Читать книгу My Jewish Year - Abigail Pogrebin - Страница 8
ОглавлениеIT WAS A sure conversation-stopper: “This year I’ll be researching, observing, and writing about every single Jewish holiday on the calendar.”
My non-Jewish friends nodded politely: “That sounds really interesting. . . .”
Non-observant Jews looked puzzled: “Aren’t there, like, a thousand of those. . .? I guess you won’t be doing much else this year.”
Observant Jews shrugged, as if to say, “Welcome to our world; want a trophy?”
I’m exaggerating. Slightly.
But what everyone seemed to be asking was “Why?” and “Why now?”
Why, when my two kids were teenagers and well past their bar and bat mitzvah, when my husband of twenty years was content with our middling observance, when it was kind of late in the game to change the game, did I want to spend the next twelve months steeped in the Jewish calendar, interviewing rabbis about each holiday, reading entire books about one single prayer, attending temple services I didn’t know existed, fasting six times instead of once?
All I knew was that something tugged at me, telling me there was more to feel than I’d felt, more to understand than I knew. It’s hard to describe feeling full and yet lacking—entirely blessed with family, friendships, and work, and yet annoyed that I hadn’t graduated much beyond the survey course when it came to Judaism.
I’m generally leery of “seekers” and the unceasing books about seeking a claim to offer a recipe for joy or insight. But here was a blueprint—thousands of years old—staring me in the face, and I’d never tested it. I’d already been drawn to Jewish life, but I hadn’t fully lived one. Judaism’s less-mainstream holidays seemed to separate the amateurs from the experts, and though I knew I’d never be fully observant, I also didn’t want to be a neophyte forever.
I grew up celebrating Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, two Passover seders, and the sporadic Friday Shabbat. But those are a drop in the bucket compared to the total number of holidays that flood the Jewish calendar. I’d watched how observant families adhere to an annual system that organizes and anchors their lives. I envied not their certainty, but their literacy. I wanted to know what they knew. I had a hunch it would take me somewhere deeper.
My Jewish identity had previously been a given, not a pursuit. I lived in a Jewish town (New York City) in a Jewish neighborhood (the Upper West Side) with mostly Jewish friends, none of whom went to synagogue regularly.
My mother, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, had been raised in Queens by a mother who had emigrated from Hungary in cardboard shoes and never had an education, and a father who was a macher (big deal) in his synagogue and insisted—not because he was a feminist but because Mom was his third daughter and his only shot at raising “a Jewish boy”—that she receive religious schooling, despite how unusual it was for girls in the 1940s. She was a rare bat mitzvah for 1951.
When my mother was fifteen, her mother died of cancer, a rending loss that was compounded by the fact that she was not permitted to say Kaddish (the traditional mourner’s prayer) for her own mother. My grandfather explained at the time that women didn’t count in the necessary minyan (quorum of ten) required to recite this prayer. She wasn’t “seen” as a Jew at the moment she needed Judaism the most. Stung and disillusioned, she turned her back on institutional practice for two decades. She ultimately came back to Judaism strongly, but my sister, brother, and I fell through the cracks during her estrangement. She didn’t sign me up for Hebrew School nor suggest I become bat mitzvah. Feminism was her new religion. (She’d cofounded Ms. Magazine with Gloria Steinem and cocreated Free to Be You and Me with Marlo Thomas.)
Our Judaism was shaped by Friday night Shabbat candle-lighting when convenient, an epic Hanukkah party to counter the seductions of Christmas, and High Holy Day services twice a year—on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, because Mom still felt she couldn’t be anywhere else on those days; their sanctity was in her DNA. When she eventually joined a synagogue again—B’nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side—she was trying to replace something I’d never known well enough to miss.
My father, Bert Pogrebin, grew up as a “bagel Jew” in a small town in New Jersey. His father, who ran a fruit stand, died when Dad was twenty. His immigrant mom, Esther, one of five sisters, was more lefty than Jew. She wasn’t sentimental. Yet Grandma Esther was a loving force in my life, cheering every tiny accomplishment, baking us ruggelach (Jewish crescent-shaped pastry), singing us Yiddish lullabies, and kvetching that we weren’t staying longer the minute we arrived for a visit. My father doesn’t believe in God the way Mom does. He loves Jewish discourse, the Nation and the New York Review of Books, reading every Bellow, Roth, and Malamud. But he isn’t much for prayer. They share a love for the New York Philharmonic, new plays, cold vodka, and books. And when it comes to Judaism, they’ve had an effortless arrangement; Dad accompanies Mom to shul on the High Holy Days because she needs to be there and they prefer to do things in tandem. They have taken classes on Torah and Prophets together. But she didn’t expect or ask him to pray or feel spiritual the way she does. She rediscovered faith in a way he couldn’t. He never had it in the first place.
