February 15, 2010 · 8:51 am

The Last Kaddish

by Robert J. Avrech (Los Angeles, CA)

The Kaddish has been called an echo of The Book of Job. Job said: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in him.”

The Kaddish is an expression of faith on the part of the mourner that although he is grief-stricken, he still believes in God, still trusts in the meaning of life. It is the ultimate anti-existentialist statement.

Karen and I will mourn forever. We are riven as day follows night. Our son will always be dead, and a central portion of our lives died with him.

This Shabbos I recite the last Kaddish of the eleven months for Ariel.

I stand in shul, eyes closed, swaying back and forth, chanting the words with—I hope—perfect diction and true feeling. I want the b’racha to go on forever. I want to stretch the words like a giant rubber band and make them reach from earth to heaven.

There are at least another dozen mourners in shul, all with much louder voices than mine, but I hear only one sound. Is this my voice? I see Ariel as he used to be: sitting in shul beside me. Is this my voice? I study the delicate contours of his face. I melt as Ariel’s lips move, savoring each syllable, whispering the sacred Hebrew text. Is this me? I study his long tapering fingers as they turn the pages of the siddur. I lean over and bury my lips in the plush groove of his neck. It is my voice. I am close to the end. It is my son.

I take three steps back and three steps forward. I finish the Kaddish. I open my eyes and discover a dozen men in shul gazing at me. Some have tears in their eyes. Several nod, tacitly acknowledging the finality of the moment. I open my eyes and I see light. I open my eyes and I am swimming through layers of memory. I open my eyes and I see splendor. I open my eyes and I see my son, my son, Ariel.

Robert J. Avrech is a screenwriter and producer in Los Angeles. Among his best-known films is the thriller, Body Double, directed by Brian DePalma. His script for the modern Hasidic tale, A Stranger Among Us, directed by Sidney Lumet, was an official selection of the Cannes film festival. Robert won the Emmy award for his adaptation of the young adult classic, The Devil’s Arithmetic, starring Kirsten Dunst and Brittany Murphy. Robert was also nominated for The Humanitas Award for Within These Walls, starring Ellen Burstyn and Laura Dern. Robert writes an award winning blog, Seraphic Secret http://www.seraphicpress.com/. He also writes a regular column for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/author/ravrech/.

This piece is reprinted here with permission of the author. It first appeared in 2004 on his blog, Seraphic Secret.

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February 8, 2010 · 9:03 am

Grandpa’s Shears

by Janet Ruth Falon (Elkins Park, PA)

I have a photograph of my maternal grandfather, Sam Frankel, sitting in the New York City sweatshop where he earned his subsistence living.  He looks rakish, wearing a cap and looking right at the camera, and even jaunty, not like the sour, beaten-down, shuffling old man I knew whose only pleasure was a Hershey bar.

But I never really knew my grandfather; he was deaf, and Yiddish speaking, and he kept to himself, wrapped in an off-putting cloak of bitterness and disappointment.

He only gave me one thing when I was a little girl, an inexpensive cut-glass pendant shaped like a heart.  I value it, even though its sparkle and clarity seem like the exception to our relationship. But I own a piece of my grandfather that’s even more important, which my mother passed on to me after his death more than twenty years ago: his shears.

The heavy, enormous scissors that he used to cut through thick layers of fabric in the sweatshop seem a more appropriate souvenir of Sam Frankel. These are scissors with serious intentions, scissors that would identify themselves as a tool, work implements in an entirely different class than the blunted scissors I used to cut out outfits for my paper dolls.  They’re meant to persevere, and to survive.

The blades are sharp, still, and the scissors are heavy, to be used by an adult who meant business.  As different from kiddie scissors as oil paints are from crayons, it’s clear that the goal of these scissors is to divide things, to separate them.  It would be someone else’s job to join things.  That fits.

Someone–maybe my grandfather, maybe his wife–wrapped both looped handles of the scissors with fabric tape, wound round and round to create a cushion that might soften the irritation of repeated use.  Without it the scissors would undoubtedly have caused blisters or, with time and persistence, calluses, those physical manifestations of surrender.

