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September 24th, 2017 
Awake Goy The high holidays this year have been the most relaxed of my lifetime. It used to be that I was quite caught up in the new year and the ten days of awe leading up to Yom Kippur. I made it a point to get to synagogue a time or two, I always fasted. I anticipated the question from my tribal minders, “What did you do this year, Phil?” and aimed to pass the test. Especially after I got married to a non-Jew. I felt guilty about my lack of adherence to traditional Jewish ways, and tried to make up for my violations in spasmodic ritual.
This year, not so much. And I notice that few of my Jewish friends are being observant. One went camping. Another made a comment to me about their Buddhist spouse. A third made a blasphemous joke with pleasure: It took 2000 years for the Jews to get Chinese food.
Yet another has refused to go to synagogue since the rabbi used the pulpit on the high holidays to express compassion for the Israeli Defense Forces. Anti-Zionism is obviously a factor here. It’s hard to get pumped for a religion so many of whose institutions align themselves with a militant apartheid state. All the polling shows that the more religious Jews are, the more supportive they tend to be of Israel.
But I’m speaking more generally about assimilationist tendencies in the United States. I have more Jewish friends than ever but a lot of them are intermarried, and the High Holidays feel more and more like something traditional people do. It used to be that Sabbath services were that way; Jews only showed up in shul for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Now even that observance seems to me to be slipping slowly away.
The other night a Jewish friend had us over for a Rosh Hashanah dinner, and said the prayers, under her breath. My wife later asked why she didn’t sing em out. All three Jews there were intermarried; and when I talked with the other Jewish guest about these trends, she was more comfortably lapsed than me. She’s looking forward to Christmas with non-Jewish grandchildren in another country; she’s moved for jobs too many times to have kept Jewish friends, but isn’t sure what to do about it.
So everything that Alan Dershowitz (The Vanishing American Jew) and other tractarians warned us about is happening, and still I shrug.
Other moderns are going through the same process, watching traditional norms dissolve. My close non-Jewish friends and my wife and her sisters and cousins have all fallen away from the churches of their youths. I share Kafka’s objection to his childhood Jewish community: his father regarded synagogue in Prague as the place to point out to his weirdo son the “sons of the millionaire Fuchs.” Chosenness and prestige culture are also problematic. The world doesn’t work that way. If I contemn one thing about Antonin Scalia, it was his refusal to consider other norms than American ones.
I need religion; and in crises, I have found myself turning to a few intimates, several from my wife’s family, and reaching for lines from Dickinson, Kafka, Tolstoy, Melville, Shakespeare, Doris Lessing. My wife is a full-on seeker, and I get some of her wisdom by osmosis. The ayurvedic temperaments are one of the most useful typologies I’ve ever encountered, right up there with Myers Briggs. “You’re either a nature or a culture person,” my wife said recently, and nature interests us more.
Am I assimilating? I don’t know. My closest friends are more unconventional than ever, and the community of anti-Zionist Jews is also important to me. They’re going to spread me in the woods anyway.
These are all observations, not moral commandments. Though I find that the guilt is ebbing; I’ve made my choices, and loss of tradition is one of the consequences. Cultures change and develop; in New Guinea they are losing languages by the day. We should pray that what we replace our old ways with is an improvement.
Source Article from http://mondoweiss.net/2017/09/high-holidays-meh/
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