Tikkun Magazine printed an essay I originally wrote for this blog, then modified significantly before submitting for their Under 25 writing contest. Click here to check it out (along with a rather enormous photograph of my head).

On my first visit to London, my friend and I spent an afternoon in the British Museum, admiring all the lovely artifacts they've stolen on various conquests. I had two goals: to visit the library where Virginia Woolf wrote and to see the Rosetta Stone.

In my high school library in Texas, there was a big copy of the Rosetta Stone mounted on the wall above the circulation desk. Beside it was a placard that said the original was in the British Museum. Now I was there and I wanted to find and photograph the real one.

I found it in a large empty room with other Egyptian artifacts scattered around. It sat exposed in the center of the room—protected, I assumed, by some sort of wireless alarm. I took a photo of it and admired it.

It was beautiful—white stone with little etchings I couldn't decipher. I focused on the stone, thinking of the fake in my hometown, which had never touched me this way, and of this real stone, which had seen so much history. I focused on the moment at which it had been discovered, and how it had been used to expose the secrets of a dazzling ancient culture.

A British couple walked by.

“Look Alan, the Rosetta Stone!” the woman said.

Her husband looked bored.

“Of course, it's not the real one.”

“Isn't it?”

“Nah, the real one is in the room across the hall. This is just a copy.”

Abandoning what had moments before been the object of my admiration, I walked over to the real Rosetta Stone, and took a picture of it—behind the glare of a glass case, squeezed between the crowds of people pushing to get closer.

Wow, I thought. The real Rosetta Stone.

A few months ago, when my grandmother passed away after a brief illness, my mother, two aunts, and two of my sisters spent the shiva (first week of mourning after a person's funeral) going through all of her belongings.

Ordinarily, this task would be left until after the shiva ended. But none of us lived in her town, so we felt pressured to sift through her things immediately. Each book, scarf, and piece of jewelry was handled with care, passed from person to person.

“Do you want this?” “I'll take it if no one else wants it.” “Julie should have it.” “Are you sure you don't want it?” “No really” “Well, okay then, I'll take it, but only if no one else wants it...you're sure you don't want it?”

My sister Elisheva eventually began to make fun of the way I reverently regarded such artifacts as tea lights from the grocery store and blank envelopes.

“That pencil is not an heirloom,” she said.

“Not yet,” I replied.

I was probably one of the worst when it came to books. This is my grandmother's book, I said to myself. This is her name on the corner of the title page. This is her handwriting. This is the dust of her hands as she held the book.

It didn't matter what the printed text said (which is perhaps how I ended up with “The Mikado and Other Plays”). It only mattered that it had been hers. She had selected it or been given it or made it and it had meant something.

Now, these objects meant something to me, but not for the same reason they had meant something to her. The blue orb-shaped candlesticks I carried home were pretty, but their value was not in their function. It was in knowing that my grandmother had owned them and loved them. This history gave them value.

As a child, my mother made my siblings and me a felt book that told the story of our family's kiddush cup (ritual wineglass). The kiddush cup had belonged to so-and-so in Europe, who baked it into a loaf of challah, and carried it across the Atlantic, and brought it to New York, where it was passed on to this-or-that person and then finally through a string of hands to my parents on their wedding day. The felt kiddush cup was held on by Velcro and moved through the pages of the book as the genuine article had moved down through history.

I was awed by the kiddush cup's illustrious history. As far as I had known, the cup had emerged from our kitchen cupboard around the same time I had gained awareness. Now, I knew it had seen my family's history. It had been cupped in hands and been enveloped by the lips of my ancestors. Perhaps they too had noticed how cold it became when filled with chilled wine.

Actually, my mom made up the thing about the kiddush cup being baked into a challah to hide it. And I clearly can't remember which family members carried it to Ellis Island. Yet despite the gaps in the kiddush cup's history, these little connections enrich each time I use it.

Why does knowing the history of an object—however fabricated that history may be—make it more precious?

Perhaps no object in Judaism more clearly demonstrates this than the Torah scroll.

The Torah scroll is made with the intention of creating an heirloom. It must be perfectly copied onto parchment by a trained scribe so that not even a letter changes over generations.

After it is made, it must be treated with care. We often pray facing it. We are instructed to rise when the Torah is taken out of the ark in which it is stored. The Torah is dressed in a velvet or silver cover and decorated with a silver breastplate, as well as bells and crowns for its “feet.”

When young people become a bar or bat mitzvah, it is a tradition at many synagogues to physically pass down the Torah. The Torah is passed from grandparents (in my case, I was lucky enough to have a great-grandparent begin the chain) to parents to child. (In fact, one of the precious objects I took from my grandmother's house was a piece of paper where she had handwritten her speech for this moment.)

