Three-month check-in / "ordinary" Judaism

I am now entering the fourth month – by Jewish reckoning at least – of this "first Jewish year" project. And I have hit the closest thing there is to a boring spot in the Jewish calendar: a two month span with no holidays, no festivals, no special observances. Reminiscent, in a way, of that six month span in the Christian calendar between Pentecost and Advent, known affectionately to liturgical Christians as "ordinary time." And so, I thought this was as good a time as any to reflect on and share some of the things I've experienced and observed in the past few months about "ordinary" Jewish life.

First, the gems:

• Judaism gives one a whole new language even for talking about ordinary things. My wife and I talked with the kids a few times about the idea of mitzvot, for example, a Hebrew word and Jewish concept that doesn't translate perfectly into any English word or Christian concept.* We found it a good metaphor for learning to keep up with your responsibilities within the family unit by mastering a few important jobs or behaviors at a time. So, we re-named our "token economy" system (a popsicle-stick jar that we add a stick to every time the kids do one of the behaviors we are working to teach at the moment) as "mitzvah sticks". Works for me.
  
  I have also used the particularly Jewish language of atonement -- teshuvah, literally turning from your mistakes or returning to good behavior -- with my older two boys to replace "I didn't do anything wrong" and "I see this punishment as unfair so I won't learn anything from it, so there!" (a paraphrase) with the idea that if they can own up to doing wrong and then make up for the harm they've done by "turning" their behavior around and doing something corrective, their parents (like God on Yom Kippur and many other days) will forgive them. But in Judaism forgiveness is not the automatic "Jesus died/rose-from-the-dead, and that washed away my sins" -- that version of "God's grace" has often been thrown at me in a "God let you off the hook, you shouldn't hold grudges or judge others" and that idea, let me tell you, leads to pretty ineffective parenting. In Judaism, as I understand it, God is willing to forgive but you have to work for it: you have to make an earnest attempt to repair relations with any people you have wronged and you have to make some attempt to repair your relationship with God as well. Actions have to have consequences, if only that the consequence for doing something bad is that you have to do something good to make up for it. This idea doesn't get through to my kids every time, of course, but on the several occasions that it has worked, it has seemed an "ordinary time" miracle.
• Judaism also redefines expected behaviors and even gives you some new ones. The Bedtime Sh'ma has brought our family into the practice of thinking about not only our "goods for the day" before bed, but also thinking about how we have wronged each other, about where we have senselessly held on to anger, and asking forgiveness (and offering it) each night before bed. That same ritual reminds us that God is watching over us, that ours is the One God who rules the universe, that ultimately we have nothing to fear from a night's sleep. Puts even the toughest bedtime-resister to sleep nearly every time. Another everyday miracle.
  
  Judaism redefines how we deal with death as well. My secular and Protestant upbringings both taught me that when people die we are to mourn efficiently, "get through the grief," and put the painful memory of their death behind us as quickly as possible so that we can "move on with our lives." Even if such were possible, I've never been convinced it was a good idea. But Judaism teaches us that even after that first intense burst of grief is past, we are to actively remember our deceased ones, first every month for a year, then every year after that. Why? Because the memory of that person is a blessing. What an incredible thought -- that instead of thinking "woe is me, I lost so-and-so," we can instead think "how blessed I was to have so-and-so in my life, if only for a little while." I have used this, too, to teach my kids how to keep the memory of deceased pets and a deceased grandfather alive and, slowly, to let that memory become a blessing.
• Observing Shabbat -- putting off our housework, our paid work, our school work, even our shopping for one day to rest, be holy, and get to know our family again after a week apart -- wrecks your former sense of time management. You now have six days to get everything done, and half of Friday is spent getting ready for Shabbat (challah and housecleaning, anyone?) so really you have five-and-a-half days to do what used to get done in seven. And yet, how I look forward to that day. "I need a Sabbath" has become a common phrase from me come Thursday night (or Wednesday night, this week). It is not just the rest, but the holiness, the family-ness. It is truly a jewel strung, every seventh bead, on the necklace of time.
• I have an awful lot of Jewish books on my bookshelf now, and I never seem to be at a loss for something new to learn. For a lifetime learner like myself, Judaism is a treasure trove.

