Rabbi Meir Kahane’s brilliant book, “Why Be Jewish?” should be a standard text for every committed Jew. Written in the late 1970’s, it suffers slightly because the many cultural references, contexts, and statistics are both dated and outdated. (The current statistics on intermarriage and sham conversions are much worse today.) This could easily be remedied by republishing the work with additional comments to explain and elucidate points that would be lost on a readership who never had the opportunity to watch reruns of “All in the Family.” Tragically, much like Rabbi Kahane’s other positions, time has proven his words to be prophetic. Our age sees an even more damaged Jewry. Nevertheless, despite these unavoidable shortcomings, it is a dignified, intelligent, non-apologetic work, which explains the reasons to be Jewish. As Rabbi Kahane explained, the only reason to be Jewish is because of the Torah. Any other reason is nonsensical. Many other cultures have profound events and historical moments that figure prominently in their self-identification.
True to form, “Why Be Jewish?” is replete with Rabbi Kahane’s razor sharp wit, which gives this bittersweet read a human face. As such, it is a text that can be appreciated by Jew and gentile alike, since the subject matter is presented in such a sensitive and intellectually honest manner, which affords the gentile an understanding of the Jewish ban on intermarriage, without denigrating, patronizing, or demeaning him. I encourage the reader to give this book a permanent home on his Jewish bookshelf. Many formerly alienated Jews cite this book as one of the main reasons they returned to Judaism.
Rabbi Kahane laid much of the blame for the high intermarriage rates of his day on the American Jewish Establishment, for their failure to provide a proper Jewish education to American Jews.These groups, as hapless today as they were back then, are as culpable today, as when Rabbi Kahane noted the following:
“The puzzled shepherds of the American Jewish community can close down their study groups and their commissions and their committees; they can put an end to the learned and expensive surveys. They can stop spending Jewish communal funds. What makes Bernie run away from Judaism? Who created the Bernie who pants after a shiksa or who marches for Jesus or Trotsky, or Arafat, or for nothing Jewish? Who created a Bernie who finds Judaism as unimportant as the color of his hair?” (Why Be Jewish? Page 34).
Without Torah, there is no good answer to give young Jews, if they should ask why they cannot marry a non-Jewish girl. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that either Marc or his parents were terribly bothered by this issue. Another sign of these dark times.
In light of the above, the following are silly reasons to be/remain Jewish:
• Those who define their Jewishness because of the modern state of Israel. While I appreciate that many “secular” Jews wish to remain in Israel, personally, if I didn’t believe that G-d gave the land exclusively to us Jews, I wouldn’t choose to live in Israel. Furthermore, without appreciating the miracles of the modern state of Israel and accepting the subsequent Halachic challenges, the creation of such a state was always doomed to become what it has become today: a secular state more concerned with world opinion than Jewish survival, a state committed to appeasing the anti-semites of the world rather than relying on the Almighty. In the absence of my own personal recognition of the Divine law as the most moral system in the world and eternally true, the words of the bible relating to non-Jewish inhabitants would strike me as barbaric and primitive.