On Being Jewish

When my first daughter was born in Rome, my wife, a nonpracticing but (it became apparent) believing Catholic, arranged for her baptism. At a distance of 47 years, I can’t be certain of anything about the arrangements, not even the location. The scene that my memory and my imagination have conspired to paint shows the four of us in a kind of catacomb, windowless, with a few candles burning on a plain wooden table. The priest’s white face reflects the flickering light; he is dressed like a monk, in some sort of long, black cassock. He dips two fingers into a baptismal fountain and sprinkles a few drops of water on my daughter’s bare head. She is swaddled in white lace and rests quietly in my wife’s arms.

However fanciful this recollection of the setting may be, I vividly remember one thing: the priest’s young voice. He was mumbling through the ritual in his Italianate English when I realized that he was trying to draw me in. “Will you pray with me,” he said, “to purge the sin from this child’s soul.” I took it as a question and shouted “No!” I’m not sure what followed, but the priest evidently ignored my outburst and forged ahead, because we carried my daughter’s baptismal certificate with us when we emerged into the Roman sunlight.

I’ve often wondered over the years why I reacted so strongly to the priest’s words. My Jewish heritage has never prevented me from singing the prescribed Christian texts in certain settings. At college I earned a few dollars as a choir member at Sunday services, and I’ve since sung enough requiems with amateur choruses to know the Credo better than most of my Christian friends. The reason I refused in that Roman setting to affirm a belief I didn’t hold was not that I held a different belief. On the question of original sin, my Jewish education, such as it was, provided no guidance. If I had any thoughts on the matter, they would have reflected Wordsworth’s glorious lines, which we read in high school and which remain with me still: “Not in entire forgetfulness / And not in utter nakedness / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.”

I had a similar run-in with Catholic theology many years later, when my wife proposed a church wedding. We had been married in Virginia by a justice of the peace who required only that we both were white. My wife wanted “to renew our vows” (as she put it), and I was willing (as I saw it) to help her complete the sacraments. I agreed to take “lessons” from the officiating priest, but I managed to avert his hints about baptism. He settled for my perfunctory repetition in his study of some basics of Catholicism, and I made it clear that I would say my “I do”s but would make no public affirmation of belief.

Nonetheless, at one point in the ceremony, he said to me, “Please repeat after me: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” I was now annoyed at his careless dismissal of my position, and I leaned forward to remind him. “I don’t say that,” I whispered — a bit too loud, apparently, because a titter sounded from the assembled guests in the pews behind me. The priest ignored me, of course, and completed the ceremony. As in the earlier experience, I refused to repeat a Christian means of referring to God in a trinity, but not because I practiced another, Jewish way of calling on a divinity.

I have come finally to realize that I have been an acknowledged Jew for all of my four score years without holding any Jewish beliefs about God and man. On the two occasions I’ve described, I did not have to worry about compromising my own beliefs to help my wife follow hers; I had no beliefs to compromise. It was that discomforting thought that undoubtedly provoked my reactions. The question pressing on me now is whether it is even possible — what could it possibly mean? — to be a nonbelieving Jew.

I know I am not alone, although accurate numbers are hard to pin down. Estimated breakdowns of the world’s 18 million or so Jews by their degree of belief vary widely. As the old joke goes, ask three Jews about any topic and you’ll get four opinions. In broad terms, however, it is generally agreed that somewhere over half of all Jews worldwide are members of either orthodox communities or conservative synagogues, who accept as true the biblical descriptions of God and of God’s historical interactions with the Jewish people. Perhaps another 25 to 30 percent of Jews believe in a God who, as the Bible says, requires from mankind only “to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God,” but who read the full Bible with some skepticism as to God’s particular relation to the Jewish people.

That leaves a sizable number of Jews who are like me — and, I’ve discovered, like most of my Jewish friends — in finding the very concept of God, as portrayed in the Bible, problematic at best. Most of us have had a limited Jewish education, although few were as nonexistent as mine. Jewish holidays were not celebrated in my home, and on Yom Kippur my father lay quietly in bed until the sun set and then washed and dressed for dinner. He lit yahrzeit candles for his parents, but if he held any beliefs about their souls, I never heard them. As far as I know, his only visit to a synagogue was on my bar mitzvah, for which I did not have to learn a letter of Hebrew. My Torah portion was transliterated into English sounds, which I memorized and then repeated, bent over a large scrolled Bible, while a rabbi swung his pointer from one group of black scratches to the next.

So how can I explain still thinking of myself as a Jew? The notion that we remain Jewish because the world treats us as Jews is not the answer in my case. My great-grandfather, according to our family genealogist, lived in Romania as Elimelech Rothenberg, but changed his family name to Michel (a form of his first name) in order to save his sons from conscription into the tsar’s army. His first born, my grandfather, was therefore Moshe Leib Michel, which was the name he bore when he left Romania in 1900 with his wife and three children. At some point after he arrived in New York City, he became Louis M. Mitchell, not only creating a Scotch-Irish family name, but reversing the initials of his given names. (My father and uncle were apparently unaware of that reversal of initials, since both my cousin and I are M.L.M.s — Morton Lewis and Malcolm Lewis Mitchell.)

In Louis Mitchell’s New York household, it is unlikely that Jewish traditions and education played any greater role than in my father’s household, since neither my father nor his older brother continued them. (My cousin’s bar mitzvah was more traditional, because his mother arranged it.) The reason my father and his brother considered themselves Jewish must have been that their father told them so. But why? Louis could have been accepted into a church in the Bronx, where they lived. The city did not force his Jewishness on him.

Perhaps it was Louis’s wife who gave their sons and daughters some Jewish education. Perhaps his membership in a Jewish-Romanian burial society prevented his passing as anything but a Jew; his 1914 grave can still be found in Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn, surmounted by a tall memorial placed later, inscribed in both Hebrew and English.

In any case, my own father had no such hindrances. He was 16 when Louis died, and he left school to become a typist and stenographer to help support his family. From then until he married 15 years later, he made his living as a secretary to railroad executives, traveling the country with them, and then as an advertising executive, finally with his own advertising agency. Nothing prevented Samuel Mitchell from presenting himself to the world as something other than a Jew. He could have married a non-Jewish woman — he hinted to me once that he would have but for the objections of his sisters — and neither the world nor his children would have seen him any differently.

Because my father clung to his Jewishness (perversely, as I see it now), I became the third generation in a family of American Jewish men who declare their Jewishness but maintain no Jewish beliefs or traditions. At least I have spared my own son, and my daughters, that fate. They know I am Jewish, but they do not feel compelled themselves to acknowledge, nor to deny, membership in any religious group.

On the other hand, I hope they believe, as I have all my life, that humans, all of us, are unique among our planet’s animals, and that the origin of that uniqueness is, and will remain, a mystery to us. Our search for meaning should take us to the roots of things, like Tennyson addressing the flower he plucked from a crannied wall: “If I could understand / What you are, root and all, and all in all, / I should know what God and man is.” I hope that is how my progeny will approach religious thought.

Malcolm Mitchell is editor and publisher of Investment Policy magazine. He lives in New York and East Hampton.