How I am Jewish
Rudolph H. Weingartner
My
pedigree is spotless, at least as far as I can determine. My maternal grandparents were named
Kahn, the Jewishness of which needs no explanation. An ancestor of my paternal grandfather was an inhabitant of
the little town of Weingarten in the south of Baden and when it became
customary to add a surname to the given name, instead of referring to a
trade—that is, instead of Joe the Cook—his surname became Weingärtner, somebody
from Weingarten, in accord with the widespread practice of naming Jews as
residents of the towns they lived in, as with the more familiar Hamburger,
Berliner, or Frankfurter. The four
of them—born in the middle of the last century in small towns in Baden—were
quite strictly observant Jews, close to what today would be called “modern
orthodox.” They dressed like other
middle class townspeople and while they interacted with their non-Jewish
neighbors, they didn’t socialize with them. (The same, I might interject, was true of my parents, even
before the Nazis came to power.)
My
father followed in his parents’ observant footsteps and while my mother had a
streak of skepticism, she was an obedient wife, mostly. When I was a child in Heidelberg, where
I was born not long after my father went into business there, our home was
quite strictly kosher. The Sabbath
was observed: we walked a fairly long distance to the synagogue, not taking the
trolley and we abstained from all work including homework for school. But we did use light switches and while
my mother finished cooking before it was time to light the Sabbath candles by
sundown on Friday, she did turn on the gas to warm our meals. The holidays were observed with all the
trimmings, such as eating on two special sets of Passover dishes, one for meat,
the other for dairy; a Sukkah was created on an open porch, there was fasting
on Yom Kippur—and so on around the year.
From a
young age, I received religious instruction after school, never very high
powered, nothing resembling a Yeshiva.
That practice that continued in New York, where we arrived shortly after
my twelfth birthday. For my Bar
Mitzvah, I read quite a few portions from the Torah plus the haphtarah, singing
lustily and in tune—music was already my thing. I did not make a speech—no “today I am a fountain pen,” as
the joke then had it. That was not
the custom in this rump German-Jewish congregation that held its Sabbath
service in the hall in which Malcolm X was murdered a quarter of a century
later. When we moved from Manhattan
to Jackson Heights, I sang in the Synagogue choir and came to conduct it at the
conservative after-dinner Friday night service, while Felix Alt accompanied
cantor and choir on the organ. A
much smaller group of orthodox congregants had had their service
earlier—without organ of course.
No organ at any of the High
Holiday services, so Felix conducted and I just sang, by then a baritone.
When I
left for the Navy in 1945, after graduating from high school, I was thanked by
the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights for my services and given a silver
bracelet engraved with my name and a woodcut-illustrated Haggadah, the book
that contains instructions and text for the Passover Seder.
Things
went downhill from there, but at a slow pace. I mostly lived at home (for financial reasons) while going
to College at Columbia after a stint on an LST. I joined my parents for High Holiday services and some of
the other holidays, but seldom on the Sabbath. I never sought out kosher food when eating out, while my
parents’ eating habits also relaxed so much that they would have been sharply
reproved by their parents had they still been alive. Still, for them emphatically no pork. I
promptly joined the Seixas Society, then Columbia’s Jewish students’
organization with a bona fide rabbi in charge.
It
never occurred to me not to join.
More broadly, I have always felt that I must identify myself as
Jewish. I don’t have any of the
cliché Jewish characteristics—in behavior or appearance. The grotesque cartoons of Jews in the Stürmer, the Nazi “newspaper” entirely
devoted to maligning Jews, resemble none of my blood relatives; my mother’s
father looked like President Taft
and my father’s father blended in very well among the farmers of the small town
where he lived most of his life.
Moreover, in spite of what I have said above, my name actually does not
reveal that I am Jewish, because it turns out to be a homonym. There are plenty of non-Jewish
Weingärtners whose names do not
derive from a town, but, in conformity with medieval practice, from the
occupation of vineyard-keeper,
which is what a Weingärtner is.
That makes it like other
profession names like Müller or, in English, like such surnames as Smith,
Carpenter, or Cooper.
