Tevya, Torah, and Jewish Identity Part II: Confessions of a Teenage Jacobstein

(GUEST POST by The CandyMan)

"Hillel said... do not judge your fellow until you have stood in his place." (Pirkei Avot, 2:5)

It was my last violin lesson with my first violin teacher. Sandra was beautiful, kind, gentle... I still remember her long, wavy blond hair, and her patience. She was a little like a mother. But she was getting married, moving away, and she couldn't teach me violin anymore. I was Sandra's youngest student, and even though I never practiced, she seemed to love me anyways. After our last lesson, when I was walking her to the door, she pulled a round plastic tupperware out of her bag. "I brought this for you," she said. "I made you this. It's applesauce." She handed me the tupperware. I could see the dull-yellow liquid inside. But I felt bad. "I'm sorry," I said. "I can't eat it. It's not kosher." "But it's just applesauce!" she said, not understanding. She knew we kept kosher, but somehow she thought the applesauce would be OK. I wanted to take it from her. But even if she hadn't used lard to make it, she'd prepared it using trayf dishes. I thanked her. I gave her back the applesauce. She took the tupperware back with her to her car. It was pretty awkward. That was the last I ever saw of Sandra. I was all of nine years old.

***

I was raised with such seriousness. I can't help but think it's affected me well into adulthood. Is it right to place such a burden on a person so young? Religion is such serious business. God either approves or he doesn't. What ever happened to letting kids have a little fun? My parents were raised Jewish, but they were not raised Orthodox. They gradually got more and more into the religion, and the community, as they got older. Can they ever understand what it means to me, who was raised with it? For whom it was ingrained from such an early age? Can a BT (Jewish born-again) hope to understand what Judaism means to an FFB (raised with it), or vice versa? When I was growing up, we had a cleaning lady. Her name was Maria, and she was an illegal immigrant from Poland. We were a house full of children, and Maria took care of everything (my parents both worked full-time). Maria lived with us. She had no children of her own, nor any family in the States. She joined us around the same time that one of my younger brothers was born, and loved him very deeply. She treated him as if he were her own child. In the beginning, my relationship with Maria was a little like my relationship with Sandra. I let her take care of me. I was a smart little kid, and Maria would ask me sometimes to explain an English word or two. She'd write the words down in a little yellow legal pad. She always told me how smart I was. I had thick glasses that were too big for my face. She called me her professor. Maria was not beautiful like Sandra. Her teeth were crooked. She had a funny nose. Her broken English made her sound stupid. After a couple of years, when I was around 10 or 11, I started to hate Maria. I didn't like the way she treated my little brother as if he was her own. My Mom was his mother, not Maria. I had a new baby brother, and I didn't like the fact that Maria had seen him in the hospital before I had. She was taking care of him a lot. Maria always seemed to make mistakes. At that age, halakha was already a very important part of my life. I was very careful about keeping kosher and modesty laws, and even though Maria tried, I kept finding problems with having a person who was not Jewish in the house. My parents were both BTs, and as the eldest child - one who excelled at limudai kodesh/Jewish studies - my word around the house carried a lot of weight. I told my parents that she shouldn't be cooking for us, it was a halakhic problem. It was a difficult age for me. I had a lot of hormones, but no outlet for them. It didn't help that Maria wasn't Jewish. As a day school student, not only did I not interact with children of other races and religions, but I was taught that the Jewish world was the only true and important one. I was filled with righteous indignation at the world, fueled in part by my hormones and in part by the religious indoctrination I was receiving at my rather Modern Orthodox day school (we had mixed classes). I took to imitating her and mocking her in front of my siblings. Everything that went wrong around the house, I found some way to blame it on Maria. My poison spread. I rallied my brothers and sisters against the "stupid Pollack." It wasn't hard. I turned even my younger brother - the boy she'd raised, the closest thing she had to a son - against her. "Is she teaching him Polish songs again? Is she going to dress him in tights, the way her nephew dresses in Poland?" I used words like a sword to cut her down, and my siblings followed my lead. I remember making Maria cry on a couple of occasions. I can't imagine what I called her, or complained about, to make her feel so bad. When the waterworks came out, I usually realized I'd gone too far, but then it would just happen again a couple weeks later. In my eyes, she could do no right. Maria didn't talk much during these episodes, and she never complained to my parents so far as I can tell. She just cried. I know now that she lived in fear of being deported. But one time, I remember this, she couldn't hold back. I was venting at her, yelling at her, using some excuse to persecute her. She started to cry again. Then something strange happened. She looked me right in the eye. "Why are you doing this to me? You used to be so nice to me!" she said. I shut up. "You know," she said, "I used to call you my professor."

