Diaspora Jews don’t have the luxury of writing about whatever they want. Telling Jewish stories is a Jewish imperative.
A little over a decade ago, in a book called Jews and Words, the late Israeli writer Amos Oz and his daughter, Fania Oz-Salzberger, described Jewish continuity as follows:
“Ours is not a bloodline but a textline. … We are not about stones, clans, or chromosomes. You don’t have to be an archeologist, an anthropologist or a geneticist to trace and substantiate the Jewish continuum. You don’t have to be an observant Jew. You don’t have to be a Jew. Or, for that matter, an anti-Semite. All you have to be is a reader.”
It is a striking passage that links Abraham and Sarah, ancient rabbinic sages, the 18th-century businesswoman Gluckel of Hameln, and contemporary Jewish authors. Like many pithy formulations, the opening of Jews and Words is probably overstated or at least overly simple. But storytelling, for Jews, has long been a core devotional activity. Or, as some sages remarked in the Midrash, “If you want to know the One Who Spoke The World Into Being you must learn haggadah!—that is, how to tell a sacred story.
This notable injunction is made all the more powerful because of the uncertain etymology of the word “haggadah” (which is a variant of the more familiar aggadah and not to be confused with the Passover Hagaddah). It could be related to the Hebrew root nun-gimmel-dalet, which means “to tell,” or to the root aleph-gimmel-dalet, which means “knot” or “web” (as in to “weave a yarn” or “spin a tale”). The ambiguity yields the insight (almost certainly intended by the authors of that Midrash) that stories bind you. They hold your family close. The more you twist them, turn them, and tell them, the tighter the web becomes.
But what makes a Jewish story anyway? What kind of stories have we been telling? Most pointedly, what kind of stories should we be telling now? These are central preoccupations of mine, both as a novelist and as a Jew.
My own criterion for identifying a story as Jewish is fairly close to that of the late, great Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua, who suggested that for a piece of literature to be Jewish, it must check at least one of two boxes: 1) It must be written in a substantively Jewish language, like Hebrew or Yiddish, in which case it can be written by anyone and about any subject whatsoever; or 2) it can be written in any language, but it must be written by a Jew about substantively Jewish matters (i.e., populated by Jewish characters and addressing questions of Jewish cultural, religious or national concern).
This definition is expansive enough to include the Hebrew poetry of an Arab-Israeli writer, but narrow enough to exclude, for example, the stories of Isaac Asimov, a very Jewish and very prolific science fiction writer who wrote almost nothing about the Jews. And this definition lands with particular force on Jewish writers (like me!) who work in non-Jewish languages. If we care at all about situating our work inside the mighty textline that defines Jewish being (as I do), it significantly narrows the scope of what we should try to do.
Novelists (and artists of all kinds) tend to bristle when you try to tell them how they should direct their creative energies. The limits of what I can write about are the limits of my imagination! There is nothing foreign to me! As the American short story writer Raymond Carver once wrote,
“Put it all in, make use.”
Important concerns about telling stories that don’t reflect the writer’s own experiences have tempered some of this hubris. But novelists are also rather desperate for approval. We want readers and many of them, both for crass economic reasons and because of (equally crass, if more mysterious) torsions of the ego. Jewish American writers in the 20th century, therefore, were often afraid of ghettoizing themselves into obscurity. Theirs was a ghastly anxiety born of persecution and exclusion that inspired writers like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow to deny their identity as “Jewish writers,” even though the Jews were pretty much all they ever wrote about.
On some level, I can relate. But I would simply say that we, Jewish writers living in the diaspora after Oct. 7, who write in English (or French, Spanish, German or Russian), simply do not have the luxury of writing about whatever we want. We are too fractured, too confused, too assimilated, too threatened, and our story is too important for that. We need to tell it in a way that preserves and celebrates Jewish continuity with the past while extending it towards new, imaginative horizons.
I would also venture—as the writer Cynthia Ozick has in her marvelous 1970 essay “Toward A New Yiddish”—that writing about non-Jewish subjects or with non-Jewish audiences in mind is a fast track to oblivion and irrelevance, both as Jews and as artists. Few remember the “great” works of the ancient Jews of Alexandria, who fancied themselves Greek and wrote accordingly. I doubt Moses was ever concerned about his work being well-received by the Hittites. Neither did the Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz think that his success hinged on a wide readership among the English gentry. That should not be our concern either.
It is, instead, indigenous Jewish storytelling that will secure our legacy, as it did for Moses and Peretz, whose stories were written for us and coaxed from the rich soil of our shared past and our present longings for what we might yet become.
In Yiddish, there is a word, “doikayt” (literally “hereness”), which expresses the notion that Jews should form and strengthen Jewish cultural, artistic and institutional life wherever they reside. So we should. (Historically, the concept of doikayt stood in opposition to the vision of cultural strength and renewal offered by Zionism, and I would emphasize that is not how I, an ardent Zionist, am using it.) But it’s on us, too—those responsible for telling this leg of the Jewish story in America—not to drop the baton because of our linguistic shortcomings or because of the challenges we face from without and from within.
Most American Jews lack fluency in a uniquely Jewish language, which makes it harder to maintain cultural continuity and coherence. The challenge for Jewish writers, then, is to translate indigenous Jewish ideas, glorious in their particularism, into, say, the language I am using right now. It’s a language of Christendom, which holds, along with Paul, that there is no distinction between Jew and Greek. I don’t agree. And, although I will likely never write anything more complicated than an email in Hebrew, I refuse to let American Jews go down with the Alexandrian ones, at least not without a fight.
That means telling our tales. It means taking up the mantle of haggadah, the never-ending, eternally verdant textline of the Jewish people. It lets us know who we’ve been, who we are and where we’re headed. As Jewish writers in America, we should focus our attention there. We should write and write and write. And as the Passover Haggadah teaches: “All who expand on the story are praiseworthy.”
Rabbi Benjamin Resnick is a contributing writer to My Jewish Learning and Jlife magazine.
