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Comment by throwawayjewish | Hacker News Reader

I was born Jewish and was pretty religious for most of my life, but even when I was religious I never understood why we should be proud of this, or why this is a good thing in and of itself.

I would be really interested if you could explain more your way of thinking about it, because to me when my father explains that we should be proud of having the same meal our ancestors did Xthousand years ago I don't feel impressed in the least.

Instead, it just feels like a long streak of spreading a meme.

People often get surprised when I tell them I don't consider myself Jewish anymore or that I don't intend to bring up any children I have Jewish. They often cite their surprise to the fact that Judaism has a long ancestral history. And I really just can't understand this frame of thinking that says Judaism is good because it's been going on for long.

So I would be interested if you could explain why this impresses you :)

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Its a personal thing, I am not in a position to persuade anybody. I think that our present is explained by the context of the past, and that you can't understand the present without looking at the past. Now the past is a complex thing that can't be reduced to some simple formula, I still believe that you can still learn out of it, because human nature didn't change to much throughout the ages. Our reality may be quite different from what it used to be, but we are not essentially different from our ancestors, so we can still learn from them (hope that helps). Our experience is similar to the experience of our ancestors, we are part of the same process - it may be distant, but it is still relevant (in my opinion), the accumulated experience of past generations is of great value (because we tend to repeat the mistakes of the past)

I know that I did repeat the same statement several times with variations, but it is as far as I can get.

Also: If something prevailed throughout time, against all odds, then that's pretty impressive to me.

> "Also: If something prevailed throughout time, against all odds, then that's pretty impressive to me."

This is dangerous logic, because you're not comparing it to anything. For instance one argument I've seen for the existence of a god was the fact that many constants and other seemingly 'magic numbers' of our universe are set just as is required to maintain life as we know it. The problem there is that assuming this is true, it's still meaningless since the only way we could ever come to observe this fact was if it was true. This observation is known as the anthropic principle [1].

Basically considering the merit or probability of something happening when you would be unable to observe it not happening is impossible. You could say you're comparing it against the failure of other groups, but this is probably somewhat disingenuous as I think it's reasonable to hypothesize that the oldest persistent ethnic group is likely some group within Africa neither you or I have ever heard of, and you'd probably be unlikely to praise their longevity and persistence in and of itself, even if it too was likely ripe with strife throughout time.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

I'm not sure the Anthropic principle can be applied here. There is a broader data set than that which is relevant for that principle, based on my understanding.

"Against all odds" would seem to be the key words here. There are countless other ethnic and religious groups that were integrated into the larger Muslim culture when Islam was first spreading. The same is the case for Christian Europe. In fact, the Romani people may be a good example of what we would expect to naturally happen to a dispersed and oppressed ethnic group. They have no singular culture, principles, or beliefs; they assumed most aspects of the surrounding culture's mode of life and beliefs.

It isn't a stretch to call the survival of the Jewish people an unexplained historical exception. There are countless historians (Jewish and non-Jewish) who have researched and written on the topic.

Or, am I misunderstanding the application of the Anthropic principle as you are applying it in this context?

Who are you comparing Jews to? This is the point. I don't think there's any reasonable comparison. Judaism's pairing of extreme insularity with great economic success in most 'host nations' leaves them without any other group to compare against. Powerless minority groups are certainly not a reasonable comparison.

Oppression and dispersion takes on a different meaning for those of means, even more so when the shared genetic lineage also happens to provide a substantially higher IQ than average for the vast majority of the group.

I was taking you seriously until you wrote this, "Judaism's pairing of extreme insularity with great economic success" and this, "Oppression and dispersion takes on a different meaning for those of means"

I really think there is an undertone to this perspective that is colored by a narrative that is false at best and possibly something much worse.

I dont think there is any factual basis to claim Jews had great economic success or were of means outside of false narratives perpetuated by their enemies. Even if you can point to specific eras or individuals that had success, you certainly couldnt demonstrate it existed propritionately more so than others, or that it existed in all the periods where they were persecuted and oppressed...

Your post display an impressively poor knowledge of even the most basic facts of history, of which you then speak on authoritatively. And then you try to attack my character based on your lack of knowledge. Dear sir, I can only applaud your narcissism. It is impressive!

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/usury-and-moneylend...

