On Judaism or Why it’s Personal.
My mother finds a Star of David and a Chai, both gold and delicate, both on gold chains, while she is cleaning out her jewelry drawer. She is constantly on a mission to clear out her house so it won’t be a burden for my sister and I when she dies. We know the exact coordinates of her will and all of her dying wishes. We don’t talk about the emotions of death a lot, but we do talk about the logistics of it, just in case. She brings these delicate symbols of Judaism to me and reminds me that they are mine, but I stop wearing them as my Grandmother becomes more and more convinced that Jew hatred in America, and especially in Europe is on the rise. I am in highschool when this happens, and I tuck them away, along with all but the most superficial pieces of my own Jewish identity.
My Judaism is always on display if you choose to see it.
I am very young the first time I remember my grandmother telling me that most people don’t like Jews. I find this note challenging because living in an Eastern metropolis, I am not only a Jew, I am surrounded by them. Although most of the Jews in my neighborhood go to private school and my parents are firmly for the public school agenda, we share hebrew schools, swim clubs where Jews have always been welcome, ballet lessons and later house parties and bad pot.
My Judaism is privileged and convivial.
My grandmother dies at 103 11/12. She is an Eastern European jew - an Ashkenazi jew. They say Ashkenazis live longer than most - but then again they say a lot of things about a lot of Jews. Her family comes to America before the war and her father opens a hardware store. They live a normal life. My grandmother, who I knew for 33 years before she dies, was alive during the holocaust - watching people who undoubetdly share her blood murdered every day in real time. My grandmother and I never speak about her feelings about the holocaust, but she reminds me very often that people hate jews and that unless I am forced to, sharing this part of my identity - especially while traveling, she will remind me - is not a good idea.
My Judaism is not contingent on rules and rituals.
My great grandmother comes from the part of Poland that is now Russia. She loses her first husband in the Spanish Flu. She becomes a single mother of three children and ultimately remarries and has three more, my Bubby is one of them. My Bubby becomes the matriarch of Judaism in our family. She is proud of her three Jewish children and my fathers bar mitzvah photos are that of a certain mid century middle class American Jewish identity that will never replicated. My Bubby never suggests that I should cover up any part of my Jewish identity and has a close personal relationship with the men that slice her smoked fish. Both sides of my family get to America before the war. That’s a thing that Jews say - before the war.
My Judaism is my blood, it’s my hair, it’s the birthmark on my hand.
At her house we celebrate every Jewish holiday with too many people for her small house, too much food for the too many people and a lot of that irreplicable mid century American Conservative Judaism. At her brother Mos house we celebrate Passover hosted by his wife, my larger than life Aunt Cookie whose real name is Rosalyn and who starts a flourishing business painting florals on jewelry boxes for grandmothers to give to their granddaughters in her 60s. Us young Jewish children are entertained by Uncle Mo’s fake leg, but more entertained by Bubby’s half brother Tom, Uncle Tom to us, who is a folk singer who ultimately made ends meet with children’s music. Uncle Tom wrote “On Top of Spaghetti,” and his brother Sidney produced the original Producers and has an Oscar, the only one in the family. Uncle Tom comes to holiday dinners on the Amtrak from New York with his guitar and a bottle of whiskey. My mom says he always wears the same stained turtleneck to seder.
My Judaism knows that every moment is sacred and nothing is guaranteed.
My Judaism is an inaudible, broken Shehecheyanu when planes land.
We dance around the sunken living room that has a very late century Jewish way of screaming “we’ve made it” as Uncle Tom makes up stories about each kid, and we forget near immediately the story of passover that we have each just taken painstaking and anxiety inducing turns reading. I am the youngest that can read for a long time, so all hungry eyes are on me to get through the questions so we can get to the brisket. Watching 20 adults dip their fingers into sweet wine and mark their already sullied plates with these droplets to symbolize the plagues we witness as Jews may be the most formative and visceral memory I have of my own Jewish identity. Though I think I am supposed to love dancing with the other kids to the music of Uncle Tom, what I really want to do is clear the table and sit in Aunt Cookie’s tiny kitchen with the adults, drying dishes.
My Judaism is perpetual sadness that manifests as an undying need to care for others.
My Judaism is the Yiddish that is a part of my English.
On this side of the family, we celebrate our Jewish identity, we don’t hide it. I grow up with a sense of Jewish identity. I grow up having nightmares of Nazis. At 35, I still have nightmares of being pulled out of my bed at night, forced into an uncertain, but certainly not good, future. I am a Jew and I have lost no immediate family members that I know of in the Holocaust. But because I am a Jew, every single person who perished in the Holocaust is my family.
My Judaism is being both a proud Jew and being completely afraid of being a Jew.
My Judaism is finding peace in what is uncomfortable.
Not all Jews are white, but both of my grandmothers and I are white. But in a conversation about Race, I consider myself a Jew before I consider myself white. My Judaism will show up in a DNA test, one that I am still afraid to take in case someone needs evidence of my Judaism. The invisibility to others of my race is a privilege. Being othered as a Jew and having white privilege are not mutually exclusive. They exist on the same plane together, every day. Though we are othered, our otherness isn’t apparent until someone wants to see it, until they go looking for it. I see it every day in my heavy lids, in my strong nose, in my furrowed brow, in my skin that can never quite find a ruddy enough match in the beauty department. I see it in my body who resents it when I eat too little on purpose and spitefully stores everything in case of flight.
My Judaism is more often than sporadically lighting Shabbat candles to reflect and regenerate.
My Judaism is leaving the world a better place than I found it.
I drop out of Hebrew school at 12 because my schedule cannot support my dedication to ballet and to becoming a Bat Mitzvah. My body who resents it when I eat too little on purpose refuses to agree to my future as a ballet dancer and even so I am not Bat Mitzvahed until i am 25, in Israel, during my first separation from my first husband. I do not like the rhetoric of my tour guides. I do not agree with the way they describe Israel as solely ours. I question my Judaism at the hands of their narrative. At 35, I still do. At 35, I question the binary arguments around Israel and agree fully with neither binary. I understand our need for self-determination, but not at the expense of others.
My Judaism questions constantly.
My Judaism is valid.
My Judaism wonders why it’s validity is questioned - by non Jews and Jews alike.
I no longer wear any external markers of Judaism other than the ones I was born with, but it doesn’t mean I won’t ever again. I both question the action of and yearn for the opportunity to have a child to continue this small but fervent people. To continue to question and carry on tradition. To sing songs in the face of hate and to forge a close personal relationship with my smoked fish guys. I will never be Jewish enough for some and I will always be too Jewish for many.
My Judaism is my own.