What it Means to be Jewish in Five Hundred Words or Less (yeah right)?: The Reflections of my Jewish Roots through a Recollection of Past Rosh Hashanah Experiences Spent in Services at the Synagogue.

A lot of times what we don't want to remember, we suppress.  There in lies the problem for most mid-twentied Jewish men (at least those I went to Hebrew School with) –the conflicting predicament in answering the headliner question. How do you remember what you have suppressed?  Should you try to remember what you’ve suppressed? 

I do see the cathartic potential in this exercise but I also question the safety of confronting past emotional traumas in the absence of an experienced therapist.  What if I were to trigger that one memory that opens the dam to a reservoir of memories that up until now, have floated placidly below the surface, unleashing the titans to teeter my ship just enough to cast me overboard to be engulfed by a whale –not the tale of Jonah but of Jimmy.  


Moreover, I don't want to mislead you that my self-hypnotic undertakings will flagellate anything to the surface; it is very possible that my mind, in order to protect me, could shake itself blank of my etch-a-sketch tracings of any unwanted memories.  For those of you who have studied psychology, you are also aware of the number of studies that demonstrate the susceptible nature of the fickle and fragile childhood memories to implantations from others; therefore, I can’t promise the complete veracity of any of my recollections.

Lets start with what I do remember.  I remember being happy that I didn’t have to go to school because it was a Jewish holiday but then being told that we had to go to services at the Synagogue (there was a "temple" closer to our town but this was for the less Jewish people so we traveled to Burlington to the... "Synagogue"). If my dad was feeling extra Jewish, he would announce that we were going to 'Hillel' (Hillel is the Jewish slang for Synagogue: like one would refer to Sean Combs as Puff Daddy, P. Diddy -Diddy for short -Puffy, and/or Sean John).  It was already a barrage of mixed emotions –feelings of deceit and sometimes betrayal for a confused adolescent –while I didn’t have to go to school, I was confronted with a questionably more tedious and monotonous, over all potentially worse, scenario.

I cringe when I hear the word "Hillel"...probably equal to the amount your Grandma would upon hearing Puffy perform Victory with Biggie Smalls.  We all have our trigger words that snap us from our hypnotic trances: this particular word alerts me to the subtle indoctrination of subliminal suggestion that I was being subjected to over the years in hopes that my father would, like a rock wearing away from years of water flowing over it, slowly overtime, insinuate that my mostly atheistic family has Jewish roots more tenacious than we do.  Or rather, not that our Jewish roots hadn’t at one time thrived deep beneath the surface but that upon their uprootal, which possibly began with my generation, you couldn't just take a spade and dig another hole and everything would be fine.

But it’s one reason I love my dad –that although he was brought up in Brooklyn where he suffered through Hebrew school five days a week, each session being longer than my two hours I was forced through twice a week, he didn't try to bequeath to me this hand-me-down generational suffering, which parents are so wont to do these days.  Instead, he realized that our ancestors who escaped from the deserts of Egypt (thanks to god's outstretched hand) had already suffered enough, which was only embittered by the fact that the only food they had time to consume was matzah.  Trail mix (or gorp as some people ridiculously insist on calling it), which would’ve been far preferable, was not invented until years later.

But that is the Jewish quagmire for each lost soul half-assedly raised to be purportedly Jewish.  For some reason, parents fail to realize that if they Bar Mitzvah a child (which contrary to what it used to be –a celebration of entering manhood –is now instead, a celebration for no longer having to go to Hebrew school and coincidentally, getting a lot of money) a Jewishness will not be brand into him.  So do I let 5,770 years wash down the drain because I am too lazy, disinterested, or insolent to bear the torch of tradition; it seems like that would leave a stained ring of guilt on the font of my conscience.  But on the other hand, should I really winnow the amount of minnows in the pond because of my dad's lackadaisical insistence that I marry a Jewish woman?  Although, college opens your eyes in many respects –for me it dilated my pupils to the fact that there was no dearth of beautiful Jewish women –it’s only shortly after I passed through the camel's eye of a needle’s ingress into the ‘real world’ that I realized I was duped by that alma mater of mine -that it truly was a microcosm for absolutely nothing.   

But let’s be honest, I live in a place where the number of unoccupied girls are few and far between.  Of the four girls I have had, to revert to the schoolyard term, ‘crushes’ on –none of whom I know to be Jewish, although this isn’t one of my first inquiries–all of them have had boyfriends, all of whom they were ‘in love with’: none of which abided here, all either living in similarly exotic places as San Francisco or off in Alaska valiantly fighting wild fires.  Of the one Jewish woman I did meet, a happenstance encounter out at a nearby hot springs, she would soon be departing to Africa.  It was for this reason that I discovered her religious orientation because she inserted an addendum that ‘therefore, she wouldn’t be fulfilling her mother’s wishes of taking a Jewish doctor’s hand in marriage’.  I told her that although I was not yet a doctor, and didn’t really have any intention of becoming one, I had completed three quarters of my pre-med requirements.  But it was too late, she had made up her mind, she was defecting to Africa.

And it’s not a lack of effort on my part, its not like I’m just sitting back reclining in the hot water of a sulfurous spring waiting for some Jewish princess to bubble up next to me; when I first arrived in Sun Valley, I went to a picnic with the Jewish Community, a minuscule colony at that, hoping to find that one girl who had been suckered into going to the event with her family and sitting down next to her, ideally off and away from her parents, perhaps at the children’s section quarantined from the ridiculous rituals, and being her knight at the round table (they did indeed use round tables), caressing her left hand, while our right hands held the stems of crystal wine glasses, our arms interlinked as our wine glasses clink, the swissssh, swissssh of the Manischewitz oxidizing as we jostle our wrists back and forth, allowing the centrifugal force of our glasses to commandeer the swirling substance around and around as we raise them to our mouths, sniff, and slowly sip. 

And as we bring the glasses down in sync, me lulling her with my deeply resonant but softly soothing voice, “see its not that bad, even if some of them are borderline wackjobs, we still have each other.”  And each of our hands saying shalom as they meet and then pass by, our arms outstretched to the other’s mouth, our fingers gently delivering hummus atop falafel spread onto a bagel adorned with locks. 

But alas, the only people who sat at the children’s table were children, jubilating with their Jewish coloring books too young, too content, too conditioned for my liking and apart from that table I was surrounded with Cougars in their fifties, the contingent I sought in age absent from this gathering.  And there I sat sulking, eating hummus slathered on a crumpled Falafel, which sat on the plate adjacent to a stale bagel sans locks, answering questions concerning where I was from, why I was here, and what I wanted to do with my life and where Judaism fits into it all.  I realized my mistake far too late, having hitched a ride down to the picnic with a Jewish couple I had severely played my cards wrong, and there I would remain for another couple hours before god would outstretch his mighty hand to deliver me to freedom.

My memories must be painful; I can't even talk about them without going off into a deluge of delusional fantasy.  You get the gist.  L’shana Tova.