Nor do
I assertively proclaim my Jewishness, rubbing my interlocutors’ noses in that
fact. But somehow I soon manage to
convey my affiliation to all but the most casual acquaintances. You can give credit—or blame—to Hitler
for this proclivity. On the one
hand, I lived through the Kristallnacht,
seeing the smashed furniture of the couple of rooms of the Heidelberg Jewish
school, saw the smoke rising from the burning synagogue as I biked back home
and from there, watched when, a few hours later, my father was arrested to be
taken to Dachau. On the other
hand, because we were Jewish, we emigrated from Germany to New York when, as I
mentioned, I was twelve. In the
United States I came to lead a life that has been radically different, I
surmise, from that I would have led as the son of a minor businessman in a very
pretty but provincial town.
Perhaps I would have enjoyed that life; who knows? But rather than speculate about what
did not happen, it is no counterfactual but reality
that the rich and varied American life that I led was thanks to the fact that I
am Jewish. You will have to take
my word for “rich and varied” or go to the two autobiographical books I have
published.*
But I
certainly don’t want to leave it at that and have my Jewishness be dependent on
the anti-Semitism of the Nazis!
For starters, Judaism consists of a set of beliefs and of
practices. Without getting into a
quasi-anthropological discussion, I will simply assert that in my view Jews are
not a race. I am as Caucasian as
Billy Graham, my elder by nine years. From that it would follow that the issue
is not readily settled by the fact that my parents and known forbears were
Jewish.
So I
turn to beliefs, at the center of which is of course the belief in God. As the often-recited single sentence
has it—congregation standing—“Shema Yisrael,
Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” For many years I never really thought about this central
issue. I was no precocious
intellectual. I sang with the rest
of them and went with the flow.
But that gradually changed; not surprising as philosophy became my main
subject in college. The flow was
no longer good enough nor, as it turned out, was anything else. I bring no news when I say that none of
the extant proofs for the existence of God does the job. Theists and deists, however, might be
comforted by the fact that when, many years ago, Michael Scriven, then a
philosophy professor, gave a paper to the San Francisco State Philosophy Club
that consisted of a number of proofs of God’s nonexistence, the only instance of such an effort familiar to
me. No competent person in the
audience thought he had succeeded.
That
leaves at least two sets of additional possibilities, one classical and one
modern. Faith stands at the center of the first: believe in God on the basis
of evidence unseen. While for some that may be convincing,
I may be simplistic in holding that in order for that to work, a person somehow
must want to believe. However, I neither want to believe nor do I want not
to believe. What I do want is evidence,
arguments, anything that makes me,
pushes me to believe. In the
Enlightenment version of this path, God is posited to explain the order of
things in the universe, an elaboration of the Argument from Design. But besides the retort that much of
this order is in the eye of the beholder, it is also possible to hold that we
simply don’t know just why the world works the way it does. What is wrong with such modesty?
Of
course, since those 18th century deists, scientists have found out a
good deal about how the world works.
Just consider Einstein and his physicist descendents and Darwin and the
biologists who have been refining and elaborating his theories. Their discoveries explain a good deal
of why things are the way they are.
Everything? Certainly
not. But ignorance of, for
instance, what caused the Big Bang or the fact that there are gaps, unknowns,
in evolutionary theory strikes me as a feeble reason for positing a divine
cause or adopting a doctrine of creationism. There are lots of things we don’t know, some of which will
in time be found out, others not. The end of the sciences is not in sight.
I am
not attempting to persuade anyone with these few paragraphs; I am only stating what I think. And I realize that what I think makes
me an atheist. I accept that label
rather than that of agnostic
because rather than being open to supernatural answers to questions that remain
unanswered, I am willing to say that we just don’t know, at any rate, not yet.
That
makes me a Jewish atheist, an odd combination of labels though perhaps not all
that uncommon. There are those,
after all, who maintain that the Jewish religion is not so much rooted in a set
of beliefs, but in the myriad behavioral prescriptions to be found in the Old
Testament as subsequently interpreted.
So, how
well do I manage to follow those Old Testament commandments? Very very poorly
indeed; that is to say, not at all except for now and then desultory
observances. While I can claim
that this laxness is in part the result of the way my entire life has changed
during the last two decades, that is hardly an excuse. The fact is that in abstaining from
virtually all prescribed practices, I acquiesced to the attenuation of my
Jewishness insofar as it is embodied in those traditional observances.