Every spring of my childhood, my parents, siblings, and I drove to two Passover seders on my mother’s side of the family: the first at my uncle Danny’s in Long Island, where, before the service began, my father and I imbibed peanuts from the bar bowl so we wouldn’t be starving while we slogged through the Haggadah (the Passover liturgy). The second seder was always at my aunt Betty’s in Larchmont, where we inverted the salt shaker into the matzah ball soup so it would have some flavor.
I loved these family seders because of the squeezes of my aunts and uncles, the din of politics competing with “Dayenu” (the central Passover anthem), the Barton’s chocolate-covered macaroons. But I would have failed any test on the Exodus story. I was still missing the basics, having no clue that the majority of the Haggadah text isn’t found in the Bible (the rabbis wrote it later) or why Moses is barely mentioned in the service despite his role in the Exodus escape (the rabbis wanted to emphasize God, not Moses, as the hero). I could never have explained why we drink four cups of wine (one for every iteration of deliverance in the Exodus text) or why Jews have two seders on consecutive nights, rereciting the same exact Haggadah both times. (The lunar calendar was less conclusive, so Diaspora Jews marked the holiday twice to cover their bases.)
Back in 1976, when I was an unhip eleven-year-old, Mom began taking my twin sister, Robin, and me to yet a third seder, the “Feminist Seder,” a ritual that reimagined every segment of the service. It was conceived by four women, including Mom, who were fed up with the patriarch-focused Haggadah and the husband-recite-and-get-served seder meal. Writer Esther Broner created a text and tradition that honored women’s sacrifices and the Bible’s matriarchs.
I was giggly at the sight of a ceremony on the floor with bedsheets for the table, pillows for seats, and a potluck meal. I soaked up the stories of women’s exclusion, centuries up until the present. Year after year, I heard poetic voices of strong women, including Gloria Steinem, whom I knew well from my regular visits to Mom’s office at Ms. magazine, and Bella Abzug, the firebrand congresswoman who always wore a wide-brimmed hat, and was the only seder participant to insist on an actual chair.
During the eight days of Hanukkah, my mother pulled out all the stops, set on creating a tradition to rival anyone’s Christmas so that her kids would never feel deprived of the national frenzy. Every night, my sister, brother, and I lit the menorah and sang “Hanukkah, O Hanukkah” and “I Had a Little Dreidel”—the game in which a spinning top with four Hebrew letters, one on each side, was twirled. In our house, a gift was opened according to whose Hebrew letter landed faceup. The presents were modest (Billy Joel’s The Stranger was a high point), but the thrill of eight wrapped boxes quickened a child’s heart and felt Jewishly correct; we didn’t gobble gifts as TV kids do around the Christmas tree. Our trinkets were meted out.
Mom hosted an annual Hanukkah party for about seventy-five people, buying a small present for every guest, asking every family to contribute some form of entertainment: song, poem, or skit. Who can forget Steinem tap-dancing in our living room, or New York Times editor Max Frankel delivering a lecture on the Maccabean revolt? My siblings and I wrote new Hanukkah-appropriate lyrics to a medley of Broadway show tunes. From West Side Story: “When you’re a Jew, you’re a Jew all the way from your first little bris, to your bar mitzvah day. . . .” From Evita: “Don’t cry for me, Antiochus . . . the truth is I burned the latkes. . . .”
I loved these traditions—our crowded living room full of families I’d known forever and our more intimate nightly family powwow around the menorah. But Jewish identity, per se, wasn’t at the forefront of my mind until I was twenty-four and it was tested. For a year, I’d been dating a Catholic named Michael who cared a lot about his Catholic heritage. Mom was sure I’d soon abandon the Jewish people and start baptizing my babies. She blamed herself; she’d failed to give me enough Jewish identity to want to preserve it. She cautioned that I’d end up caring later, more than I did in my twenties, a warning that felt unnerving. Despite her sadness, I moved to Palo Alto with Michael when he was admitted to Stanford Law School.
