Tomorrow night, along with Jews across America and around the world, I’ll be heading to my synagogue to begin observing Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. For most of my life, I attended reluctantly, dreading the long hours of prayer. I was proud to be Jewish, taking satisfaction in my people’s survival and success despite the attempts to annihilate us. But I was also embarrassed by what I perceived as Judaism’s weirdness and obsolescence: all those nitpicky laws, and that implausible, reward-and-punishment God I thought was portrayed in the liturgy.
“I’m just a cultural Jew,” I would tell people, though I knew nothing about Jewish culture, history, languages, arts, or philosophy. I more meant that I liked edgy humor and bought too much food for dinner parties. Or I’d say that I was “an ethnic Jew,” not realizing that there are Jews of just about every ethnicity, and every race too.
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