The Jewish Thing, Part 2: The Wrath of Bubbe

PREVIOUSLY ON BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: THE JEWISH THING, PART 1

I told you I'd come back to it. With no new exciting life developments a'happenin' (a.k.a. no job) I'm dipping into that old yamica of tricks* and continuing on with the Jewish thing. My mother's friend Eve gave only one note about my blog - "be kind to the Jews". Um... uh... this part might be rough going for you, Eve. But it all wraps up nicely in Part 3 after I go to Israel and learn a bunch, so don't get too upset. Whoops - did I just give away the ending? I have so much to learn about story structure...

*I refuse to spell it 'yarmulke', because my brain reads it YAR-MULL-KEY, which is gross.

So if we recall, Part 1 came from me trying to explain how it was that I stopped going to temple. I talked a lot about how it was fairly difficult being a lone Jew in a conservative Christian suburb - it made me - what's a nice word? - disenchanted with organized religion, to say the least. I saw firsthand the way it divided people, made people treat others poorly. But y'know what else made disenchanted with my religion? My religion. Yup, that's right. Judaism is just as much to blame for driving me away from religion as close-minded Christians are. Sorry, Judaism. I love you dawg but you know it's true! See, as much as I was the token Jew in my hometown, the funny thing is that I was never actually all that Jewish really. My family was reform, which is the Jewish equivalent of threat level green - it's as low-down on the totem pole as you can go. We weren't super religious - we never celebrated shabbat, which I only realized on my recent Israel-trip is quite abnormal for Jews. It was mostly high holidays, which meant services. Services were hours long and painfully boring - I never liked going. And OH YEAH: Hebrew school.

I hated Hebrew school. HATED it. For one thing, it was more school after school. What kid would like that? With no Jews in the area, we had to drive twenty minutes to get to the temple - to a kid whose age was in the single-digits it felt like an hour. All of the other kids there knew each other from regular school, so for them it was like extra hang-out time - for me it was more like, "who are all of you?" or perhaps, "Do any of you watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer?" I remember week after week screaming and begging and crying, running out of my house and taking off down the street in a refusal to go. A couple weeks it worked, but most of the time my mother would pull up in the car and bribe me by promising a McDonalds run (fat kid kryptonite).*

*Let's be honest though - she could have bribed better. If she had offered to take me to Taco Bell instead I probably would've converted to Orthodoxy. 

And the teachers... well, we didn't have the best of relationships. I was not happy to be there, and I guess I could be occasionally... surly. Yeah, surly. I remember gleefully telling one teacher that I was going to miss the next class because I had family in town. Then, in the pick-up line*, this teacher approached my car and asked my mother if I was indeed missing class. My mother said no (though I had thought we had reached an agreement on this point), and with god my mother, my aunt, and my cousin as my witness, this teacher - a grown-ass, middle aged woman - looked at me, an eight or nine-year old - and shouted "HA HA, HA HA, HA HA..." in my face. As my mother pulled away in the car, we could still hear her yelling. So not the most healthiest of environments for anyone involved, it seems.

*You want to see sheer inanity? Go to a Hebrew school pick-up and watch how it takes cars tens of minutes to simply get their kid and leave.

All of this might have been fine if I had been way into the religion itself or something... but you'll be shocked to hear this wasn't the case. I found the logic of religion... specious. My questions were given trite, patronizing answers - I think people felt because they were talking to a child, they didn't have to earn my beliefs in a real way. They were wrong with this kid. To this day, whenever he sees my mother, the president of the temple asks her, "How's Alex? Is he a lawyer yet?" because I argued so much. I just never liked being told what to do and not being as good reason as to why. "Just because" didn't cut it for me. There were silly rules and silly traditions that made no sense - any organized religion has them. And I didn't like being told that I had some sort of obligation to some greater thing that other people insisted was important, even if it meant nothing to me. I thought Yom Kippur was the worst. One of the high holidays, Yom Kippur is the day of atonement, where you apologize to god for all the bad stuff you've done all year. I remember thinking, "I'm not going to apologize to some supposed deity. If I wronged another person, I can apologize to the person, but I don't owe some anyone else an explanation. and I can police my own morals thankyouverymuch, I don't need fear of a sky bully to make me be a good person."

The point is, after my Bar Mitzvah*, which I did for my parents, I was out. They were all like, "we want you to do confirmation" and I was all like, "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?" Okay, I didn't really say that. I would never swear in front of my parents. But hopefully the harshness of that sentence indicates just how flabbergasted and not-agreeable - putting it lightly, here - I was to the idea of continuing my Hebrew studies.

