Last weekend I travelled to Melbourne to attend the Limmud Oz festival, which is a two day festival of Jewish Culture and Learning held alternately in Sydney and Melbourne each year.
Limmud Oz was born out of its well-established sister festival Limmud, which is a much grander five day affair held in the UK annually.

Clive Lawton, affectionately known as the "father of Limmud", having founded Limmud 25 years ago, was instrumental in founding the atipodean version and was at this year's festival to present a number of fascinating sessions.

I attended one of his final sessions entitled, "Why Be Jewish?"

Such a topic is an interesting one for a Melbourne audience. I suspect Melbourne Jews (particularly the ones that live in the Ghetto-like bagel belt of Caulfield) feel they are somewhat immune to the serious issues facing the rest of the Jewish world in the Diaspora.

"A decline in the number of kids receiving a Jewish education?" Nahhhh!
Most of OUR kids go to Jewish day schools.

"Intermarriage and assimilation problems?" Nahhhhh!
Most of OUR kids marry Jewish and stay Jewish.

Oh you think so eh Melbourne?

Clive, who first visited Melbourne 10 years ago commented at the time that the Melbourne Jewish community reminded him of the Jewish community he grew up in the Britain of the 1950's.

Ten years on, time has not stood still. Clive now sees Melbourne Jewry as the Jewish community he remembers in his teenage years in the 1960's.

Ten years. Ten years of change. You do the math.

"I can tell you what happens in the 70's, the 80's, the 90's and the Naughties if you like" he said. "Because I have been there and I have seen what happened. And if you think it is not happening to you as well, you are living in a dream world. It's happening to you like it is happening to everyone else, except you are slower than everyone else."

Them's fighting words and the Jewish mothers in the audience were none too impressed with the Englishman's views invading their home turf.

"Staying Jewish is getting harder and harder" he proclaimed.

Why?

"Because they don't hate us anymore."

In many ways, Australia is "the lucky country". For the most part, Aussies live in relative racial harmony and thank G-d we have not yet suffered a terrorist attack. However, I think Australians are frighteningly naive to think that it could never happen in Australia.

It is not a hard thing to be a Jew in Australia. It is much harder to be, say, a Muslim. The ultra religious Jewish community is so insular it doesn't have to worry about the rest of the world and the secular community looks like everybody else.

Long gone are the days when our Eastern European grandparents fled vicious antisemitism, or even worse, suffered the Holocaust, only to come to Australia after the war to discover a land truly made of milk and honey.

Today, we are more likely to receive comments like, "oh you are Jewish? That's so interesting. My brother's girlfriend is Jewish. What's that thing about sundown on Friday all about, I forgot what it is called..."

I am not for one second suggesting Australia is some kind of nirvana free of antisemitism, of course it is not. But compared to many other countries, we have it pretty good here.

What I am getting at is this: "Because they hate us" is not a reason to be Jewish.
We cannot survive on the hate of others. We cannot teach our children what a wonderful thing it is to be a Jew if the best we can come up with is, "because we can't let the antisemites win". Fear cannot be our great motivator. When we obsess about antisemitism we paint ourselves as perpetual victims. When we over-emphasize the threat of assimilation, it makes us feel like an endangered species.

Our parents have to care too.

All too often, parents leave it up to the school to do all the "Jewish stuff". Kids go to their prohibitively expensive Orthodox Jewish day schools, learn Tanach, learn Halacha, learn minhagim, keep kosher and then they go home and...play X Box on a Friday night while the family hoes into a pepperoni pizza.

And you wonder why our kids are growing up and saying, "Be Jewish? Oh get stuffed!"

I am also not suggesting everyone becomes orthodox. That's not the point I am making. I am talking about "dugma ishit" - personal example and being a positive personal role model. As children we look to our parents for guidance and for the right answers. If we continually receive mixed messages it's no wonder that we grow up confused about who we are and what our identity is.

We need to show our kids that being Jewish is a rich and valuable lifestyle.
But that alone is still not enough.
We need to show our kids that being Jewish is a rich and valuable contribution to the world.

Perhaps then, we will grow up with a sense of pride, not fear about being a Jew.

Why be Jewish?

Because we are a light among the nations and we have a message the world needs to hear.