272 Lynn Davidman
As we have seen, my interviewees do not perceive traditional Jewish law as author-
itative. They feel a great deal of freedom to decide what to observe and what not to
observe from the gamut of traditional practices. Indeed, some even claim a link between
practices derived from other aspects of contemporary culture (such as the New Age), or
other religions (such as Eastern traditions), with the ways they construct themselves as
Jewishly identified.
Sheryl, a single woman in her thirties, provides an interesting example of such
religious bricolage. In response to my question of whether there are any rituals, of any
kind, that are important in her life, she said,
Well, right now I am doing, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the book,The Artists’
Wa y– it’s a book to kind of help unblock your creativity and one of the things
that they recommend that you do is morning pages. That when you get up in the
morning you write three, non-stop sort of stream of consciousness to get all that, it’s
like a brain dump, to get all that stuff that’s on your mind out onto the page and
I’ve been doing that, it’s kind of odd, I started doing that and then I was reading
the book about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and somewhere in the book they
talked about at the beginning of the month before Rosh Hashanah how religious
men would get up at midnight and start to pray because that’s when their minds
would be the most clear. And I realized as I was reading that I had kind of started my
morning papers on the first day of the month....It is a very weird coincidence and
doing them has really um made me see a lot more coincidence in my life, and I don’t
mean necessarily I believe it’s coincidence. And that I continue to do this daily, it’s
like the Jewish morning prayers.Here she describes an example of a daily ritual practice that she links with Jewish
memory and ritual although it does not derive from a specifically Jewish source.
Another important dimension of the ways many of my respondents construct their
sense of ethnicity as Jews is by attributing their worldviews, values, and philosophy
to insights from Judaism or Jewish culture. The interconnectedness between ideas and
practices is explicit here, because respondents linked their worldviews and values to
their daily activities. Several people related their leftist politics to their Jewish heritage,
stating that Judaism is about a sense of social justice. A wonderful example of this can
be seen in the story of a man named Ted. He was an extremely left wing political activist
for much of his life. When talking about his life choices and Judaism, he framed it as
follows:
So, you know...and like I said, my grandfather was active in the 1905 Revolution
as one of the People’s Police. And he used to tell me about the 1905 Revolution and
how it failed, but how it was wonderful when it was...when the people took over,
it was like Nirvana, Utopia, whatever. I mean, it was the first time the Jews were
free. And you know, what a wonderful time that was. And so what happened in
the sixties to me was a replay of what my grandfather used to tell me, because there
were occasions where we freed areas. We fought National Guard troops, we did...
there were lots of...I mean, I was reliving my grandfather’s life in a lot of ways.
Ted also related his activism to a Jewish value structure, saying:It seems to me, and you probably know more about this than I do, that this idea
about doing good deeds while you’re alive, that that’s all there is. First of all...well,