Encounter With An Estranged Family Member, Part I

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

I am so sorry that I wasn’t able to post during the later part of last week. I flew across the country for a bat mitzvah and while I make a point of posting from work trips like the one I made to NYC last month, even if it means staying up all night, extended family is a separate matter. I realized once I was there that my time with them was too rare, too short and too hard-won to divide my attention. I will make it up this week because I have so much to talk about, including something that happened there.

First, I was slain by the beauty of the weekend. The bat mitzvah girl is an exquisite soul, and so is her younger brother. Growing up, I was very close to her mother and all my cousins, but this next generation of kids — the once-removed generation of cousins — are so scattered to different corners of the country, so busy with their lives, that they have visited only a handful of times in their lives, which breaks my heart.

I myself have not gotten an in-depth sense of who my cousin’s kids are until this past weekend. But I was slain by them during the past few days.

The bat mitzvah girl — for the sake of privacy, let’s call her Malka, because that’s her Hebrew name — is a lovely little empath, who reminds me of my own daughter in that way: intelligent, sensitive, serious and vulnerable to the pain of the world. She also has some learning disabilities which made learning Hebrew for her bat mitzvah ceremony prohibitively difficult.

For this reason, my cousin sought out a Jewish tutor and officiant a friend had recommended, for her commitment to making Torah accessible to every Jew. This woman — let’s call her V. — lives in another state, and the family never met her in person, but she worked with Malka extensively via Zoom and flew in for the ceremony.

I met her for the first time in the restaurant where the guests gathered for dinner the night before the bat mitzvah. She had taken an Uber directly from the airport. Malka’s mother also met her for the first time that evening, in the parking lot just after she arrived. I would not hear this story until later, but here is what happened at that moment:

My cousin went to greet her and V.’s body language telegraphed that she was prepared to embrace. As my cousin moved in for a hug, she saw that V. was wearing dangling earrings that said Free Palestine. She stiffened with her hands on V.’s shoulders and instead of closing in further for that expected bodily embrace, she stood with both hands on V.’s shoulders, frozen in shock. She re-enacted this moment for me in her kitchen two days later, pantomiming her expression: mouth open, eyes wide, barely able to contain her rising panic.

The aspect of this re-enactment that left me slain was my cousin’s own body language. It wasn’t the stance of a stranger recoiling from an enemy. It was the stance of a Jewish mother clutching the shoulders of a child in her extended family, aghast, silently crying: What on earth have you done to yourself?

I wish I could have seen it with my own eyes. By my cousin’s report, V. met her gaze, understood everything in it without a word exchanged between them, and reached up to take off her earrings.

Fast forward to half an hour later. I’m at a long table across from my brother, with Malka’s mother on my left and an empty seat I’m saving for another cousin on my right. V. is on the other side of this empty seat. I have no idea who she is or what her political sensibilities are. I have no idea she’s going to be officiating the ceremony. I assume she’s a friend of the family.

We introduce ourselves across the empty seat and start talking. I’m immensely drawn to her. I like her edgy haircut and what I interpret as a soft-butch presentation. We start comparing notes about our Jewish lives and there’s incredible overlap: both of us spent our early formative years in hippie reform synagogues that we loved and then moved to the midwest and joined more conservative shuls that felt, at least initially, less cozy and accessible.

Then our conversation moved on to our current Jewish lives and — needless to say — here we sharply diverged. She dropped her passionate Palestinian activism into the conversation early and easily, as if she fully expected — having discerned that I was a progressive — that I would share her political alignment. Within minutes, our getting-to-know-you questions turned confrontational.

“How do you feel about the anti-Semitism baked into so much of the pro-Palestinian camp?” I asked.

”How do you feel about the genocide being committed by Israel?” she answered.

You can imagine how fast this went south. The point of no possible return came when she told me with a straight face that Hamas was in favor of a two-state solution and Netanyahu had sabotaged that negotiation; that per international law, armed resistance was legal and justifiable in response to occupation; and that I was a member of a cult.

Things had become incredibly heated and angry by the time my other cousin arrived, the one for whom I’d been saving the seat between us, and my brother and Malka’s mom all but shoved her into the chair between us, ending our commerce for the evening.

And here, friends, I am forced to suspend the story because — by an ecstatic turn of events in the last hour — I’m spending the rest of the afternoon with Dara Horn.

I will absolutely send part two at some point today — I’m just not sure when.

Am Yisrael Chai.