What
remains of Jewishness besides beliefs and prescribed behaviors? A number of what might be called
secondary characteristics that are, to be sure, shared with very many who are
not Jewish, but are statistically more prevalent among Jews. Placing a high value on education, is
central and has happily been passed on to my children and grandchildren. Political liberalism is another, rooted
in a concern for fellow human beings, perhaps unconsciously engendered by a
history of persecution—as in there but for the grace of God go I. While his term is about to end, the
arch-conservative Eric Cantor has been the only Republican Jew in the House of
Representatives where Republicans are in the majority. The odds are that after the coming election
there will be none. An excellent
sculptor acquaintance of mine, an African American, once quipped to me, “The
only people who collect art are artists and Jews.” I have purchased works of art all my life—of course no
Rembrandts. On the other hand, I
lack the interest in and cleverness with money widely believed to be a Jewish
trait. But then all of my cousins
seem in that way to be apostates.
More
such “secondary” traits could probably be listed, but no one of them nor all of
them together would really answer the question posed in these reflections. In the end, I may have to accept the
answer that is provided by most of the world, in contradiction to the stance I
took above. Let me explain my
thought in a roundabout way. An
American youngster, Anthony, the son of devout Roman Catholic parents,
faithfully goes to church with them, receives communion, follows all the
rules. Later, away from home, say
in college, Tony stops going to church nor does he go to confession. Moreover,
he ceases to believe in the virgin birth and divinity of Jesus nor does he
assent to any of the other components of the Credo. At that point he will surely say of himself that he is no
longer a Catholic. Nor will the
world regard him as a Catholic.
Someone who knows his background might refer to him as a lapsed
Catholic, but a lapsed Catholic is not a Catholic.
Compare
and contrast. Aaron is the son of
observant Jewish parents, attends all synagogue services with them, eats only
kosher food and more. As an adult,
however, Aaron does none of these things; indeed, he insists on crisp bacon for
breakfast. And yet, whatever
Aaron holds himself to be, the world will not call him a lapsed Jew. There is no such thing. He is, rather, a non-practicing Jew or
a secular Jew. What Aaron does or
does not do is irrelevant to the way he is regarded; he remains a Jew—as do I.
* * * *
* * *
Let me
conclude with a coda. Even though there was plenty of
anti-Semitism in America before World War II, I was never aware of having been
treated positively or negatively because I was a Jew. I became the first Jewish
dean at Northwestern, but never knew who noticed; no one mentioned it. But now I want to tell of two occasions
in my professional career that took place
in the early 1980’s
incidents in which my Jewishness played very different roles.
When,
as a finalist for the provostship of Duke University, I became the only
remaining candidate, the then Duke Chancellor and a strong supporter arranged a
three-person dinner with the university’s president Terry Sanford. There was pleasant chit-chat
until, at dessert-time, Sanford picked up my curriculum vitae, probably looking
at it for the first time. “I see
you were born in Heidelberg” he said.
My cheerful response, “Yes you are looking at a standard issue German
Jewish refugee.” Dead
silence. Quickly the conversation
petered out and the dinner ended.
I never heard again from Duke.
But I finally did learn that Sanford’s vaunted liberalism was compatible
with quite virulent anti-Semitism.
Another
time I was one of the finalists for the presidency of Brandeis University, all
three of us Jewish of course.
Invited to the campus, I was quizzed by a large number of people arrayed
around a big conference table—trustees and accessories. It was a lively and friendly
conversation, lasting more than an hour, as I recall it. I enjoyed it. What remained for me was breakfast the next morning with
Abram Sacher, the university’s founding president. An interesting experience, all of it, but no offer of the
presidency. Brandeis appointed its
first woman president. I
understood that; end of story.
Not
quite. Many years later I spoke to
someone who was familiar with that search. He told me that many among the deciders thought that I was a
good fit for the institution. The
fatal reservation was that in some way I was not sufficiently Jewish. No one ever raised that issue in our
interchanges, so, of course, I did not address it. Had I known, I would happily have sung for them my favorite
Sabbath hymn, though I would have done so in the Ashkenazi pronunciation of my
youth. Ve’shomru benei Yisroel es ha’shabbos . . . . I have a terrific melody for it.
July 6, 2014
*Mostly About Me: A Path through Different
Worlds (2003) and A Sixty-Year Ride
through the World of Education (2007).
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