How does this article support your claim that Jews survived because they "had means"??? Showing a disproportionate amount of jews in finance in the last 500 years in a few limited instances...in no way shape or form speaks to the means of the vast majority of Jews nor does it to speak to 3000 years of persecution.

You wrote a previous comment about jews distinctive physical features and now you speak of their means and share an article about rotschild and than view a Jew who calls you out on your false narrative a narcissist?!

Ascribing a few peoples wealth on a group of millions is the very definition of anti-semitism... I refrained from calling you out sooner to try to give you the benefit of the doubt...but the fact is the wealth on one person or a few people lending money hardly reflects on the entire Jewish people...it is a dangerous stereotype not based on actual facts...just a stereotype based on a fraction of a fraction of the population...

Your belief that jews arent poor or oppressed minorities without means throughtout history is patently false! Even if you can point to a few exceptions to the rules.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/banking-and-bankers

Or you can search for literally any source. The extreme success of the Jewish communities throughout time is extremely well documented. This success, paired with insularity, was often one of the big motivations for their oppression throughout history. Expulsions would generally involve direct or indirect confiscation of material possessions. Between the 13th and 16th century Jews were expelled some 15+ times, in some cases multiple times from the same places (such as France) where they would be expelled, invited as their absence proved problematic, expelled again, and so on.

The reason Jews have distinctive features is because today about 75% of Jews are Ashkenazi - a very distinctive group with a variety of distinct features, both physical and nonphysical. For instance Ahskenazi individuals show an average IQ average nearly a standard deviation above the mean. The reason for the genetic relationship is that historically Judaism was far more insular than it is even today. For instance interfaith marriages is an extremely new phenomena. Pair a religion that makes it extremely difficult to join (and was only more difficult in the past) with extreme restrictions on things like marriage, and you end up with strong genetic similarity. It's not dissimilar, in effect, from geographic isolation which yielded most distinctive traits of various groups today.

Thank you, that is an interesting way of putting it!

As you I don't see why someone should be proud about anything inherited. It can be a gift (or a curse), but it is certainly not an achievement.

That being said, for me the Jewish tradition is immensely powerful, even though I'm not a believer in God. Sitting together with your family at the Seder table and talking about what it means to be free vs. to be slave is an amazing experience. It would be very hard to re-create that experience without the frame given by our Exodus narratives and the surrounding traditions.

I'm sure other cultures have their own powerful traditions for keeping values alive and transporting them across generations. But as you are already very familiar with Jewish traditions (probably much more than me), why not make use of this treasure?

Well said. One point however...

>As you I don't see why someone should be proud about anything inherited. It can be a gift (or a curse), but it is certainly not an achievement.

One way to look at this is if you believe achievements are worthy of pride, or that pride is an 'incentive' to achieve, than recognizing how significant everything you do can be is a great way to inspire maximizing achievement... One way to do this may be to recognize that your achievements can have a positive impact on future generations, even in simply creating positive and breaking negative parenting cycles in your family, or how smiling at someone can have a ripple impact elevating numerous peoples days and possibly lives... its possible that training us to be proud of something that is as insignificant as being a product of our parents will nurture a sensitivity to take our ability to impact others with the seriousness and responsibility it demands. Just a thought.

Just to throw in an additional perspective of what I find fascinating about this topic.

I don't think that all long lasting things are particularly interesting. Rocks have been around longer than the Jewish people but we don't celebrate that as extraordinary. It is considered perfectly natural. It is noteworthy when something is unnaturally long lasting; when other peoples/belief system were put under similar pressures the results have been drastically different. Imagine 50 people are dragged under water on a beach by a horrible undertow and held underwater for an hour. 2 out of the 50 survive while the other 48 don't; the 2 who survived are definitely of interest because we would want to know how they survived.

Isn't that literally Suvivor bias?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Not if you include those that did not survive in your sample / analysis. From the link "concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not".

Well, I can't answer for GP but I can relate to both of you, because I swing back and forth between the two modes.

I was also raised religious (Hareidi) and am now entirely secular, by most counts. And I've spent many hours trying to argue that it's ridiculous to take pride in the fact that some arbitrary tradition lasted for a few thousand years. So a bunch of people did this or that ritual for thousands of years...sucks for them! Why should I? (Never mind that the tradition may have evolved/morphed to the point that Talmud-era Jews would barely recognize it, let alone second temple Jews or earlier.)