I never saw him use these scissors; instead, it was the women in his family who I associate with sewing and creating.  My grandmother used her treadle-pedal sewing machine, which was sold at her death when my mother was too grief-stricken to know she’d regret its loss. (She also knitted and made sweaters for my dolls from leftover wool which I still own.)

My aunts were both in the millinery field, crafting hats from all sorts of materials in the era when women seriously wore hats; I have some of these, too.

And my mother has dabbled in needlepoint, rug-hooking, mosaics and knitting.  To this day, she has never used a sewing machine; she sews everything by hand–even, equal stitches that hold together.

I’ve never liked sewing.  I had to take a sewing class in junior high school, and I wasn’t good at it.  I didn’t like the precision it required nor the fact that I had to follow a pattern. But the easiest part was cutting out the fabric.  I used my grandfather’s shears.

Janet Ruth Falon, the author of The Jewish Journaling Book (Jewish Lights, 2004), teaches a variety of writing classes at many places, including the University of Pennsylvania.  At the moment she is teaching journaling and creative-writing classes to people with cancer, and she’s working on a project that she hopes will be published as The Breast Cancer Journaling Workbook.

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February 1, 2010 · 9:36 am

The Shul is Dark

by Chaim Weinstein (Brooklyn, NY)

The shul is still, dark.
Blood-red velvet drapes
Hide cold hard-oak doors
Slide open, reveal
Lonely Torah scroll:
Knitted mantle frayed,
Blushing, embarrassed,
Like town urchin or
Forlorn orphan brought
To Magistrate’s Throne.
Old Jews’ prayers rise
Like illusory
Flickering flames high
Above the gold-hewed
Menorah, curling,
Wispy bony smoke
Rising to gray grime
Of low-hung ceilings:
Here the journeys end

Chaim Weinstein taught English for more than thirty years at two inner-city junior high schools in Brooklyn, NY. “The Shul is Dark” is based on a short story that he is currently working on, one which has long haunted him.

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January 25, 2010 · 9:43 am

Israeli Phone Etiquette

by David Bogner (Efrat, Israel)

The title of today’s post makes a bold assumption; it assumes that there exists some sort of established etiquette for speaking on the phone here. If there is, in fact such established etiquette, I have yet to encounter it.

Take, for instance, the following typical exchange:

[Phone rings]
Me: “Hello?”
Caller: “Hello?”
[long pause]
Me: “HELLO?”
Caller: “Hello?”
[another long pause]
Me: “Can I help you? You called me. Surely you had some idea of what you wanted to say when you dialed my number!!!”
Caller: [as though 30 seconds hasn’t elapsed since I answered the phone] “Yes, I’m calling to speak with David, this is…”

Just so we’re clear, this is not something that happened once or twice. This is what happens every single time I answer the phone! I’ve listened to other people’s phone conversations and with the exception of my sarcastic remark about who called whom, this is exactly how the entire country begins a phone conversation!!!

The first few times I was on the receiving end of one of these calls, I thought perhaps the person had forgotten who they were calling. I mean, it’s happened to me on occasion that my mind wandered while the phone was ringing and when the person answered I had no idea who they were or why I was trying to reach them. But that’s not the case here… everyone begins their phone conversations like two painfully shy teenagers meeting at a school dance!

The crazy part is that Israelis are wonderful conversationalists. I can’t ever recall seeing or hearing of an Israeli who lacked for something to say. The Hebrew language’s relative paucity of words is more than balanced by the generous use of inflection, accent, tonal range and volume.

Israelis can go gesture-for-gesture with any of the great ‘talking cultures’ of the Mediterranean (Greek, Italian, French, etc). By this I mean that Israelis are extremely animated talkers, sometimes to the point of becoming oblivious to the scene (or accident) they are causing during an emotional tête-à-tête.

So what happens at the start of a phone call that makes them momentarily mute?

The end of the phone call has the opposite problem. Israelis seem to have never adopted the standard formulas for ending a phone conversation cleanly. People here don’t say:

Caller one: “Thanks for the recipe, I’ll look forward to seeing you this weekend.”
Caller two: “My pleasure, Bye.
[click]

No, instead conversations are allowed to loiter and circle the airport until the ‘plane’ is completely out of fuel.

