this woman’s work

On interfaith marriages: Matzah and Marinara

There’s a lot of (heated) discussion about adopted kids and conversion on this listserv I’m on. This blog entry (and the comments) have added to the discussion I’m having in my own head.

I’m waiting for the movers and drinking the coffee nice Brett got for me. I need to wake the kids up in about ten minutes.

I reread my last post (and caught the typos but as is my policy, it’s been too long and I won’t fix ‘em) and think it was too awkward.

Most of you know that we’re an interfaith family and while it would make my rabbi plotz, we do have a nice happy Jesus cross that usually hangs in our bedroom by Brett’s side of the bed. It’s a cross from Ecuador that I got Brett when we were first dating as a symbol of my acceptance of his different beliefs. (Brett hasn’t bought any symbols for me but he stood with me and held Noah while our rabbi converted us both and you know that’s a way better symbol than any sort of thing I could hang on the wall.) On this cross, Jesus is very smiley and his arms are up and he’s got colorful clothes on.

Brett is not fond of evangelicals pushing an agenda but on the other hand, it’s taken him a long time to understand how it makes me feel. For him, it’s an awkward moment but if he wants to, he can smile and nod because even if he doesn’t believe in the fire and brimstone bit, he does believe in grace. He can pass, you know? He’s gone to enough bible studies that he can quote a bit of chapter and verse back or at least say, “Oh yeah, that’s a good part.”

The other incident I was talking about in the entry below went like this. The person (he’s an Episcopal priest but before that he was a charismatic preacher and there was more of that in him as far as I could tell) had a little fable to tell me:

Once upon a time his great-grandfather — who lived in Germany — was Jewish. And he was studying to be a rabbi like his father before him. One day on a bet he went to a Christian revival meeting and lo and behold! He saw the light and found Jesus that very day. When he came home his father said, “Well, son, you do what you like but I have to kick you out of the house and your brother, too, for also inconveniently finding Jesus. But here’s enough money to send you to America.” You know what happened? His whole family ended up in a concentration camp and everyone died! But not the great-grandfather or his brother! Moral of the story? Jesus really does save — literally and figuratively! (And bear in mind what he didn’t explicitly say — but if God could save the grandfather and his brother but let the little Jewish babies die, well, that doesn’t say much for God, does it? Or else God really does hate the Jews, which I seriously think was the implicit point of this guy’s story what with his meaningful raised eyebrows, concerned nods and glorious smile at the so-called happy ending.)

So the guy who’s telling me this happened to be adopted into this family (in another equally offensive conversation he let me know that he approves of “good” people saving innocent babies from “bad” people as his family saved him) but he ends the story by telling me that it’s certainly possible to be a proud Jew and a saved Christian! How does he know? Because he is one!

“Why,” he added chortling. “I’m probably more Jewish than a lot of Jews you know!”

(Because of Brett’s fundamentalist cousin, I figured this was code for “we celebrate the Hebrew feasts.”)

Plus, he told me, he hangs with rabbis sometimes at his interfaith conventions and rabbis dig him what with him being so Jewish and all.

It was with great satisfaction that I informed him that he is NOT Jewish because adopted children have to be converted. So there. It kinda took the wind out of his sails let me tell you. His very mustache looked deflated.

I used to think that Brett would be my get out of jail free card in these conversations but they must not think he’s a very good Christian to let his whole entire family burn in hell. Pretty ineffectual, is what they must be thinking. But my point in bringing Brett up is to say, “Hey, I didn’t grow up in a cave with only a Torah and a box of matzohs, you know. I live here in America. I’ve heard of Jesus. I’ve had opportunities to accept said Jesus into my heart. In fact there is a saved person right in my very bedroom. And you know what? I rejected Christianity because as surely as God spoke to you, so he spoke to me. And what God said to me is, ‘Hey Dawn! You’d make a nice Jew!’ So if you have any faith in God whatsoever, what’s say you trust him on this one, ‘kay?”

