When I Was Jewish

"We're going to be celebrating Hannukah this year," I announced to my son nine years ago. He raised his right eyebrow, scowled, and glared at me suspiciously.

"We are?"

"Yes," I said, "in honor of our Jewish heritage."

He rolled his eyes and slunk from the room. "Psycho," I heard him mutter. He had watched with some alarm as I had begun to embrace my Jewish roots, bestowed upon me by my birthfather, Fred, whom I had found and lost to cancer the previous August. I had fasted on Yom Kippur in Fred's honor, although he had not been, from most accounts, what one might describe as orthodox. According to my Uncle Gerry, Fred's brother, there was no genetic predisposition to explain my sudden all encompassing preoccupation.

"Neither Fred nor I had any particular religious leanings," Gerry told me. "At best we could be considered agnostic."

Nevertheless, I was somewhat frantic to learn if we were descended from the Cohens, the officiators at important rituals, or the singing Levites who also performed janitorial work in the Temple, or Israelites - everyone else.


"I don't have a clue as to whether we fall into a designation of Cohen, Levite or Israelite," Gerry responded. "I believe we do have some distant relationship to Cain and Abel, unconfirmed of course."

"It was just not something he believed in," my half-sister Rebecca told me when we shopped together at Zabar's http://www.zabars.com/ in Manhattan. "He was impatient with all the mumbo jumbo."

"Where do you get this stuff?" My daughter demanded. "You can only be Jewish through the mother. Everyone knows that."

"What do you know?" I countered.

"Apparently, a lot more than you."

Upon discovering my incipient Jewess-ness, I had begun to study Judaism with Rabbi Bob every third Tuesday. I read A Jew Today by Elie Wiesel. I studied the Torah. I began to pray standing up. I had gone to Shabbat services at the Temple and had come home with vivid descriptions of candles and music and Hebraic verse. I sang V'shamru v'ney Yisra-el with off-key confidence. I wished my fellow Jews shabbat shalom, and partook of challah and mushroom blintzes.


During philosophical discussions upon the nature of God, I bent forward in the hard brown chair in Rabbi Bob's office. Although I was impatient for a metaphysical experience that defied description, my eyes would drift to the pert green and black yarmulke affixed to the Rabbi's hair with a matching green hair clip.

"Tell me what you think." the Rabbi prompted.

I wondered about Moses, and how, trembling with doubt, he had asked God for a sign. God told Moses that to look upon His face would mean obliteration, madness. God's visage was beyond mortal ken: radiant flash and fire, sacred, holy. I pictured Oz. The best Moses could expect was to know God by where God had been. I imagined a smooth brown back just turning the corner.

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