The message is clear: this object is treasured. It has been treated delicately and with great care in every generation. So, you know, don't drop it. (In fact, dropping the Torah not only carries severe punishment under Jewish law for the person who drops it, but also for the people who see someone drop it.)

It is not a very far leap from ritual objects to the rituals themselves.

Recently, I was telling my boyfriend about the one time I have consciously chosen to eat unkosher meat (that makes it sound like at other times I have drunkenly chosen to eat bacon cheeseburgers).

He was pretty shocked that I had ever done that, and frankly, I was, too. I had almost forgotten it.

Of course, it was in college and I was going through a time of exploration and yada-yada. But it seems like a pretty big deal from here to say, “hmm...no thank you, only vegetarian option on the menu, I'll have the chicken.”

I think a lot of people who keep kosher but don't believe that God really cares if we keep kosher go through moments of “Okay then, so why do I do it?” (This is not to say that I'm sure God doesn't care if we keep kosher, okay God? I'll try not to speak in absolutes. Let's just say I'm agnostic about it.)

There are a lot of ways people rationalize keeping kosher. It sets me apart and reminds me that I'm Jewish. It's a more humane way to kill animals. I've been doing it for so long, I don't think I could stop. I'm a vegetarian anyway. The smell of bacon makes me sick and I don't like eating animals whose shells I have to crack.

But I think the most honest reason is “My family does it. And if I stopped, it would be a huge deal.”

What I'm getting at, I suppose, is not so original (but you didn't know that when you started reading, so sucks to you). These decisions to participate in Jewish rituals are hallowed not (only) because of something intrinsically valuable, but also because of the connections we make between them and the people we have loved.

It may not even be clear what our ancestors' or immediate family members' feelings about these rituals were and are. It's hard to know if they really “believe” in them or not, even if you ask them point blank.

But it's what they did and do, and somehow following their example connects you to them in a complicated and sweet way, like an old tallit around your shoulders, like a hand tucking you into bed. It makes you feel like you are less isolated, like your life is lengthened by this connection backward and forward, perhaps even that you can prolong their lives by participating.

Once, as a kid, I was reading the letters section of a magazine. I came across a letter sent in by a reader, Name Withheld. I kept reading and found several letters from this same author. I was impressed by not only how many letters Name Withheld had published, but what diverse points of view he had about so many articles from the previous issue. I pictured an retired grandfather sort, with plenty of time to read and write replies, typing away in a home overlooking a rocky Northeastern beach.

I'd become quite fond of Mr. Withheld, when, in a moment of "boy, am I glad this is all happening in my head," I realized that "Name Withheld" was not a man with a charmingly antiquated moniker, but rather a way of indicating that the reader had withheld his or her real name.

Now the brazen author of a dozen viewpoints became a scattered group of cowards. I had to go back and read each of the letters to assimilate this new information about them. In an instant, a realization that I had been wrong in the way I was reading changed the way I experienced the text in front of me.

Even if I'd wanted to, I could no longer delude myself into believing that Mr. Withheld existed.

I've only successfully kept a diary once in my life. For three-and-a-half weeks, I forced myself to catalog my daily experiences on the Vision Program in the Balkans. I've talked about that trip on this site before, but just to recap: 23 American university students, half Palestinian, half Jewish (one both—good counting), a month doing comparative conflict analysis and dialogue in former Yugoslavia.

We spent most of our first three weeks in the Balkans getting to know one another and trading accusations of communal guilt for our perceived victimization. Just like any group of college students backpacking around Europe.

The waking up moment happened in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The town is split down the middle by a river of striking turquoise-blue. The great symbol of Mostar is a white bridge, rebuilt after the war, but the town has long been split between Bosnian-Muslims and Croatian Catholics.

At that point, we had reached an impasse in our conversations in our dialogue group. We were feeling defeated and hot in our hotel conference room. Nothing could un-stick us, not even the breeze coming in off the Neretva River.

Then, one afternoon, while the other hotel guests took in the sun on the patio, the Palestinians in the group collectively snapped out of it. On that day, the Jewish students were essentially told to shut up and listen. Out came a story of familial loss, communal dissolution—brutally honest, shockingly personal stories. And at the culmination, one student told us of a friend who was killed in an IDF attack.

It was a session of open mouths that mimicked gaping wounds. I felt defeated by accusations that were not accusations. I no longer wanted to expunge myself of guilt. Instead, I wanted to bathe in it. I was looking for a cleansing of the spirit by confession, so I drew myself a bath.

I made a connection during that session between the circumstances of my birth and the death of the friend of the person sitting in front of me.

