Mayor Bloomberg's Purim message (sort of)
In an age when non-Jewish politicians trip all over themselves trying to prove their Jewish roots, you have to love Michael Bloomberg. Here’s a pint-sized Joel Grey look-alike and leader of a city with one of the world’s largest Jewish populations, who has every reason — and right — to pander to his tribesmen in Brooklyn and beyond. But when asked about his Jewish beliefs, Hizzoner is conspicuously light on the shmaltz.
“Religion, I’m not comfortable in talking about, I think,” he recently told a reporter. “It may be good politics, but it’s not me.”
The occasion of the interview was Bloomberg’s recent trip to Israel, where he represented New York at the opening of Yad Vashem’s new museum. A New York Times reporter accompanied Bloomberg on the flight back and probed him about his Jewishness. The Times also seemed impressed that Bloomberg declined to pander — just as he refused to play up his Jewishness during his election campaign. (At the time, a Forward reporter asked him about his grandfather, who was a rabbi. A testy Bloomberg replied, “My grandfather? Number one, he’s deceased. Number two, he’s not running. The only issue is who I am, not who my parents were.”)
Then as now, Bloomberg skates dangerously close to earning the most overused and presumptuous sobriquet in Jewish communal life — “self-hater” — but that hardly seems to be the case.
“I believe in Judaism, I was raised a Jew, I’m happy to be one — or proud to be one,” he said, then added after a pause: “I don’t know if that’s the right word. I don’t know why you should be proud of something. It doesn’t make you any better or worse. You are what you are.”
If he hates anything, it seems to be chauvinism — the idea that you are defined and, more importantly, privileged by the mere fact of your family tree.
If Bloomberg’s honesty is unusual, his sense of Jewishness is not. Social psychologist Bethamie Horowitz, the research director of the Mandel Institute, says that 90 percent of respondents in recent surveys react positively to the statement, “I’m proud to be a Jew.”
At the same time, many of those proud Jews, like Bloomberg, do not partake in most of the Jewish “behaviors” — synagogue attendance and ritual acts, for example — that demographers often use as an indicator of Jewish involvement. And yet these “not-so-engaged” Jews show what she calls a “fair amount of attachment and interest in Judaism in a world that doesn’t stigmatize Jewishness.”
Horowitz, who spoke this week to members of this newspaper’s board, has designed studies of American Jewry that look beyond the behaviors of Jews to consider their attitudes. Those surveys, she says, become explorations of the choices Jews are making, and not the ways they are failing to “measure up.” Horowitz likens Jewish identity to a “journey,” where behaviors and attitudes remain fluid and flexible. By adopting this metaphor, she says, planners are in a better position to know what appeals to Jews who are currently engaged only marginally.
There is an implied gamble in accepting Horowitz’s methodology. If surveys are planning tools, and planning costs money, she is suggesting an allocation of community resources that many consider controversial. It’s admirable to value a broad range of Jewish behaviors and attitudes, critics say, but in an age of limited resources, shouldn’t we put our money into the kinds of Jews who are most likely to support (or grow up to support) Jewish institutions? To put it bluntly, it’s nice that they feel Jewish, but are they willing to pay for it?
This is a great question to be asking on Purim, if I do say so. Megillat Esther is a chameleon among Jewish texts. If you read the story without irony, it sounds like the old joke about Jewish holidays: “They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat.” Heroic Mordechai reads the writing on the wall (I know — different story) and manages to get his niece Esther into a position to influence the king and thwart his minister’s anti-Jewish plot. Esther risks her life in approaching the king, and the Jews are saved.
But it is also possible that the authors of the Megilla intended it as a parody of the Jewish Diaspora. As concubine to a non-Jewish king, Esther is hardly a role model for continuity. If the Megilla is satire, that may be the point: “You see what happens when you live in Diaspora?” you can imagine the authors saying. “Do you see the things you must stoop to when your fate is in the hands of others?” In that case, the joke is on us.
But somewhere between parody and fairy tale, Esther can be read as a quintessentially modern story as well. Like Horowitz’s subjects (in other words, like all of us) Esther is on a journey, from an assimilated self in the king’s harem to a woman who awakens to her identity and responsibilities as a Jew. And having embraced those responsibilities, she becomes a hero to those who understand the sacrifices we make for survival.
Today we have the relative luxury to talk about Jewish continuity as a function of high Jewish involvement and raising children Jewishly with an array of choices and little or no coercion from the “outside.” At other moments, continuity is less important than mere survival. Such moments transform a “kingdom of priests” into a nation of warriors, or refugees, or Marranos, or deal-makers.Mayor Bloomberg’s Purim message (sort of)
That’s what the costumes are about. Purim is a holiday of shape-shifting and expediency: The shape we take today may not be the shape we’ll need tomorrow. The Megilla is not telling us to raise our kids to marry royalty (although a billionaire mayor might be nice). But perhaps it is reminding us that we never know who we will have to be to remain what we want to be.