By Ande Jacobson
I was looking through my old high school yearbooks recently, and it got me thinking about some friends and classmates from long ago. There were four of us who went to school together for 16 years, from first grade straight through undergrad, but two of us had additional connections back then. We also went to Sunday school and temple youth choir together. Andrew and I were friends most of the time growing up, although we also had some disagreements that got blown a bit out of proportion. His mom was a lawyer and a notary, so when we’d have a fight when we were kids, he’d draw up a contract that he wouldn’t speak to me ever again and had his mom notarize it. Of course it generally only lasted a day or so before becoming null and void. I guess that practice served him well because he ultimately became a lawyer like so many others in his family.
When it came time for his bar mitzvah when we were 13, his mom wasn’t sure whether I’d be invited or not because every time we’d have a fight, he’d go home and cross me off the list. Then the next day, he’d add me back onto the list. This cycle would repeat over and over until it was time to send out the invitations, and his mom genuinely didn’t know if I’d be on or off the list at that point. As it turned out I was on the list when it was finalized, and I happily attended his big day.
One thing that we used to bicker about when we were young was that he claimed that he was more Jewish than me. Our parents got a kick out of that one because as his mom said, she wasn’t aware that there were degrees of “Jewishness.”
When Andrew and I were still in temple youth choir, one song that we sang got stuck in my memory – Be Kind to Your Parents. It was a fun one. This was the version we sang:
Here’s a piece of good advice,
Think it over once or twice:Be kind to your parents
though they don’t deserve it.
Remember they’re grown-ups,
a difficult stage of life.They’re apt to be nervous,
and over-excited,
confused from their daily storm and strife.Just keep in mind,
though it sounds odd I know,
most parents once were children long ago!Incredible!
So treat them with patience
and sweet understanding,
in spite of the foolish things they do!And some day you may wake up
and find you’re a parent too!
I’m not sure why that one got stuck in my head given I decided early on that I never wanted to be a parent, but we used to sing it a few times a year as novelty song that we all enjoyed in part because it always got a rousing laugh from those listening.
Andrew and I both dropped out of youth choir when we got to high school because band practice conflicted with choir practice, and band won. The only class we shared through high school was band, but that was a big part of our lives at that time. We were both college prep but with different goals for our future studies, and music reached across all boundaries.
When we got to college, although we attended the same university, we really didn’t see one another there. We were in completely different programs. I was focused on math and the sciences in my engineering program, and Andrew was pursuing a degree in political science to prepare himself for law school. We caught up with one another at one high school reunion decades later, and much had changed. The familiarity and friendship borne of our early shared experiences as kids were still there, but we had led very different lives, me as a software/systems engineer with a major government contractor, and he as a litigator and partner in his law firm.
As I read through the various notes friends wrote in my high school senior yearbook, Andrew had written a rather touching one looking back at our shared school years, and he mentioned what he called “Jewish Honor” as a shared value which reminded me of our arguments about Jewishness in grammar school. Jumping to the present where antisemitism is reaching new heights, I miss the innocence we enjoyed back then.
I’ve long had a complicated relationship with religion in general. Nobody is born any particular religion. They are born into a family that might practice a given faith, but they are not inherently of that faith until it is thrust upon them. In my case, I wasn’t required to believe in anything in particular, and at the tender age of ten, based on everything I had experienced, read, and been taught, I knew that I had no belief in the existence of any kind of God or gods. From what I had seen, there was no proof that any such thing existed. There were just stories that had been told over time for various reasons, but that didn’t make them true. They were invented by men, usually for some form of control.
Given that my extended family practiced Judaism, my mother insisted that I go to Sunday school specifically to learn about the cultural history. It wasn’t that she was a strong believer. She really wasn’t, but she lived through WWII and saw how the world treated people of various faiths. Her grandparents escaped the pogroms of Czarist Russia to start a new life here in the US. Because of my family’s history, she knew that at some point in my life, I’d be exposed personally to the ugliness of antisemitism, and she didn’t want me to be hurt by it.
It turns out that she was right. I first experienced antisemitism directed at me personally when I was in college. I’ve experienced it many times since then, and it always came from ignorance and some kind of religious fervor and bigotry. My mother also wanted me to understand Jewish history because she said that whether I practiced or not, having that familiarity meant that I’d be able to find commonality and friendship in the Jewish community anywhere in the world. That last part seems a little idealistic in today’s reality, but I understood her point. Whether I believed or not, practiced or not, there would always be those in the world who would view me as Jewish because of my family’s history, and others who would be accepting for the same reason.
Over the years, I’ve gotten into many arguments with various people over the concept of religion and more specifically trying equate Judaism with something biological. I have always held that Judaism is a religion. It is not a separate race or biological entity. In fact, science has shown that race itself is a purely cultural concept and has no biological basis at all, so to equate a religion, i.e., a set of beliefs, to something biological is absurd.
That of course begs the question of whether I consider myself Jewish. By all practical means, I really shouldn’t. I don’t practice any religion. Yes, I came from a family that practiced Judaism, although my immediate family did so rather haphazardly. Once I was no longer in Sunday school, we celebrated Chanukah, Pesach (i.e., Passover), and Rosh Hashanah with our extended family, but my immediate family no longer attended temple.
I firmly believe that the world would be a far better place if there was no such thing as religion given that so many deadly conflicts stem from religious ideology taken to its extreme. In fact, I wrote a short story about such a world as the first one in my Alex and Rowan series – A World without Religion.
I recognize that as the world exists today, it’s unlikely that religion as we know it will cease to exist any time soon. It’s too deeply embedded in so much of human culture. Still, as we learn more about the universe through scientific pursuits upending more and more of the existing religious dogma, perhaps it will happen someday. Time will tell.