Half Changed World: Making connections

More broadly, other than the central idea of monotheism, Judaism doesn’t care so much about what you believe, as what you do.  If you went to a rabbi and said, “Rabbi, I follow the commandments, I go to shul, I keep Shabbat, but I don’t know if I believe in God, can I still be a good Jew?” my sense is that most rabbis wouldn’t hesitate to say you can.

This is my sense of Quaker theology, too. Oh and if you’re Reform? The idea of what you need to do to be a good Jew is an awful lot more flexible, which is why I’m a Reform Jew. (I don’t keep shabbat, we rarely go to shul but we “think” Jewish. It’s where I look to find my answers.)

Nothing like hitting save and then remembering that I meant to write a totally different entry.

So we’re not celebrating passover. I know, we suck. I am a Bad Jew. I really am. Here are the reasons we’re not celebrating it:

–I have mixed feelings about Passover. You know why it’s called Passover, right? Because the Angel of Death passed over our firstborn sons and instead slaughtered everyone elses. We traditionally have lamb because G-d told us to put lamb’s blood on our doorposts so that angel would know to skip our houses. I say “we” here but really I mean the Jewish people who actually celebrate Passover and not incomptent Jews such as myself.
–And more importantly, we never celebrated Passover growing up. Ok, once we did and my then 3-year old brother got really drunk on the Manischewitz. But because we never really celebrated it, I don’t have all kinds of lovely family memories to make it a meaningful holiday.
–Also, since I never celebrated it, the ritual feels awkward and stiff to me. I don’t even really know how to do it properly although we have somewhat faked it before.
–Which leads me to another reason: I’m the only one who cares. Brett doesn’t care. Noah begged me not to put on a seder. He doesn’t like the food and he finds it boring and he feels that his model seder at school was plenty.
–No one else in my extended family celebrates it. My dad did for a couple of years and it was great. It wasn’t properly done but that was ok because it was about family togetherness and celebrating our Jewish heritage. This year when I asked him if he would be inviting us over for Passover, he acted like I’d asked him if he was planning on dancing naked in his front yard for the new moon. (I think this is because his new girlfriend is drowning in -isms and I’m pretty sure one is anti-Semitism.)

I’m sad about all of this. I worry that Noah will grow up feeling like I do — what holiday? where? who me? — but I just don’t know how to fake it. What I try to remember is that Judaism, for me, is a belief system in which to ground my personal search for truth and a relationship with God/G-d (as I understand him).

On Sunday, I volunteered for the model seder, remember? And afterwards I sat with the woman who organized the event while she talked about her Passover plans. I so envy real live Jewish people with Jewish families and Jewish cultural history. I feel like a fraud sometimes at synagogue because I never know the prayers or the proper greetings for holidays (I mumble a lot, duck my head and smile). Sometimes I feel really angry with my father because he had the ability to give us his Jewishness and except for some bad jokes and memories of his mother’s rugalech, he blew it. (None of us is even able to imitate the Yiddish accent he puts on for jokes — what will we do when he’s gone and we can’t tell those jokes anymore?)

But you know what? I realized when I was thinking on this that this is really valuable for me because it gives me an inkling — just an inkling, mind you — of how deeply I will fail Madison if I don’t give her the tools to be a part of her African American culture.

I imagine how much worse it would be if Judaism was something everyone could tell about you at first glance and then they’d look at me and say, “Hey, what’s that prayer over the wine again?” And I’d feel constantly like a fraud, like someone living in costume. I’d feel disempowered and unsure of who I was. It would be like hanging at the oneg at Shabbat services for the rest of my life — trying and failing at making small talk.

I was reading this Jane Brown article the other day (Amber, that rabble rouser, turned me on to Jane Brown) and this part really struck me:

Often, Caucasian parents of transracially adopted youngsters, we choose environments to live in or schools based on what we think are places that offer the “best” opportunities. Yet we make these judgements about what IS best based on Euro-Caucasian standards. That this is sometimes a class issue as much or more than it is a racial one. They pointed out the many wonderful and often overlooked resources and benefits that are sometimes passed over by Euro-Caucasian people that are NOT passed over by parents of color raising children of color. That not everyone values the same things.

