The 'Weird' Reason I Wear a Kippah
The 'Weird' Reason I Wear a Kippah
Hint: It goes against everything many Jews think.
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In 2020, I became what is known as “a professional Jew” — someone whose profession is in or related to the organized Jewish world — when I founded IZZY, what many people call “the Israeli Netflix.”
I didn’t intend to become a professional Jew. Truth be told, I didn’t even know this was an actual term until the CEO of a Jewish Community Center in the U.S. used it to describe himself in a conversation we had some months ago.
My motivation with IZZY was simply to bring the Israel I experience every day to the world through long-form content (i.e. movies, TV shows, documentaries) that provides desperately needed nuance and context to people’s thoughts and feelings, both positive and negative, about Israel. I figured this would make more people less judgmental of Israel, and perhaps even more appreciative of or interested in our country.
When I founded IZZY, I didn’t even realize I would be working with Jewish organizations, until an executive officer at Jewish National Fund reached out to me in our early days. I didn’t plan, for example, to create our IZZY for Educators program, which the Jewish Agency for Israel requested from us to support their educational efforts. And I didn’t expect to be producing a documentary series with Avi Melamed and his organization, Inside the Middle East, about the first and second Palestinian uprisings in Jerusalem, during which Melamed served as a high-ranking Israeli security agent.
Most of all, as I was thrust into the organized Jewish world via IZZY, I didn’t think it would make me more interested in Judaism, both professionally and personally. But that’s exactly what happened.
I started to read books and essays about Judaism. I dove into Jewish philosophy and spirituality. I spoke with literally hundreds of rabbis, nonprofit executives, family foundation directors, philanthropists and donors, community activists, and educators across the Jewish world. And I began working on JOOL, since I couldn’t understand why there isn’t more entrepreneurship, innovation, and creativity in the organized Jewish world.
The more I learned about Judaism, the more I noticed how little I knew about it, despite growing up in a Reform Jewish home in Los Angeles, going to Jewish summer camps, having a Bar Mitzvah, and being confirmed. I started to wonder, for example, why more people — including non-religious Jews and non-Jews — don’t observe Shabbat, in whatever ways feel right for them, especially in an age when burnout, stress, and technology use (overuse?) seem to be at all-time highs.
You might be saying to yourself: Why would non-religious Jews and non-Jews observe Shabbat? For the same reason non-Buddhists practice yoga. It brings value to their life. It makes them feel better. It helps them cope with life’s trials and tribulations. Why can’t Shabbat — and other aspects of Judaism — do the same?
This is why, despite being an unapologetic secular Jew, I started wearing a kippah.
Turns out the Jewish tradition of wearing a kippah evolved as a sign of recognition that there is someone “above” us who watches our every act. In the Talmud, there is the story of a woman who was told by astrologers that her son is destined to be a thief. To prevent this from happening, she insisted that he always have his head covered, to remind him of God’s presence and instill within him the fear of heaven.
Once, while sitting under a palm tree, his head covering fell off. He was suddenly overcome by an urge to eat a fruit from the tree, which didn’t belong to him. It was then that he realized the strong effect wearing a kippah had on him.
In Talmudic times, the practice of wearing a head covering was reserved for men of great stature. In later generations, though, it became the accepted custom for every Jewish male to wear a kippah at all times, and especially during prayer.
Nowadays, when we see someone wearing a kippah, we probably say to ourselves: He’s religious. But — and this is where it can get controversial — Judaism isn’t a religion. I learned this from Avraham Infeld, the great Jewish educator and former President of Hillel International. “Being Jewish is defined by membership in the People and not by religion,” Infeld said. “The Jews have a religion, but Judaism is not a religion.”
Every morning, Infeld prays on his porch. On one of these mornings, his next-door, non-Jewish neighbor came to Infeld with an unusual request: Would you go with me to buy tefillin and help me wrap my arm, so that I can also pray in the morning? Infeld told this story to a charedi rabbi, who proclaimed: “You’re not allowed to, of course!” When Infeld asked the rabbi for his reasoning, the rabbi said, “Because he is not a member of the Jewish people, that’s why!”
“Rabbi, did you hear what you just said?” Infeld responded. There was a pause, and then the rabbi sheepishly admitted that maybe Infeld was right, that maybe it is “membership in a People” that defines whether or not someone is Jewish.
This concept of Peoplehood, according to Infeld, “is, in fact, the oldest phrase in Jewish history. We were always known as am Yisrael, the People of Israel. Even Pharaoh in Egypt spoke about the Jews as an am, as a People. And yet, to my mind, the most serious danger facing the Jewish people today is that Jews of all kinds have forgotten that word: People. We are not a religion and we’ve never been a religion. Judaism is the culture of the Jewish people.”