For illustration purposes:

[at the tail end of a long phone conversation]
Me: “Well, I’m really glad you called.”
Other person: “Good…”
Me: “Great, so I guess…”
OP: “Ok, so…”
Me: “Alright then…”
OP: “Wonderful…”
Me: [sitting in confused silence because the conversation is inexplicably still going on… it simply refuses to die a quiet death!]
OP: “So…”
Me: “Ireallyhavetogonownicetalkingtoyoubye” [click]

If I hadn’t finally given the caller the verbal equivalent of the bum’s rush, the conversation would likely have gone on for another two or three minutes! No exaggeration! It makes me tired just thinking about it!

Again, I have listened in on other people’s conversations (it’s really not hard to do in such a vocal culture) and virtually everyone has this stammering, meandering wind-down to their conversations in place of the familiar (to me) formulaic; ‘set up’… ‘acknowledgement of set up’… and ‘mutual disconnect’.

Now, granted I’ve been living here in Israel less than a year-and-a-half…. so there are still quite a few cultural nuances that bump up against my ‘old country habits’. I’m sure if I was in Japan and I had to listen to people answering the phone with a brisk, “Mushy Mushy!”, it would take me at least this long to become comfortable with the change.

But if there is anyone out there who can shed a little light on how the concept of a clean start and finish to a phone conversation turned out to be such a difficult thing for Israelis to master, I would be much obliged.

David Bogner, formerly of Fairfield, CT, lives in Efrat with his wife Zahava (nee Cheryl Pomeranz), and their children Ariella, Gilad and Yonah. Since moving to Israel in 2003, David has been working in Israel’s defense industry in International Marketing and Business Development. In his free time David keeps a blog, Treppenwitzhttp://www.treppenwitz.com(where this piece first appeared) and is an amateur beekeeper.

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January 18, 2010 · 9:54 am

As the sequoias

by Chaviva Edwards (Storrs, CT)

The first time I went to a Conservative synagogue, I was told by a friend that when the mourner’s kaddish is recited, to stay seated unless I actually am in mourning for a lost loved one. I sat there as a few of the 20 or so people there stood up on old, worn ankles, tired hips mustering the strength to stand tall in the sanctuary while reciting the prayer that does not once mention death. I mouthed the words to myself, because it was what I knew — when reciting kaddish, the congregation stood together with those mourning, each holding each other up. This is an across-the-board kind of thing, though it varies from shul to shul. I can confidently say that most Conservative/Orthodox shuls are the kind of places where only the mourners will stand.

But last night at Erev Rosh Hashanah services, the rabbi gave probably the most poignant explanation for why all congregants should stand during the kaddish. He told the congregation about an article he had read about the seqouias — the tall trees that grow thin and high. The roots of these trees are pretty much at surface level, that is, they do not grow very far below the immediate surface. So how do these trees stand so very tall when threatened to be blown over by the smallest breeze? The roots are intertwined across entire forest areas. The roots lace together, creating a strong, solid structure, a base of root upon root that allows each tree to hold his neighbor up, and in turn, to hold up the entire collection of sequoias. Without one, they all would falter.

How appropriate is this? How beautiful an analogy for why a congregation should stand, arms intertwined and souls laced together tightly in a sanctuary space with those mourning and those not mourning, simply to support one another in a time of extreme sadness? Like the sequoias, Jews, too, should interlace themselves, standing tall and help one another brave the wind that blows soft, then hard, across our cheeks.

Chaviva Edwards, currently residing in Storrs, Connecticut, is in her second year of the master’s program in Judaic studies at the University of Connecticut. In her past life, Chaviva was a copy editor for such publications as The Denver Post, The Daily Nebraskan, and The Washington Post. Alongside her master’s work, she is rekindling her insatiable desire to edit through special projects involving Judaism and Jewish topics. She is an avid photographer, devotee of her many blogs, and a Web 2.0 connoisseur.