I have been thinking on this because I am contemplating preschool for Madison. Yes, I like to plan ahead. See, I’m realizing that I can’t make Black friends for Madison. I can help her make adopted, Black friends living in white families (that’s a cinch, we have a support group) but I cannot go out and find her some nice Black friends living with Black parents and taking their Black culture for granted. She’s going to have to do this. And how I can help her do this is find her a preschool where she’s not the minority.

Fortunately we live in a racially mixed neighborhood and near a neighborhood that is predominantly African American and so I think I can find out by hitting the libraries and rec centers that are nearer to that neighborhood and asking people. But I was kinda stymied because I was trying to figure out which is more important: finding a school that resonates with our family values? Or finding a school that may in some ways go against our family values but is predominantly attended by African American children and has African American teachers. I’ve decided that the latter is more important because I don’t think Madison will be harmed by going to a part-time preschool that maybe is a little more structured or a little less playbased than I would prefer. I mean, I still hope to find a preschool that is both — similar to our values and can give her the cultural exposure she needs — but I think the deal-breaker will be a school that has lots of Black kids.

What I hope is that Madison makes friends and has playdates and through her our family makes friends and this is how we build our Black community. Right now our Black community is very limited to some biracial kids we know who have at least one non-Black parent and the aforementioned adopted kids in our support group.

Now I need to go do dishes.

Jackie said: “Part of my trouble is that much of the iconography, the Virgin Mary, the rosary, the Virgen de Guadelupe, still resonates with me, helps me make that connection, but I don’t know how to extrapolate a religion or community from that, you know?”

As a Reform Jew, I always wish there was such a thing as Reform Catholicism. There’s a wonderful book Sisters: Lives of Devotion and Defiance by Julia Lieblich. This book helped me decide to be Jewish in earnest although I struggle with some aspects of Judaism. One of the nuns is ex-communicated but she continues living/working as a nun. It made me realize that religion is between the individual and God and that the structures around our religions are there for us. It may be difficult to find a totally like-minded community but I do think it’s possible to be a seeker from within any religious tradition that feels like home and to bend that tradition to suit our personal relationship with God. I know that this is a bigger challenge in Catholicism but I don’t think it’s impossible. And I think it’s important that we not give up the things that are meaningful to us because our very human leaders try to tell us that we cannot have them unless we follow their rules.

I do struggle with this though. Judaism is all about following halacha — Jewish law. Is Judaism meaningless if we reject any of those laws? For someone like me — not keeping kosher, not honoring the sabbath, unable to pronounce any of the blessings (!) — can I really live a Jewish life? Well, it depends on who you ask. One day I’d like to live more Jewishly but I feel that this time will come when my children are older because after all, I’m in an interfaith marriage. It’s one thing for the two of us to decide that Judaism will be the dominant spirituality in our family; it’s quite another for me to demand that we all follow laws that are really important only to me. As the kids get older, if either of them want to embrace aspects of Jewish practice, I’d be pretty darn happy and ready to join them. But to follow these things now would be a hardship and ultimately, I’m afraid that they would actually turn my children away from Judaism and possibly then from God. It would be different if we lived in a Jewish community and had families that were living Jewish lives but we don’t. I trust God in this though. I trust that as my way has been made clear, so will my children’s and meanwhile within the context of Judaism, we are able to communicate with each other about that journey.

In the same way, I recognize that Catholicism for many people would have no power without the specific teachings of its leaders. In much the same way that Judaism is halacha so Catholicism is following rules set forth by the Pope — at least as I understand it. But then I remind myself that religion is the way that men (historically) have tried to understand God and so it belongs to us.

In the book my rabbi gave me before my conversion, Liberal Judaism at Home, the author Morrison David Bial writes:

The major difficulty with the criterion we have mentioned, his own sense of spiritual values, arrived at by diligent study of tradition — is that it obviously sets each Liberal [Reform] Jew as his own judge of what he will or will not do.

