Welcome

Hello friends, family, weirdos, and other blogreaders (those were not mutually exclusive. In fact, I certainly expect most people to be in two or more of those categories). I am new to the world of internet blogging, and therefore, if you find my writing, boring, dull, stupid, idiotic, elementary, or even as good as mildly uninteresting, please feel free to hurl your insults and unconstructive criticism in my direction. What I write here may or may not be what I actually believe, but my hope is that it will enhance my writing abilities, and allow me to think where other people can read it and tell me how ridiculous my thoughts are.

For my first post, I wish to share with you an unedited piece I wrote for "RA diversity retraining." Although I planned on my blog having a bit of humor, this is a more serious piece relating to individual search for identity.

Am I Jewish?

I was too young to remember but when I was one year old and my father took me to my first baseball game, a man came up to him asked, "Are you Jewish?" My dad, being Jewish, responded that he was, but this curious stranger was not finished. "Is your son Jewish?" I don't know how my father responded, nor do I particularly care to, but regardless, I am still faced with the same question today.

I've never been to temple, and I've been to church on every Christmas Eve, but I certainly wouldn't characterize myself as Christian. I believe in neither God, in the Christian sense, nor Jesus being his son. But my disbelief in God excludes me from being religioiusly jewish as well.

It is clear then, that my Jewish identity is something cultural. So what does that make me? A cheap, bagel-loving, money-making individual? Well, I do like bagels and I am cheap, but does that really define me? I would rather define myself as a humanitarian, as a liberal, and as an intellectual.

Recently, however, I feel unable to separate myself from being Jewish. I somehow feel guilty about "my people's" actions against the Palestinians in Gaza. Why should I feel guilty? What do my Jewisheness and theirs have in common? Only the fact that we have been "the others" for so long that we must band together. Israel's actions in Gaza have made me reconsider whether I must continue to identify as Jewish and reevlauate whether or not I am Jewish.

Quote for the day:

"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates in The Apology