I cam across your “How Jewish Am I…Really?” blog the other day when I was searching for information about the Bar Mitzvah of a boy who shares your last name.

Unfortunately, or perhaps very fortuitously, your question and those following are very common ones. Unfortunately, because it seems that what you received as “Jewish education” did not provide any meaningful definition of what being a Jew is all about. The communal experience you describe could be just as well a description of being on the Blue Team in color war. It might be fun to sit around a campfire and sing songs lauding Blueness. You and the other guys on the team even develop a closeness and feeling of community. So can the members of the Garden Club or the Saturday night regulars at Pete’s Place.

Don’t get me wrong. I am strongly for community. Why would I, a Jew in Jerusalem, be writing to a Jew I don’t know in Portland, Oregon, if it wasn’t because I feel that we are part of the same community?

However, being connected to the Blue Team can’t possibly last too long outside camp or graduation. There’s no common purpose, no common goal and most of all, no inherent meaning in being on the Blue Team. So I totally understand and agree with you that it should obvious why you should go to temple and why you should celebrate holidays. But that would only be obvious if you were taught those things.

Where you taught whether or not there is a G-d? Where you taught if there is a G-d, why did He create the world? Why create us? What difference does it make to G-d if we eat beef or pork or lobster or puffed wheat? Why give us all these nit-picky laws? Why pray? Does G-d need our praise? There are so many religions out there, who says we’re right? Why do bad things happen to good people? My bet is that you were taught some ritual, but given little real education. If you haven’t been taught the answers to these and hundreds of other basic questions, how can you expect to want to fast on Yom Kippur or sit hour after hour in front of a Siddur that has no meaning to you?

I wrote before that perhaps it is very fortuitous that your questions are common ones. They show that you think and that you care about your Judaism. If you take your questions seriously and make an honest effort to find answers to them, you may find a greater wealth of knowledge and inspiration than you ever imagined possible.

We Jews have been around for some 3,300 years. Through all this time, basically the entire period of recorded history, we have not only survived (see Mark Twain’s “Concerning the Jews” http://ohr.edu/judaism/concern/concerna.htm), but the Orthodox have maintained the same laws during all that time. The most respected amongst the Jews, (at least until the last 150-200 years or so), have always been the Torah scholars. They have asked all the questions and provided the answers. It is up to you. If you really want answers, you have to make the effort to find them.

Some suggested websites dealing with the basics of Judaism:

http://www.aish.com
http://ohr.edu
http://www.simpletoremember.com

I don’t have any connections in Portland, but you might want to check out the learning options at http://www.portlandkollel.org/home.html

With best wishes for success,

Shalom

P.S. This was not written as a post, but rather as a presonal response to you.

I want my tax dollars to be used hunting down the REAL terrorists! I mean come on, how long does it take to find and bring to justice Bin Laden?