Strangers and Neighbors

by Maria Poggi Johnson

  The intimate connection in the meanings of Jewish and Christian rituals and symbols can be surprising when the two religions live side by side as they do in my neighborhood. I got quite a start once when Ahuva casually dropped into the conversation the phrase “paschal lamb.” For Catholics the phrase is absolutely bursting at the seams with theological, symbolic, and spiritual significance: the Lamb who was slain, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. I was momentarily bewildered by the sudden turn in the conversation, and then I realized that she wasn’t talking about theology at all; she was talking about food. Paschal lamb? It’s what the Hebrews ate at Pesach, of course. I hazarded a quick explanation of what Christianity does with Passover, and when I got to the bit about the Eucharist, she reacted with palpable embarrassment, as if the whole body-and-blood thing were a skeleton in the Christian closet, something that everybody knows about but that people generally have the good taste not to speak of in public. The disciples certainly found the command to eat the flesh and drink the blood of Jesus shocking and unsettling. Maybe Christians should too.

  As tightly interwoven as Easter and Passover are, theologically and symbolically, they don’t always happen at the same time. There’s a complicated business about solar and lunar cycles and the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and things of that sort. The two festivals can be as much as four weeks apart, but I like it when they coincide, when our neighbors are scrubbing their houses at the same time that we are fasting for Lent. When we are getting into the car to go to Maundy Thursday Mass to remember the Last Supper, I like to know that the Rubins and the Gindoffs and the Schwartzes and the Cohens are in their houses doing what the disciples thought they were going to do when Jesus turned it all on its head. It is the sharpest reminder of how very close we are—and how very far. We are remembering the same stories, the actions of the same God, but our relations to the stories are different, and the way we remember them is different.

  As it happens, I have actually been to a Passover Seder at a Church in Virginia, years before I had even been in the same room as an Orthodox Jew. It was interesting and educational and done in a spirit of respect for Judaism and Jews. There are a number of reasons why it is important for Christians to understand Passover, and there are plenty of Churches that host Seders, and I can quite see their point. But it made me somewhat uncomfortable at the time, and does so now more than ever. When I tentatively mentioned the subject to an Orthodox friend, she obviously didn’t like it one bit. She felt, I imagine, rather as I would feel if I heard that a group of ecumenically minded, well-intentioned, open-hearted Muslims or Buddhists had bought a book and got together to celebrate the Eucharist. I certainly wouldn’t hold it against them personally, but I’d really prefer they didn’t.

  The story of Passover as it is enacted at the Seder is a family story, and as such is very personal. It wasn’t the ancestors of the Virginia congregation who smeared blood on the door frames of their huts, ate a hurried meal with all their possessions in bundles at their sides, clutched their children as wails of anguish streamed from the houses of their oppressors, and took off into an unknown freedom in pursuit of an almost-forgotten God who had remembered them just in time. When the Angel of Death swept over Egypt, our ancestors were getting on with their business in Ireland and Sweden and Africa and England, quite unaware that in a distant desert an unknown God was taking history by the throat and calling to his side the people he had chosen for his own. It would be many centuries before God made himself a child of Israel, took the story of the Exodus by the throat, and gave it to us and to the whole world.

  Actually, this year some new friends, Reform Jews who have quite a different take on this issue (as on many others), have invited us to their Seder. I feel rather shy about it, and a little bit worried that our Orthodox friends will disapprove: but only a very little bit, and certainly not enough to return anything other than an enthusiastic, “Oh, can we? I didn’t know! Gosh, thanks, we’d love to come.”

  7

  Train Up a Child

  in the Way He Should Go

  Acontraband ring was broken up recently at the yeshiva—the Hebrew boys’ high school. A list of clients, schedules, and a complicated system of concealment, including alarms that could be rigged to the dorm doors, were discovered in the possession of Yosef, the ringleader, my friend’s eldest son, and quite the most charming lad you could wish to meet. The object of all this criminal ingenuity? Marijuana? Pornography, perhaps? Liquor or cigarettes at the very least? Nope. Two tattered Harry Potter books that were being passed around according to a strict rota.

  A world in which rebellious teenaged boys can satisfy their need to transgress boundaries, defy authority, and damn the torpedoes by reading high-quality children’s literature is, I suspect, a world rather different from the one most American teenagers inhabit. But the world in which the yeshiva students are being trained to take their part as adults is different from that inhabited by most Americans, and the point of education is, after all, to equip young people for what awaits them in adulthood. As most of my waking hours are spent in some sort of activity involving the education and formation of young people—raising my own little flock and teaching theology to college kids—I find it intriguing, and sometimes challenging, to watch my friends’ children growing up in the world—very different from mine—of Orthodox Judaism.

