Welcome to my life...

I've been thinking about getting a tattoo for a long time, so long in fact that it's kind of a joke. Likely I'll go on thinking about it forever and never actually do it. Of course, I thought about getting my belly button pierced for ten years before I finally did it, so I guess I shouldn't say never.

When I was younger I couldn't think of anything that meant enough to me to tattoo on myself and I can't imagine getting a tattoo that didn't mean something to me (in fact I can't imagine getting one unless it meant a lot to me, maybe everything). I finally came up with something I might want to get a tattoo of but then I got stuck on the irony of getting a Hebrew letter tattoo. It seems to be on other peoples minds as well because I've read no less than 5 articles in the last year about the Jewish prohibition of (or, depending on who you ask, aversion to) tattoos, the latest in today's New York Times. Apparently it's not as ironic as I would have thought, or if it is that isn't stopping people from doing it.

So, with that objection out of the way, I'm forced to face a much more difficult one. The thing is, I'm afraid people will think I'm not Jewish enough to brand myself as such. The truth is I don't think I'm Jewish enough. There are two pretty simple tests of Jewishness. One is, do you practice the religion, and the other is, do you have a Jewish mother and my understanding is that they are mutually exclusive. The Orthodox rule is that if you have a Jewish mother then you are Jewish. The Reform rule is that if you were raised practicing Judaism you are Jewish. The first takes a view of Jewishness as race (more than religion) and since I'm not big on organized practice of religion I guess that's the view that I should subscribe to, and that's the only view under which I am Jewish at all and even then I'm a couple of generations of mother's away from anyone that actually practiced the religion...but since that view doesn't really take into account religious practice, just blood ties...well you see why I'm hesitant.

Race is a tricky thing to get a handle on. Maybe there was a time when it was easy, black and white (pardon the pun), but now, at least here, the lines are a little more blurry. I have enough trouble just figuring out my own racial identity much less wondering about other people's lineage.

I recently found out that my great-grandfather (my father's mother's father) was from Finland, Swedish, but from Finland. This is actually not uncommon because the Swedes occupied Finland for quite a while and many of them still live there and identify themselves as Swedish Finns. Presumably that means they identify Swedish as their race and Finnish as their nationality. If that's true, and it seems to be, then it doesn't seem that easy to just lump all the people of European nations into one race, but that's another blog really.

Americans have racial versus national identity issues, perhaps, more than most nations. We're an immigrant nation and like it or not, believe it or not, we really are a melting pot. People came here and though they cut their ties to their home nations they can't sever all ties, some things are in their blood. So now we have Italian Americans, and Irish Americans, and Swedish Finnish Americans, and African Americans, etc, etc, and more to the point, combinations.

A combination is what you might call me (English, Irish, Danish, Dutch, Swedish Finn, either Native American or African, Irish again, Italian, Russian Jewish). So, which of those things should I identify with? Even if I answered that question it still wouldn't bring me closer to getting my tattoo. It would probably just give me more tattoo options (perhaps a shamrock), and we all know how great I am at making decisions.