A Journey Into Judaism With No Real Destination

To judge a book by its cover, “Generation J” looks like a classic work of spiritual hunger and seeking. “Call us a bunch of searchers. Call us post-Holocaust Jews. Call us Generation J.” These words appear over a melancholy, sepia-toned photo of a woman with a star of David tattooed on her shoulder blade.

But the tattoo, it turns out, intends no Holocaust allusions. It’s one of those temporary henna things, and the six-pointed star is set in a curling vine with tiny leaves. It is--such as it is--Lisa Schiffman’s matron-of-honor outfit for a good friend’s nude pagan wedding, one of many incidents described in “Generation J”--the story of her quest to discover what it means to be a Jew.

The daughter of parents who are settled atheists and the wife of a man who is a “lapsed Unitarian,” Schiffman begins her spiritual journey not with “I know there has to be something more,” but with frustration that no rabbi would perform her interfaith wedding. Provoked into exploring her own heritage, as well as broader possibilities, she progresses chapter by chapter through various stops on the spiritual streetcar line: nude voice-and-body therapy, a river mikvah bath, circle dancing to St. Hildegard of Bingen’s hymns, researching the kabbalah over a shot glass in a bar at 2 a.m.

What “Generation J” does not have, which is part of its charm, is the yearning, passionate tone characteristic of spiritual search memoirs. Schiffman writes in a smooth and peaceful voice, and her emotions run the gamut from annoyance to curiosity. The book catalogs an assortment of experiences which do not seem to accumulate, and it is not clear that she ends up somewhere new.

Schiffman tells us that when she was small, her mother called her “my ethereal child,” and ethereality is the hallmark of her spiritual conclusions, as well as the quest itself. Schiffman seems oddly reluctant to embrace the whole of the Jewish faith. In the course of the book, several people tell her that its various practices will not make sense without an immersion in the whole. “Washed-out, watered-down Judaism is powerless,” a rabbi tells her, yet she is reluctant to explore that past.

“I knew I didn’t have it in me to keep kosher, to say blessings, to do any one of the hundreds of mitzvot,” she writes. “I needed another way to God. . . . Mitzvot, halakah, these weren’t for me.” Why not? The traditional way Jews have understood and practiced their faith for millenniums is categorically excluded. She never explains why.

Perhaps it is embarrassment. Jews are, she writes, recalling from the stereotype, “a dark and hairy people . . . different from everyone else in the United States, but not in the right way.” Her most visceral expression of discomfort with Judaism involves not theology or practice, but an encounter with “a bearded guy in a too-small polyester suit and a knit skullcap” who tries to hand her a flier for the Jewish Food Festival.

Having refused the historic vision of Judaism, she instead follows her instincts, selecting and rejecting and reinterpreting as it suits her. Perhaps as a result, she can’t seem to arrive anywhere. As she goes under the mikvah waters, “an intense sadness opened in me, unfolded, dissipated. . . . Always, I would be fighting to emerge.”

Although it is well written and entertaining, the narrative is hampered by reporter’s syndrome: expert characters appear, are professionally interviewed, then never come back. The few repeating characters, her friends, are not fleshed out as they might have been. That’s true literally; few are given any physical description, without which they run together in the memory.

An example is Mark McCormick, a friend who pops up a few times, someone in the process of converting to Judaism. Throughout the book we get minute glimpses of his journey, and I wished these were larger and more thoroughly described. He is on a spiritual quest parallel to Schiffman’s, yet he seems to be clearer about his destination and to have a larger hunger for it. At the end, they decide to study the Talmud together. His story might have been a fascinating counterpoint to hers--yet he’s glimpsed only in passing. We don’t even know what he looks like.

Schiffman’s chronicle presents a moving and gently told portrait of youthful American Judaism setting out on a brand-new wilderness journey. Arrival at a promised land will be, I hope, the subject of a future book.

Frederica Mathewes-Green is the author of “At the Corner of East and Now: A Modern Life in Ancient Christian Orthodoxy” and “Facing East: A Pilgrim’s Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy.”