Moreover, if I've already rejected the notion that the Torah is the word of God, why would I consider myself Jewish? How does being born to one woman versus another determine my identity and fate? If I don't believe, why am I "in the club" at all? Because the believers say that I don't get to choose my own identity? Shouldn't I be able to just laugh that off?

I went through a phase in which I refused to identify as Jewish, but it didn't stick. There is too much of my upbringing that I _do_ connect with, or remember positively, and feel good about. So I can't quite shake the identity. And lord knows I've tried.

Instead, as the sun sets on Tel Aviv for the last day of Passover, I'm writing a comment on HN and enjoying the challah I just took out of the oven. Let me check...yeah, it took more than 18 minutes to prepare. But what can I say? I'm Jewish, and what kind of Jew celebrates a holiday without challah? Not this one.

I think the point here is that identity, belonging, nostalgia, and a sense of connection to a larger community - not just a generation alive today, but a chain of generations - can be a powerful emotional driver for people. Simply put, the idea that "our ancestors" did this or that and the tradition and identity lives gives many otherwise rational people a feeling of belonging.

And while there's no shame in choosing to forge your own way, independent of the social environment into which you were born, it's no great honor either. It just is. Some people feel imprisoned by the narrative, some empowered, and some just don't care. And some - I suspect more than might meet the eye - are forever caught between a prison of arbitrary rules and the discomfort of floating listlessly through a strange and uncaring secular society.[0]

So if you managed to leave the baggage behind, all the power to you. For others, the baggage is inescapable. And for yet others, the baggage isn't baggage at all, but a source of positive emotion.

[0] I can't remember the exact page, but somewhere in Chapter 9 of Brachot the Talmud briefly addresses this conundrum. Search for "אוי לי מיצרי אוי לי מיוצרי". Hope I got that right...it's been many years.

We're not blank slates. There really are genetic differences. It very well might be that stereotypes about arguing and having opinions etc. are genetically-connected personality traits, who knows? Maybe some science has brought us a smidgen of understanding just enough to be dangerous…

The weird uncomfortable part is understanding that the strange individualistic rejection of culture and interest in just taking the best ideas from everywhere is actually a common experience of secular American Jews. You know what it's like to be a minority, just not part of the same club as everyone around you, so you question things and easily find the conclusion that most of the old traditions and views are nonsense. You're left wondering whether it's okay to find a "tribe" you fit (political or cultural or whatever) or if really the concept of tribes is itself just bad. If everyone else would stop being tribalist, we could all just live in a post-ethnic, post-diversity world or something where no individual has any more claim to any worldview or idea or culture than any other… but that's fantasy too.

The fact is: most people on the planet haven't even had the chance to be in a situation where they truly separate themselves from their traditions and consider the possibility of just not being of the group they grew up identifying with.

Consider the trans-racial ideas of that controversial lady in Spokane… these things are not easy ideas to grapple with.

>I really just can't understand this frame of thinking that says Judaism is good because it's been going on for long.

Im not a rabbi or in kiruv or anything, so take this with a grain of salt...but I would point to Jordan Petersons position about the longevity and survival of the bible stories and his response to atheists around it all sounding made up. There is a reason these stories survived through the ages. There is wisdom and much to learn from the ideas in the Torah even if you dont buy into their accuracy. It's just too shallow to dismiss it as superstitious ancestors who werent as smart as us.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the very fact that we are finite beings in a world that will survive our existence means that our life will face tragedy...and the best way to cope with a tragic existence is to find meaning in life and in our actions.

Most fundamentally is buying into the idea that we can bargain with the future and that decisions we make today matter and have an impact on the future and future generations.

From that context, ritually connecting with the past and exploring how things that happened to your ancestors have an impact on your existence today is about the best way I can think of to get you to internalize the idea that what you do today matters to tomorrow.

The idea of mesorah(transmission from generation to generation) is framed as a way to verify the validity of the stories...but I really think its more along the lines of showing the unbroken chain between the past and the present...so you can internalize the responsibility of the chain between the present and the future...