This is why I wear a kippah. It is a cultural demonstration that I am proud to be Jewish, the same way I have a basketball tattooed on my arm, a demonstration of my love for the game.
“Dude, it’s so funny that you’re wearing a kippah and you also have tattoos,” a friend recently said to me. “It feels oxymoronic.”
If you treat a kippah or Shabbat or eating kosher as nothing more than religious acts — then, yes, I would absolutely be a walking oxymoron. But if Judaism is indeed the culture of the Jewish people, what’s wrong with subscribing to multiple cultures? What’s wrong with being a proud Jew and loving basketball? And what’s wrong with expressing these passions in ways that feel right to me? (Full disclosure: One of the kippot I wear is designed like a basketball.)
“The moment you define Judaism as a religion, the first thing that happens is you create religious denominations,” Infeld said. “Where was Reform, even Orthodox Judaism, 700 years ago? They did not exist because we did not define ourselves as a religion.”
Up until our great emancipation in the beginning of the nineteenth century, being a Jew meant being a member of a particular People. Once upon a time, we were slaves in Egypt, left Egypt for Mount Sinai to meet the creator, and then signed a covenant with him, by which we would be his People and he would be our God; he would take care of us and give us rain in the right season, and we would keep his commandments.
“I know of no Jewish philosopher before the emancipation who understood being Jewish as anything other than this covenant of Peoplehood,” Infeld said. “It turns out that God kept his side of the bargain, but we sinned and because of our sins, we were scattered among the nations of the earth. This is why for thousand of years every Jew understood inherently that our role in life was to keep ourselves distinct as a People, which was why Jews lived in ghettos. It was there that we could more easily keep God’s commandments. It was there that we hoped and prayed that God would forgive us and bring us to back to the land of Israel.”
Then, around 250 years ago, along comes modern nationalism, and with that, modern liberalism. Suddenly, Jews have the opportunity to leave the ghetto, and many of them change their understanding of what it means to be Jewish. Some simply stopped being Jewish. The charedim became more ghettoized. But the majority of Jews accepted two new meanings of being Jewish. One is that Judaism is a religion, which most of the Western world still believes today. And the second is that Jews are a nation, which produced Zionism.
For many who left the ghetto eager to become assimilated, they adhered to one non-written rule: We can act like them, but we can’t accept their God. Hence why, in these Jews’ eyes, Judaism became a religion. For the Zionists, the manifesto became: We are a nation. “And so it was that the basic idea of who we are started getting lost,” Infeld said.
When Infeld was President of Hillel International and traveled around the Jewish world meeting with students, he would bring a chart that was divided into three columns. The top line listed: apples, oranges, bananas. Down the side read: lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber. A final line asked students to fill in the blanks: Jew, it listed, and then two blank spots. In other words, what is to a Jew as an apple is to an orange?
In the United States, more than 200,000 responses were unanimous — Jew, Christian, Muslim — suggesting Judaism is a religion. But in 40,000-plus responses from Israelis, not one said Jew, Christian, Muslim. Instead, they said Arab or Italian or American, implying that Judaism is a nationality. When it came to Russian Jews, 10,000 responded this way: Jew, non-Jewish is a Russian.
“What does this all tell us?” Infeld rhetorically asked. “I’ll tell you what this tells us: the Jewish people are totally confused about our identity! So now we see organizations, like the former UJA, making statements like, ‘We are one.’ We are one what? We are one hell of a mess, that’s what we are!”
Maybe one of the reasons it is weird to see a Jew with tattoos wearing a kippah is because our definition of being Jewish is, in Infeld’s words, one hell of a mess. Maybe one of the reasons many young secular Jews, both in Israel and across the world, don’t see themselves in Judaism is because they can’t comprehend (or haven’t been taught) that someone can live a Jewish life, yet not be religious. Maybe one of the reasons more Jews don’t do Jewish on a consistent basis is because the Judaism (i.e. its religious aspects) they are presented, by the organized Jewish world’s gatekeepers, is inconvenient or inconsistent with how they live their everyday assimilated lives.
And maybe one of the reasons Judaism is grossly misunderstood in the greater world — which creates suspicion and animosity (i.e. antisemitism, Jew hatred) — is because we Jews don’t even understand Judaism in and of itself, meaning we can’t possibly know how to properly explain and portray it.
“Only when we understand Judaism in the context of Peoplehood can we begin to understand what it means to be Jewish,” Infeld said. “And only when we see ourselves as part of a People will Judaism unite — instead of divide — us.”