My parents met in Texas when my father, who was serving in the Israeli air force, traveled to Texas to learn how to use weapons the United States was providing to Israel. In other words, I would not have been born if not for the fact that the United States provides Israel with weapons technology that it in turn uses against Palestinians.

I know, I know. It seems a little histrionic.

But the fact remains that, in that moment in the basement of a hotel in Mostar, it became so clear to me that my heritage is wrapped up in the violent side of Israel that I could not believe I had never realized it before.

I guessed that if I explained this new reading of my personal history to my parents or siblings, their reaction would be amusement, confusion, or even anger. (And I was right, that is how my mom responded—hi Mom!)

But that doesn't matter. What matters is that from that point on, I felt a more urgent personal impetus to work toward ending the conflict. In the past, others—civil leaders, politicians, ancestors—had made decisions that I could not control. Now I would make decisions that reflected my new awareness.

Fast-forward two-and-a-half years. For three weeks, the war in Gaza consumed my attention. I read every article I could get my hands on. I wrote checks for humanitarian aid. I emailed my Congresspeople. I made my gchat status a poignant article or donating opportunity. I talked to my friends in Israel and at home. I tried to articulate my perspective clearly when the opportunity arose in other social situations. I tried to make myself feel useful when I was largely useless.

I had recently begun reading Jewcy.com, an online community of Jews writing on a variety of topics, including Israel. In my reading, I was so disappointed to read posts and comments from people who were so clearly stuck in a very particular hear no evil/see no evil/recognize no evil way of looking at Israel. I tried writing my own posts to persuade people to think differently. I tried commenting on other people's posts. I got myself worked up. I tried to be reasonable when I really just wanted to say, “You are so retarded! I hate you!” (Yes, I wanted to use the word “retarded.” A lot.)

The conversations on those blog posts go on for pages and pages of comments: No you're wrong. No you're wrong. Your mom is wrong. Your face is dumb. Etc.

I am starting to realize that if you are reading a situation a particular way, you cannot simply be told to throw that out and look at it in a different way. I think the human response to that is inevitably—no, I know better, let me teach you something, buddy. Perhaps that is what makes Abraham's Vision so remarkable: they create conditions within which you can learn from other people without feeling like you are being encouraged to think in a particular new way. The only prerequisite for this to work is to be open to listening.

That's why I'm cutting myself off from the Jewcy debates (hardeeharhar). I think the more important task is to join with like-minded people. So much of the stagnancy of the situation is in the feeling that the majority thinks in a particular way. We must make it clear that there is a new majority of people who are less concerned with the borders of the State of Israel than we are with Palestinian and Jewish lives, people who think the opportunity to make the Jewish State a beacon of responsibility, justice, and holding-ourselves-to-a-higher-standard is being thrown away.

To end on an optimistic note, I have heard—now more than ever before—disappointment and anger about Israeli activity in Gaza publicly articulated by American Jewish leaders. I also had a civil conversation with my father about the conflict, which must be a good sign (or a sign of the apocalypse, I'll get back to you on that).

But I used a somewhat lacking analogy up top. When I was a kid, and I realized I was misreading the letters section of the magazine, I went from an objectively wrong reading to a correct one. What I learned from the trip is that my changed opinions about Israel should instead be changing opinions. After discovering myself to be deluded once before, I would be missing the point if I didn't keep challenging my ideas.

Jewish Voice for Peace (my favorite marginalized Jews for peace nonprofit) is currently conducting a campaign for the Shministim 2008-a group of young conscientious objectors refusing to begin service in the Israeli Army. (They've also got about 800 supporters on Facebook.)This group of about 100 12^th graders has articulated their reasons for refusing to serve in this smart and clearly heartfelt letter. The students are not protesting mandatory service but rather the policies of the Israeli government in the West Bank and Gaza. They see the government's current policies as moral indefensible and a dead end.

They also call for dialogue and an end to the claim that there is no one to talk to on the Palestinian side: "In a place were there are humans, there is someone to talk to."

It is moving to see young Israelis choose to serve repeated jail sentences rather than act in opposition to their moral views.

If you're interested, you can send a letter of support for their cause to the current Defense Minister, Ehud Barak.

My mom posted an essay on her blog that was written by my little sister for a school assignment.  In the vein of NPR’s “This I Believe” segment, it is titled “I Believe in Pumpkin Soup.” My sister uses lovely language to describe the olfactory effects of pumpkin and cinnamon on her memory.  The essay is charming; my sister reveals herself to be much more interested in family traditions than I would have guessed, as she describes the family gathering from the four corners of the earth around the table at Sukkot, to break bread together and scoop up the thick, savory pumpkin soup we all love.  She reminisces about her first trip to Israel when she was seven and how the same scent of warm melon was there to reassure her and enforce her association with it of family and special occasions. 