You can find more of her work at www.kvetchingeditor.com, chaviva.yelp.com, www.twitter.com/kvetchingeditor, and flickr.com/photos/kvetchingeditor

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January 11, 2010 · 9:31 am

The Diner

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

God’s sitting at the next table over,
amid the noontime rush,
consulting the menu the angelic
waitress has placed before him.
I wonder what he’s ordering,
what celestial meal will be to his liking.
There are so many questions I would like to ask,
but I don’t want to appear rude,
like some overzealous autograph seeker.
I’d like to ask if he made the universe eons ago,
and whether these days he takes an active hand
in the petty and paltry affairs of man.
I’d like to know why over the course of time
he has let so many disasters go unattended,
and more selfishly, what plans does he have for me?
But I will sit here quietly at my own table
and not presume upon his meal.
He has enough on his plate, I would think,
though I do wonder whether he leaves a large tip
as he finishes his coffee, checks his BlackBerry,
and contemplates what miracles
he has to accomplish by evening.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years.  Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in a new YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy,  edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

“The Diner” was prompted, Mel says, by “the Job-like questions I still have about God and what He is not doing lately.”

You can read more about his work at his website: www.melglenn.com

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December 21, 2009 · 9:35 am

Jerusalem: December 24

by Cherryl Smith (El Cerrito, CA)

I’m wheeling my new rolling cart out of the supermarket on HaPalmach on Christmas Eve, strolling past Bank Hapoalim, which looks pretty crowded, and congratulating myself on the purchase of the brown and white checkered shopping cart that makes the seven block trek back to our apartment on Rechov Alkalai an easy errand, no awkward maneuvering of heavy grocery-filled plastic bags or hands red from the drawstrings. There’s a new bookstore on the corner and tonight I decide to go in. It’s a small, inviting place with a good English selection and an electric kettle for tea or instant coffee. I browse for a few minutes and though I’m feeling carefree and happy, I resist buying more books, say l’hitraot to the young clerk and go back outside where the air is cold, and the streets, the open stores, the traffic — all are the same as on any other weekday evening.

How to describe this, the joy of Christmas in the Holy Land?

Tourists have arrived from around the globe and the hotels in Jerusalem, as well as in Bethlehem, are full. The municipality is distributing free evergreen trees at Jaffa Gate to anyone who wants one.  For the past few nights, a lime green floodlight has been projected onto the Old City walls. There is even a large inflated Santa Claus outside a shop on a side street in the Christian Quarter. Around 10 pm, we hear bells ringing from the Old City and we do not, immediately, remember that it’s Christmas Eve.

This is my first visit to Israel in winter, the first time that I have experienced Christmas as just another day, all the weeks and months leading up to it invisible within the Jewish calendar of Haggim and Shabbatot that create the rhythm of life here. It’s the first winter that I have not wished to flee my surroundings, to mute the sensory barrage of piped in Christmas music, the glare of Christmas lights, the shopping countdown and the spending frenzy–the first time that Chanukah has not been swept into the holidays of “the season.”

There is Christmas in Israel and it is a religious observance, the reason for the December influx of tourism to the sites made famous by Christianity. Here, in the one Jewish country of the world, Christmas is not a national holiday. The day passes unnoticed in the Jewish and Arab-Muslim neighborhoods and for the first time in my life the weeks of December did not include finding a response to the question: “Are you ready for Christmas?”

The IBA English news even interviewed Christian tourists in a kind of human interest story you sometimes see given to Jewish holidays in the US.  The tourists, “some of whom refer to themselves as pilgrims,” notes Yochanan Elron, the anchor, have filled the hotels and are enjoying Israel for the holiday. IBA news’ Leah Stern speaks to visitors outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. One African-American woman traveling with a tour group is especially enthusiastic. What does she want to tell the folks back home? “Everybody” ought to come here, see the sites, spend time in Israel. It’s safer here than in the cities in the USA.  You’ve “just got to experience Christmas in Israel,” she says.  It is “the best Christmas” of her life.

The same for me, exactly.

Cherryl Smith is author of After Being Somewhere Else (poems) and Writing Your Way Through College, a student’s guide. She teaches writing at Sacramento State University where she is a Professor in Composition and Rhetoric.  During the fall and winter of 2007 she taught at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

This piece is reprinted with permission of the author.

