A few months ago, my nine-year-old son asked me a question I was completely unprepared for: “What is Jewish?”

It was not a philosophical question about what it means to be Jewish. He genuinely wanted to understand what the word itself meant. For a moment, I just stared at him.

We were living in Sydney, thousands of miles from Tel Aviv, where he had spent most of his childhood. We are Israeli. Hebrew is his mother tongue. He knows the songs, the food, the holidays and the slang. He knows how to stand for the siren on Yom HaZikaron. He knows that Friday afternoon has a particular feeling to it, even if nobody lights candles. He knows Purim means costumes, Hanukkah means sufganiyot, and that somehow every Israeli has an opinion about where to find the best hummus.

And yet he looked at me and asked, “What is Jewish?”

My first reaction was disbelief. How could my child not know? I also felt, for a moment, that I had failed to teach him something obvious.

I grew up in Israel, and for more than a decade I have built my professional life around Hebrew and Israeli culture, working with thousands of people around the world who are actively trying to get closer to something my son had simply been born........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)