  The process starts very young—it has to. At the age of thirteen for boys and twelve for girls (they say that girls are more mature, and who am I to argue?), young people become bar or bat mitzvah, which means they take upon themselves responsibility—up to then assumed by their parents—for obeying the commandments. There are a lot of commandments, and obeying them is a serious business, so by the time children become adults, you want the obedience to be second nature. As soon as kids can toddle, they are shown how to touch the mezuzah on doorposts as they go through doors. As soon as they start putting words together, they begin to learn the berakhas, the proper blessings to say in Hebrew before eating fruit or drinking water or after washing their hands.

  They dress distinctively from an early age. Men keep their heads covered to remind them that God is above them. For little boys up to the age of three, this means long hair; the first Orthodox “event” we attended was watching as Dovid lost his shaggy glam-rocker locks and got his first yarmulke. Our Adam, a lone boy in a sea of sisters, has grown up thinking of yarmulkes as the badge of masculinity; we eventually had to get him his own to prevent him from nabbing Dovid’s.Women, it is said, are closer to God than men are (again, who am I to argue?) and in consequence don’t need yarmulkes. They are, however, subject to laws and traditions about behavior (women cannot, for instance, sing, dance, or act in the presence of men) and about dress (married women cover their hair with snoods or wigs or hats). This also starts young; even teeny little girls wear long skirts, long sleeves, and high necks in irreproachably opaque fabrics, even when it is 95 degrees in the shade. Needless to say, the purpose of the dress code—the term is tznius—is modesty, although I am here to tell you, in case you don’t already know, that the average active little girl is a great deal more modest in leggings or overalls than in a skirt.

  Through eighth grade the Orthodox kids all go to the Hebrew Day School just down the road from us, where the playground is always full of little boys with flying tzitzis playing baseball.Half the day they study “English” subjects, meaning not only English but also math, history, social studies, and so on, and the other half is dedicated to “Hebrew”: the language itself and subjects like Chumash, the books of Moses; Novi, the Prophets; loshon, proper speech; hashkafa, ethics; and halakha, how to observe the mitzvahs as outlined in the Talmud. Sex education is not included in either half of the curriculum. In the most strictly observant families, young people do not learn how babies are made until they are on the verge of marriage, or so the story goes. I am, I have to say, deeply skeptical about this. Children are experts in the rapid and efficient diffus
ion of information; it only takes one ten-year-old to pick up the facts from somewhere, and everybody in town under the age of fourteen will know all about it by lunchtime tomorrow and have sworn a solemn oath never to let on to the grown-ups.

  Whatever they do or don’t know in theory, they don’t get a chance to practice. When a boy turns thirteen and becomes a bar mitzvah, he trades in his jeans and T-shirt for a black suit and a white shirt, and tops his yarmulke with a broad-brimmed black hat. (It has to be said, few things set the inherent geekiness of your typical teenage boy into higher relief than does a uniform of wispy sideburns, black suit, and big hat.) Then he vanishes into the yeshiva, where he studies for about a thousand hours a week (a full, although I imagine rather idiosyncratic, high school curriculum and a full religious curriculum).Meanwhile, the girls, demure and gorgeous in long pleated skirts and prim white blouses, go to Bais Yaakov, and they see very, very little of the boys.

  Men and women have separate hours in the swimming pool at the Jewish Community Center, and kids go to single-sex summer camps with kosher kitchens. I took my daughters to the JCC for the closing ceremony of the girls’ bat mitzvah camp this year, because Alizah was directing the closing entertainment program. Alizah is big sister to Yaffa and Ester, and where Yaffa and Ester go,my Catherine and Elisabeth want to go. So we went. It was lovely and so weird that I found it genuinely disorienting. There was the kind of emotional atmosphere you would expect from a bunch of teenagers who had been living together, and presumably sleeping only five hours a night, for a couple of weeks and were beside themselves with exhilaration and exhaustion. There were adorably sincere and goofy sketches on the spiritual theme of the camp, and choruses with recorded backing music, and lots of swaying and arms in the air. There was an antediluvian public address system that shrieked and roared and held up the proceedings for twenty minutes while people fiddled with knobs. There were interminable thank-yous and a blurry video of camp highlights that was hilarious, touching, and deeply meaningful to the girls themselves and totally incomprehensible to everybody else.

  What made it so disorienting was how intensely familiar it all was to me. Other than the absence of men, it was in all respects—goofy sketches, choruses, uncooperative PA system, hugging, giggling, in-jokes—identical to the gospel coffeehouses and evangelistic events that were a significant part of my adolescence. Except that we were all fired up about Jesus, and these girls were all fired up about the Torah. I don’t know when I’ve had a more fascinating evening.

  Once the years of yeshiva and summer camps are behind them, it is more or less time to start thinking about marriage. Marriages are not arranged in the sense that, say, traditional Hindu marriages are, and Fiddler on the Roof matchmakers in head scarves have morphed into professional dating services, but the process of choosing partners is a good deal more formal and includes a great deal more community involvement than in mainstream American society. Dating is not an end in itself; it is a way of looking for a spouse. Dates between young people are arranged by adult family and friends, are in very public places, and serve the purpose of letting people figure out if they want to get married.

