What is a Halakhic Jewish Identity? TORAT CHOVEVEI A YCT Community Learning Project Study Guide: VaEtchanan This study guide was made possible by funds granted by the Covenant Foundation. The statements made and the views expressed, however, are solely the responsibility of the author.

Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis, W. W. Norton and Co., 1968, pp. 19-21

…Today when the term identity refers, more often than not, to something noisily demonstrative, to a more or less desperate “quest,” or to an almost deliberately confused “search” let me present two formulations which assert strongly what identity feels like when you become aware of the fact that you do undoubtedly have one .

My two witnesses are bearded and patriarchal founding fathers of the psychologies on which our thinking on identity is based. As a subjective sense of an invigorating sameness and continuity, what I would call a sense of identity seems to me best described by William James in a letter to his wife:

A man’s character is discernible in the mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: “This is the real me!”

Such experience always includes

…an element of active tension, of holding my own, as it were, and trusting outward things to perform their part so as to make it a full harmony, but without any guaranty that they will. Make it a guaranty… and the attitude immediately becomes to my consciousness stagnant and stingless. Take away the guaranty, and I feel (provided I am ueberhaupt in vigorous condition) a sort of deep enthusiastic bliss, of bitter willingness to do and suffer anything…and which, although it is a mere mood or emotion to which I can give no form in words, authenticates itself to me as the deepest principle of all active and theoretic determination which I possess…

James uses the word “character,” but I am taking the liberty of claiming that he describes a sense of identity, and that he does so in a way which can in principle be experienced by any man. To him it is both the mental and moral in the sense of those “moral philosophy” days, and he experiences it as something that “comes upon you” as a recognition, almost as a surprise rather than as something strenuously “quested” after. It is an active tension (rather than a paralyzing question) – a tension which furthermore, must create a challenge “without guaranty” rather than one dissipated in a clamor for certainty. But let us remember in passing that James was in his thirties when he wrote this, that in his youth he had faced and articulated an identity crisis ”of honest and desperate depth, and that he became the Psychologist-Philosopher of American Pragmatism only after having experimented with a variety of cultural, philosophic, and national identity elements: the use in the middle of his declaration of the untranslatable German word “ueberhaupt” is probably an echo of his conflictful student days in Europe.

One can study in James’s life history a protracted identity crisis as well as the emergence of a “self-made” identity in the new and expansive American civilization. We will repeatedly come back to James, but for the sake of further definition, let us now turn to a statement which asserts a unity of personal and cultural identity rooted in an ancient people’s fate. In an address to the Society of B’nai B’rith in Vienna in 1926, Sigmund Freud said:

What bound me to Jewry was (I am ashamed to admit) neither faith nor national pride, for I have always been an unbeliever and was brought up without any religion though not without a respect for what are called the “ethical” standards of human civilization. Whenever I felt an inclination to national enthusiasm I strove to suppress it as being harmful and wrong, alarmed by the warning examples of the peoples among whom we Jews live. But plenty of other things remained over to make the attraction of Jewry and Jews irresistible – many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction. And beyond this there was a perception that it was to my Jewish nature alone that I owed two characteristics that had become indispensable to me in the difficult course of my life. Because I was a Jew I found myself free from many prejudices which restricted others in the use of their intellect; and as a Jew I was prepared to join the Opposition and to do without agreement with the “compact majority.”

No translation ever does justice to the distinctive choice of words in Freud’s German original. “Obscure emotional forces” are “dunkle Gefuehlsmaechte”; the “safe privacy of a common mental construction” is “die Heimlichkeit der inneren Konstruktion”- not just “mental,” then, and certainly not “private,” but a deep communality known only to those who shared in it, and only expressible in words more mythical than conceptual.

These fundamental statements were taken not from theoretical works, but from special communications: a letter to his wife from a man who married late, an address to his “brothers” by an original observer long isolated in his profession. But in all their poetic spontaneity they are the products of trained minds and therefore exemplify the main dimensions of a positive sense of identity almost systematically. Trained minds of genius, of course, have a special identity and special identity problems often leading to a protracted crisis at the onset of their careers. Yet we must rely on them for formulating initially what we can then proceed to observe as universally human.