It sounds like you've decided to start a new chain for your children and sever that connection to your past. For me, I think the responsibility and ramifications of that decision are massive and at the very least deserve a reckoning with the significance of how the decision impacts future generations regardless of what you finally decide...it feels to me that because you werent able to internalize the ideas (regardless of the factual nature of them) of "Hashem took ME out of mitzrayim" or "had the exodus not taken place, we would still be slaves" ...and never connected with the powerful idea that we eat matzah to commemorate what our ancestors ate rushing out Egypt...you either feel the decision for keeping your future generations connected to the past is inconsequential, or the past is blatanly wrong.

Considering you grew up religious, I am assuming you had a modern Yeshiva education...like many others, it sounds like they failed to show you the pragmatic wisdom in yiddishkeit and instead left you feeling unconnected with your brilliant history.

I would encourage you to try to pass on the parts that you did connect with and the pragmatic wisdom in much of the torah and halacha to atleast give your children the chance to make their own decisions.

You can reject the bible and reject religion and put science on a pedestal...but the idea that what you do matters and that you can bargain with the future...and that who and where you are today is a product of decisions your parents and their parents made...that lesson is too important not to pass on. It would be a shame to be passedover!

> There is wisdom and much to learn from the ideas in the Torah even if you dont buy into their accuracy. It's just too shallow to dismiss it as superstitious ancestors who werent as smart as us.

>From a purely pragmatic standpoint, the very fact that we are finite beings in a world that will survive our existence means that our life will face tragedy...and the best way to cope with a tragic existence is to find meaning in life and in our actions.

Agreed.

> Considering you grew up religious, I am assuming you had a modern Yeshiva education...like many others, it sounds like they failed to show you the pragmatic wisdom in yiddishkeit and instead left you feeling unconnected with your brilliant history.

This is condescending, in my opinion. You're presuming to know why they don't accept the religious narrative. It's great that it speaks to you, but it doesn't speak to them and it doesn't have to. I might be reading too much into this, but it seems you're invoking the common meme that "if you would only have had the wonderful opportunities to learn in this yeshiva or that one, or to appreciate the 'true beauty' of this stream or another of Judaism, you'd agree with my point of view." Maybe, maybe not. Maybe GP had a superior education than you did, and if YOU would have had the education GP had, you'd reject religion too?

> I would encourage you to try to pass on the parts that you did connect with and the pragmatic wisdom in much of the torah and halacha to atleast give your children the chance to make their own decisions.

Maybe the opposite is true? Maybe the only way to give children a fair choice is to NOT indoctrinate them with ideas they didn't choose, and instead give them a blank slate from which to start?

No matter what you do for your children, you're making decisions for them. Raise them religious, you're exposing them to X instead of Y. Raise them secular, you're choosing Y instead of X. There's no way to give them everything, you have to make choices for them.

I doubt there is only one correct way to find meaning in our life and actions (though my take on it is that while paths may differ, an honest pursuit would lead to similar insights regarding the ultimate meaning). I also don't think you have an obligation to remain with a way you don't connect to. The only thing I disagree with is judging a path that doesn't resonate with your specific frequency when obviously (at least as I see it) it brings a net positive to civilization. While I'm not religious, I can understand how on the surface things can be seen as primitive (especially when practiced at face value) while holding deeper truths underneath.

>Maybe the opposite is true? Maybe the only way to give children a fair choice is to NOT indoctrinate them with ideas they didn't choose

If only that were possible. You're going to indoctrinate them one way or the other (as you correctly concluded in the following paragraph), and since you're going to do so, the best indoctrination I can think of is personal and intellectual integrity, which might lead them to decide to go back to your roots or take a different path, both being fine if they come from the right place.

Thank you for all your contributions in this thread, I really like your attitude towards heritage, religion and the complexities of identity.

This is great. I’ve dismissed my Jewish heritage and the teachings of religious texts, but this perspective gives me pause. Maybe I’ve been hasty in my assessment that religion doesn’t offer me anything for making a better future.

Give Jordan Petersons bible lectures a try (on youtube or his podcast)...they might open your eyes.

I ignored these for the longest time because they were about the bible. Well, they aren’t really. They’re kind of about everything, and now I wish I’d watched them a lot sooner.

> It's just too shallow to dismiss it as superstitious ancestors who werent as smart as us.

This is commonly misunderstand point, as you hint at.

Our ancestors were about as smart as we are -- some smarter, some not, but on average they were far more ignorant of how the world works. There were plenty of brilliant ideas wrapped around less sure knowledge.

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