The relationship ended nine months later. In part, I began to feel the fault lines more than I’d expected or that I could explain to him. It wasn’t just that when I took him to my aunt Judy’s seder in Palo Alto, I realized that everything familiar to me was foreign to him; it was the ineffable gaps that reminded me that we didn’t come from the same “stuff.” He knew more about his faith than I did about mine, so it was hard for me to visualize our religious future together. How would I teach our children what I didn’t know myself? Our conversations on the topic were strained. He thought I was overdramatizing our differences; I thought he wasn’t being honest about how hard it could become.
I cried a lot when I packed my bags and flew back to New York, despite my parents’ loving welcome. Walking back into my childhood bedroom with its Laura Ashley wallpaper felt like failure; I’d left less than a year ago with fanfare and a certain degree of courage, to strike out on another coast. Now I was home without an apartment or a job. I had also come up against an unfamiliar realization: my Judaism mattered. Or at least, I was being forced to decide whether it did. I could shrug off the question for a while longer, join a gym, schedule dinner with friends, job-hunt. But it would keep circling back, perching on my shoulder like an insistent parrot, “You have to deal with me.”
Which is not to say that I truly dealt with it until 1997: the moment I was looking at my newborn son at his bris (circumcision). This necessitates a rewind to 1993, when I had a blind date with a wonderful Skokie native named David Shapiro and married him eight months later. I had never felt such an instantaneous certainty about knowing someone without knowing them, of looking forward to talking to someone for the rest of my life. He had a Midwestern genuineness, a keen sense of humor, a fascination with history, and a devotion to family. Our family parallels felt like no coincidence: we both had parents with strong, uncomplicated marriages; I’m an identical twin, and Dave has identical twin sisters. Dave is three years younger than his twin sisters, and Robin and I are three years older than my brother, David. We had an instant shorthand and ease together.
On a sunny October morning, Dave proposed to me at the Lincoln Center fountain, pouring champagne from a bottle into two flutes, playing our favorite song on a portable CD player: “I Could Write a Book,” by Rodgers and Hart.
David wanted a small wedding, so we culled the guest list to the bare minimum (not easy—I have regrets), picked a pre-high-season date with lower airfare to St. Lucia, and asked my Yale classmate Mychal Springer, by then an ordained rabbi, to come marry us. We exchanged vows on a mountain so windy, I thought I might blow off. Mom had requested a wedding canopy, and the island resort seemed to enjoy creating its first “hooper,” as the St. Lucians referred to it—the huppah (canopy for weddings). It was important to me to be under one; all my ancestors had been, and I wanted to relive the Fiddler on the Roof wedding scene, having watched every Broadway iteration since 1969, memorized the movie, and played Chava (the rejected daughter) in a college production.
When our first child, Benjamin, arrived in all of his robust nine pounds, twelve ounces, something powerful reared its head as I watched his swaddled self, capped in a miniature yarmulke, held aloft by the mohel who performed the “surgery,” Phil Sherman. (Phil is famously theatrical but he gets the job done fast, with an improvised pacifier of sweet wine for the infant, minimal baby-wailing, and plenty of shtick). I’ll never forget the questions that echoed in my head as Ben was being blessed: “Do you really understand why you’re doing this? Does this mark the start of your Jewish family, or are you just checking the box?”
The bris conveyed a decision I’d never made. We scheduled the ceremony because that’s what Jews do: host a bris on the eighth day of a boy’s birth, invite friends and family to come witness, bless, and then eat. I cried that morning because I was hormonal, true, but also because Ben was the newest tiny Jew, joining a tenacious people that many were determined to eliminate. And I cried at my deficits: how little I knew, and how late I’d have to learn it if I chose to start now.
This was the moment that led me to write my first book, Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish, an anthology of face-to-face interviews with Jewish celebrities about whether they cared about Judaism. Sure enough, these public figures had wrestled with similar vacillation—discarding what was inherited; feeling part of a tribe or indifferent to it; owning or abandoning tradition; mastering rituals or never learning them; navigating the patchiness of observance, the shame in stereotypes, the riddle of Israel.