To the traditional Jew, this is nothing less than a severe transgression of halacha, the law. It is God who established the Torah and its mitzvot, commandments. Anyone who would dare set any mitzvah, commandment, aside is one who would cut at the roots of the God-given religion.

Then what can the Liberal Jew use as his final criterion, to help his knowledge of tradition and his understanding of Liberal Judaism in the task of deciding just where he fits in the infinite spectrum of Jewish observance? The answer must be a sense of kedushah, of holiness, of that which will help him sanctify his life, to make it truly meaningful. By this must he live, and it will help him give his life that inner meaning by which we seek fulfillment.

I believe that God speaks to each of us who are ready to listen. I believe that prayerful contemplation of the religious traditions that speak to us is our right and — for our children’s sakes — our duty. I want to model an active relationship with God for Madison and Noah. I want to show them that every religious tradition has wisdom that belongs to those that seek it. No one has a monopoly on the right way to do things; not even the guys who put themselves in charge.

How cute is this set? That’ll be our first night’s gift. I think I’d eventually like to get the Shabbat and Passover sets, too.

Noah is getting harder to buy for nowadays. His interests are more specific and expensive. Since we celebrate both holidays and then his birthday is just about a month after Christmas, it’s an awful lot of challenging shopping to do. And then, too, the grandparents want advice on what to get him.

Some people have asked if we’re going to celebrate Kwanzaa now and I said that we have enough December holidays for the time being. Besides, Kwanzaa means nothing to Madison’s birth family so it’s not like we’re stinting on her heritage. If either of the kids decide they’d like to try on celebrating it, we’ll revisit it then but for now, we’ll stick to the two we already have.

Google sticks to ‘Jew’ search, amid protests - The Times of India

Google Inc the leading Internet search engine, said Monday that it had no plans to alter its search results despite complaints that the first listing on a search for the word “Jew” directs people to an anti-Semitic Web site.

Yesterday Noah participated in our temple’s consecration ceremony. This symbolizes the beginning of the first graders formal Torah study, although I don’t actually see much formal Torah studying going on as compared to, say, the kindergarten curriculum last year. I think that for our temple it’s mostly about the community welcoming our children into the fold and celebrating our commitment to help them learn about Judaism and what it means to be a good Jew. My father (who is Jewish) came but the other grandparents couldn’t make it for various reasons (weddings and illness).

I always wonder how it is for my father to come to temple and see Noah growing in his Judaism since five out of his six children did not grow up in homes that were the least bit observant. My oldest half-sister’s mom is Jewish but I don’t know how observant she is or if she is raising her own kids as Jews.

My youngest half-sister is interested in Judaism and my father has encouraged her to get involved in the temple. I have, too, mostly because I think that having a structure in which to learn about faith is important for many agnostic kids. When I first began exploring my spirituality, I found it really overwhelming to sift through various creeds. Rooting myself in Judaism feels comfortably familiar and it centers my outlook but I don’t think that the Jews have a lock on truth. Anyway, I think it’s good to give kids a place to begin their spiritual journeys and I also think it’s important to give them room to take a different path, too.

I know some of my friends are reluctant to commit to a formal faith practice with their kids and I can appreciate that. The mistake is in thinking that by giving kids a faith, you’re invalidating other religious belief systems or creating a child whose worldview will always be limited. I believe that religious observation gives the family more opportunity to discuss big questions and also gives children the chance to see that humans are fallible even when we’re trying really hard to do things the “right” way. It’s perfectly all right — even necessary — to disagree with basic tenets within formal religious teachings. After all, religion is a way to bring people closer to God; studying and critical thinking, following your heart even when it leads you away from your religious leaders is a big part of that. Our big goal for Noah is to have him feel comfortable in having a personal dialogue with God/the universe/everything and only he can be the author of that.

But then we’re Reform Jews; what can I say?

I find it very inspiring when I meet families who create their own faith practices, too. Certainly religion doesn’t need the roots within a church or synagogue but having other people around who share your commitment is an awfully nice thing.