These are all beautiful memories, except for the fact that they are wrong. 

Now that my older sister Liora and I live on the East Coast, we can’t afford to fly home for Sukkot, which is in the middle of the fall semester.  Arielle’s vision of us scurrying home just in time for my father to place steaming hot bowls on the table in front of us draws a lot more from Campbell’s commercials than Danan family history.  My mom points out that our relatives in Israel definitely did not serve pumpkin soup when Arielle (at the age of five, not seven) and the rest of us visited them in the middle of the summer. 

It’s a lovely little device to suggest that though the world is uncertain, pumpkin soup is the same across time and space.  And it’s just the kind of thing that I would’ve written for my non-Jewish high school teachers, who, let’s face it, eat this Jewish identity stuff up.  So I’m not criticizing Arielle’s writing. 

What her essay does is reflect our tendency to muddle over the inconvenient realities of home and family—and for that matter, of religion. 

I realized how often I do this myself when writing columns for the Chico Enterprise-Record, that venerable publication.  I wrote my own little essay about pumpkin soup—generalized a charming story of seasonal foods that my dad cooks, and the warm gooey feeling they give us.  But I’m not sure that every time we gathered in the sukkah, we felt “truly comforted” and appreciated being surrounded by people we loved.  I think most of the time we were just like, there are way too many mosquitoes out here and I hate you for eating all the challah. 

I similarly make up charming stories in my mind about many elements of Jewish experience: family traditions, Shabbat services, and—lately—the High Holidays.  I neglect to remember the planning, the infighting, the hassle of travel.  I rarely recall the irritating sermons, the congregation’s annoying insistence on singing the shema in the regular tune even though the cantor has just sung it in the High Holiday tune (and omigoodness it makes me want to scream when they do that).  Most notably, I forget year to year how horribly uncomforting and uninspiring the words of many of the prayers are.  Every year, new portions of the prayerbook appeal to me.  But equally, new sections puzzle and horrify me.  I am forced to ignore them in my quest to keep the High Holidays appetizing. 

This year, the passage that really got to me was U’Netanah Tokef.  The prayer asks: who will live and who will die in the coming year?  How will they die?  By fire or by water?  By sword or by beast?  By famine or by thirst? By being hit repeatedly over the head with a pool cue or by being forced to watch reruns of “Reba”?

But don’t worry—the prayer goes on—even though we have no answers to these questions, we can rest assured that prayer and charity and repentance can maybe reverse our untimely fate if we do them a lot.  For the coming year, anyway. 

I think this section stuck out to me this year because a friend of mine did, literally, die by water—of accidental drowning—about six months ago.  His death was a horrible shock—one of those so-clearly-meaningless happenings that it takes months just to convince yourself it really happened in a world you supposed to have meaning.

Now, I don’t think my dear friend lived his life in a less prayerful or less repentant or less charitable way than anyone else I know.  If anything, he was a rarity—devoted to his family, a kind and generous friend, aspiring to help strangers as a pre-med student.  When I traveled with him to the Balkans, he was one of the only men on the trip who wasn’t afraid to open up emotionally in our dialogue group.  He befriended every person he met, whether Jewish, Palestinian, American, Serbian, Bosnian, Albanian, or Croat. 

And I don’t think that my particular progressive liberal hippie brand of post-denominational renewal Judaism requires that I think otherwise, asks me to find in my friend’s life some instance to explain away his accidental death. 

So how do I say the words of this prayer? 

I wished my mother was there to give me a lovely, figurative explanation, like that what it really means is the death of the soul through drowning in self-absorption, or something.  But she was thousands of miles away and I was alone with the page in front of me.

How do I say the words of this prayer?

It’s a question that comes up again and again.  When we ask for peace for the children of Israel but not for all the people of the world, or when we say the names of the patriarchs and not the matriarchs, or ask for the messiah to come, for God to raise the dead, for the Temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem.

How do I say the words of these prayers when I believe in egalitarianism, universalism, rationalism, pluralism?

In most of the synagogues I frequent, an egalitarian approach to the liturgy has been applied.  We say that God is the God of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, too.  Al-kol yoshvei tevel—for all who dwell on this planet—is a handy phrase for adding in after al-kol yisrael—for all the people of Israel—at the end of the Kaddish. At Beth Am, we said “mehayeh kol chai”—God sustains all life instead of “mehayeh meitim”—God raises the dead.  When I go to services that don’t change these phrases, I usually say the change to myself, under my breath, like “You and I both know what I’m saying here, right God?” 

