A Cautionary Tale

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

Yesterday something happened that took my breath away.

Our local Chabad rabbi needed a minyan and he texted my 15-year-old son.

I can honestly say this was among the most profound joys of my entire life. It felt momentous in a way that defies translation. I had the deepest sense of relief, among other things: that whatever mistakes I may have made as a parent — and no parenting life is free of them — I’ve raised two beautifully Jewish young adults.

This occasion took me back to my son’s bar mitzvah for a moment, and an equally moving and jarring thing that happened at his reception.

My son was calling his inner circle up, an individual or family at a time, to be honored in his candle-lighting ceremony.

As he read a brief statement about the role each honoree has played in his life, they took the candle from his hand, used it to light their own candle, and embraced him before sitting back down.

Our rebbetzin, Tzivie, was there representing her family and she was called up in her turn to light one of his candles. She did so, and then she could be seen speaking to him, but unlike all the others, she did not hug him before sitting back down, though she had never refrained from touching him before.

I realized with a shock that, by Jewish law, my son was a man now, and she was no longer permitted to hug him.

The bar mitzvah ceremony is, of course, a ritual marking a Jewish boy’s passage into manhood, but nothing drove that home in a visceral way more than this moment.

And two years later — yesterday — that feeling returned, when the rabbi included him in the congregation’s circle of men to be tapped for a minyan.

Where was my husband, you might ask. My husband converted to Judaism in order to marry me, but it was a reform conversion, which isn’t recognized by Chabad. And though my husband does identify as a Jew, it’s probably more accurate to call him a Judeophile. He has the deepest love and admiration for the Jewish people and is thrilled to be in the fold; he has fastidiously kept his promise to raise our children 100% Jewish (with no Christmas trees or other competing traditions) but he doesn’t know the Mourners’ Kaddish and he could not adequately fulfill the role of a minyan member.

But my son could, and that’s all that matters to me.

Years ago, I went to visit an elderly and infirm Jewish man. I’ll call him George Goldstein, which resembles his real name in that it’s recognizably Jewish. I’d been sent by a friend who lived in his retirement community and who wanted him to write an account of his life. I was there to discuss the possibility of assisting him with such a project.

This encounter was one of the most memorable and heartbreaking ones I’ve ever had. Mr. Goldstein was a Holocaust survivor from Hungary whose response to trauma was to run as far away from his Jewishness as he could. He married a non-Jewish woman and made no attempt to give his son any semblance of a Jewish upbringing.

He clearly regretted the latter decision when we met, but it was too late. His son taught at a university known for being among the most anti-Israel in the country. Let’s call it Jihad University, because that’s not much of an exaggeration.

He told me that though his son, too, was an ardent anti-Zionist, neither this nor his fastidious lack of Jewish observance had saved him from experiencing chronic anti-Semitism at Jihad university.

“If he’s an anti-Zionist and totally non-observant, how do they even know he’s Jewish?” I asked.

“He has a Jewish last name.”

“Ah, of course. But… since his mother isn’t Jewish, he’s not even Jewish by Jewish law! So if he’s not technically Jewish, and he doesn’t identify as Jewish, is there any angle from which he could actually be said to even BE Jewish?”

The old man looked steadily across the coffee table at me and said, in his fading voice: “He’s Jewish to the goyim.”

Because of course he was. Of course.

I felt such an overwhelming connection with this man. Such a sense of familial closeness. There was a framed rectangle of cloth on his wall, with the word “Shalom” embroidered in Hebrew and surrounded by a pattern of vines. I said, “That looks almost like a challah cover,” and he said, “It is a challah cover.”

There was a painting on the wall of a storefront with an awning overlooking a cobblestone street. There was nothing to identify the shop or the location, but I said: “The feeling I get from that painting — for me, it conjures the meat-packing district in lower Manhattan,” and he said, “That’s where it is.”

The whole meeting was like that. An intimacy beneath this first meeting between strangers who were generations apart. A quintessentially Jewish feeling that, again, defies translation.

Here was the most heartbreaking aspect of our conversation: his adult son felt so culturally bankrupt, so devoid of a heritage, that he had begun delving into Hungarian customs and traditions. He was the son of a Holocaust survivor and apparently it had never once occurred to him that he had a Jewish treasure trove to draw on.

That day I ran home and re-doubled my efforts to immerse my children in Jewish community and to create gratifying Jewish experiences for them. You might say I was “scared straight” by this encounter, even though I was already committed to raising them Jewish.

But before that, just before taking my leave, I asked Mr. Goldstein if I could give him a hug.

He said yes.

I put both my arms around him and held him tightly for several moments, trying to wordlessly impart my empathy and my sorrow for the ways trauma had bent him away from his birthright.

He said, with quiet and poignant dignity: “Nobody has hugged me for a very long time.”

Very soon afterward, I heard that he’d died.

Fam, I implore you, let’s teach our children well. We don’t need to be religious to give them Judaism. We don’t need to be a Bibi supporter to give them Judaism. We don’t need to believe in God to give them Judaism.

At my mother’s retirement party, a young Jewish doctor came up to me and told me a story I hadn’t known. He’d been slated to work on Rosh Hashana and my (atheist) mother asked him why he hadn’t arranged to take the high holy day off. He told her he wasn’t religious.

Reportedly she told him: “Look, if the Nazis rise to power again, they’ll be coming for you whether you’re religious or not. So go to shul on Rosh Hashana.”

He told me he deferred to her immediately and has ever since.

No matter what our relationship to Judaism, or level of observance, we — like Mr. Goldstein’s son — will always be Jewish to the goyim. So let’s be Jewish for ourselves first and last. We could not be richer when it comes to tradition, culture and heritage. Let’s not squander those riches. Let’s not deprive our children of the priceless gift of what rightfully belongs to them.

I’ll be back with you on Friday. I hope your week is going well so far.

Huge love to you all. Chazak v’ematz.

Am Yisrael Chai.