Why Be Jewish?: Intermarriage, Assimilation, and Alienation by Rabbi Meir Kahane (1983, Paperback)

If you are a Jew of any shade, shape or color, this is one book you MUST read. If you have doubts of why you were born into this world as a Jew, then this book will answer that important life saving question. Even if you are Jewish and just luke warm about your Faith, this book will give you a reason to at least appreciate your Jewishness. For ANYONE who is considering being Jewish, I also recommend this book to know what kind of people you will be encountering!
The following are excerpts to be found in Ch. 8 of this book:
It was the Torah that made the Jewish family a warm and close unit where respect and love dwelt in necessary harmony. It was the Torah that turned out youngsters whose passion in life was not drugs and kicks and violent sadism, but the famous kometz, aleph-aw. And it was from the little Torah cheder that scholarly giants of the earth came forth to teach sweet morality and true goodness.

If you want an answer, do not seek an easy one. If you want to be a Jew-be the one that always existed. Seize the mainstream of Judaism, no matter how difficult it may be. Let me suggest to you a few points of departure:

l. That life is short and meaningless if its purpose becomes the mere pursuit of pleasure. That unless we are to go mad, there must be something more to this brief candle.

2. The knowledge that the Jew is different and exclusive; that he has a role to play which will determine his and the world's destiny; that the Torah turns him, his people, and in the end all humanity into a holy and meaningful entity.

3. That Torah cannot endure with simple practice, but is based upon deep and never-ending study, and that without scholarship, Judaism degenerates into the joke of the Long Island temple.

4. That only if we believe that the Torah is Divine will we submit to its will, for if it is just a product of "clever" rabbis, surely you will be convinced that you are as clever as they.

5. That the Jewish people is bound together by common destiny, and that this imposes upon each one an obligation to love and rush to the aid of each and every other Jew; that the Jew has no permanent allies except his own people; that for the Jew, Jewish problems come first; that we measure our responses by the yardstick: Is it good and right for the Jew?

These are the principles; now go and study them. Study; learn. Learn Torah, for only Torah and Torah knowledge can make you the kind of Jew that you must be. "The ignorant Jew cannot be pious" - this is the deepest of all truths. So find yourself a rabbi, a teacher. But make sure that he believes in what he is teaching. Make sure he is an honest man who does what lie preaches and who can give you the truth that he has in his heart. Torah: go drink deeply from its waters.

You are young and you have the choice that the Almighty gives to all, young and old: life or death, good or evil, truth or illusion. If you choose the transitory pleasures of your present chapter of life, you will awaken some day with the taste of ashes in your mouth. If you really believe that the things for which our people struggled and fought and died and then continued to live for so long, are so cheap that they can be thrown away for a job or a girl - surely you will awaken one day with a broken heart and a broken soul. And you will follow the path of all the foolish and disillusioned Jews who saw in Emanicipation and Enlightenment an opportunity for "freedom" and "growth." Their paths led to the dead ends...

Rabbi Kahane was prophetical in his understanding of the challenges facing the Jewish people and the threats to the continuance of their very existence, both in Israel and in the diaspora. His solutions were controversial, to say the least, to those Jews feeling complaisant and those "whistling past the graveyard." His solutions were condemned by those in the gentile world who either didn't appreciate the threats, were naive about a "kumbaya" world providing the solutions or disingenuously desired those same threats to come to their full fruition. In any case, he paid with his life for being courageous enough to speak out about the issues that other Jews feared to speak of in whispers. Whether the reader agrees, disagrees or abhors Rabbi Kahane's solutions, his vision of the threats to Jewish survival was clear and unstinting. "Why Be Jewish?" confronts one of the oldest and greatest threats to Jewish continuity, the significant challenge of being a tiny minority seeking acceptance in a generally and genuinely welcoming society while struggling to avoid its immergence and disappearance into the proverbial melting pot. Over six million Jews were lost in the Shoah/Holocaust. Since the end of the Holocaust, many more than six million additional Jews are missing from the demographically projected world Jewish population that should exist today. "Why Be Jewish?" explains this loss with a focus and force that no other writer could dare approach. It is essential reading for anyone, gentile or Jew, who places a value on the survival of the Jewish people as a distinct and intact people in the 21st century.