A Jew's hope calls me to my best, not as a member of the sales team, but as a reader, a thinker, an interpreter, and a male human being responding to the emotions and sheer opinions of others. I am caught in the paradox of recognition . . . I distrust myself already. A modest disavowal is turning rapidly into a bold statement of personal identity. They say the devil got his start that way.
Religions do, too.
Maybe Judaism did, for one. At least it anticipated my strategies. Neither does the Bible, for no one can ever be sure which defines a Jew. As Robert Alter has said, the uncertainty left dissenting voices right in the Old Testament, sometimes side by side. You figure it out.