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December 14, 2009 · 9:13 am

Two year anniversary since my father died….

by Linda Cohen (Portland, OR)

After Linda’s father died in December 2006, she began her blog, 1000 mitzvahs, as a way to move through the grief that she was feeling at that time. “It has proved to be a transforming experience both for myself and my family,” she writes. “This mitzvah project has allowed us opportunities to talk more about my father, doing mitzvahs and sharing more family stories.” The numbers below refer to the number of mitzvahs that she has performed since starting the blog.

Today is December 1, 2008. My father died two years ago today. His death also coincides with my son’s birthday which turns out to be a wonderful blessing. Solomon was so excited today to turn eight. I had left three gifts on the table and he was so happy to find them when he woke up. Later, he confessed to me that he had peeked into one of the bags while I was still asleep. When he opened the presents he never let on that this was the case. I know sometimes my husband and I wonder if our kids really need one more toy, but today Solomon was so grateful for everything that he received. There were some baseball items (hat and cards), PJ’s, Legos, several gifts of money but his most favorite gift was a boxed set of Chaotic cards. He had been coveting them for weeks at Target and I was excited when I snuck them to the cashier without him seeing a few weeks ago. He was shrill with excitement when he opened them and saw what was inside.

I spoke with my stepmother today and she had gone out for dinner with my stepsister and her family. They ate Chinese food, told stories about my dad and toasted him. Officially in Judaism, you commemorate or have someone’s “yartzeit” on the Hebrew date of their death. So I have decided that even though it is sometimes easier to remember the English date, I want this date to remain Solomon’s special day and I will light a candle in memory of my dad next week on his yartzeit, December 8th. I am sure my dad would want it this way too.

820) Referred a friend to a colleague of mine for some services.

821) Have you ever offered to do something and then really wished you hadn’t? You might wonder why did I offer to do that? I had one of those moments this weekend and was even contemplating how I could get out of it. It was kind of a misunderstood offer that would require about an hour of my time which in itself was no big deal, it was just that it was in combination with my son’s birthday party on an already busy day. In the end, I just figured I should make the best of it and did, and you know what? Attitude is everything because it turned out to be exactly what I needed at that time of the day.

822) Offered to drive two children to Solomon’s party to help out the parents.

823, 824 & 825) Donated a gift certificate to a Mitten Tree project, as well as coordinated a donation of hand creams and purchased some baby clothes for the project.

826) Brought new magazines to my gym to donate to the reading area.

827) Donated in memory of Rabbi Gavriel and Rivkah Holzberg of Mumbai, India.

Linda Cohen considers herself a young, hip Jewish mother who does what modern Jewish mothers do. They bring the traditions into the 21st century. They take care of their families, their communities and get involved with organizations they care for passionately.

Linda feels blessed to be married to her insightful “renaissance” husband. She’s also the mother of two spirited and exuberant children who keep her laughing and always keep her humble. They all live in Portland, Oregon with their Cavalier Spaniel.

You can read more about her work at http://1000mitzvahs.wordpress.com/ where this piece first appeared. It’s reprinted here with permission of the author.

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December 7, 2009 · 7:51 am

Following the Lead of My Radical Foremothers

by Dina Ripsman Eylon (Thornhill, Ontario, Canada)

The idea to start an academic journal on Jewish women came to me while researching the lives of Rachel Yanait Ben Zvi, Mania Shochat and Netiva Ben Yehuda for an article on women in the military in pre-state Israel. I realized that despite the fact that these women were instrumental in military organizations prior to the establishment of the Jewish state, nothing about them was mentioned in history textbooks of the period. Growing up in Israel during the 1960s and 1970s, I was not aware of the contribution of any of these women, except for Rachel Yanait Ben Zvi, (the wife of the second president of Israel) even though during this time in North America, the Second Wave of the feminist movement flourished.

Confounded by personal reflections and undefined theories forming slowly in my mind, I devoured books in the fields of women’s history and feminism. I wanted to know more about complex issues like Jewish marriage and divorce, and the role women were expected to play in the family. I wanted to understand political and social structures that propagated discrimination and inequality.