No fewer than sixty-two people agreed to talk to me for the book, including both Jewish Supreme Court justices at the time, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer; actor Dustin Hoffman; director Steven Spielberg; opera legend Beverly Sills; comedian Gene Wilder; writer and director Nora Ephron; Star Trek’s Jewish duo, Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner; Olympic medalist Mark Spitz; and three of my former bosses at 60 Minutes: Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, and Executive Producer Don Hewitt.
In the midst of what proved to be intense, intimate conversations, I realized that I hadn’t answered the questions I was posing: How much does being Jewish matter to you? Do you care what religion your children are? Do you feel a personal weight because of our hard history? Are you pro– or anti–gefilte fish?
Then I was jarred by my interview with Leon Wieseltier, the wild-haired, erudite writer, who grew up Orthodox and is fluent in Jewish scholarship. I sought him out because I know he’s unapologetically opinionated and I didn’t want my hand held. But as we sat on chairs opposite each other in his spare office, the bluntness of his message was still bracing. He was entirely unsympathetic to the idea that I, and many of my interviewees, might be unmoved by, and uncommitted to, Judaism:
“The problem is that most American Jews make their decisions about their Jewish identity knowing nothing or next to nothing about the tradition that they are accepting or rejecting. We have no right to allow our passivity to destroy this tradition that miraculously has made it across two thousand years of hardship right into our laps. I think we have no right to do that. Like it or not, we are stewards of something precious.”
I left this interview feeling both depleted and energized. I picked up Wieseltier’s book Kaddish and underlined a line I’ve kept with me: “Do not overthrow the customs that have made it all the way to you.” The proverbial lightbulb went off.
I began weekly Torah learning with a young rabbi, Jennifer Krause, who had taught my parents’ study group and who hails from Tucson. It soon became a highlight of my week as I began to understand how random Bible stories connected, how family dysfunction was timeless, how right and wrong was clarified in our ancestors’ mistakes. Torah references suddenly popped up everywhere: novels, political speeches, movie scripts, poems.
Ultimately Jennifer nudged me to cross the Rubicon—to become a bat mitzvah at the tender age of forty. I fought her at first, because it felt like much ado about not much, and I didn’t want to celebrate myself for such a belated milestone. A bat or bar mitzvah (literally: “daughter [bat] or son [bar] of commandment”), typically marked at age twelve or thirteen, is the turning point of a Jew’s life—as other religions have their rites of passage—so I was hesitant, twenty-eight years late, to ask friends and family to save the date, to rent out a defunct synagogue since I still didn’t belong to one, to reserve a restaurant space for lunch. Jen told me to stop angst-ing; this wasn’t about a party, but a promise. I was signing up for Judaism, and that was worth a catered meal.
I gave in and soon found myself on the subway memorizing my parsha (Torah section) with earphones every day, pressing stop and rewind to make sure I knew the chant. As the date neared, I became single-minded, going over the prayers and feeling pulled toward the ceremony in some inexorable way.
I slept in my childhood bedroom the night before the service because my Chicago in-laws had kindly flown in and were bunking in our apartment on various sofa beds and mattresses. I suspected that I’d need a little separation and quiet to concentrate. Mom left a gift on my old Laura Ashley comforter: a silver Kiddush cup (for wine blessings on Shabbat and holidays) with my name engraved and the date of my bat mitzvah. “Better late,” she wrote in her card. “I’m so proud you chose this.”
Jen was right: my Big Fat Belated Bat Mitzvah was unforgettable. Maybe it was watching Ben and Molly come up on “stage” to recite by heart the blessings for the candles and challah (braided bread), or seeing them witness their mom officially join the Jewish people. Maybe it was that when I chanted Torah, the handwritten Hebrew letters were no longer swimming on the parchment, but recognizable. Maybe I was overwhelmed by reciting the same text that has been read and read and read by Jew after Jew after Jew for more than three thousand years—even when people had to do so in secret. Maybe it was watching my mother crying in the front row.
My Torah portion in Leviticus included the concept of Karet—being cut off from one’s people. I realized that I was choosing not to be.
After the bat mitzvah, I became somewhat insatiable, downloading books and journals, listening to recorded sermons of rabbis I admired, reading the Jewish press. I convened a monthly Torah study group over wine in my living room with friends, led by the cheeky, affable Rabbi Burt Visotzky from the Jewish Theological Seminary, an expert on Midrash (Torah commentary). Burt suggested that we begin at the beginning, so we chose the book of Genesis and didn’t stop till we’d completed it five years later.
