Election Section

I am a living, breathing interfaith experiment. I had a briss and a baptism; a confirmation and a bar-mitzvah. My family attended synagogue on Friday nights and went to church on Sunday. Raised by parents of separate faiths, my mother is a minister for the United Church of Christ and my father is a lay Jew. Starting with me, they decided to raise their children both religions, not just half and half. I don’t call myself a “halfie” or “half and half.” I would never want to get only half of two religions. My parents have insisted that I get the whole of both religions.  

I can hear you now. “How is that possible!? Didn’t you grow up confused? How could your parents do that to you?” Sure, growing up interfaith isn’t simple. As I’ve taken my faith into my own hands, I’ve started to realize the liturgical complexities of being both at the same time. Like, how does Jesus figure into my religious identity? That’s a very complicated question, one that I haven’t figured out how to integrate into my faith just yet. I have grown up feeling like I’m half in one religious community and half in another. I always thought my Sunday school compatriots knew I was a little weird; in Hebrew school I never felt like I belonged. They had it easy, I thought. Their parents told them who they were and they didn’t need to have questions about their “identity.” 

Regardless, it has been a blessing to grow up in a family that cares deeply about faith and religion in general. Without my parents’ insistence, I wouldn’t have had the privilege of wrestling with questions of faith and identity in our complex world. I am blessed to have been exposed to God’s majesty and feel instructed to do God’s work; blessed to have the access to the solace and comfort God’s grace provides during difficult times.  

Though I have had difficult integrating into specific religious communities, as an American and a dual-faith worshipper, I feel as if I belong. My upbringing is an essentially American experience. In Europe, for example, my parents would probably never have even thought of marrying. Outside of Western developed countries, one could assume my parents never would have even met! Cultural and ethnic identities are much stricter in other places in the world than in the United States. If you disagree, just look at current debates over immigration in France and Germany, or the struggles against extremism in the Mideast.  

But how can I talk about my experience? What vocabulary or metaphor works best to describe my religion? In school, we do learn how to describe diversity with metaphors. A popular and, I think, inadequate example is the “melting pot.” Mixing different kinds of metal into a melting pot creates a really ugly—probably brown—and useless metal. Sure, the metal is a well-mixed and uniform alloy, but the brilliance of gold and the flexibility of tin are lost in the smelting process. The strengths of American diversity—the vibrant personalities of cultural identities that make up our societal mixture—are dulled in the process, lost in the melting pot.  

With the rise of multiculturalism, a new metaphor has taken hold—the salad bowl. Much better, but not quite right. The melting pot was too industrial and metallic; a salad can be a wonderful dish with lots of interesting flavors and colors. The salad metaphor appealing and functional. When one makes a salad, adding lots of different parts makes it taste better, but each bit retains its good flavor—cranberries, feta cheese, spinach salad, garbanzo beans with a sharp raspberry vinaigrette. And a toasted baguette on the side, hmmm.  

A study of the children of immigrants, conducted six years ago among young Haitians, Cubans, West Indians, Mexican and Vietnamese in South Florida and Southern California, suggests that the salad bowl has its flaws. Asked by researchers how these children identified themselves, most chose categories of hyphenated Americans. Though they are Americans, few choose “American” as their identity. What holds the salad bowl together? What makes a group of appealing and very different parts into a single national character? One might answer, “it’s the dressing!” However, I’m still uncomfortable leaving our national identity to a topping. 

The melting pot does have the strength of suggesting a general mixing of the population marked by religious, ethnic and cultural differences. But my status as a Jew and a Christian doesn’t make me a mix of brown ugliness, but two energetic parts. The salad bowl has the strength of keeping each identity intact so that we can experience the richness of our diversity. Both of these metaphors are taking place inside of me. The melting pot is a part of who I am—I’m smelting my two religions together. The salad bowl is taking place inside me—I’m putting two awfully tasty vegetables together. But neither quite gets it, but they do bring us closer to what we’re looking for. Americans have struggled since the Revolution to combine our unmatched diversity into a cohesive character that doesn’t ignore the importance of each individual part. 

