Retying The Knot: On Prophets, Pogroms and McDonald’s

My wife and I fly regularly to visit our grandchildren. I use a computer. I have just successfully used modern medicine to address a hearing issue. I mention these things not to establish my credentials as a modern person, but because I’ve been acculturated—as perhaps you have—to lead with them. To signal that I am not a person left behind. That I am forward-facing, reasonable, unencumbered by the past.

But lately I’ve been wondering about the cost of leaving that impression.

Last week my son Isaac and I spoke about his wife’s family. She comes from a world quite different from most of the Jewish people I’ve known across my lifetime. Her lineage is unbroken. Grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents—known, named, and present in their commitment to Judaism. Those who survived the Shoah continued to practice Jewishly, remaining faithful to commandments going back some four thousand years. The chain of tradition was tested, at times severely, and it held.

That conversation stayed with me. What it subtly illuminated was the nature of my own chain—where it had broken and how, in retrospect, I have come to see its repair as an aspiration, a practice, and a responsibility.

I want to be careful here about the word secular. I don’t find it useful, and not only because it compresses something complicated. I don’t believe most of us are steadfastly secular, any more than I believe most of us are steadfastly devout. We have our moments in both directions. There are times of great need, and in those times, almost........

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