NanaoThrowsPetals
I have this very good friend, in her teens, as myself. She's a wonderful person, and also happens to be Jewish. However, she seems to enjoy marking herself as secular.
Honestly, she only seems to be in it for the holidays. I don't even know WHAT she believes. SHe never mentions God. She doesn't attend shul, she doesn't seems to think religion is important, and she's not a fan of any of the 'rules.' Not a one. In fact, she gets pork in the lunchline, sits down next to me, and says "Bad Jew." Like, she's completely dismissing her religion and heritage.
I know this might seem a little pushy of me, but I really want her to explore religion more. Maybe attnd shul with me. But I know that to an 'outsider' who doesn't follow 'rules', everything I do seems inconvenient to her. Keepng kosher? Not working or partying on Saturday? FASTING? PRAYING?
gonk So I have a question. Should I try to persuade her to be more religious? Should I let it alone? If I DO try, how do I go about it?
First of all, please forgive me for removing your size and color formatting. I couldn't read it so small and pale, so I made it regular-sized and darker in color. Hope that's okay.
Secondly, I'm neither a rabbi nor a scholar, and I speak with no authority whatsoever, so check with your own rabbi if you have one, or find a competent authority that you trust in order to make a more authoritative statement. So, onward.
I've been where your friend is. That is, I wanted to identify with the Jewish people, but I didn't want to do the things that seemed inconvenient to me, like the laws of kashrut, Shabbat, tzniut, and so on. Very, very, VERY gradually I came to feel differently. Why? Well, I had one close friend who was Orthodox. I wondered why she did this or that, why she avoided this or that. I asked her questions about what she did, mostly because I was curious, not because I wanted advice. I thought, "How cool is it that Jewishness can encompass so wide a spectrum of beliefs and practices?" And it
is cool for that very reason.
But eventually, my friend M suggested to me that while she could describe it all she wanted, it was a lot like everything else in life: one really doesn't know what it's about unless one has lived by it.
Your friend doesn't realize it, but she's actually already skirting at the edges of wanting to learn. How do I know? Because when she orders ham in a cafeteria or restaurant,
she thinks about it. She doesn't think, "That looks good. I think I'll eat that." No, she thinks, "That looks good. I think I'll eat it, even though I shouldn't." She doesn't just think about it, either -- she talks about it. "Bad Jew," she says of herself, and maybe gives a little laugh as if to say it's funny and she doesn't care.
She's kidding herself. A Jew isn't indifferent to the laws, nor to God. Your friend can't be indifferent, even in the midst of doing what the Torah specifically tells her not to do. She's thinking about it. It's on her mind. Eating pork isn't wrong, mind you, not for someone who isn't Jewish. But for a Jew, even for a "secular" Jew, it is inappropriate. She knows it, and she can't just do it and let it go. She has to talk about it, has to mention it, has to think about it. Every time she eats pork, or a cheeseburger, or shellfish, she thinks about the fact that she's a Jew and that doing these things hasn't caused her any harm so far, as far as she can tell. But she's also wondering, why not? Why isn't it harming her? If the Torah tradition tells her she shouldn't eat those things, why isn't that being enforced? She probably spends more time thinking about the dietary laws and their implications than you do! Why? Because every day, she forces herself to confront them. You, you live by them. She, she has to consciously defy them.
I have a friend who's a lesbian, and when we were in college, some other girl called her a man-hater. Bless my friend -- she was quick as lightning. She smiled and said, "Honey, I don't hate men. I don't need to hate them. I can like them or not like them, because they're not major in my life. YOU hate men, because you know that you can't live without them." It's much the same for Jews. Non-Jews don't have to obey the laws of kashrut, Shabbat, and the rest. They don't have to disobey them, either. Those laws simply don't apply to them. For a Jew, though, we are bound by halachah, and so we
have to either obey them or disobey them, because they are intimately relevant to us.
Don't push your friend. When she laughs and says, "Bad Jew," just smile and go on eating your own kosher lunch. Eventually she may bring up the topic herself, asking you why you live by such 'inconvenient' and 'archaic' laws. Ask her why she obeys the rules of the school, why she obeys the laws of her city, her state or province, and her country. The answer will be the same: because it's required, and because the laws are there for reasons. Even if she doesn't understand them, she obeys them, because she knows it's the right thing to do. Even if no one would notice her breaking one, even if she wouldn't get caught, she probably wouldn't disobey the laws, because she understands that they exist for the purpose of fostering a rational, working society.
That's the same reason we Jews obey our laws.
