I was deeply curious. What about this day makes someone like him (and I don’t say that in a bad way, not at all) turn off his cell phone and stop eating for a day? There is a certain power there.
I think my curiosity stems from three different places.
1. I am a culture nut. I studied intercultural communication, I taught international students, my greatest desire is to travel, and I love to write about other cultures. If it has to do with another culture, I want to know about it.
2. Religions fascinate me even more. I will get into that later.
3. I think Jewish people are interesting.
1 is pretty self explanatory so let’s start with 3. I haven’t known very many Jewish people in my life, hardly any. The small personal religious experience I have had, and my family experience in relation to Jewish people has been strange, to say the least. I spent a small amount of time as a fundamentalist Christian (I was young), and of course, Jewish people were God’s chosen people… so they were good. But they killed Christ. So they were bad. But it was okay because God was going to forgive them, so they were good! But they refused to believe Jesus was the Messiah. So they were bad. I really don't know much about them. I mean, I know the general Charleton Heston God's chosen people, exodus from Egypt, passover, ten commandments, Anne Frank, Adam Sandler Hannukah song stuff.. so yeah, not much.
My father’s family (Welsh) had the usual prejudices. My Grandmother to my Granddad: “Why did you name our son (my uncle) David? That’s a Jew name! It’s a Jew name! Now he has to walk around with a Jew name! What will people think?” No matter how much my grandfather explained that it was for the Welsh name Dyffudd, the patron saint of Wales (they were Catholic), to her it was still a Jew name. Their Catholicism never managed to trickle down to me, and so I escaped relatively unscathed with, apparently, not a Jew name.
My mother’s family (Polish posing as German) yes, okay, this one is a little more complex. My mother’s grandparents immigrated from Poland during the partition in the early 20th Century. It was good to be German (or Prussian, as they styled it then) in Poland during that time. It sucked, however, to be a Pole, or a Jew. They just happened to live in an area with the highest concentration of Jewish people in all of Europe. They immigrated to the US, told everyone they were German, baptized their kids as Lutheran, and yeah. If you said the word “Jewish” in my grandma’s house, you got the same response as if you had said “the axe murderer is hiding in the bedroom,” or “the man has come to take away your children.” This sort of strange anxiety.
Naturally, I grew up fascinated with Jews. But not for the obvious reasons.
This leads us to #2. Religion.
I want to know everything about religion. Not so much the bells and whistles, but why. WHY do people do what they do, and what do they feel when they do it? What does it feel like to believe? To have faith? To belong? To participate? I am disabled, you see. I am unable to believe.
I have had three experiences with religion in my life. The first was when I was about six. Me and my mother stayed with some Krishna devotees from the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. They were happy, joyful people. I remember that. And there was always singing. I loved the singing. I used to sit for hours and look through the huge book about Krishna, telling all the stories of his mythology through full page, ornate color plates. They were beautiful. I believe they helped shaped my personal aesthetic.
The next was when I was 11. I had no previous religious education or belief, but one day my mother came to me and told me I was to be baptized a Lutheran. Once I was, I could go to no other church other than a Lutheran church, and I was to tell everyone I was a Lutheran. She said this with such fervency and urgency and conviction that I was terrified to cross the threshold of a religious edifice for many years after that. I went to a church, got water sprinkled on my head, had a party, and then never set foot into a Lutheran church again from that day until this.
The last was when I was 20. I was a drug addled bohemian with few prospects, and less sense. But I was sincere. I wanted to believe, I really did, and I really tried. I couldn’t do it.
In graduate school I did a comparative study that looked at group cohesion in both a Catholic congregation, and a Jewish Temple. As a result, I was invited to a public Seder for Passover. It was a touching and lovely ritual. It made me feel so empty.
All my life I have yearned for a sense of belonging to something larger than myself. A faith, a belief, a community, a tradition. Perhaps it is just what I am going through in my life that I am looking for the rock, the port in the storm… or maybe I just feel it more strongly now. I am an agnostic by default because my believer is broken.
So, I am powerfully curious when I talk to Sasha and he relates to me what he is doing for the holidays. He explained to me that Yom Kippur is not a get out of jail free card, but rather, it is a time to make right the wrongs you may have done to others so that you can be sealed into the coming year. I am not sure I know what that means, but it made me think.
How wonderful it would be if the people who have wronged me… really wronged me… would just acknowledge what they had done, and tell me they were sorry. Ask for my forgiveness. What a gift that would be. What a weight that would lift. Perhaps it is not so much for the person who has done the wrongs, but for the wronged. A gift. Ammends.
What does this have to do with Jewish people? What is it that is so powerful about a tradition that even a secular man would participate. Perhaps he is not as secular as he lets on, or maybe… maybe belonging to something bigger than yourself is more powerful than cynicism.
I don’t know why I yearn so much, but I do. And I try to fill that space with knowledge.
How I wish I could have my day of atonement. How I wish I could believe.
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