On Jewishness

Journeying with the Testaments - by Monica Sharp

Photo by Ben Ostrower on Unsplash

Jewish can feel like a heavy word. But for years, for me, it was light, aspirational, and dare I say, associated with scathing, desirable good humor. I have often considered how to be American is, in many ways, to feel (and, more often than in many places, to be, in fact) Jewish: displaced, immigrant, possibly shunned at home and forced to make a new life elsewhere.

I don’t mean just recent Jewish displacement. I trace it back to pre-biblical history. Exodus. Old Testament. Adjacent to the Epic of Gilgamesh.

I learned about Jewish history and Judiasm early, through literature, reading Judy Blume and The Diary of Anne Frank at school. A confused childhood viewing of Fiddler on the Roof, and later, Yentl.

As discussed in this space, my own family’s story is very much a migrant story. My mother’s side was Finnish and Finnish-American, and they often felt shame in their daily lives against the background of their community: ashamed of speaking Finnish at home, ashamed of the food, the milk-drinking with meals, the mandatory huivi.¹ All the customs and textures of a world they were trying to leave behind. These points of shame quietly assimilated into my upbringing. I felt them as wounds to resolve, as something missing looking for a mirror.

That mirror presented itself to me in the form of Jewish history and Jewish religion.

I think we can safely say that the flavor of American comedy, from Mel Brooks to Rob Reiner, is extremely Jewish. I was soaking in it. My young adulthood unfolded in the era of Mike Myers as Linda Richman on Saturday Night Live.

I took History of Religion in university. The history of science in Islam. And, for many semesters, classes in Spanish and medieval Spanish history that foregrounded the convivencia² (fictional construct though it may have been), the court of Alfonso el Sabio,³ Moses Maimonides⁴ and Averroes⁵ and the innumerable contributions of Jewish scholarship to common life in pre-1492 Iberia.

I couldn’t get enough of the endless meditative spiral of history, literature and religion. The sheer convergence of it!

There was a period when I thought I might convert. I might find a nice Jewish boy. In general, I loved a mensch. I dated two Jewish men in college, one from a thoroughly assimilated family, one from an Orthodox family in New Orleans, which feels stranger now that I’ve read Nicholas Lemann’s recent essay drawn from his book Returning.⁶

Lemann writes about growing up among descendants of Alsatian and southwestern German Jews who arrived in the early nineteenth century as backpack peddlers in the rural Deep South, by his birth established and prosperous, belonging to grand Reform temples on St. Charles Avenue, having followed the Pittsburgh Platform’s directive to scrub separateness and strangeness from Judaism. That context matters for what comes later.

Throughout my late teens and early twenties, I continually felt like maybe (?) I was a lost Jew. I read Philip Roth, constructing a map back toward somewhere I might finally belong.

And for this Finnish-American, Protestant, Lutheran-baptized, blonde girl, that somewhere began to look … Jewish.

I was struck in my early twenties about the many ways our family’s Finnish-American immigrant experience aligned with that of a Jewish immigrant family. Looking back now, with adult eyes, I’m fascinated by how quickly I connected those dots, and by the complete absence of reluctance. I had no hesitation whatsoever to investigate that option.

I want to say more about this. Because here’s what I’ve been thinking about: years ago when I asked a former manager, a dear friend, whether anyone in his family kept kosher, the speed and sharpness of his “no” stayed with me. Almost offended.

Lemann helped me understand this response. For an assimilated family, the divide between German Jews and Eastern European Jews is so vast that any whiff of old-world Jewish custom and the shtetl registers as down-market, something to be actively repudiated. I remember the moment clearly: a work trip, a rental car, me working up the nerve to ask, and then the ferocity of his response. I thought, oh, he’s angry. But what I understand now is that his offense wasn’t really about my question, but the long shadow of a very particular kind of assimilation, one not so different, in its architecture of shame, from my mother’s huivit folded away in a drawer.

Which brings me back to the younger version of myself, so eager to claim kinship with a history that wasn’t hers. I read the books. I dated the boys. I drafted the essay connecting Finnish-American displacement to the Jewish experience as though literary sympathy were a form of lineage.

And maybe there’s something real in that instinct, the recognition that migration leaves a particular scar. Assimilation always bears a cost. Belonging is rarely freely given and its lack is often grieved.

All those things are true. They cross traditions.

But I am not Jewish. As an Episcopalian, I am firmly rooted in a tradition that values the Old Testament, positioned inside that same inheritance of covenant and exile and the long human argument with God. I don’t need to convert to feel the weight of Exodus. The text is already mine, in the way that it belongs to anyone willing to reckon with it honestly.

And I do reckon with it. I came to the Old Testament the way I came to many things in my life: via reading. Classical mythology, then the ancient Near East, Gilgamesh predating Genesis by centuries and yet telling versions of the same stories, flood and hubris and the wrath of gods who could not yet be asked for mercy because mercy had not yet been invented. Homer and Virgil and tales of wars that dragged on for years, staining every solder and army with a desire for revenge.

That context is everything. When fellow parishioners tell me they’d like to toss the Old Testament out the window, that it’s too cruel, I understand the instinct. But I beg to differ. The times were cruel. (For what it’s worth, times also are cruel now. Take a look around.) The Old Testament and its contemporary literature describe a world that operated on honor before grace, retribution before forgiveness, on the logic of covenant: hold up your end of the contract or suffer, and with good reason. You had it coming to you.

But that world is not simply behind us. Read the Old Testament alongside Homer, alongside Gilgamesh. What emerges is not cruelty for its own sake but a detailed map of human psychology: how power organizes itself, how shame functions, and what people do when they feel abandoned.

Those patterns have not expired. They are present in every organization, every family, every nation that has ever stated what it owes its members and what it will demand in return. The movement from that world toward mercy and the possibility of salvation is not a repudiation of the Old Testament. It is its culmination. We understand what grace costs only when we have suffered in the presence of a God who withholds it from us.

What I needed, all those years ago, wasn’t Judaism. It was permission to grieve what earlier generations of my family surrendered in order to “become” American.

That grief had a name. I just borrowed someone else’s for a while, as a younger person, until I found my own.

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A resident of Florence and a devoted member of the St. James community, Monica Sharp combines her background in arts and culture with a deep commitment to humanitarian work. Monica was licensed as a lay preacher last year in the Convocation of Episcopal Churches of Europe. Find her on sharpmonica.com and read more of her writing on Substack.

1. Huivi (Finnish): a humble headscarf denoting Laestadian Christian piety, the old country knotted firmly beneath the chin.

2. Convivencia (Spanish for "living together") is a term used by scholar Américo Castro to describe a period in Spanish history from the Muslim Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the 700s to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain. It claims that in the different Moorish Iberian kingdoms, the Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in relative peace. This idea suggests that medieval Spain was a place of religious tolerance and cultural exchange-very different from later periods when only Catholicism was allowed. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convivencia.

3. 1221 - 1284+. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_X_of_Castile

4. Died 1204 CE. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maimonides

5. 1126-1198. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averroes

6. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Lemann