Through this personal quest for enlightenment, I was introduced to the works and philosophy of the renowned novelist and author Virginia Woolf. In the late 1920s she explored the subjects of women’s history and writing. Woolf delivered two lectures on the topic of women and fiction at the Cambridge women’s colleges of Girton and Newnham. She examined women’s writing from all possible angles and famously concluded that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” and inevitably, if she is to write anything at all, or be written about. In A Room of One’s Own, her subsequent work, she articulated women’s inopportune historical exploits and boldly stated: “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”

In Israel, the question “what does it mean to be Jewish?” does not surface except for the need to affiliate oneself with either the secular majority or the observant minority. When I arrived in Canada in 1980 to pursue my graduate studies, I learned that being a Jewish woman was not limited to being merely secular or religious. Jewish identity was not inherent but actually a product of one’s self-search or desire to belong socially. Assuming a Jewish identity was a choice that many women wanted to make.

As the eminent Jewish feminist Susan Weidman Schneider wrote in her seminal work Jewish and Female, “the tension for Jewish women today comes from the struggle to stay within the tradition yet not compromise one’s identity and integrity as a woman.” Weidman Schneider described a variety of ways in which these identities are sought: changing and feminizing known rituals, “rediscovering” new aspects of Judaism that may relate to women, studying sources and texts to discern women’s input, and moreover, “transforming traditional Judaism and Jewish institutions so that they include women…”

Schneider’s book was another milestone in shaping a more defined view on the life of Jewish women in North America and helped to crystallize my feminist ideology. It was an ideology based on a determination to empower women by the only weapon I had – education.

As the founder and editor-in-chief of Women in Judaism in 1997, I wanted to help create ‘a paradigm shift’ within the field of Jewish Studies and build a new one reintroducing the findings to what is considered now the ‘mainstream’ or “malestream” study of Judaism. Since its inception, the journal has gained international readership and is listed in dozens of directories and indexes. In addition to publishing prominent scholars, the journal promotes young and emerging scholars and makes it a priority to give a voice to materials that most likely would have never been published by “malestream” Jewish periodicals. The journal welcomes a diversity of points of view, conflicting or harmonizing, in order to develop a genuine dialogue.

Our primary goal is to give Jewish women an uninterrupted voice, a place where all voices are heard and listened to, devoid of any patriarchal sponsorship or censorship.

Author and publisher, Dina Ripsman Eylon has a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. She has been teaching various undergraduate courses at Carleton University and at the University of Toronto. For the past twelve years, she has served as the publisher and editor-in-chief of Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal (http://www.utoronto.ca/wjudaism/journal/journal_index1.html), a gender-related publication, which has engaged and promoted new feminist scholarship in Jewish Studies. Her book, Reincarnation in Jewish Mysticism and Gnosticism, was published by Edwin Mellen Press (2003). Eylon founded the Vaughan Poets’ Circle and serves as the Thornhill branch manager of the Ontario Poetry Society.

This piece is based on Dina Ripsman Eylon’s “No More Anonymity,” which appears in Living Legacies: A Collection of Inspirational Contemporary Canadian Jewish Women (edited by Liz Pearl). It’s reprinted here with permission of the author.

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November 30, 2009 · 9:14 am

The World’s Oldest…Question

by Irina Tsukerman (Brooklyn, NY)

…is “Who am I?” In my case, it means who am I as a Jew. Am I even a Jew? My ethnic identity and my religious identity should be one and the same, because all Jews, as a people, are supposed to follow certain religious prescriptions (many of which indeed sound like a bitter pill to swallow). But I don’t believe in much of it. For instance, I don’t think kashrut is justified. I’m an agnostic. Praying doesn’t do the trick for me. I don’t want to waste my Saturday afternoons in synagogue, which to me, is a good place for community interaction, but otherwise isn’t particularly useful. I’m not a Democrat. I don’t believe in abortions, welfare, affirmative action, community service, and pro bono work. What can I say? I’m a bad Jew…

