I'm Not Very Religious

What does that mean?

Very little, in fact. There is no word in Hebrew for "religion" so when Jews say they're not religious, they could mean one or more of many different things. Among the possible meanings:

• I sometimes go to McDonalds, sometimes even on Saturdays.
• I love doing a Passover seder every year, and all my social activism is based in Judaism's ethical teachings about תיקון עולם, but I don't belong to a synagogue or think about God at all, and I don't believe in separatism or any of the ritual trappings of religion.  
• I belong to a synagogue, but I only go there twice a year.
• I belong to a synagogue and go there every week, but it's not Orthodox.
• I belong to an Orthodox synagogue, but it's not as Orthodox as Rabbi T's synagogue.
• I belong to Rabbi T's synagogue, which I suppose people will call "ultra-Orthodox," but I'm still willing to go to movies and let my children attend coed summer camps and public schools.
• (men) I don't wear a black hat; a modest little crocheted yarmulke is good enough.
• (women) I sometimes wear slacks in public, and I only cover my hair in the synagogue.
• I belong to a synagogue, but I don't pray three times a day; once a week is about all I can handle.
• I don't really believe in God so much, at least not the kind of God who cares about whether I pray or not, so even though I go to synagogue twice a day to make everybody else happy, when they do all those prayers and stuff I kind of tune it out and think about the book I'm writing.
• I'm proud of my Jewish heritage and I send my kids to parochial school and summer camp and I love studying all the Jewish religious texts, but my own personal focus is more on the ethical aspects of Judaism than on all the rituals.
• I'm into the Jewish holidays, the ethics, and the rituals, but I just can't get into all that spirituality/prayer stuff.   

Most often, in this country, it also means, "When I was a kid growing up, I wasn't really exposed to the Jewish religion, and I don't really know very much about it at all."


This post appeared on my old blog about a year ago, before we began experiencing technical  difficulties.