Happy Rosh HaShanah, reader. As I’m sure you know, Rosh HaShanah is the celebration of the Jewish New Year, marking the beginning of the Yamim Noraim (which lasts until Yom Kippur next week), the holiest week in the Jewish spiritual year. What you may not know is that Rosh HaShanah is also the day that everyone and their Jewish mother here in Hollywood embraces their inner Jew and takes the day off to “attend services”. Well, all except me. So I got to thinkin'...

Now, if you know me at all, you know that I embrace my Jewish heritage as an essential building block for my complex, fractured and problematic psyche. Judaism as a religion has never been a strong influence on my life, as I prefer to think of myself and my upbringing as relatively liberal and entirely non-religious (My mother’s family is Russian Jew, my father’s Irish Catholic; both lapsed) Yet still, I am ashamed to admit that I’ve never attended services on the High Holidays, and in fact haven’t been to Temple in years. I have not read the Torah, have only a passing and essentially literary knowledge of the rest of the Hebrew Bible (The Old Testament to the goyim in the crowd). I have never sat at a table for Seder. We celebrated Hanukkah growing up, but the menorah was always placed on the shelf near the Christmas tree. I am, in my own mind, a secular Jew; that is, I embrace my Jewish heritage as my racial and ethnic and cultural background, though I shy away from the religious elements that are so intrinsically entwined.

So here’s my question: does the pick-and-choose aspect of this culture make me, for lack of a better term, a “Bad Jew”? Does this lack of interest in/devotion to the spiritual element of Judaism discredit my claim to being a Jew? Or has the melting pot society that we American’s live in blurred the lines between race, culture and religion so much that the ties no longer bind as strongly as they did in the Old Country? Is God really dead, or is that just existential bluster to sell books and give even atheists something to believe in? Is religion, as Buddha foretold in the midst of a gradual yet inevitable decline? Has it already gone? Has organized religion become so politicized that it is spiraling downwards towards obsolescence, at least in the West (all while religious zealotry is at or near its apex in Muslim society)? Is a Catholic still a Catholic if they screw their girlfriend out of wedlock or support a woman’s right to choose? Has the Industrial West, as a culture, moved the beyond the point of being bound by our individual religions in favor of a mismatched, politico-ethnically sensitive, moralistic but secular society? Do I really believe that I can write an entire paragraph of rhetorical questions and expect an answer? No. But let me know what you think anyway.

Whew, now that I got that off my chest, I can concentrate on more important things. Tune in tomorrow, dear reader, for my blessed return to irreverence and cynicism…and football picks!

Shalom.