Jew Out of Water

Whenever I tell someone I am a Jew, I wait for someone to disagree with me.

This is the double-edged sword of living in Ohio and working with the folks I work with: no one really knows anything about Judaism. As I am the first out gay person some of my co-workers have ever met, I am also the first Jew. Downside: people know nothing about the holidays or cultural traditions and are prone to making some assumptions which annoy the shit out of me. Upside: I am suddenly an expert authority on being a Jew, a distinction which has never been bestowed on me previously in my life. I garner respect for what I do know about being a Jew because they assume whatever I am telling them is factually accurate.

My father’s side of the family is Jewish. According to Halakha (a blanket term for Jewish law), one’s mother has to be Jewish in order for her children to be considered Jewish. I can’t remember at what age I learned this, but I remember being upset at how tacitly unfair this distinction was. It was compounded by the fact my mother and I never got along as it was.

My mother came from a long line of Polish Catholics.  It was not her love of Catholicism, however, which kept me from growing up more steeped in the Jewish tradition than I would have liked. Both of my parents had a strong dislike of organized religion. I had a hard time begrudging them for this since they were both raised by parents who required them to be part of these religious traditions: my mother did confirmation, went to Catholic high school; my father had a bar mitzvah, learned Hebrew. In my mind, they had done the work and had earned the right to dislike these things.

My father had the greater concern that clinging too fervently to a particular religion divided people and encouraged bigotry. Although my father never talked about it, his father had been a solider in WWII and was present at the liberation of at least one concentration camp. I imagine this left one with a few opinions about being a Jew and being religious. If Dad had lived longer, I would have asked.

The one aspect of Judaism which allowed me to get to know the tradition at all was the story telling part of it. My father, the perpetual author, loved to take the basic story behind each holiday (which usually involved intrigue, suspense, and someone trying to murder one or more Jews without ANY embellishment at all) and tell them to my brother and I with significant enhancements. He told us about the Maccabees, a family who had to learn how to become warriors to defeat folks trying to oppress them and who also valued scholarship because they wanted to outsmart their enemies when possible instead. I remember a retelling of the Chanukah stories that involved fighting armies riding on elephants and my father vividly describing the shambles the Temple was in after it had been desecrated. (There are multiple holidays where Temple desecration occurs, so it is hard to say what story he was telling at the time). How could I not think being a Jew was cool?

Pairing my dad’s stories with Woody Allen movies during my high school and college years sealed the deal, and I set out trying to learn about being a Jew whenever I could.

One roadblock I hit was my mother: while she infamously started at least one fist fight for someone making an anti-semitic comment about my father, she actively discouraged us observing any Jewish holidays at home.  And I am not talking about the somber holidays which require fasting and/or remembering Holocaust victims (of which there are more than a few)–even the fun ones were not allowed.  Lighting the menorah was usually all we could manage each year, and even half the time that ended in a blow-out argument.

The second roadblock I hit was one I was more surprised by: I was sure once I expressed interest in learning more about the Jewish tradition, my father’s family would be interested in teaching it to me. But this was not the case: my father had two siblings surviving him after his death. Both had married non-Jews. My aunt stopped practicing Judiasm in the 1980’s and converted to the religion which would get her kids into the best private pre-school (practical, I suppose). My uncle still goes back to Buffalo for the big holidays (Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Passover), but gave up trying to teach his kids anything. My grandparents still get to temple when they are up for it, but talking to them about it seems to mostly exhaust them. I tried to lean on them a lot after my father died and some days I felt like they were basically telling me they had already raised four Jewish kids, two of whom are already dead, and they don’t have the energy to engage in the practice again.

I identify with being a Jew because I often feel like a displaced person, just have Jews have been throughout history. I identify with being a Jew because of my father, who I adored. I identify with being a Jew because Jews are survivors.I identify with being a Jew because every Jewish holiday focuses on food. I identify with being a Jew because Jews (or at least Jewish traditions) love wine. I identify with being a Jew because of the emphasis on scholarship in the Jewish tradition. There are a hundred reasons I identify with being a Jew.

Some days trying to find this part of my identity reminds me of transitioning genders. Except in some respect transitioning genders was easier: it was easier for me to figure out what it meant to be a man and how to do that. I am still struggling to figure out what it means to be a Jew and how I will incorporate this rich tradition into my life.