Caution:  This post contains potentially offensive religious material.  Don’t read it if you are too thin-skinned.  You were warned.  Don’t flame me if you don’t like it.  Remember, I told you, close the page if you can’t take religious sarcasm.

The Jewish holidays just came and went for this year, but we didn’t celebrate.  Oh, I tried to get my boychik to go to shul, but he wasn’t in the mood.  We missed half of them last year (Disney is an appropriate place to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, isn’t it?)  But I have to say that religion isn’t much of a topic of discussion in our house, anytime. Although there are some who would say we’re heathens, in actuality we’re both pretty much mutts when it comes to the organized faiths of our world.  I have attended far more services at the Catholic church in the past 20 years than anywhere else, though I grew up in the baptist faith (sssshhhhh, don’t tell anyone, I don’t want that getting out).  The Bob, on the other hand, is Jewish.  Lest you be confused, to be clear, his jewishness apparently only falls into the secular, slightly larger than normal nose, bagel-eating, Brooklyn accent stuff.  It doesn’t include the black hat and long coat, full beard, can’t touch a TV Remote or Light Switch on Friday nights stuff that you read about in Chaim Potok’s novels.  When we first started dating, I guess his jewishness was one of the things that intrigued me.  You know, because my closest brushes with God’s Chosen People up until that point had been at Too Jays in O-town, while EB and I noshed on pastrami on rye and black & white cookies.  What?  That’s not very close?  Hey, I knew some yiddish, I visited Dachau when we went to Germany in ‘82, I can relate, right?  Wrong!  Mainly because, while the Bob’s jewishness is overt at first meeting, he’s what I fondly call THE WORST JEW EVER!  I don’t think he’s been to temple more than 15 times in 25 years… really, less than 15 times, oy vey!  And because most of those were Funerals and Bar Mitzvahs, they really don’t count, do they?  But, as his brand-new girlfriend, I didn’t yet know this so I went right out to Barnes & Noble and bought everything they had in the ”Judaism for Shiksa’s” collection.  Then I started reading.  Pretty soon I was well-versed on all the holidays (high and low), knew some hebrew (baruch ata adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam), and even had his mother’s recipe for matzo balls.  So, I’m going to fit right in, right?  Wrong.  What I didn’t realize is that my studying of his faith was going to reveal his and even his family’s lack of knowledge about their own faith… and that’s not good.  While I wasn’t aware that they dress up the torah in satin bags and lots of jewelry, or that the bulletin they hand out in temple is written backward (missed those two things in the dummies books), I found some things that my beloved and his family didn’t know either.  For instance, our first Hanukkah began on Christmas night and I asked the Bob to share the story of Hanukkah with my conservative baptist family so they’d know what we were up to with the candles and muttering.  The Hanukkah story according to the Bob, “there was a battle, there wasn’t enough oil, but somehow they made it last 8 days.  The End.”  “No”, I exclaimed, “tell them about the Maccabi’s, the miracle, the reason why Jewish boys played Dreidel”.  “Huh?”  he replied.  Then I told them the whole story myself, because I knew it better than he did.  To his defense, it had been a long time since Hebrew School which was before his Bar Mitzvah.  And, since his parents divorced immediately after his Bar Mitzvah and he quit going to shul at that point, maybe he had a reason for not knowing the whole story.  Now, though, I know better.  His family is just like mine.  They identify with a faith, know the big stories, are reasonably well-versed about the whole Santa vs. Jesus thing, but we don’t get bogged down in the details.  You know, sort of like this: David fought Goliath, he won after he got lucky with the slingshot.  But, we didn’t know that the fight went down in the Valley of Elah until Tommy Lee Jones did a movie with that name in the title recently.  So, we too aren’t the best christians, and we sometimes don’t explain things like we should.  Bob went to church with me that first year, on Easter.  Yeah, isn’t that when you’d take a Jew to church, Easter?  When we came out, he immediately wanted to know why they undercooked lunch in our story of Easter.  He knew the high points (Jesus died on cross, we think he came back, he saved us from our sins, The End) but he had never heard about the lunch.  I was confused, ”what lunch, what are you talking about?”  He said “the bloody lamb, what was up with the bloody lamb?”  “Oh… oh that… that’s Jesus!” I responded.  “My God” he exclaimed, ”did they eat him?”  And that’s how religious intolerance probably began… in a parking lot, without enough explanation to make everything seem normal.  We’ve had some other mis-fires, like Jelly Donuts for Hanukkah.  You see, because the festival was created when the oil lasted 8 days fried foods are the food of choice.  My in-laws knew about Latkes but they didn’t know about Sufganiyot.  How had they missed that?  Any holiday that comes with a free pass to eat fried dough is my kind of holiday!  Then, it happened again.  Last year we went to the annual Brisket Dinner at his Mom’s house for Yom Kippur.  I even made a Kugel – and it was the best damned non-kosher Kugel ever made, even if I say so myself!  So, while we were eating the “Last Supper” (the last meal they were going to eat before their fasting for Yom Kippur began), I asked if they still waved a chicken or a bag of money over their heads the day before Yom Kippur.  The custom is actually called Kaparot, and I had read about it in one of my assimilation manuals, it’s very real and still customary, even here in Knoxvegas.  Again, though, my in-laws had no knowledge of these strange things I spoke of, and they all looked at me like I had asked them if they had all ran through downtown Asheville, naked, swinging a chicken and a bag of money!  I guess that’s when I realized that we were going to be fine on the whole seperate religions thing.  We had a Rabbi at the wedding, I even spoke hebrew in my vows, and we signed the Ketubah, but I’m still a protestant – no denomination, just like before.  I tried to assimilate, but there’s no need.  We can just be ourselves, eating BLTs on Bagels, and loving each other, in spite of the fact that we are both the WORST NON-DENOMINATIONALS EVER.      

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Bob, Family, Food, Holidays, Marriage, Religion.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.