a rabbi if you want to know about making teshuvah.
Being Jewish was different. Every Christmas was a time when I was forcibly reminded of that because, as the only Jew in my school, I was always trotted before an assembly of parents and teachers for the annual holiday program to sing one or two Chanuka songs before returning to my seat in the chorus. I, the token Jew, always lit a token menora and recited a token blessing in a language neither I nor anyone else in the audience understood.
My family lived in a small town in the south, and everyone else was Christian. My best friend lived down the block. She was German, and she had a heavy accent. Maybe we became friends because we were both so different, not only from one another but from everyone else.
Not only was I different, I was unique. I was the child of a Holocaust survivor. To me, Jewishness was synonymous with the Holocaust, my very existence a victory over Nazism, my life a curious rebuttal of the most inexplicable sort of death. It would be easy to lay responsibility for this at my father's door; he was, after all, the survivor. But he didn't regale me with tales of Nazi atrocities, although it might have helped if he had.
What I had instead was absence. Silence. I had no grandparents or real family on his side, no stories within which my place in an historical chain could be linked, for my father never spoke about his own past and was resistant to my clumsy adolescent attempts to get at some version of a truth.
The tension between hiding difference and extolling it formed our family's ethos. The emphasis in our family was to achieve, to be better than those around us, to value learning. This wasn't arrogance so much as a more sophisticated version of a survivalist mentality. So I worked hard in school, I got good grades, and I was universally recognized as one smart cookie, and, of course, I was Jewish. You might say that it was almost a given that my intelligence was a direct reflection of my Jewishness, perhaps even its raison d'etre. Nevertheless, our family led a curiously schismed existence.
While I was told to be so very different, we were, for most of the year, "just like" anyone else. We blended. We went to synagogue rarely. We didn't keep kosher. My mother knew no Hebrew. But I was Jewish because I stood alongside a culture; Jewishness leaked into the semi-permeable membrane cocooning my consciousness by osmosis, by virtue of who I was -- or more to the point, what my father had been and it never occurred to me that anything more like effort or systematized learning might be involved, necessary, or even desirable.
I called myself Jewish, and what was more, I wasn't "just" a Jew. I was a child of a survivor. Judaism per se had nothing to do with it. My identity hinged upon a single historical event.
Characteristically, one sees oneself best in the eyes of one's children, and it was only when I had children of my own and saw that they engaged in the same meaningless rites divorced from their history and asking of me questions to which I didn't know the answers did I realize that I had to go back to school and decide if that was all there was to Judaism. Osmosis was no longer sufficient.
Not an easy task, nor one I approached without a fair degree of ambivalence and skepticism. Most American Jews cease their formal Jewish education at age 13; ironically, they become "adults," forever encumbered with an adolescent's knowledge. For most, Jewishness is detachable, something into which one can shrug, like a tight coat. And I was saddled with not enough knowledge and just enough accumulated arrogance to believe that because I had excelled in my profession and my secular studies, I could easily master an arcane, antiquated religion simply by virtue of osmosis.
In keeping with my more general themes of things hidden and things different, I chose the Internet as my forum. The Internet was attractive. I could click in, click out; I could "lurk;" I could venture nothing, absorb what I chose, expel the rest. And, of course, a smart cookie like me could get it all without the need to engage in discussion.
I correspond regularly with a Chasid I've never met, and through him and his organization, Chabad-Lubavitch in Cyberspace, I've rediscovered my difference in a new way. What's more important is that I've discovered what I don't know, and more to the point, I refuse now to be defined as the product only of a traumatic event. And I've learned that one can't be Jewish by osmosis.
Being Jewish takes effort, as much as any secular study, and maybe more because the balance between the two can be tricky. Being Jewish isn't a barrier to be breached; it's part of me and central to my identity, as inextricable and indivisible as my eye color, my height, my general appearance, and the way I want others to view me. In particular, I want this difference to be manifest in the way in which I treat myself and other people, and I want this difference to be a source of pride for me and my children.
If I turn a critical eye to the juxtaposition of those things I remember from being eight -- to that tiny menora, to my lone voice, to those staring eyes -- I discover in that solitary Jewish child the internal dialectic not only of difference and the perils of being different but of the need to make sense of these disparate pieces of history, to push past a collective, systematized, ritualistic trauma.
Sometimes I wish I were eight again, not because I want to go back into hiding or let my Jewishness leak in and out in dribs and drabs, but because I think now that my songs would sound that much sweeter, my voice be that much stronger, and those tiny candles burn ever brighter.
Ilsa J. Bick, MD is a child and adolescent psychiatrist practicing in Fairfax, VA.
a rabbi if you want to know about making teshuvah.