I used to think that altering the words of the prayers was wrong, because it let you off the hook from struggling with the ancient texts.  But how can I pray earnestly if I’m saying something I don’t really believe?  I have no way to defend the traditional language to the multitude of Jews my age who are disinterested or the non-Jews who are disenfranchised by them, so I feel there is no choice but to let the words be changed by time and circumstance.  Why should liturgy be untouchable when progressive Judaism insists that other aspects of Jewish life can change over generations? 

But I had no quick fix for U’Netanah Tokef, and I found myself sitting there like I sometimes find myself sitting in the middle of the seder or a night in the sukkah—cranky, because this isn’t what I remembered the holiday to be like. 

How do I say the words of this prayer?

I kept my mouth shut.  I didn’t say the words.  But I didn’t protest them either.  I just tucked them away to talk about later with like-minded people. 

Friday evening:

At 770 Eastern Parkway, men and boys transform the floor into a dancing mass of black hats and free-falling curls.  The Chassidic women sit in two balconies that face each other over the chaos below.  The balconies are fenced in by mirrored windows and constricted by long, narrow benches.  The women are not dancing tonight, and that bothers me.   

On the Upper West Side, the keyboardist at B’nai Jeshurun insists on accompanying every prayer, including the “Barchu.”  I lean over to my companion and whisper that I feel like I’m in a musical. 

Romemu, a kehilah that meets in the basement of a church on 114^th Street, prefers for parishioners to sit in a circle, some on pillows on the ground.  We chant and beat drums, and soon I am filled with the image of desert earth falling away beneath me.  This kind of worship is the essence of Judaism—a cult in the wilderness devoted to praising God.  Only that woman’s wailing is really irksome.  Isn’t she just a bit over the top? 

The sermon at another synagogue is filled with blind Zionist sentiment.  A fifth shul is not adequately committed to egalitarianism.  At a temple in Boston, we are forced to sing a song from “Fiddler on the Roof.” 

Shabbat should be a day of rest, but my quest to find the perfect synagogue has transformed every service into a critical exercise. 

Growing up, my mother was my rabbi, and as a result, every platitudinous sermon, every garbled melody, every attempt to rephrase a blessing into a more progressive version of itself compels me to protest.

The only right Judaism is the Judaism of my childhood.  It consists of some mixture of my father’s Moroccan cooking, my mother’s cloying Debbie Friedman tapes, and being told to get up and get ready for services already because this is my mother’s job and she really cannot be late.  It also consists of telling my friends that I can’t come to the football game—sacrilege in a Texas town—because I’ve got to spend Friday evenings around the dinner table with my family.  The Judaism of my childhood requires that I eat cake for breakfast on Shabbat morning, and spend Shabbat afternoons reading on the living room couch as the sun sets lower and lower until someone calls out “Havdalah time!” and my siblings and I shuffle gladly into the kitchen. 

I’ve tried hard to recreate the Judaism of my childhood and found snippets of it in various places: at Chabad of Cambridge, England, where I studied abroad; while reading Jewish and non-Jewish theology; in holiday celebrations held with transplanted San Antonio Jews in New York City.  I have searched for the Judaism of my childhood as Jews throughout the centuries have sought to return to the authentic kernel of Judaism—that essential something that makes a thing Jewish or not Jewish.

I may be a discriminating connoisseur of Jewish practice, but when it comes to authenticity, the Judaism of my childhood is not a judgmental one.  As a kid, I was encouraged to meditate and study Buddhism, to work with Christians and Muslims for peace.  But others have repeatedly questioned me about my Judaism’s validity.  People want to know how my dad—an Orthodox Sephardi Jew—can tolerate my mom being a progressive rabbi.  They want to know more about the Renewal movement, which sounds a little wishy-washy and suspicious.  They want to know how I can earnestly believe that Israel has damaged the Jewish community despite my large family there. 

I have tried to defend my Judaism by comparing it to other, established forms—“Martin Buber argued a century ago for coexistence with the Arabs in Palestine!” “Renewal Judaism is just like progressive Chassidism.  It’s very scholarly” “My parents were Orthodox when they first got married.  My family’s pretty conservative, I promise!”—but the questions have not stopped coming, and so I have countered their claims of legitimacy with my own divisive claims.  I have been left feeling alienated, left whispering in the back of shul after shul, “This is not right.  No, not right at all.”

More and more, I believe that a search for the essence of Judaism is similar to my attempts to recover the Judaism of my childhood.  It is simply not possible.  That reality—if it ever existed—is gone. 

That my vision of my Jewish childhood is tenuous became explicit recently, while driving my mother home from the airport after a Renewal conference.  I told her that I was giving her this chance to defend herself, to provide me with the particular turns of phrase that would enable me to better stand up for her.

