Jewyness

It's the weirdest thing. Ever since I've gotten back from South Africa, I've been getting along better with my parents. I no longer feel trapped eating dinner with them. I no longer bristle when my mother tells me a hot piece of Jewish gossip I really never wanted to know about. It no longer makes me sad that my Dad quotes Seinfeld compulsively. I laugh instead of cry when my Mom asks me, "Can I please tell you something about the holocaust!?" and then goes on to describe some list she found online about her great grandparent's deportation to Auschwitz. "Isn't that a bit of a morbid thing to look into?" I asked my mom, and then we laughed (literally laughed) about how over-played the Holocaust is in Jew School. We laughed...

I'm not sure you recognize the gravity of this anecdote.

You see, for the longest time, my reluctance to be part of the Jewish community in Seattle was one of the Great Tragedies of our family. Not only was I gay, but I didn't like going to Shul. I didn't want to have dinner at our orthodox friend's house. I was sick and tired of being asked when I was going to finally go to Israel.

But now, something has seismically shifted. I blessed the shabbat wine last night without rushing through to the end of it, and I didn't mind when my mother placed her hands on my head to bless me (which is part of the shabbat ritual). It's like I've internalized the teachings of Kal Penn in "The Namesake." He left for Soho too! He came back with a newfound appreciation for his culture! This brings up another issue- my inability to appreciate a life that does not have a symbiotic relationship to some sort of Hollywoodized narrative. But we can talk about the relationship between life and art some other time...

I'm still trying to figure out how this all came about. Was I finally able to buddhify my relationship to my family? Was it because I escaped, because I left for South Africa, that I am now somehow able to come back and really fully integrate myself? Or am I over-embracing all of this because of some romanticized narrative of a jewish boy returning to his faith. Perhaps the propaganda of Jewish summer camp suddenly penetrated the most inner parts of my brain. Or maybe, most likely, I just now somehow don't view my mother as a threat anymore. She's no longer trying to control me. Or, perhaps, I've just figured out how better to control myself.

Buddhists say the places that scare us are the places that bring up all of our old baggage, and the most fearless thing one can do is to place oneself in these uncomfortable nomad lands, where you can't easily say what's right or what's wrong because everything is so shaky and ambiguous and you have nothing to hold on to.

In the past, I always viewed those scary places as places far away from the city where I grew up, places where I'd have to face the harsh reality of being gay, or having AIDS, or something else really scary. But, all along, the scariest place was really my parent's house, because it brought up so much baggage. But again, for some reason, the house no longer scares me.

Last night, as I was drinking the shabbat wine and grabbing fistfulls of Grateful Bread challah, I looked at both of my parents (I believe my mother was on one of her exciting tangeants, this time about a book I gave her based on the movie Charlie Wilson's War)...but instead of seeing my parents, I saw a man and a woman, each with their own charms, and passions, and all the character traits they no doubt passed down to me. The humorous traits, the bookworm traits, the socialite traits, and the neediness, and passive aggressive traits as well. But for the first time in ever, I didn't resent any of these traits.

There's a particularly powerful moment in "The Namesake" when Kal Penn's character arrives at the airport, before he's about to go to his father's funeral. Penn is just back from Soho or Martha's Vineyard or somewhere distinctly culturally anglo-American, and he's shaved his head. He comes and sits down with his mother and sister, and for the first time, he actually looks at them. He doesn't try and disassociate. He connects.

I balled while watching this part of the movie.

It takes a lot of maturity to do this, to really accept your parents for who they are, and I don't think I'm there quite yet. But, for some reason, I feel like I'm a lot closer.

There's definitely a strong anti-assimilationist thread that runs throughout Jewish culture (even in Seattle) and if you ask any older Jew how they feel about where Jewish American culture is going, they'll likely tell you it's going to shit. We've become too obsessed with money, we're inter-marrying too much, we're not supporting Israel enough, we're embracing a cold intellectual stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is harmful to the existence of Israel. But whenever an older Jewish person would talk to me about these things, I was quick to label them an alarmist. They were refusing to look at the case of the palestinians, they were failing to recognize the human rights of all people, they didn't realize that Jews succeeding in America was a good thing. Intermarriage wasn't killing Jewish culture, it was including non-Jews who were interested in the faith. We needed to stop being so xenophobic and stop trying to so righteously protect our outsider status.

I still believe all of these things, and so I am sensitive in understanding that by reclaiming my Jewish culture, by embracing many of the things about my family I used to hate, I am lumped back into the category of Jews who are Jewish. And, as the queers and feminists of the world love to say, I don't like categories. Jewish is still a category, and categories can repress.

So don't complement me for coming back to my faith, or any of that nonsense. I still want to be a Jewish agitator, demanding reform both within and outside the Jewish community, but I finally feel mature enough to "accept the things I cannot change." Things like my parents. They will never change. And that's coo.