To be a secular Jew in today’s society brings constant challenge. Adults know that life is about questions, not answers. We live with contradiction and try to find strength in the emotional and intellectual muscles we develop as we struggle with it. The suffering and inequity we see around us cannot be rationalized and dismissed; it must be confronted daily, to the degree that we are strong enough to deal with it. To define one’s Jewishness is itself fraught with ambiguity. The orthodox child has an easy answer - we are God’s chosen, we follow his word as he wrote it in his Torah and as interpreted by our leaders who he gives the power to lead us. This ethnocentric and homocentric worldview is not helpful to the person who sees the larger world and has absorbed the modern reality that man is not the center of the universe. The concept of a God who is some kind of grand public accountant, having as his main concern the adherence of a small group of humans to an arcane set of laws, gives little aid to a person looking out beyond the borders of his or her tiny community.

And yet it is something, this ‘Jewishness’: not only a paradox but also a source of pride. The accomplishments of both secular and religious Jews, their great contributions to human advancement, cannot be overstated. Volumes upon volumes have been written about the ambiguous nature of the secular Jews’ attempt to define themselves. I neither have the space nor qualification to attempt a significant addition to this literature. Let me merely state my well-supported view that the conundrum of Jewish identity is a central well that can simultaneously be a source of both creativity and alienation.

Ultimately then, for the secular Jewish artist like myself, these unanswerable questions can create a kind of ‘Inner Diaspora’. We are interested and aware of a larger world, where not only are Jews not ‘chosen’, mankind is not ‘chosen’. And yet somehow ‘chosenness’ also seems to exist apart from its religious basis. We cannot easily define ourselves and yet we know that by virtue of our lineage we have inherited a unique place in the world.

One clear characteristic of Judaism both as a religion and a tradition is the value given to study. Jews study anything and everything, absorbing their current culture like a sponge. For an American musician like myself growing up in the 60-70s this meant developing a deep interest in African-American music and I investigated its vastness with minute attention. Now today, as the world steadily shrinks and information comes closer many artistic forms become part of a growing world culture. More study and investigation follow and again I have to sit back and find myself. So, just as millions of individual Jews scattered into the world in the original Diaspora, this modern secular Jewish artist/musician (and many, many like me) scatters internally by virtue of his many interests and the ambiguity of his Jewish ‘home base’. Of course I don’t mean to pretend that this expansion from a single cultural tradition into the wider modern worldview only happens with Jews. I just think it can be particularly intense, with a kind of ‘multiplication’ of the historical Diaspora with a personal one. I am thinking of the compulsion to travel and document, the seeking out of other traditions’ approaches to the human condition.

Finally, when we consider how someone in my position can attempt to re-encounter the spiritual dimension of existence in a non-homocentric reality there arises the advent of the ‘Bu-Ju’. Buddhism and Taoism are the only religious traditions, which for thousands of years have spoken not only of humans but of ‘sentient beings’. There is no assumption that the universe was created only for man and no petty parochialism about a single path to enlightenment. To me the Judeo-Christian idea of ‘redemption’ by God is itself a childish wish. If we are going to be redeemed it must be by our love and compassion for the world around us, not because we jumped through more spiritual hoops than our competitors. While economic materialism destroys the worlds’ resources, spiritual materialism destroys our civilization even more tragically.

To bring this question more to the current point, what is Jewish music? Again, there is a conundrum. If we speak of Klezmer it’s really a group of appropriated eastern European musical forms and styles. In the case of Sephardic music, it is Arabic and/or Iberian. The ‘Jewishness’ of the music is its cultural context within the history of the Jewish people ‹ the stories of the songs and their place in the Yiddish or Sephardic traditions. Some might say it stays Jewish to the degree that the musicians and their listeners do not assimilate. The secular Jewish musician is confronted with his particular portion of the difficult problem of self-definition all over again. For years now, John Zorn had asked me for a ‘Jewish’ record. We both agreed it would come when it came. Truthfully, I began this project merely with the idea of augmenting my trio ‘Sync’ with 2 wonderful string players. However, as I was composing and recording the music I began to feel more and more strongly that there was something Jewish about it ‹ not only in the presence of some Klezmeresque scales and melodies in a few of the pieces. I also felt that the music was funneled through my personal ‘Inner Diaspora’ (lets call it ‘ID’(!). For example, Minutiae, the least ‘Jewish’ sounding of the pieces, seemed to reflect on the dynamic interrelationship of fine detail to overall form I feel from both Judaism and Buddhism. I began to think this ‘ID’ also contributes to my need in all my work to constantly change the roles instruments play in the music - lead vs. accompaniment, harmonic vs. rhythmic. And yet it is also time for an admission. I am most happy with the results because I feel the elements fuse to the point where all the musicians’ identities come through equally and questions of cultural identity are secondary to the immediate sonic experience. Observant Jews constantly state that only through studying and following the Torah will Jews continue to exist. Secular Jews in their darkest hours admit to feeling that it is only anti-Semitism that unites Jews as a people. I realize that if Jews were to disappear because of the emergence of a broader human culture, which advances past ethnic and religious divides, well, I would be just fine with that. I have my doubts, but if the world ever gets there and this music is still played, let it lose its ‘Jewishness’. However, I think it could only have been composed by a particular 20th/21st century secular Jew working out his own ‘ID’.