Growing up in Los Angeles, I thought being Jewish meant having a New York accent and sharp sense of humor.
Most of our parents had emigrated to California from New York and had brought their particular brand of Jewishness with them.
Their way of being Jewish was a haphazard mix of sarcasm, Hollywood movie culture and matzoh ball soup. Their attitude was in-your-face and irreverent.
And they somehow managed to retain their tough Brooklyn drawl despite countless decades living in California.
My own generation grew up unconsciously adopting our parents’ culture despite our California milieu. Although we grew up just minutes from the great Pacific, our cultural roots traced more directly to the Borsht Belt rather than the Beach Boys.
We were more comfortable just sitting around talking, playing poker or watching movies than we were hanging out at the beach. We never surfed. We never listened to the Eagles or Jackson Browne.
We made summer pilgrimages with our families to the old country … New York. We peppered our broad California twang with the quick metropolitan pulse and the kvetch of the New York Jewish dialect.
Sure, we occasionally showed up in synagogue on Yom Kippur and donned those white velvet kippahs with the button on top, glancing at our watches every 10 seconds until the service was over.
But overwhelmingly it was a certain cultural swagger that defined our Jewish identify rather than an involvement with religious and communal life.
Banter and humor
When I moved from California to the Midwest to attend law school, I felt like I had arrived in a different country. I met Jews that didn’t talk “Jewish.” Instead, they had odd Midwestern accents.
Midwestern Jews weren’t particularly funny either. In my circles growing up, if you let two minutes go by without cracking some kind of joke, an unbearable sense of discomfort would pervade.
Instead, Midwestern Jews engaged in earnest communications with each other. They spoke with a simplicity that took me offguard. It was like I had stepped into a Norman Rockwell painting. I thought that I had stumbled upon one of the lost Jewish tribes, hidden away for millennia amongst the tall cornfields of the American prairie.
I spent much of my spare time in law school socializing with a couple of Jewish guys from New York. They reminded me of my buddies from back home. It was like putting on an old pair of shoes.
We could effortlessly spend hours talking about nothing at all, each one trying to one-up the others’ jokes. Our communications were so familiar to me.
However, when my three years in law school came to a close, I realized that I hadn’t really gotten to know these guys in a meaningful way. Amidst all of our joking, we forgot to share anything deeper about ourselves with each other.
Meanwhile, I started forming deeper bonds with my new Midwestern friends. Initially, I had a difficult time carrying a conversation with most people. My usual conversational devices elicited silence and a blank stare from the natives.
I knew that I had to resort to drastic measures in order to survive in this strange environment. I had to learn how to have a normal conversation. And a funny thing happened. I started to form deeper relationships with people.
The last four years living in the Midwest have stripped away some of the layers of cultural baggage that I had been clinging onto for so long.
Being here has helped me focus on cultivating the essential characteristics of Jewish life – the commitment to community, acts of kindness, the pursuit of holiness and the aspiration to adhere to the highest ethical standards in one’s daily life. These are the attributes that make up the inner fabric of the Jew.
When you’re living on the East or West Coast, it’s easy to get distracted with the cultural trappings of Jewish life. A Seinfeld re-run, a noisy deli meal or a few bars of “Sunrise, Sunset” certainly can give you a nice warm Jewish feeling. But it’s really just a passive form of being Jewish.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe that Jewish cultural delicacies have the ability to lift the Jewish spirit and gladden the heart. But it took my journey into America’s middle section — the least Jewish part of the country in terms of population — in order to connect with a deeper sense of what it means to be Jewish.
This is not to say that Midwestern Jews are in any way better than coastal Jews. Rather, this is really just a testament to how lazy I got in my familiar environs. Sometimes you have to step out of your comfort zone in order to evaluate yourself objectively.
God told Abraham to “lech lecha,” to leave the house of his father to go to a land where he’d never been. In this new land, Abraham was able to achieve greatness.
In my own life, my Jewishness was on autopilot. Coming to the Midwest opened my eyes to some of the deeper aspects of Jewish life. But, oy, do I miss those piled-high sandwiches and matzoh balls from my favorite L.A. deli.
Bryan Edgar is an attorney at the downtown Milwaukee law firm of Weiss Berzowski Brady LLP. He lives with his wife and three children in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood.
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