Local photographer Eliot Kamenitz: ‘I am a Jew’

Clarion Herald Guest Column

I am a Jew. I was born that way. 

I can’t say I am very religious. I don’t go to temple, not even during the sacred days of Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur when many Jews find their spiritual way home for at least once a year.

I can’t read Hebrew. I don’t know the current year of the Jewish calendar, and I married outside of the faith.

And, as I was once picking up a Yahrziet candle to light in my father’s memory, an elderly devout Jew noted my otherwise lacking ways.

He called me a Bad Jew. It’s just one of our labels.

As Jews we sometime tag ourselves: Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed. Other times, we have self-inflicted names: Agnostic, atheist, non-practicing. Some of us have left altogether to embrace other religions, which comfort our souls.

But none of this matters because no matter what we call ourselves or what others call us, in the end, we are Jews ... because ... we were born that way.

We are not a religion. We are a people. A very old people.

Once a month, I do meet with an orthodox rabbi and a few others in an informal meeting to say a few prayers, eat some lox and bagels. We discuss current events. We discuss traditions. We discuss our place as Jews in the modern world. I find warmth in this. But I don’t do it to move closer to my God. I do it to move closer to my people. 

The other day in Pittsburgh, they killed 11 of my people. They died for one simple reason. They were born Jews. 

In lieu of this and other recent events, many of us believe it is a bad time to be a Jew. I think this is wrong. It is a good time to be a Jew.

It is a good time to be a Jew because, as it has been drilled into us, we are God’s Chosen People. You’ve got to understand, this doesn’t mean you are first to cross the finish line. It doesn’t mean you get to go to the head of the lunch line.

It means, by Jewish teachings, as far as I understand it, you are God’s fix-it-man on earth.

It is taught amongst our people: Jews were put upon this world to practice Tikkun Olam. Simply translated, it means “repair the world.”

If ever the world was in a fixer-upper state, it is certainly now.

The Jewish deaths in Pittsburgh have given this country a chance for repair. It will give all people, no matter what race, what following, what party, what tag they go by, the chance to find their goodness, no matter how far it is buried in cynicism or hopelessness, and try to repair this broken day in this broken world teetering on a broken future.

I am sure the families of those lost in Pittsburgh will not find this a cooling salve to the heat of their pain, but today the world is looking at the 11 Jews in Pittsburgh. Unwanted or not, they are performing Tikkun Olam. They are the initial tools for sapping the power from the toxins of bigotry, blind hate and ignorance.

This is why it is a good day to be a Jew. Because we cry not for ourselves, but for the world we can repair. If we Jews do not believe this, then all the tears we shed today – and all those we have shed for the last 5,000 years – will have been in vain. 

Eliot Kamenitz is a photojournalist who worked for The Times-Picayune for 32 years and later for the New Orleans Advocate for four years before retiring in January 2017.