My Jewish Story ||#FlashbackFriday
I sit on a chair that is too high for me, my little girl legs swinging, scratching against my new denim skirt as I shift restlessly in my seat. I sit between my father and my mother, who radiates warmth from her soft rolls, smoothing the short, fine blonde hairs of my baby sister. I am three years old, and most of the time I am scared of the dark, but as my Zaida turns off the light I feel calm, not fully comprehending the coming of the sabbath but knowing that it is there. A stillness seems to overcome my Baba and Zaida’s dining room and I watch my grandmother as she flicks her wrist, striking a match. A small burst of light erupts, and I stare in awe and fascination as she touches the fiery wood to the wicks on the candles, sitting in their heavy silver pedestal-like stands. The light seems to roll off of the match like fluid, turning into burning flames as it touches the wax.
My mother, who made her covenant with Hashem only four years ago but devotes herself to Him as though she has all her life, joins my grandmother, waving their hands three times over their faces and closing their eyes, simultaneously as though it is magic, whispering the words to a prayer I am too young to understand but will, someday. I follow suit, clumsily flailing my small hands over my eyes, mumbling gibberish incoherently, trying to imitate the poetic words they are speaking. Baba lowers her hands, opens her eyes. The Shabbos candles flicker, and her face is illuminated, her subtle wrinkles visible under the glow, and I know that she has done this a thousand times and yet every time is as special as the first. My Zaida turns the light back on and she walks around the table, kissing each of us and murmuring the words "good Shabbos". She reaches my chair and holds my little body close, kisses my forehead, whispers "good shabbos" in my ear like a secret. She does this every Friday night, because this is what she always has done, what she will always do in the years to come.
When she sits down, my Zaida raises his small kiddish cup filled with red wine, the bitter smelling substance I have asked to taste many times, my innocent question answered every time by laughter and the words "when you are older". He mumbles endlessly, reciting the Kiddish, his eyes never straying from the small prayer book he holds in his hand despite the fact that he knows these words by heart. I avert my attention elsewhere, to the smell of matzo ball soup, my favourite, wafting into the room from the kitchen, forming a halo around my head.
Ten years later I will sit in the same spot and sip the chicken broth slowly, nervously, counting every calorie, pushing the matzo balls aside. I cannot help it, and yet it fills me with a guilt that pulls at my heartstrings. Although it is not my intention, rejecting the matzo balls feels like rejecting my grandmother, rejecting the traditions with which I grew up. When I am better, I will eat them again, re-learning the feeling of their light texture against my tongue, reclaiming the love that my three year old self felt for this night of light and wine and my grandmothers soup.
I am six, and I am sitting in my chair at day school as Morah Ora teaches us the Aleph Bet. I am a quick and passionate learner, and my father and I sing songs like Hava Negilah and Oseh Shalom in the car on the way to school every morning. At some point we stop doing this; I don't really know why. The year goes by and suddenly it is nearly June and Morah Ora is telling us about our roles in the upcoming Siddur Ceremony. My attention is mostly focused on the ray of sunshine somehow forcing its way through the closed blinds, a sign of the looming summer, dreaming of swimming pools and parks. Morah Ora says my Hebrew name, Yehudit, grounding me, bringing me back to the classroom, where she tells me that my best friend and I will be reciting the Shema at the ceremony. She tells us that this is an important job, that this prayer is a significant one. I practice every night before bed, whispering these sacred words with my eyes shut tightly.
"Shema yisroel Adonai eloheinu Adonai echad".
It is my lullaby. A month later I stand for pictures with my friends in a blue silk dress, holding my brand new Siddur protectively in my arms. I will read from this prayerbook every day at school and sometimes at home, and it soon becomes stained with age and overuse. When I am nine the bindings fall apart and I get a new Siddur, but I keep this one in a my drawer, running my hands over its pages every so often. I continue to say the Shema. I know it off by heart now. Five years later I switch to public school, and I mourn for what I believe is the end of my Jewish education. I whisper a reluctant goodbye to Geveret Dror, the older woman who has taught me for two years, who has watched my Hebrew skills transform alongside my passion for writing. When I start at my new school I feel as though I am in a new world. I miss my friends, especially Yuval, my best friend from Israel; I miss tefillah, our daily services. We switch shul's and start attending Hebrew school at Temple Har Zion, and although I will not admit it to anyone, I enjoy it. I find myself caught between wanting to divert from Judaism to spite my parents and grandparents, and holding on to it for dear life. I choose the latter, and I am glad.