“Well, don’t tell them I had my chakras aligned at the rabbinical retreat,” she responded.

“Mo-om,” I replied.  She was being deliberately difficult.  Here I was, doing my best to defend her to the Jewish establishment, and she was off partying with tree-hugging pagans who made pot hamantashen on Purim!

“Isn’t it true your tree-hugging pagan friends make pot hamantashen on Purim?” I asked. 

“She was just one lesbian Wicca rabbi, okay? Not everyone makes pot hamantashen.  Besides, your savta used to bake hashish into her cookies on Purim.”

My savta—my father’s mother—that beacon of spiritual authenticity, baked hashish cookies for Purim?

It took me a moment to digest that very silly information.  And in that moment, I realized that my mother did not want or need me to stand up for her.  Her Judaism was genuine in her eyes; my insecurities were my own.

Who does deserve authority? My parents? My ancestors? Myself? The Big Guy Upstairs?  Anyone at all?  I guess the nice thing about my particular brand of Jewish chameleonism is that I get to keep struggling with that.

 

As the hubbub over Barack Obama’s association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright dies down, the time has come to reflect on our bizarre and contradictory understanding of the role of religion in public life. 

When Obama’s name first floated into the homes of wealthy, educated American Jews, there was quite a to-do over the fact that this guy who was pretty much a Muslim might soon be our President.  What would he do about Israel?  Was he to be trusted?  Didn’t we just want a good ol’ reliable Christian in the White House?  Obama was forced to publicly declare that of course he was not a Muslim, god forbid.  (It was pretty embarrassing for the Jewish community.)

Then, as the Wright scandal progressed, it became clear that the church of Jeremiah Wright was not at all “safe.”  We were dubious of Obama’s connection to a man who spewed such anti-American vitriol.  But we were comforted when Obama explained that Wright was of another generation, a generation that had been beaten down and had found in the church a place to express its feelings of abandonment and mistreatment.  It was just civil rights stuff and nothing to worry about, Obama said. 

But then Wright kept saying the stuff he had been saying before, and everyone got up in arms about it because…well…it was one thing if he’d said stuff like that before, but honestly, could he just say whatever he wanted whenever he wanted?  However, evidently, we were satisfied by Obama’s public breakup with Wright (or else someone else might be the forerunner now). 

Did we learn anything at all from this?  Can we perhaps glean that just as the Christian church is not homogenous, neither is the Muslim one?  Can we say firmly that Obama’s religious affiliation as Christian or Muslim or whatever is such a wide-ranging descriptive that it’s effectively meaningless?  Or do we still think that it matters?  Do we need to find out that Obama is actually affiliated with some unsavory Jewish sect before we will get it? 

And as for Obama’s apologetic defense of Wright’s past statements—well, we found that compelling, right?  No one (except maybe Bill Cosby) can deny that black American men have had it pretty bad.  Wright said (and says) things that are a product of the circumstances of his upbringing.  We might not want Wright to be President, and yet we are willing to accept that Obama could sit in his church and walk out and say what he says about hope and uniting across racial lines for a better country and, y’know, mean it.  I’m willing to wager we would not make the same concessions for a Muslim President who sat for a couple decades in a mosque with a heady imam speaking about the way America has poisoned the Middle East.      

I guess Jesus does matter, after all.

Or maybe it's just that we've accepted our collective responsibility for the anger of black Americans and not for the anger of Muslim Americans. 

I don't know.  I'm open to suggestions.

There was only one blonde-haired girl in my Jewish day school class.  Her blondeness was a magnet—boys and girls alike followed her around the playground—and her yellow curls granted her a special role in all our games of make-believe.

When we played House, she was the baby.  When we played Jungle, she was the lion cub.  When we played Doctor, she was the attending physician.

And so, it was only natural that when we began to hear whispers of something called “the Holocaust,” which all the sixth graders were learning about, but which we were still too young to learn, that she would play a central part in the new game we started to play.

We were fascinated by the Holocaust initially because it was taboo.  Some kids weren’t even allowed to listen to the speakers or watch the films that our embarrassed, non-Jewish history teacher used to introduce us to the topic.  She would speak in hushed tones and gesture out to the class, as if to say: “But of course, who am I to say?”  Out of school, we passed around books on the subject—Number the Stars and Jacob’s Room, fiction written for older kids—and at recess, we unpacked this new storyline, this new horrifying and amazing truth about the world, like every story we had learned since preschool. 

We played Holocaust. 

Playing Holocaust went something like this:  Sabrina and I, with our dark hair and our willingness to play disfavored roles, were poor Jews, languishing in a secret room hidden beneath the city streets.  We would have died if it were not for Andrea, whom we sent out into the world above, where her blond curls disguised her as a German woman, and she could get food to bring back and feed us before we starved.  