But I was still a Jew without a synagogue, and I didn’t look for one because, for all my Jewish awakening, I didn’t view temple membership as lacking. Then I stumbled into my first real Jewish home, Central Synagogue, a Reform temple in Manhattan with Moorish Revival architecture, a dazzling rose window, and thousands of devoted congregants.
I happened to attend the bat mitzvah of my friend Pamela’s daughter and was drawn in by the splendor of the sanctuary, the urgency of Rabbi Peter Rubinstein’s sermon, and the expressive voice of Cantor Angela Buchdahl. It was love at first sound.
Outside, I phoned my husband: “We have to join this place.”
Ever the realist, he said, “You spent ninety minutes there.”
“I’m just telling you, Dave: this is where we should be.” I knew I wanted to keep listening to this clergy. I wanted to keep coming back to that room.
I signed us up the following Monday. Dave trusted my gut and went along.
Central draws people in quickly. Suddenly, I was safeguarding Friday evenings to attend services—Central’s largest weekly gathering, which numbers hundreds and feels ebullient and sacred. The music penetrated, the spoken prayers felt unforced.
I enrolled my children in the weekly religious school and delighted in watching them bow during their abbreviated tefilah (prayer) service and learn Hebrew alongside their new friends. For Ben’s “mitzvah project” (community service), he chose to visit regularly with a Holocaust survivor and was affected by his stories.
But then Ben hit a roadblock, when he was saddled by severe anxiety in the seventh grade—a discomfort that was compounded by the loss of his friend Jacob, age ten, to brain cancer. Ben told us that he saw no point in a bar mitzvah or praying to a God who could let a ten-year-old die. I wrote to Senior Rabbi Peter Rubinstein, asking sincerely for help; I had no clue how to parent this moment.
Peter suggested that Ben stop by his office, and one meeting changed everything. Peter managed to connect with Ben in a way that no teacher or therapist had. Over the next few months, Peter talked Ben through his sense of religion’s futility. One day, out of the blue, Ben told us he wanted a bar mitzvah after all.
Ben and Molly became bar and bat mitzvah two years apart in ceremonies that seized my heart. During each service, I felt my children uplifted by a ritual that conveyed, This is about you and also beyond you. None of this lasts without you. I cried at the same two moments: when the rabbi passed the Torah scroll from the two pairs of grandparents to Dave and me and then to our child—a physical passing of the tradition—and also when they received a private blessing from the rabbi in front of the ark. I don’t say this lightly: it felt as if God was close by that day. Central Synagogue brought home the idea that my mother had predicted years ago: Judaism is a train that circles back to pick you up.
So with all this newfound connection, why did I feel compelled to go further? I think because the more I did grasp, the more I saw what I didn’t. It bothered me that I had never lived the entire Jewish calendar. I couldn’t explain Shemini Atzeret. I wanted to fill in the gaps, not just asking what Tu B’Shvat means but why it began and its relevance today.
One rabbi, Irwin Kula, posed two questions that guided me throughout my yearlong undertaking: “What do we hire a holiday to do for us? What is the yearning to which the holiday is a response?”
I wanted to know what each holiday does. Not that I would sit back, fold my arms, and expect fairy dust; I’d do my part, leave my skepticism at the door, be as active and open as possible. I hoped to be taken somewhere. The land of the holiday-knowers looked compelling, grounding.
Of course, multitudes of Orthodox Jews follow every holiday as a matter of course, but most Jews in the United States are not living by the Jewish clock, nor even aware of what happens when. (The holiday dates change every year according to the Hebrew calendar, which is tied to the moon’s cycles and is impossible to memorize; many holidays officially begin at sundown the night before, often lasting more than one day depending on the holiday: Rosh Hashanah is two days; Sukkot is eight or nine, depending on whom you ask.)
I wanted to understand what we non-Orthodox Jews are missing. Not just the facts and figures of Judaism, but their expression in real life. I wanted more of the intensity that I’d observed other people feeling.
The much-dissected Pew Research Center study of 2013 revealed that most Jews do not connect their Jewish identity to Judaism. I wanted to find out if that’s because we haven’t really looked there.