***

Hate is a natural human emotion. There is a strong part of our monkey mind that has evolved to identify threats, and fear them. This is the root of the "us vs. them" perspective that LNM frequently discusses. We hate the unknown, and defend ourselves against it. The people we love - they become part of our identity, and we defend them vehemently. But the unknown, the other - they are not part of us, and it's easy to hate them. This is why religion and politics are such hotbutton issues. They tap into our sense of selves, our sense of community. And immediately the monkey brain jumps in and says, we are under attack, we need to defend ourselves and the people we love. Whether historically justified or not, whether justified in our holy texts or not, modern Judaism has a large ethnocentric component. This is hardly restricted to Orthodox Jews. When I was in college, Hillel's motto was "Increasing the Number of Jews Doing Jewish With Other Jews" (they've since changed their tune). Even skeptics, casting about for Jewish meaning, might be tempted to focus on the ethnocultural side of our tradition. But community is a double-edged sword. When does the community become a means of excluding the other? Of tapping into the wrong kind of feelings? Jesus once said of kashrut, "It is not what you put into your mouth that makes you unclean. It's what comes out of your mouth that makes you unclean." He meant our words. When I was berating Maria with my senseless hatred, I was looking for something to hate on the outside. That's easy, that's natural. That's human. But I was projecting. The contamination was inside me, in my heart, and it was the words coming out of my mouth that were making me unclean.

In college, I took a poetry creative writing course. One week we were asked to choose a classic poetry form which we had studied in class and write an original poem using that form. I chose to use the *** It had been quite the shaloshudos. As we noshed on fish balls and little rolls, we had listened to the weekly speaker: a Protestant minister who had converted to Judaism and was now a rebbe. His story had been inspiring - how he'd learned Bible and realized that Judaism was the true religion, not Christianity. He spoke of how we were all vessels, and it was our job to fill ourselves with the light of the Holy One. As a young teen, I kept an eye out for proofs of Judaism, proofs against the secular world and other religions. The very existence of this man was a welcome confirmation. After Shabbos, I grabbed a ride home with two neighbors, friends of my fathers (who wants to walk when you've been walking all day?). I sat in the back seat of the sedan, still dressed in my suit and black hat, enjoying the summer night air that came in through the window. And the men in the front seat started talking about the shaloshudos speaker. "I don't get these guys," said one of them. "I mean, there has to be something wrong with you if you switch from one religion to the other. I mean, all religions are basically good." The other man nodded. I couldn't believe my ears. These men were Orthodox Jews - FFBs! They should have been supporting this rabbi, not bashing him! I'd never heard anything like this in day school, or at home with my family. It seemed like heresy to me. But I respected these men, and it made me think.

***

"All religions are basically good." Isn't it strange, how a casual comment, even overheard, can open up a whole new world of possibilities, and change a life? I was a teenage Jacobstein, obsessed with religious proofs, confident in my faith, and driven by a righteous indignation. But those words, that sentence, rang in my ears for years after that. If my religion was so good, so true, could others be so different? Eventually this would sink in, and when it did, it would become the very cornerstone of my religious philosophy (at least, for a time). Then again, perhaps I was only ready to receive that message because I'd had certain previous experiences. Every person is a development, a work in progress. We start out as a block of limestone, or granite, or gold, and then life starts chiseling away at us until the features emerge. Our politico-religious worldviews, the philosophies that become our identities, are built up through incremental experiences. We are a complex mixture of internal grit, rational thought, life experiences, and the people around us. My siblings and parents were not in the car that night. My experience was my own. They had different experiences, experiences which led them in one direction or another. How can we pretend to understand the person who works next to us, or lives next to us, or even davens next to us? Even identical twins have different lives, take home different lessons. One goes Republican, the other Democrat. This one married her high school sweetheart, this one's still single. We spend so much of our time rationalizing. Trying to prove our point using logic and words. But life has to be experienced. And it's an upside-down world. Yesterday's class clown is now the neighborhood rabbi, and the neighborhood rabbi... well, he's dating a non-Jew!