The synagogue was a bare, shabby place, airless with all the windows
shut, where forty or fifty men, mostly aged and bearded, faced east to
the Holy Land, humbled themselves before their fierce, demanding God and
wailed their songs of endless sorrow. I stood there swaying with them,
but only mechanically, for I was raised in the Reformed Temple that these
traditional religionists would spit upon, and in recent years I had even
strayed from this watered-down Judaism, occasionally doing lip service on
the holy days now but coming to believe that if love for your fellow man
is in your heart you need no superstructure to dramatize it for you. And
if it isn't, no God and no Church can put it there. So I stood there
swaying and wondering. What is a Jew? The anthropologists have proved
it is not a race, since the only scientific category is the Semitic,
which includes Arabians and Assyrians, some of the most fervent anti-Jews
in the world. And if it were merely a religion, all Jews like me would
have to be excluded. And if it is only a unit of national culture it is
withering away in America, for the customs and traditions that the
Glicksteins brought over at the end of the nineteenth century may have
been inherited by Israel, droning in his yarmolka at my side, but were
thrown overboard as excess baggage by anyone in such a hurry as his
younger brother.