So I took the leap. I began a column for the Forward newspaper, called “18 Holidays; One Wondering Jew,” a journey generously shepherded and supported by the Forward and then expanded considerably for this book. I promised readers I’d dissect and digest every single Jewish holiday, no matter how obscure, promising to write before and after each major one—to share my preparation first, my experience afterwards. (For the less famous holidays, one chapter seemed sufficient.) I aimed to climb the scaffolding of a more rigorous Jewish life without knowing the outcome.
Yes, I could predict all the roadblocks:
1. Judaism’s schedule is a bear. I committed to writing about eighteen holidays because when I started counting them, I came up with between eighteen and twenty, depending on how one tallies the major and minor festivals and fasts. I leaned toward a clean eighteen since it’s a significant Jewish number: every Hebrew letter has a numerical value and the word chai (life) adds up to eighteen. Chai also means “raw” or “uncooked,” an apt adjective since I considered myself an unbaked Jew.
2. The Sabbath is considered the most important holiday of all, but I thought I’d lose my audience if I wrote about all fifty-two. I wrote about two, without counting them in the total eighteen.
3. I like eating. The idea of graduating from one difficult fast (Yom Kippur) to six didn’t electrify me.
4. Synagogue services are typically long, and, let’s be frank, not always riveting. I decided to research and visit different temples and independent prayer groups across denominations, which would mean significant pew time.
5. My kids and husband didn’t sign on for this. Now, not only did they have to participate (at least a little), but they’d have to hear about it (a lot). They said that they were game, but I wasn’t so sure. I apologized in advance because I’d be absent at odd times (one penitential service, Selichot, began at midnight; on Shavuot [the giving of the Torah], people study all night till sunrise).
6. I apologized to my Central clergy because I’d be peripatetic for a year. I apologized to my husband because I’d be running off to spend hours without him, sitting in other shuls on the High Holy Days when we normally sit side by side.
7. I realized my method might appear quirky or hypocritical: I would be observing Jewish holidays without being observant, eating ritual foods without keeping kosher, designing a personal seminary without getting a degree. This would be an expedition, not a conversion. I was clear, but others might not be.
8. I worried that I’d be perceived by the Orthodox as a tourist or trespasser in what adds up to their way of life. Even though, even in Orthodoxy, there is no one way. I’ve met observant Jews who don’t keep every fast, who parse kosher rules very personally, who discard one rite but wouldn’t skip another. Judaism has become highly customized, and the labels of Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox are all moving targets.
9. My Hebrew is pathetic. I first learned the language in college (taught by a dynamic professor who used the Israeli Top-40 pop countdown to drill vocabulary), then promptly forgot everything I’d mastered because I stopped using it, then relearned enough to chant my Torah portion, then recently went on Craigslist to find a tutor and found Joel Goldman, a very sage, very Orthodox instructor who looks anxious for the Jewish future every time I read aloud.
10. Okay, The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs was a brilliant book. I went to high school with A.J., I know A.J., A.J. is a friend of mine. But he and I agreed that my voyage would be different—A.J. followed the Bible’s scriptures, I’d be the holiday pilgrim. He gave me his blessing. And he kindly wrote the Foreword to this book. So everyone can stop bringing up A.J. already.
I noted the hurdles and then pressed ahead:
I printed out a Jewish calendar and taped it to my fridge.
I ordered a shofar (ram’s horn) on Amazon.com. (FYI, they can be malodorous.)
I picked out white clothes for Yom Kippur. (We’re supposed to dress in the white of our burial shroud.)
I polished my candlesticks and found a recipe for hamantaschen (the Purim pastry).
I researched a place to go for Selichot (penitence before the High Holy Days—who knew we atone before we atone?) and a place to observe Yom HaShoah (Holocaust remembrance). I was drawn to places where a holiday would be highlighted; not all synagogues program every holiday.
“Most American Jews don’t see identity as an enterprise of labor, a matter of toil,” Wieseltier told me. “So in America now it is possible to be a Jew with a Jewish identity that one can defend, and that gives one pleasure—and for that identity to have painfully little Jewish substance.” I wanted my Jewish identity to have Jewish substance. I wanted more “toil.” Wieseltier’s prescription for Jewish meaning—a resonance I craved—was to “get into the fight.” It was time.
First stop: Rosh Hashanah.