*I still maintain that people should have their Bar Mitzvah when they're 18 or 21. A party that expensive, that nice was wasted on me - I didn't have any fun. I didn't get to eat any food, almost none of the people who became my best friends were there, and most importantly, at that age I refused to dance. And we all know that now I love dancing. I would kill to have that party now.

But honestly, the straw that broke the camel's back probably happened way earlier - this camel was walking around with a broken back for years before he quit. In the mid/late 90's, right after the Lewinsky scandal broke, I was at my Bubbe's house in Michigan. I was seven or eight years old. Bubbe had recently gotten e-mail - remember when internet was new? remember when WiFi wasn't a thing? - and like all old Jewish ladies, used her screechy, insane dial-up mostly to send chain joke e-mails. I was sitting next to her, staring at her weird fake plants while she was reading an e-mail. Suddenly she laughed uproariously. I read the joke - "If a Jew was president, all the secretaries would be shiksas!" I asked her why this was funny, and she explained that Jewish people didn't marry people who weren't Jewish. At the time, I was convinced that I was going to marry the pretty blonde girl in our neighborhood who had become my best friend, so I said - and this is verbatim - "Well, if I loved somebody who wasn't Jewish, I would marry them?"

"Aw, how sweet!" You're thinking - you'd be mostly right, this was before I got fat and I was a pretty cute kid. Bubbe disagreed. She began screaming at me. Screaming, at a child. Screaming that I should never say that, that Jews married Jews - the finite details of what she said are a little lost to me, but I remember two feelings very well. First, I remember feeling how wrong she was, and how mad I was that she thought she could tell me how to live my life based on her rules - "I'll marry whoever the hell I want!" Secondly, I remember the feeling of, "It is completely inappropriate for you to be screaming at me when you're an adult and I'm a child". Honestly, even at such a young age, I was feeling "how dare you scream at me like this! Just because we have differing opinions doesn't give you the right to bully me, Bubbe!" I wasn't then speaking in those grown-up words but the feeling translates.

The irony that Bubbe couldn't see is how badly her bullying (Bubbying?) backfired. Instead of shaming me into feeling I had to stick to the Jewish conventions, I instead - chip on my shoulder - became more determined that no person, no religion, no ridiculous rules would tell me how to live my life. I life my life on my terms.

This got suuuuuuper serious, didn't it? Yee-ikes. Sorry, this is just sort of how my Jewish journey continues, I guess, and I'm trying to write it all out, warts n'all. But remember, Part 3 is way more upbeat. Falafel is involved.

TO BE CONTINUED

The Jewish Thing, Part 1: Barrington Balagan

DISCLAIMER: If you thought last week I started taking myself too seriously, this week is gonna be difficult...

It's Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year; any Jew will tell you that it's a very important holiday for anyone who subscribes to the religion. I have been asked if I would like to go to services tomorrow - my response, verbatim: "Will there be lunch involved?*" You may find this tasteless - it's a religious service, after all. But considering that in the last ten years I haven't even considered going to services, it's a minor victory for the faith. My inner [insert hard-hitting journalist] tells me the obvious follow-up question is, "Why haven't you been to services in ten years?"

That's right kids, buckle up. We're gettin' into the Jewish thing. Prepare for some complaining.

*This question is VERY Jewish and is perhaps is an indicator that I should go.

I grew up Jewish in an extremely conservative Christian area. This experience, for those of you who did not share it with me, feels something akin to being trapped on one side of one-way mirror, watching everyone else have a party without you. And when you start banging on the mirror, trying to let them know what's up, the smug little brats turn towards the noise and start pelting you with eggs. Overdramatic, sure, but everything's overdramatic when you're a child. Correction, everything's overdramatic when you're an overdramatic child.* Still, I maintain to this day that I was in the right.

*This sentence would seem to imply that I am no longer overdramatic. This sentence would be lying.

It starts young. Kids are dumb, and they can be mean without knowing it. It would seem, based on my experience, that they don't have the mental capability to feel empathy. Or maybe it was just the kids around me. No, wait... it was the adults too. That is, perhaps, the most frustrating part of it all. One of my two biggest pet peeves in the world is adults who act like children, and maybe this contributed to that.* I have a running log in my head of some of the incidents that were an affront to me. Let's begin, shall we?

*The other is when someone opens a can of soda, takes one or two sips, and then leaves it on the counter where it immediately gets flat and is wasted. WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU? Have you no decency??