We played our parts with dignity. 

“You must go, Alexis,” I would say to Andrea, who got to pick her own name for the game.  “Even though the Nazis might find us before you return.”

“Without you, we’d starve,” Sabrina would add.  And Andrea would hug us both and then solemnly withdraw into the sunlight above the slide. 

Later that night, lying in bed with a stuffed animal cuddled close, I would continue playing Holocaust, imagining I was a refugee woman with a child to protect as I hid from the Nazis in the fields.  I had very little sense of where I was running to, or what it meant to be a refugee, or how, exactly, all this Nazis-hating-the-Jews business got started.  But I felt very earnestly that my role in the game was to be the quiet, strong woman, protecting the more vulnerable even as I endured the blows of oppression.

Meanwhile, my non-Jewish friends were getting really good at softball.

I can’t remember if one of our elementary-school friends had the guts to play an S.S. officer.  More likely, we all played Jews, each of us imagining the invisible threat of the German officers.  The games were not about being caught or being killed.  They were about daring escapes.  They were about running, hiding, and suffering.  It’s an important distinction: we didn’t play Concentration Camp.  We were interested in the slow decline of human rights—in unfairness, not in death.  We were interested in suffering while others flourished, not in suffering alone.

Playing Holocaust was not really about acting out the story of World War II.  It was about trying out those feelings that, collectively, we felt were ours to feel.  We hadn’t really been there, but we knew.  We understood.  This was just another line in a long history of oppression.  Being a Jew meant being privy to the worst impulses of humankind. 

Of course, the stories of how people died in the Holocaust held a kind of twisted fascination for us.  But in our games, we were much more inclined to act out the stories of survivors. 

Many years later, as a college student, my sister and I went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.  Upon entering the museum, each visitor is handed a “passport” that tells the story of someone who lived during the Holocaust.  Some were killed; some lived on.  The cards are handed out randomly, presumably to impress upon visitors the arbitrariness of survival.

The person on my sister’s card survived; the person on my card did not. 

If I had lived during the Holocaust, I would probably have died. 

My sister saw my face and offered to trade.  I traded.

That thought, which I experienced for the first time that day, shattered some romantic notions I had about the Holocaust. 

After all, here was a story of the heights of human sacrifice and human suffering; of coldness and warmth; of the limits of human survival; of star-crossed lovers and love in unlikely places; of a ray of hope shining out of the depths of despair; of the origins of the Jewish State.  Here was a story of “the ultimate.”  And it was all true. 

Standing in the museum, I thought, this was a story about death.  There was nothing romantic or redemptive about death.  The people who had died in the Holocaust had not earned anything for the rest of us.  They had only died, and that was it.

It was a simple, obvious thought.  And it represented a small, but important transition in my thinking.  It pointed to the line between commemorating the lives of the dead, and commemorating the Holocaust.  Between telling the story of the lives of those we have lost, and telling the story of the oppression of the Jewish people.  It snips the narrative in two, and separates life from life.

I only began to think about my relationship to the Holocaust—the way I have been taught about it and struggled to comprehend it from the days that I first played Holocaust in the sandbox to the day I stumbled out of Yad Vashem into the blinding Jerusalem sun to the every-day that I encounter it and choose to discuss it or ignore it—when I began to think more critically about my relationship to Israel.

 

 

In the summer of 2006, I traveled to the Balkans with a group of 23 Palestinian American and Jewish American college students. 

 

We sat on chairs made for children in a sticky Belgrade classroom in June, fanning ourselves with our massive course readers.  The staff, half Palestinian and half Jewish, had split us into two mixed groups, A and B.  Luckily, they had placed me in Group B, with the cool kids.  At this stage of the trip, there were still serious social navigation issues to be considered.     

A thought experiment: begin by writing down eight aspects of your identity.

I chose three easily: Jewish, American, woman.  Boy, my mother would be proud.  

After thinking for a moment, I added: Student.  Then: Texan.  Everyone in New York thought of me as Texan, anyway.   

Next: Israeli.  After all, my father is Israeli, my family Israeli, one of my passports— Israeli.  Sure, I had never really considered myself Israeli, but in many ways, I strongly identified as Israeli.  Didn’t I?  When pressed?  If they asked about it, I would have an explanation anyway. 

And for that matter: Moroccan.  My family had lived in Morocco for hundreds of years.  Morocco is in my blood, in my family traditions, in my understanding of myself.  Moroccan.  Yes.

Only one left.  Alright, how about something more personal.  I am a writer.  Or a theologian.  (I had just spent a year studying theology in Cambridge.)  That could be one: theologian/writer.  Excellent. 

