My Jewish Culture

What is in your head.

The reason why I have rarely been homesick in the past 15 years of my wanderings is that what I really long for is Jewish culture. Jewish culture, unlike my birth city or my old school friends, is everywhere where I happen to be — I rebuild it from some mysterious source code wherever there is a moment to sit down with a book or time to play with a thought — and nowhere at all.

The longing for the lost past that none of us can remember is vividly alive in me as it is at the heart of all Jewish prayer. You honor a destruction with your life, and you never stop. Jewish culture, as it must, always leaves you unsatisfied and somewhat lonesome, because no actual Jewish person or resident philosemite of course can live up to the Platonic ideal (wasn’t he Jewish?) of Jewish culture.

I, the mutt, a descendant of debauched film stars and Communist economists, a convert to Roman Catholicism of all things, carry around the world my Jewish culture. It was passed down into me in the 5th district of USSR-satellite Budapest, and it pulls me more strongly into what my life can be than absolutely any other thing that has ever happened to me.

I sit and I write and I work and I remember and I befriend and I judge people contained by my Jewish culture. If everything else was taken from me, this one thing would remain. In country after country, climate after climate, now on a new continent, I furnish my homes with sofas and counter-stools, and end up sprawled out on a carpet with a book. As my legs go numb in most uncomfortable positions I think there should be much more, more knowledge, more debate, more conversation, because this un-knowledge is impossible. Unbearable! What is wrong with everybody??! Don’t they understand there is so much to do; do they still not know there is no Heaven, this is heaven?

You turn the page careful never to leave Jewish culture (it would just catch you anyway and then you’d both be embarrassed). You look out at the mountains as the sun rises over Wyoming and you’re an outpost of Jewish culture. You watch as the sheep crawl down into the valley and wonder if this is the most efficient route between A and B.

Before I moved to America I was terrified of getting lost, of disappearing into this vast country, of being swallowed up. But how could I ever be when, like some migratory bird, I have an incessant programming for how to nest, and I will do it on any tree, anywhere. (Clip my wings, and I’ll use my beak, nice try.) You do things and you don’t know where they come from: the indomitable ambition, the certainties of duty, the split-second mapping of the social, the all-night hunger to learn that’s never sated. Give me five sticks, a puppy, a butcher, and a truck, and I’ll build you a cultural organization where everybody knows everybody and works together and marries, and studies and quarrels, and is absolutely miserable at all times in their wanting better and bigger and faster, and it will be my joy, my Jewish culture.

I can tell which of my friends have been exposed to Jewish culture because they think more and do more and are constantly unhappy. Fun! People can friend-group their way into it or colleague into it or date into it, and they are now performing Jewish culture. The great heirs of the Levantine and generally Mediterranean traditions of inquiry, academy, and a polemic God, the sages under the tree talking all day like it’s a trade (“school” in Greek means leisure - you give up the arable land for arable ideas), Jewish culture doesn’t change when everything around it changes. The great artistic institutions of America are Jewish culture. Claude and ChatGPT are Jewish culture. Long live your liberal Wissenschaft! The apotheosis of loquaciousness cannot be undone, it undoes all that is stiff and backward and heartless and lacking belonging. Your information theory forgets mutual information but not in Jewish culture. My most Jewish-culture friend is 100% Indian. It is fine, we’ll take him, nobody’s perfect.

And I feel that bone-chilling cold wherever there is no Jewish culture. The towers and totems of unmoving thought. The motions of learnedness without obsession. The aims of the mind with no humility toward the social. That he is brilliant — he reads all the books and strikes all the poses but he doesn’t feel the love and loyalty that are the wells of shared discovery and knowing. That she is wonderful — but she doesn’t get that the dead leave us duties, they never absolve, that no community benefits from self-erasure. Jewish culture is a community of thought (hence all the arguing): communities are enriched by individual excellence and hard-won relations, it is the responsibility for every individual to do their best, to share and learn and fail and then do their best again. And again. And again. Like the Law sends you to temple to be with your friends every day for a year when your father dies so that you don’t make yourself disappear and thus harm us all, personal striving is the pro-social secret at the heart of Jewish culture, and forfeiting it is the great social crime. Every Jew is born to think through Creation from zero in their life, and to share their findings, and to debate and be debunked and to update. In this sense, I’m afraid everyone is Jewish. You have this one life and you are bound to make something of it.

I know I am saying this as the Catholic convert I supposedly am, but it is a good thing that Jewish culture knows there is no external salvation, that we are the only ones who can save each other. That sin is for beginners and journeys are arrival. That thinking is love and knowledge is care, and we have a sacred duty to make the next generation better off, to leave the Earth a slightly better place than how we found it. Talk about a marginal revolution… That sorry, no, no one should have truly unconditional love for oneself, that’s just the easy way out, a capitulation, your recipe for preventable tragedy. That the world is already full of tragedy, one should not try to become one more.

Looks like having a punishing God who gets super mad at you and sometimes floods the world when you were bad makes you win a lot of Nobel prizes and outperform other ethnicities in fields requiring just one’s portable brain (and social enthusiasm and of course irritation at one’s own low performance). Jewish culture knows that when one mind makes itself disappear the whole community will eventually disappear — and the community can never disappear. It knows that we are beholden to each other to keep each other around.

And so, please, hope to never be satisfied. Please, hope to never feel like you have talked enough, and asked enough, and loved enough, and belonged enough. Please, hope to never think you have helped enough. There are no excuses in this life, only pleasures. And what is a greater and more lasting pleasure than this constant internal anguish, the group-play of minds, the wins of wit and participation? This self-exposure for collective merit without which none of us can have a future.

Jewish culture is an idea that if all around you are driven to try and create, the resulting spirit of collaboration and competition will make everyone more active, useful, and productive. Task 0 for any person who wants to think as a life is to find or build the conditions within which they can be at their best. Our ancient tradition turns this into a daily routine, and once you have experienced it you can never go back. Once you have been pushed thus, once you have suffered thus, once you have achieved thus you will forever be an advocate for this truth, and look bewildered at anyone who thinks they can do without. And you will tell them even sick Proust wrote great books, Radnóti his best poems in snowy trenches during a forced march — how the exiled corresponded, the imprisoned lectured!

There are contradictions at the heart of my Jewish culture, and I suspect this is how I survived all the other contradictions in my life. To be able to be small — an armchair, a notebook, my hushed slippers — in increasingly big and loud places. To know that faith is a fight and fealty is always debated. The birthright of this timeless cultural engine thrown into the moment of the universal. (To life!) The charity and selfishness of clarity, the total subjugation to being needed. The friends you see as ideas. The pamperings of teaching. That life is so, so short and there is no time to waste whatsoever. That we go big and go home. That religion is loss and the future is from everyone for everyone. The utter delight of unkilled existence to revel in and to share.

And so I thought as I was ascending the rocks that the big sky alone can’t efface me; in me are alive all the faces I want to speak to in my mind, all the minds that I write to late at night. The high desert may be dry but the inventiveness of friendship is flowing. And I find amid all this air around me and all the fluxes and tides within my life my mind that is like a stone to flatten and to cut with, sharpened to write with, it weighs me down, it marks the road, and as long as I can think there will always be a home for all of us.

Nothing can swallow a stone.