Finding a way to celebrate diversity and describe a cohesive American identity is all but impossible. We are beginning, however, to find a way to put it all together. One of the best examples of a new way to think about diversity is the junior senator from Illinois—Sen. Barak Obama. He’s the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya. Obama grew up around the Pacific Rim, from Indonesia to Hawaii, a set of locales that increased his exposure to the world’s cultures. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, an editor of the Washington Monthly, writes of him, “What was perhaps most brilliant about Obama’s speech at the convention, and indeed about much of his campaign, was the way in which he revamped his unusual, foreign-seeming biography so that it fit the central American political myth, the ascent from the Log Cabin, with a post-racial 21st-century spin.”  

The way that Obama manages to talk about his life in a way that presents himself as the quintessential American, even though he grew up in Hawaii and was born to Kenyan man and white woman, addresses exactly the same problem of choosing either the salad bowl or the melting pot. People love the taste of his personality, in its richness and diversity. At the same time, voters can feel how his experience—the salad bowl of his upbringing and career—fit into a full and unified identity.  

“A post-racial 21st century spin.” Cute, but not quite right. The fact that Barak Obama has a successful way of portraying himself to the American public is not post-racial; it is successful because it is racial. The power of his candidacy is that he stays our fears about the melting pot and salad bowl, white folks feel more comfortable with his blackness and black folks feel comfortable with his whiteness. He walks, he sprints, along the lines of racial division without withdrawing the racial component of his candidacy. He is both races at once rather than neither race. Wallace-Wells gets it later on in the article when he writes, “Masterfully, Obama had used race to unite.” As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said 40 years ago and Barak Obama is living today, Americans “are caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny.” 

Racial identity and religious identity, critics may say, are different categories altogether. We choose religion and born a particular race. Religious identity, however, is as much as cultural experience as racial identity. Being born Episcopal links you to the culture and identity of that religion. As much as our sons and daughters try to run from their religious identities, they will always be linked and will likely return to their roots. Equally powerful are the cultural implications of race. Ever heard of a Black or Asian parent telling their child that they’re acting White? Running away from your racial or religious heritage are equally difficult. As a tool of analysis, we can consider that racial and religious identities are close enough.  

It’s a wonderful talent Obama has, and I’m trying to learn from him as I try to constitute my dual-faith experience as a whole rather than separate parts. I’ve never liked the feeling of holding onto two separate and different identities. As I’ve gotten older, I have been able to gain some perspective over the problems with my identity at Hebrew School and in Sunday school. I’ve realized how much that my experience was rooted in my own distress with who I was, rather than not being allowed to fit in. Though I have made progress toward a more unified religious identity, I am not done wrestling with the two-sided-ness of my experience. 

The tension between identity and diversity, one of those hard questions about America, has hit me particularly hard. I am still searching for a way to make my faith walk the line between Christianity and Judaism, so that I can be both at once. I wouldn’t want to divorce the tradition of either of my parents. Though it has sometimes been a difficult and frustrating burden, I am learning to respect and appreciate the responsibility that my upbringing gives me in my life. I am an experiment in religious cohesion and the American experience. 

The way I learn to deal with the blessed both-ness that God has given me will, God-willing, be helpful to a world racked with religious strife. It already has allowed me to confront and penetrate the American experiment, to engage more deeply in the promise of America. To a world stricken by the deadly battle between religious extremisms, interfaith worship and dialogue provides a value-rich counterpoint to an agenda of war and broken religion. I am excited to be a part of that conversation. 

As for an effective way of thinking about American diversity, the closest I can come to a functioning metaphor is the concept of the ethnic stew where all the ingredients are mixed in a sort of goulash where different kinds of meat and vegetables still keep their solid structure. What I like about this metaphor is the broth flavours each bit and each part keep their singularity as well. Oh, I can hear the criticisms now. What about the vegetarians?  

Americans will continue to rethink who we are, and we would be half as mysterious and interesting if a simple food metaphor could explain us. I feel similarly about myself. Asking questions about who I am or what religion I am is what life is all about anyway. 

Isaac Goldstein is a Berkeley resident