82 Spirituality Studies 10-2 Fall 2024 1 Where It All Began Walking from shul to shul, looking for what, I did not know. We dressed in fancy dresses, hats, and high heels all in the 1950s style on the High Holidays. Often, we wandered the three synagogues within a mile radius, preening and hoping that the boys would look at us. I always began at my father’s synagogue, which was in a small little house (called “schteibels” in Yiddish) with an upstairs balcony where the women sat. The ceiling was blue with stars painted in them – as I often gazed above wondering what it was that I was supposed to feel. The women around me would be chatting or reading their prayer books; but when I asked a question I was told to “sha shtill” (keep quiet in Yiddish). So, I learned to look down to the ground floor longingly at my brother, my father and my best buddy Michael as they prayed in a language I did not understand, thinking that they knew something I did not. I so wanted to be part of the action, but as a girl growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family that knowledge was not available to me. Often my mother would be at home cooking the extensive meal that we would eat when the services were over. So, my girlfriends and I would wander aimlessly until the services were over; then we could go home to take off the painful high heels and the hats that made us look like old women, rather than the teens that we were. I started to question it all at an early age, since it had no meaning to me. I was told that God was up somewhere looking at me and judging my behavior. That bearded man was sitting on a throne saying “Meir tour nicht” – we should not. I was never sure what it was that we should not be doing, but I did know that it meant very little to me. Oh, I did have a confirmation (an Americanized ritual for Jewish girls coming of age) at the age of twelve, in a class of four other girls. In fact, I even won the essay contest on “What it means to me to be a Jewish girl”. It was my mother who wrote the essay because her Judaism meant so much to her. I even cheated on the exam that determined if I had written the piece, quoting my mother in the essay I was supposed to have written on my own Jewish practice. I also went to Hebrew school for a short while where the teachers were all austere men who hit one’s knuckles with rulers if you got the Hebrew alphabet wrong. Finally, I rebelled and begged to go to the I. L. Peretz Workmen’s Circle school where the teacher was a Holocaust survivor and a socialist. Here I found some joy, with the singing, the learning of Yiddish (the language of the Eastern European ghettos). There was music, celebration of International Workers Day and lots more that drew my attention. It was my first introduction to thinking about progressive politics as well. But I believed nothing about a God; to me the concept was irrelevant, although I saw my mother and father praying regularly. As a young woman I found myself in Boston on Passover; my friends and I decided to go to Durgin Parks (a world-famous prime rib restaurant that had been there since the founding of Massachusetts). There I ate non-kosher food for the first time; when I walked out, I expected that God was going to strike me dead. When that did not happen, I began to doubt more and more. In fact, I even began eating non-kosher seafood and having milk and meat together. I was falling away from the belief system that was being crammed down my throat. My father was a Holocaust refugee out of Lithuania, who had lost his whole family to the Holocaust by bullets, outside his small village Kupiskis. On his way the U.S. he had thrown his ritual phylacteries into the ocean, but purchased another set as soon as he landed, feeling that he needed to hold onto the rituals he had grown up with. He continued to pray this way for the rest of his life. My mother had also been brought up Orthodox, not learning English until she went to public school, even though she had been born in the U.S. The house we lived in was kosher, with the rabbi coming every year to throw out the non-kosher food for Passover. We followed all the rituals, Shabbat, high holidays, minor holidays especially with the foods traditionally associated with each holiday. We maintained two sets of dishes for milk and meat and had separate everything for Passover. It was quite a chore to prepare for that holiday. And my mother was a fabulous cook, thus food was the centerpiece of all holidays. I soon became overweight because of food being the manifestation of love in that household. We were surrounded by my mother’s family, with many immigrants from Poland and Russia, all speaking Yiddish, each having suffered some trauma in the Holocaust, either themselves or having lost close family members. Additionally, I grew up with a dear uncle who was diagnosed as a schizophrenic while I was still young. His many psychotic episodes happened right in our home, with me often calling the police to come take him away in a strait jacket to the nearest mental hospital. This happened countless times in my youth.
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