But there are also stones in the road:

• All of these new Jewish concepts have made my relations with significant non-Jews -- those I am related to by blood or marriage most especially -- more difficult. It seems that every time I casually mention something that happened in synagogue or on a Jewish holiday to my mother, my sister, my in-laws, the conversation just stops. My mother has voiced support for my journey into Judaism on occasion, but she also clearly has misgivings. Our agreement to still spend Christmas with her, initially intended to smooth things out, seems like it may only succeed in bringing all of the we-have-different-religions-now issues to a rapid boil.
  
  Also, I have students every so often who ask me about being Jewish (I don't brag about it or anything, but I also don't hide it, and taking off Yom Kippur was kind of a giveaway), and I never know what to say. Having not even started a formal conversion study, I don't feel I can publicly call myself "Jewish" yet, much less act as a spokesperson for the faith. But I also don't want to let misconceptions linger, and I feel a need to challenge whenever someone makes an exclusively Christian statement or assumption. And doing something nice for my students and hearing "thank you, Jesus!" in response is really beginning to get old!
• The November-December "holiday season" has been getting to me. The privilege I used to enjoy by being Christian -- every store and media outlet in the land catering to my religious holiday, the same privilege that led to a half dozen irate Christians lighting up the internet over Starbucks not have a sufficiently Christmas-themed holiday cup when -- that privilege now belongs to someone else, and said coffee shop will never even consider a blue holiday cup for my new holiday! I'm not bitter about that, mind: Jews really are less than 5% of Americans, much less than that in most parts of the country, so why should Starby's offer a choice of holiday cups? But seeing Christmas decadently celebrated all around me, having my children offered a "Christmas gift market" at school the week after Chanukkah, the sheer number of people who just assume that "Christmas" is the only thing going this time of year -- it's a tremendous cold-air-in-the-face reminder of all that one gives up by leaving the majority culture and joining a minority one. The gains from doing so may far outweigh the losses, but the losses have an awful lot of advertising money.

With all the changes this new religion (and culture -- some say another "civilization") is bringing about in my life, I have found myself asking – and other people have danced around the question with me as well – why Judaism? More to the point, why now, at this point in my life?

I have tried to answer the question of "why Judaism?" in several posts in this blog, and I suspect I will keep addressing that issue as I keep writing. For now, I think the best answer is: I am a religious person, who needs a religious home, who wants to make religion a central point of his life, who would do it professionally if he could figure out a way to make that work. And I feel more at home in Judaism than I have in any other religion in more than a decade. And, coming from a person who has "sampled" quite a number of religions in my day, that is saying something.

As for why now, that answer is given by one of the sages of Judaism, Rabbi Hillel himself: "if not now, when?"



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* Many people translate mitzvah as "commandment," which carries a connotation in our Christian-dominated culture of "one of a dozen or so things God said you must (not) do, so you have to (not) do it at whatever cost." And I am sure some Jews see the mitzvot that way. Other people translate mitzvah as being closer to the Western concept of a "good deed" or "deed of merit," something that sort of earns you credit in God's Book of Life, if you will. The most literal translation of the Hebrew, by my reading, would be "that-which-we-are-instructed-to-do," which carries less judgment than "commandment" but also less sense of take-it-or-leave-it voluntarism than "good deed." One way or another, there are 613 of them, some are specific to classical Temple Judaism and can't be performed today, and I'm not sure how many American Jews really are able to keep all of the rest. Well done for those who can and do, but the point is that for most Jews I know the mitzvot are acts that please God, deeds we should perform and perhaps aspire to master, but they also constitute a list too long for most to master in one lifetime, especially living in a Gentile land. So as for me and my family, we pick those mitzvot from the list that seem most important, sometimes those that are easiest, often those that strike us as most spiritually fulfilling or earth-nurturing or neighbor-loving, and we work on adding to the list a little at a time. Which makes it a good metaphor for learning responsibility within a family unit as well.