In kindergarden I first got a taste of how completely oblivious people were to the mere idea of inclusiveness when were all given Christmas Trees to color. It seems it had not occurred to anyone that someone might not celebrate Christmas. Then, in second grade we had a "Christmas Concert" where we sang all Christmas songs. I asked the music teacher if we would sing any Hanukkah songs. "Well", she sighed, "Light the Candles All Around the World is sort of a Hanukkah song." "Uh, no bitch, it is not" I didn't say; I was a nice boy.* In fifth grade we had a Christmas party that included games like "stuff the Santa" and "guess the Christmas song". I was recently told by a friend (shout-out to my homegirl Katrina!) that she distinctly remembers me being deeply upset and as a fifth-grader she thought, "yeah, that isn't really fair". I boycotted that Christmas party. I sat out in the hall, against the lockers. NOBODY cared. No teacher came out to talk to me. Nary a peep. Nary!

*But seriously it isn't.

Kids can be cruel. Time after time I would get asked, "What's wrong with you?" "How can you not do Christmas?" "Don't you know Christmas is way more fun than Hanukkah?*", and my personal favorite, "so how can you just, like, not believe in Jesus?**", as if my religion was any weirder and more random than theirs, or as if I had anything to do with the religion I was born into. A kid wrote his in-class story about Christmas vs. Hanukkah (guess who won - it rhymes with Bristmas). I used to get so angry and defensive, inappropriately so, and I didn't understand why. A classmate in high school recounted to me, "I remember when someone said something about Christmas and you stood up and started yelling - six million Jews died in the holocaust!" "Oh my god, that's embarrassing" I said, turning red. I have no memory of that incident, but I have no doubt it happened. I do remember going to sit in the hallway when someone brought up Jesus Christ in class, requesting angrily for someone to come get me when they were done.

*"HANUKKAH HAS EIGHT DAYS THOUGH SO THERE" became my defensive response.
**I got asked the Jesus question even in high school. Nuts, ain't it?

So while the tantrums were perhaps misguided, I do understand the place they were coming from. Unfortunately, I developed a reputation as that Jewish kid who hated Christmas, which only further added to the problem; now to the other kids, Jews seemed really grumpy. Kids used to ask me why I hated Christmas - another super fun question! - but that wasn't it at all. I have no problem with any religion or holiday... what bothered me, really made my skin crawl, was the fact that these people could not even wrap their minds around the idea that somebody could think differently than they did. It was a foreign concept that anybody might do anything other than the things they themselves did. It wasn't that they didn't like Judaism; it was that they didn't even seem to know (or care) that it was a thing. And while "that's not a thing" is one of my favorite expressions, it most certainly was a thing. I imagine two blonde parents in country club argyle sweaters, sipping coffee and reading the paper as their daughter comes home from school...

     Daughter: Hello mummy! Hello papa!
     Mother: How was your day sweetheart?
     Daughter: Oh, it was so exciting! There's a new boy in class, and he's a Jew!
     Mother: A what?
     Daughter: A Jew, mummy.
     Mother: What on earth is she saying?
     Father: A Jew... oh, like on the television? Like that Seinfeld show that you love.
     Mother: Oh, sweetie, Jews aren't real! 
     Daughter: But he is, mummy, I saw him!
     Father: Sweetheart, what did your mother and I say about making up stories?
     Daughter: But papa!
     Father: What did we say?
     Daughter: ...it's not polite to lie.
     Father: That's right. Goodness me, it says in the paper the president had an affair...

Did I overdo it? Well, you get the idea. Anyway, the whole situation just felt bad in my core, my inherent sense of what was right and what was wrong. My mother feels so awful when I talk about this aspect of my childhood - "I feel like I failed as a parent!" she says. But growing up that way gave me empathy for anyone feeling like a minority or an outsider; I know how it feels to feel marginalized.* It's cruel, it hurts, and nobody should be made to feel that way. Many (powerful) people don't seem to care about the feelings of others anymore - we could use a little more empathy in the world. So I learned how wrong discrimination and marginalization were - I say that's a pretty good trade-off for being pissy during a couple of class parties. And possibly more importantly, when I see Bill O'Reilly on TV talking about the "War on Christmas" and "how DARE Target change their sign to say Happy Holidays", I know he's an asshole. Because being NICE AND INCLUSIVE to all people is A GOOD THING. It's kind. We could use more kindness, too. Kindness and empathy, and also smaller size frozen pizzas because I always end up eating the whole thing even when I'm not actually that hungry, y'know?

*And don't think I'm not aware that my experience PALES in comparison to many others. But this happens to be mine.

This still hasn't quite answered the question of why I stopped going to temple, but we're out of time for this week - I've gone on long enough; I'm stepping off my soapbox now. So to all my Jews, have a good Rosh Hashanah. And to everyone else, enjoy work/school! Jews are taking the day off, suckas!

TO BE CONTINUED