I have been thinking so much about the precall that we got. I badly want a baby soon but I am also very very aware that this birthmom is in such a painful, difficult position. I also know that we’re not the only people whose bios are being sent to her and I’m sure that they are feeling as desperately hopeful as I am. It’s strange wanting something so much and knowing at the same time that if it comes to fruition, there will be others who will be left in pain and/or disappointment.

I feel very woven into the world — tied to the other waiting parents and to the birthmoms who are sifting through our bios trying to make very difficult decisions.

There’s an article about Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion. The movie is a literal interpretation of the gospels and as such has been a target for criticism from interfaith groups and the Anti-Defamation League. Their argument is that the movie is anti-Semitic because its literal take on the gospels makes the Jews out to be bad guys.

Sometime around the year A.D. 30, in the Roman province of Palestine, an obscure Jewish carpenter named Jesus of Nazareth began to teach publicly and to proclaim the coming of a ‘Kingdom of God.’ For centuries, the Jewish people had expected the appearance of a promised deliverer known as the Messiah –a figure who would restore their ancient dignity, and free their sacred homeland from all evil and despair. In the minds of many, Jesus appeared to be this Messiah. Surrounded by a core group of twelve disciples, Jesus began to attract a massive following from among the common people of Galilee and Judea, who eventually praised him as their Messiah and King. However, Jesus also had many enemies in Jerusalem. The Sanhedrin, a governing senate composed of the leading Jewish priests and Pharisees, conspired to put Jesus to death.
 
With the aid of Judas Iscariot, a member of Jesus’ own inner circle, the Sanhedrin succeeded in arresting Jesus, handing him over to the Roman secular authorities on unsubstantiated charges of treason against Rome. Although Jesus consistently maintained that his Kingdom was a heavenly and spiritual one, the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, faced with the possibility of a riot, ordered that Jesus be taken outside the city and crucified as a common criminal.

That’s from the movie’s web site.

This is a tough one for me. I believe in freedom of speech and freedom of religion. I believe that fundamentalist Christian and Catholics have a right to their point of view. But their belief that the New Testament is the inerrant word of God is really disturbing, especially because the Gospels pretty clearly condemn the Jews. If you believe that the bible is absolute then there’s no argument with that: it has the Jews saying, “His blood be on us and on our children!” and if you believe that then that means me and that means Noah. This puts the Jews in an extremely awkward situation. How do we defend ourselves while still displaying religious tolerance? And why do we have to defend ourselves against a religion we don’t even believe in?

You know, one could argue from the Christian point of view that the Jews were given the role illustrated in the New Testament by God in order to give Christians salvation. After all, if Jesus hadn’t died on the cross for the sins of mankind, then where would all of those sinners be? Except that I don’t believe that the Jews have blood on their hands. No, not at all. I believe that the Gospels were written centuries after Jesus died on the cross (if Jesus did, in fact, exist and did, in fact, die on a cross) and were written to convert people.

I’m a little scared of Gibson’s movie. In fact, I’m a little scared of fundamentalist Christians period. If you believed that the Bible was the actual word of God, how could you not follow it? Follow it exactly? Me, I don’t believe it and that’s why I’m a Reform Jew and not an Orthodox Jew. But as much as it scares me, I also believe in Gibson’s right to promulgate his views. And while I find his views disturbing, I believe that they are rooted in his devotion to his faith. It’s not like he’s out trying to get people to believe in blood libel; he’s just trying to tell people the truth as he understands it. I guess if I was a zillionaire with access to movie cameras, I might be doing the same thing.

This journalist does a much better job than I of explaining the social and religious complexities surrounding Gibson’s film.

Want to know more about the debate surrounding the Sanhedrin’s culpability in the crucifixion? Here are some links:
(more…)

We went to hear the shofar and it was a pretty good service. The rabbi told a funny story with props and the mood was jubiliant if a little stressed (all of those parents trying to keep small children somewhat quiet).

I can’t tell you all what a huge giant good feeling it gives me to watch Noah singing along to “A Tree of Life” or mumbling the Hebrew. I don’t know where his spiritual journey will lead him but knowing that his roots will always be in Judaism — that those songs will always sound like home — means a great deal to me.