I am standing with my family for photos in a dress that is tight in all the wrong places, middle school braces, hair too gaudy and make up too dark for my skin tone. I am uncomfortable in my clothing, in my skin, in front of the camera. It is June 16th, and I am with so many people who I love and yet my mind is drifting to the sanctuary a few feet away, to where I will, in a few short hours, chant Torah and Haftorah as a Jewish woman for the first time. A lot of people tell me that their bat/bar mitzvah was a really profound moment in their Jewish lives, but it wasn't that way for me, so much so that I considered leaving it out of this essay altogether. I included it because certain aspects were significant, and because I felt too guilty leaving out such an important tradition. I loved learning to chant Torah, and I especially loved Haftarah, the melodic trope rolling off of my tongue. In the years afterwards I continued to chant both Torah and Haftarah when given the opportunity- chanting Haftarah two years in a row on Rosh Hashanah, something that gave me great joy, and chanting Torah at camp. My Bat Mitzvah, looking back, was not a truly significant moment in my Jewish life. But the bonds I created around that time and in the six months afterwards with many important people and clergy in the shul have been incredibly important to me and have helped me immensely in finding spirituality, God and happiness in my own life.
I am applying lip gloss in the small bathroom of my Aunt's house in Florida. It is August, it is hot, and I am happy. As I walk out of the room wearing a scoop neck skirt and long black skirt, I call out to her, ask whether she is ready to go to shul for Shabbos. I have become very close with her in recent months and when she invited me to spend a week with her over the summer I gladly accepted. We have spent the week walking through nature reserves and having important conversations, saying words that are painful yet necessary. She is in her seventies and she has devoted her entire life to Judaism, to this faith that has comforted her time and time again. Hearing my voice, she walks out of her room, love shining in her eyes. "I have something for you," she says, staring at my open neck. She tells me to close my eyes, and I feel something cool and heavy being placed upon my chest. When I open them she kisses my cheek, and I look down to see a gold chain with a hamsa pendant. “It was my mother’s,” she says, “and I want you to have it so that it can hold you when my arms can’t.” She tells me that she hopes that God’s hand will act as a talisman for me, protection from everything that hurts me. Later, she holds my hand in synagogue. She tells me that she believes in God, that she loves Him and believes that while he doesn't make bad things happen, He gives us the courage and the strength to get through them. I take her beliefs and I wrap them around my finger, I hold them in my heart and see whether they take root. They do.
It is summer and I am fifteen years old and life is beautiful, mostly. I am at camp and we are singing the Havdallah niggun and the voices of my friends are making their way from my ears into my heart. We are not singing completely in tune, because that just isn’t going to happen when a bunch of adolescent boys with cracking voices are singing but it’s lovely all the same. The sun is setting and I am warm, resting my head against the chest of the Israeli boy I have become close with. We sing mash-ups between prayers and English pop songs, we sing traditional camp tunes, more niggunim than I can count. Sitting amongst my friends by the water singing the songs I have grown up with, taking part in the traditions that have been a part of me all my life, I feel like I belong. This is not my first year at camp but it is my last and for that reason everything feels more significant. I take in each moment, taste it on my tongue, inhale. I savour it. This year is also different because there is a different energy in the air, a certain kind of tension. The political unrest in Israel is high and although we are thousands of miles away, we can still feel the pain of our brothers and sisters in our homeland. Some of them are with us, and as we sing HaTikvah, the Israeli national anthem, passion rings through their voices. The bonfire crackles and spits, the flames growing brighter with each syllable we sing, tears in our eyes. My heart aches for the people and for the land of Israel, this incredible country that I have never visited but want to, desperately- but feel a deep connection to, anyway. Israel feels like home in a sense too tangible, to real to deny, and my love and pride for our people, for the place that will always be our safe haven is strong. I think about the things that my cousin Elizabeth tells me about; the energy and friendliness of the shuk, the Machane Yehuda Market in Jerusalem; the heat and the history of Masada; the different people davening by the Western Wall. We wave our Israeli flags and dance and I dream of weeks, years I will hopefully spend in Eretz Israel, perhaps through a youth group program, perhaps at a seminary, perhaps on a spontaneous tiyul through the small country I love despite my lack of experience. The fire shrinks to a small flicker and darkness settles over us all, our humming becoming barely audible as sleepiness takes over. That night, as I lie in my cot in the cabin, the sound of my friends’ heavy breathing fills my soul, my neshama with joy and peace. This is oneness, I think, this is beautiful.
