Last week I wrote about the reality that Judaism was never just a religion. Here, I want to consider what happens when we start labeling what kind of Jews we are, or labeling others. I was listening to a podcast recently when someone said, “I’m just a Reform Jew,” almost apologetically, as if she needed to qualify her own belonging before someone else did it for her. I kept coming back to that word, “just” and what it says about us that so many Jews feel the need to diminish their own Judaism before anyone even asks them to explain it.

Then I was in a conversation about a potential teacher, and someone described her as a “committed Jew.” When I asked what they meant, the answer was that she knew t’fillah and brachot. To be clear, those are important skills, and they were genuinely relevant to the role we were discussing. But what stuck with me was how quickly and naturally the language of “commitment” had become synonymous with a specific type of liturgical knowledge, how, without much reflection, we had taken a broad and complex idea about what it means to be part of a people and reduced it to a single, narrow measure.

These two examples are connected, and I think they point to something that has challenged American Jewish life for some time, a persistent assumption that there is some sort of hierarchy of Jewish authenticity. Some Jews are more real, more legitimate, more genuinely committed than others. I believe there are real and negative consequences to these assumptions. There is a clear difference between labels that simply describe and labels that exclude. The first acknowledges that we are a varied people who have always expressed our Judaism in different ways. The other claims some authority to decide whose Judaism counts and who belongs. The fact is, Judaism has never given any individual or movement that kind of authority, however much some have tried to claim it.

What makes this especially troubling is the moment we are living in. Antisemitism has risen in both frequency and visibility in recent years, with the Anti-Defamation League documenting record numbers of incidents in the United States and FBI hate crime data consistently showing Jews as the most targeted religious group in America. This is the environment we are living in, and at a time when our instinct should be pulling us closer to each other, we continue to sort and rank ourselves in ways that divide us. It is not only wrong, it is a distraction from what actually matters and what we actually need to be doing together.

For me, the moments when I feel most genuinely connected to my Judaism are the moments when I am  simply being part of the life of my people. This happens most powerfully in Israel, surrounded by Hebrew and Jewish time and a sense of shared story that you can almost feel in the air. I also feel it around a Shabbat table with family and friends, or sitting in a sukkah, walking into a Kosher market before a holiday and feeling that positive energy in the air, and of course celebrating daily with a school full of Jewish children who are just beginning to understand what it means to belong to something larger than themselves. None of those moments required me to prove anything, including some level of liturgical skill and Biblical knowledge. They require me to show up, and I think that is closer to how Jewish commitment is actually experienced by most people than the categories we tend to reach for based on observance, skill or knowledge.

Research distributed by the Pew Research Center shows that only a minority of American Jews regularly engage in traditional forms of religious observance, which means that by the narrow definitions we often apply, much of the Jewish community would fall outside what we call “committed.” And yet many of those same individuals are deeply engaged in community, in philanthropy, in education, in the daily work of sustaining Jewish life and the Jewish people in ways that are no less significant. Our tradition itself offers a broader lens. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, all Jews are responsible for one another, does not come with qualifiers. It does not distinguish between the knowledgeable and the less knowledgeable, the observant and the less observant. It assumes a shared bond that precedes and transcends all of our differences.

That does not mean those differences are irrelevant. Jews do pray differently, interpret differently, and live differently, and those differences sometimes do create real boundaries that cannot simply be wished away. Ignoring that would be dishonest. But there is a profound difference between acknowledging the diversity of a people and assigning value to that diversity in ways that narrow belonging and leave people feeling that the door is not fully open to them.

What we share remains far more substantial than what divides us. All Jews share a history that is both particular and enduring, a sense of responsibility that extends beyond individual choice, a connection to a people, a land, and a story that continues to unfold. At a time when that shared identity is being tested from the outside, it matters enormously how we speak about it among ourselves.

So when someone says they are “just a Reform Jew,” pause and state clearly, “there is no ‘just’ in belonging to the Jewish people. And when we describe someone as a “committed Jew,” it is worth being honest about what we mean, because no single measure, not liturgical knowledge, not synagogue attendance, not any one marker of observance, captures the full reality of what it means to belong to this people and this story. We may not all live our Judaism in the same way. But we are still, all of us, part of the same people.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)