose to my Jewish friends that it would be better to say, “Serious Jews don’t marry people who are not serious about Jewish values and culture.”. Although everyone should be free to pursue their own life their own way, because I believe Jewish values and culture are important and endangered, I think it’s unfortunate for Jews to marry non-Jews when it leads them to lose or abandon their cultural identity. But when Jews marry non-Jews who embrace the Jewish cultural identity and want to help support and grow it, it forms a bond of alliance between Jews and Gentiles to preserve Jewish culture and values and protect Jewish people. It grows the tent. And that is to the benefit of all Jews.
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