Or at least I would be according to one view. The other view, secular nationalist one, seems to justify me completely. I espouse my history and background. I completely support Israel. I encourage the unity among the Jews, including one language, which should be Hebrew, not Yiddish or Ladino or anything else. Hebrew. I’m an ardent advocate of Israel’s right to exist… I long to rejoin the Jewish community, and hopefully one day will actively participate in a number of important Jewish networks and organizations. And I support the core tenets of “traditional” Jewish values, such as justice, defense of the helpless, and love of learning. (Though the phrase “People of the Book” has a slightly different connotation in my view). I hope to become the best that I can and make my people proud of me. Which makes me a good Jew…

But wait a second. Some of the more religious communities wouldn’t call me Jewish at all. I don’t even follow the basic of Jewish things. I eat pork, well, sometimes. I don’t really like pork. But I love rabbit and seafood and black caviar and chicken covered with cheese with dry plums. I am far from modest in my attire. I don’t mark the Holidays with the exception of Yom Kippur, which I mark only by fasting not prayers or restraint from work. I don’t have a Jewish name and I don’t want one. And though I want my children to have a Jewish education, I’m more concerned about their secular one and that they enjoy life, and are vivacious, aggressive, fun-loving, a bit crazy and to an extent, even disobedient and skeptical.

I want them to be everything I am and more. I want them to have an opportunity to go to the prom in school if they so wish. I didn’t, but only because I didn’t want to, not because I couldn’t. I don’t want them to wear long skirts all the time, but a variety of clothes that they like, as long as they don’t look like prostitutes. At the same time, I would love them to be as much interested in Jewish history, culture, and current life as I am, and I want them to be just as supportive of Israel. So who am I? Am I Jewish or not? Am I a bad Jew or a good Jew? Is an agnostic who supports Israel any better than an ultra-Orthodox who doesn’t? Is it so wrong to want to live to the fullest, and eat what I like, and do what I want with my life and free time, in the modern world?

Life is so short – why waste it on useless restrictions? Don’t get me wrong, if I were forced to follow the rules (such as if I married into an observant family), I’d be able to. I’m a good, disciplined girl. But is it worth it? Is any man and any family, no matter how much I love him, worth the sacrifice of my core belief, my very identity of living life to the fullest? Can I really change – not just my habits, but my very nature- for the sake of somebody else? Do I want to? I’ve read John Fowles’ masterpiece, Daniel Martin. There, a character, an energetic, spunky though very stubborn young woman, marries a guy who becomes a deeply observant Catholic. She adapts to his way of life, but in return, fades, and loses her sparkle. Is that what would happen to me if I were to embrace my traditions? Do I want that? I’m seriously questioning myself and my motivations. I have no right to make promises that I can but do not want to keep… including promises to myself.

And I have to make peace with myself and know who I really am. Otherwise, I don’t feel like I really belong anywhere. If anyone of my readers has ever experienced such a conflict, please help me understand what is happening to me. How do I deal with not knowing what I am in relation to my own nation? What do I owe to my ethnicity and my religion? One thing I know for sure: if I want to come to any satisfactory conclusion, I’ve got to be honest with myself, which I haven’t been previously. And if any observant Jew ever reads this, please do not judge me too harshly. I came from a world where Jewish tradition was suppressed, and for me it doesn’t make any sense half the time, rationalized or not. For me the costs of giving up the way of life that I enjoy seem greater than the dubious benefits of an observant lifestyle. Before condemning me as the heretic that I probably am, read Daniel Martin and try to see how similar I now feel to Jane. And read Hesse’s Steppenwolf – it’s kind of the opposite. There, a cultured but very withdrawn and dry individual, reaches out to embrace life with all its complexities and heterodoxies. Please do respond to this, whether you’re Jewish or not. What, to you, is your identity?

Maybe Jewish and maybe not,

Irina

Irina Tsukerman was born in Kharkov, Ukraine in 1985, and came to the United States in September 1995. She received an A.B. in International/Intercultural Studies from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 2006, and graduated from Fordham University School of Law in 2009. She currently resides in Brooklyn.

You can read more of her work at her blog, The IgNoble Experiment http://sicat222.blogspot.com/ where this piece first appeared in 2004. It’s reprinted here with permission of the author.

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