  During dating and engagement, couples are expected to be shomrei negiyah, which means that they have no physical contact. This is not a euphemism for no sex; it really means no physical contact, of any sort, at all. After they are married, they will be shomrei yichud, which means they will never again be alone with anyone of the opposite sex, other than a close relation. (Or a doctor, or dentist, or if your husband is out and the guy finally shows up to fix the furnace, you let him in. They’re strict; they’re not stupid.)

  At social events men and women will separate and sit on opposite sides of the room. This practice, I have to say, drives me nuts. For one thing, it goes without saying that the wailing infants, the overstimulated toddlers, and the bored, sulky ten-year-olds are never, ever on the men’s side. For another, the talk on the men’s side is all about theology and Scripture—there’s usually a rabbi who gives a little speech about the religious significance of the occasion—and on the women’s side, largely about domestic matters. Now, I’m no bra-burning bluestocking; I can talk about babies and food with the best of them. But I like theology too, and whatever the men are talking about always sounds so interesting (all the more so from being heard in snatches, the way a garden always looks enticing and mysterious if you glimpse it from a moving car). Whenever we go to a “do,” I always edge as close as I decently can to the men’s side, strain to pick up as much of the conversation as possible, and interrogate my husband afterward to fill in the gaps.

  As exasperating as yichud is to someone like me, accustomed to a culture where it is acceptable to talk freely to most everybody about most everything, the reason for it is clear. It’s a simple, radical solution to a serious problem. There is a halakhic principle called “building a fence around the Torah,” according to which if something is prohibited, you avoid not only it but anything that might possibly bring you into contact with it. That way you can be sure. If you don’t even touch money on Shabbos, you can’t buy or sell. If you keep separate plates for milk and meat, you can be sure that you will never, by accident, eat a goat that has been cooked in its mother’s milk.

  By the same token, if you keep daylight between you and all members of the opposite sex from puberty onwards, your chances of starting marriage unhampered by a messy sexual history are excellent. If you never have the chance to fall into conversation with someone at a party and discover that you both love Dickens and anchovy pizza and Joni Mitchell, or that he gets your sense of humor in a way that your husband, bless his heart, just never has, then it reduces practically to nil the chances that you will ever find yourself caught in the kind of emotional tempest that makes shipwreck of so many hearts, families, and communities.

  Family life is extraordinarily important in Judaism, even more than it is in Christianity. This is because Christianity has, from early in its history, accorded high respect to those who, like Paul, choose not to marry in order to devote all of their energy to the service of God. There is no place for voluntary celibacy in Judaism, and much of the service that God requires of Jews is conducted in the family home. The Orthodox regard marriage and family as a universal calling, and many of their laws reflect this.

  Chastity, of course, is not the only nor the most important virtue, and sex and marriage are among many things that responsible parents try to prepare their children for in their adult lives. But sex is probably one of the things that parents fret about most, and it is also one of the areas in which the differences between our Orthodox friends and ourselves are most apparent. We all want the same things for our children; we want them to be kind, virtuous, self-assured, devout, faithful, happy people with stable relationships. But we want them to be happy and virtuous and devout in very different worlds. The Orthodox world has a coherent set of practices and institutions to form their young people and a tightly knit community that supports it. Rules and conventions as strict as tznius, negiyah, and yichud, if they are to operate in ways that are healthy rather than neurotic and oppressive, cannot function in the context of individual families. If you are going to raise your children to stay clear of all relationships with the opposite sex except those with their spouses or, briefly, people they are seriously considering marrying, then you need to provide them with a world in which they can follow the rules and still be normal. They need a world in which not only you but the parents of most everybody they know take it for granted that they will socialize only in large groups; a world that is sufficiently tight-knit so that everybody knows everybody, and sufficiently different from the larger world so that it is really impossible for you to blend in; a world set apart from the world of MTV and Abercrombie and Fitch and all the weird things that start to seem almost normal when you’re around them enough.

  On the one hand, a close-knit, integrated community in which children can grow up securely surrounded by people who reinforce the same commitm
ents is a thoroughly excellent thing. There are many things about the world of the Orthodox that I envy. But it is not our world. And I have mixed feelings about it. This type of stability comes at a very high price, because in contemporary urban America any really homogenous community, whether Jewish or Christian, must of necessity be artificial, since contemporary America is full of all sorts of people. And artificially homogenous communities are necessarily sustained, to some extent, by a “fortress mentality,” and the fortress mentality—of fear, suspicion, and even hostility toward the world outside—is something I really don’t like. There is, to be sure, plenty to be fearful, suspicious, and hostile about, but there is also plenty that is beautiful and fascinating and challenging and exciting and good, and I want to teach my children to be open to it. I want them to be faithful Christians who live with integrity and in communion with the Church, and I want them to become sophisticated, well-informed, discerning people who are at ease in the world and are open to trusting friendships with people very different from themselves. I want an awful lot, I know, but there it is.