Rich

I had intended to go to the crafts fair at the Dulles Expo Center yesterday or today but was too busy trying to do things at home to manage that. And I have a commitment tomorrow, so no crafts fair for me this year. The Dulles Expo Center is closing so no more for that venue for me. (In case anybody wondered, it’s being replaced by an Ikea.) It’s not like I really need more jewelry and I’m well stocked up on local honey.

I did make it down to my condo complex holiday party tonight for a little while. They had the usual heavy hors d’oeuvres, which were okay. The best things they had were a decent malbec and lots of chocolate covered strawberries. It seemed less crowded than usual, but I had gone right at the beginning and didn’t stay long because i had a story swap to go to over zoom.

I told a brief Chanukah in Chelm story. Jane told “Prince Rooster,” which is a story I also tell. John told a story in India involving a young girl and a tiger. The highlight was (as usual for this time of year) Margaret telling “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas.

I said that my feelings about religion deserve their own entry, so here goes. In short, it’s complicated.

To start with my maternal grandfather had a rabbinic degree though he made his living as a watchmaker / jeweler. He was definitely a scholarly type and wore a yarmulke at home, though I don’t remember him wearing it in his store or on excursions to the zoo or the like. My uncle was sent to a Jewish day school but my mother went to public school and she just barely knew even the Hebrew alphabet. I believe that this sexism affected her interest (or lack thereof) in religious observance.

My paternal grandfather had a cantorial degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary. My father’s religious education was pretty much entirely in Lithuania as a child. Both dad and grandpa were survivors of the Kovno ghetto and Dachau.

The key thing is that my parents were more concerned with community than with religion per se. That is, Mom went to shul (Yiddish for synagogue) pretty much only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, though she was active in Sisterhood. Dad, however, went regularly, largely to make sure they would have a minyan (the quorum of ten men required to perform certain parts of Jewish services. Back in those days, even Conservative synagogues only counted men, though nowadays most Conservative synagogues also count women.) Dad was also one of the key members of the building committee when our synagogue built an addition. And he edited the congregation’s newsletter for at least a few years. (There is a hereditary illness in my family that leads us to edit newsletters, but that’s a separate subject.)

But in strictly religious, versus cultural, terms, I grew up in the house of the holy dishes. That is, my parents kept a nominally kosher home but would go out to eat shrimp wrapped in bacon at a local Chinese restaurant. All of the summer camps I went to had some Jewish content. One of them had brief Friday night services for example. The most influential of those camps was Camp Ein Harod, the socialist Zionist camp I went to for two summers and the source of a couple of my most popular stories. And, well, let’s just say that the first Broadway musical I ever saw was Fiddler on the Roof and my cousin David sang “Sunrise, Sunset” at every family occasion. (And, by the way, every Jew has a cousin named David.)

Which pretty much meant that I was all set to follow in the tracks of my parents and be a typical American cultural (but not especially religious) Jew. Until I got very friendly with Debby in 10th grade. She had gone to the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County up to that point and was modern Orthodox. And, at some point, she persuaded me to go to a Shabbaton (basically, a weekend retreat, including Shabbat services and learning sessions and lots of singing) that was affiliated with Torah Leadership Seminar. Debby sold this to me as a good way to meet boys. (Hey, we were teenage girls. As my father once said, I had a one-track mind, but a lot of trains ran on that track.)

Anyway, I had a great time and went to other events, including Seminar itself (a weeklong retreat) a couple of times. And by the time I started college, I considered myself modern Orthodox. I kept kosher and kept shabbat fairly strictly, though I did eat vegetarian food and fish in non-kosher restaurants, which was not uncommon among Orthodox Jews in the late 1970’s but is more or less unheard of nowadays. I continued being pretty much observant for several years, through graduate school at least, though I did sometimes relax my shabbat observance somewhat when traveling.

So what changed? I can’t pinpoint one thing, but my relationship situation (aka the world’s longest running brief meaningless fling) was a factor, since he is not at all religious. But, more to the point, most Orthodox synagogues only interest in single women is getting them married off. (And not just Orthodox shuls for that matter. After my father died, my mother felt out of place at the shul she’d gone to for 20-something years.) Basically, once I was in a non-academic environment, I had a hard time finding a community that worked for me.

Now, I’m not entirely non-observant. I’m not about to start eating pork and shellfish. I pay attention to the Jewish holidays in planning travel and so on, though I don’t really go to shul regularly. I’ve found some other sources of community, largely via the storytelling world. And I have some Jewish connections, though more cultural than religious. I’m not really satisfied with that state of things, but I need to find a way to clarify what I really want so I can look for the right fit.

One thing I should clarify because people make assumptions, is that I am not an atheist. I have a definite personal vision of G-d. In short, I am not sure whether or not I believe in G-d, but I definitely believe in godliness, the power of people to behave in ways that do good in the world.

As I said to start with, it’s complicated.