I sit on the Bimah of my synagogue, my home, Har Zion as my confirmation class rehearses for our upcoming service we will lead together on Shavuot, a graduation, a sort of last hurrah. It is bittersweet, and as I look around me I am filled with love and pride for my wonderful, fantastic friends. These are the people I have spent the last five years attending youth group programs with, going to Bar and Bat Mitzvah's with; these are the people with whom I have grown, formed and shaped my true Jewish identity, with whom I have learned the true meaning of friendship and love and g'milut chassadim. As they come to the lecterns to read their interpretations of the traditional prayers, to chant blessings, I am filled with pride. Our class has shrunk and shifted in size over the last few years but these people, these are true, dedicated Jewish individuals and watching them grow into such incredible people has been a privilege unlike any other. I am so lucky to know and love them; the bond we share is as strong as steel. I see their faces and I remember the times I sat in the class struggling with my own pain only to have someone reach over and grasp my hand, or hug me, or send me a text filled with heart emojis and kind sentiments despite the fact that I have not said a word to imply that I am anything less than fine- they've always just known. This year is our last year together and we aren’t quite ready to let go, I think. We have learned more and grown more in this one year than ever before; we have learned about different ideas of God, and formulated our own; we have learned about reform judaism, about the movement upon which our belief system was formed; we have learned about other faiths and the ways in which other people express their devotion to their own God(s), and in a few weeks we will pledge our dedication to our own.
And it is there, as I am reflecting upon this last year spent with my friends as a hebrew school student, that I find myself thinking about my own future children. It’s a strange shift in focus, I know, but my thoughts seem to flow naturally towards these children I don’t have yet but will, one day. And I am thinking about what I hope my children will think about when asked about about their Jewish story, about what Judaism means to them. I hope to hold these children close to me as I bless the Shabbos candles, and I hope to let them help me light the Chanukah candles in December, my hand guiding their small ones. I hope that they learn to love the niggunim we sing, the prayers we whisper. I hope that my children think and dream in Hebrew, and I hope to tell them that this language, so melodic and poetic compared to the one I naturally speak is the one we have always used, a “we” that they may not be able to quite conceptualize at the time but will, someday. I hope that they sense that they come from an ancient peoples, that their ancestors faced persecution and anti-Semitism simply for being who they are and yet came out of dark periods as faithful, strong people who make up less than 1% of the world but have an enormous influence. I hope that they learn to fight injustice, to pray for guidance, to form their own ideas about God. I hope to teach them to recite the Shema before bed every night, and I hope they know that it is there for them as both a lullaby and as a battle cry, in times of simcha and in times of sadness. I hope that they are never jaded, that they find joy and passion in their Jewish lives every day, that they sing “l’chaim”, ‘to life’, to life and to love and to together-ness.
As I look around at a room of smiling familiar faces, people I love, I have a final hope for my future children. I hope that they know that the greatest thing they can take from their Jewish teachings is the incredible friendships they are bound to form. I hope that they take these people who love them and understand them and hold them close. I hope that they allow themselves to engage in conversation about their faith and beliefs, to find people who share them. I hope they understand that we need to stick together, and dedicate ourselves not only to God, but to each other. Because I know the gift of this kind of friendship, and I can’t think of anything more I could ever want for my children- those children I do not yet have, but will, someday.