Why wasn’t everyone else done yet?  What were they writing?  There were only eight words to write down.  How long could it take? 

Thought experiment: the staff informed us that aliens had taken over the earth.  At this point, I doubted the staff’s clearly biased information, but alright, I would imagine that little green aliens had taken over our classroom in a big spaceship.  They would let us live, the staff said, but first we had to give up two of our eight chosen identities.

Easy, peasy.  Obviously Moroccan was the first to go.  The connection there had always been tenuous.  And in any case, while my family might be Moroccan, I was certainly not Moroccan by any stretch of the imagination.  If asked, I would explain that I was really Moroccan-Israeli.  “Foreign” might have covered it better.  But the aliens were wise to consolidation and demanded certitude.   

Texan was not terribly interesting and American pretty much covered that anyway.  Goodbye, Texan.  

But the aliens were not appeased, the staff said.  Two more identities had to go. 

Student was disposable because it was a temporary state of being.  Of course, I considered myself a life-long student of the world, but that was probably covered under writer/theologian.

And woman, while certainly important, was really just a fact of life, not an identity I needed to express to the group. 

Once more, the aliens demanded satisfaction (for imaginary aliens they were quite demanding).  We were to throw away two more identities, and select a final pair to present to the group.  (The aliens were violently interested in the intersection of identity-politics and conflict resolution, it seemed.)

I had four identities left: Jewish, writer/theologian, American and Israeli. 

I hesitated over American.  I had just spent a year in England, and visions of New York in the rain and Philip Roth books danced in my head to the soundtrack of a Woody Allen movie.  To be American seemed incredibly important, but in this room it did not set me apart.   

I wanted to keep Israeli, but was I really Israeli?  If I were to say, “I definitely think of myself as Israeli,” would I believe it?  Was it something I had thought before or an identity I wanted to have in this room where nationality mattered not a little?

Couldn’t I keep them all and not decide?  Damn, I hated these aliens.

I kept writer/theologian.  I wanted to be a writer.  And I wanted to be a thinker.  (I also wanted everyone in the room to think that I was smart.)

And that left Jewish.

For all the questioning, re-imagining and truth-stretching I had to do to keep other identities in the ring, Jewish was one identity that was not optional. 

It was not a choice.  It was not a conclusion I came to by considering how I wanted this group of Jews and Palestinians to see me. 

If I threw it away, I imagined the aliens would take one look at my remaining identities and throw me in an intergalactic rehabilitation facility, where I would be forced to look at photographic stills of my ancestors in the shtetl and my ancestors in the mellah, sing Cheeri-Bim/Cheeri-Bom, and tread broth in a giant vat of matzah ball soup until I cried out “Okay, yes!  Yes!  In the words of Daniel Pearl, I am a Jew!  I swear if you let me out of this cage, I’ll donate to the JNF!”

They were doing a number on me, these imaginary aliens. 

And so that is what I told the group.  Whatever other identities might come and go, of these two things I am certain: I am a writer, and I am a Jew.

When it came time to share, and I heard the answers the other students had come up with, some of which were abstract words like "desert" and "jazz," I felt a little sheepish that of my eight original choices, half were nationalities (Texas, of course, being a sovereign state).  But I was pleased that I had discarded all of them in the end, and kept one group identity, one personal.  One tying me to the past, one opening the possibilities of the future.  Maybe every once in a while we all need some aliens to sit us down and force us to consider what our identities really are.

The title of this blog is taken from a book I loved growing up called What Happened to Heather Hopkowitz?

The book tells the story of a young Jewish American girl trying to figure out what it means to her to be Jewish, and finding herself going down a path (Orthodoxy) that seems crazy to her family and non-orthodox friends.  Hence the title, which asks how a nice girl could let a thing like religion happen to her. 

(Spoiler alert) Orthodoxy is not my chosen brand of Judaism, but I can't help but identify with Heather Hopkowitz's struggle to find her place and find acceptance in her family community, her community of friends, and her Jewish community. She was a teenager (and fictional); I've graduated from college (and am not fictional), but we still have a lot of the same questions.  Add to that the more grown-up questions that bear down on me now: my relationship to Israel, my beliefs about inter-marriage, my understanding of how to respond to the Holocaust--and I think you'll agree I have plenty of material for a blog.

"What Happened To Shira Danan?" will be a place for me to publish my thoughts on being a young, American Jewish woman.  I hope you'll check in weekly to read more about my life growing up in south Texas as the daughter of a female rabbi and a Moroccan-born Israeli father, my journeys through Chassidism, Zionism, Secularism and more.  It's going to be a funny, thoughtful blog for you to read, and hopefully soon it will be a funny, thoughtful podcast for you to listen to.