“Fine, thank you,” I say, now armed with all the information I need to fool the rabbinate. If they want a picture of gravestones like in that article, then I’ll use Photoshop.
Not Jewish Until Proven Guilty
“Jessica, it was horrible,” my dad says over the phone.
My parents had agreed to my request to find a rabbinate-approved rabbi from Chabad and convince him to give me a letter testifying to my Jewish identity. It turns out that the Chabad Houses are the rabbinate’s international network of rabbis around the world—sort of like McDonald’s franchises, but without the bacon.
“We felt like we were raped by this rabbi. I’m so sorry that we couldn’t help you.” He begins sobbing.
“What happened?” I ask, trying to hide the quiver in my voice. I don’t know if I’m sadder that my parents have now been hurt by this or that this might be the end of the road for me having a Jewish wedding in Israel.
“This rabbi started asking mom and I questions. When mom told the rabbi that she had converted, he refused to even speak to her,” my dad sobbed. I could barely understand him through his and my tears.
My mom, who has always been proud of being a Jew by choice, had told this rabbi the truth, fully believing that all of the Jewish people are accepting and caring. She had been taught that halacha, Jewish law, forbids a Jew from reminding a convert that they converted. She has now been Jewish for more than half her life.
“Then he said to her that you were not born with a Jewish soul because a Jewish soul is formed in the womb of a Jewish mother, and that Mom is not a Jewish mother.” My dad continues crying.
This rabbi had penetrated and violated my mom’s body with his words. He defined and symbolically controlled her body without her permission. I want to kick something. I’m furious. I can’t believe that my parents are suffering so much at the hands of this man, who has the audacity to call himself a rabbi.
After I hang up with my dad, I call up this so-called rabbi.
“You just spoke to my parents. I want to let you know that you are a horrible person, rabbi, and Jew. You do more damage to Judaism than good.”
He attacks me back like the rabid rabbi that he is. The conversation continues for over an hour. I argue halacha with him. He tells me that Reform rabbis aren’t even rabbis and that they all eat bacon. I tell him that is like saying all ultra-Orthodox spit on little girls for dressing immodestly. He tries to offer me conversion classes. I tell him I’m already a Jew and don’t need a conversion, and that all I want from him is a letter proving my Jewishness. He refuses. I offer him a bribe.
I hang up the phone wanting to send him a year’s supply of bacon.
When I tell Meydan what happened, he is unsympathetic.
“You wanted to lie to the rabbinate? That sounds like bad karma,” he says.
Despite the fact that the whole rabbinate thing is important to Meydan, he isn’t doing anything to resolve the situation. He is strangely absent from all of my efforts—sort of like Bush was after Hurricane Katrina.
I explode. “What the hell does karma have to do with it? First of all, wrong fucking religion! And second of all, the rabbinate is so corrupt that just dealing with them brings bad karma. Besides, why don’t you do something to help me? This is your goddamn request! Why have I been doing all of the work?”
After that Meydan agrees to talk to the ITIM rabbi and to try to look for a solution together.
Maybe things will work out after all.
* * *
1 . Kohen means “priest” in Hebrew. Anyone with the last name Cohen, Kahn, or Katz is considered to be a descendant of a priest from First Temple times. The ultra-Orthodox believe them to be of a higher caste.
12
Freedom From Religion
Sitting on opposite ends of the couch, the same couch on which we cuddled the first night we moved into this apartment, Meydan and I are watching the news.
The biggest story of the past few weeks is the reoccurring riots in Jerusalem—the religious, but not the spiritual, capital of the world. The penguins have been rioting every Shabbat against a parking lot that is open next to the Old City. The Riot of the Penguins, as I like to call it, consists of them throwing rocks at fellow Jewish police officers on Shabbat—a day when they are not supposed to be lifting or carrying anything—in order to protest other Jews desecrating Shabbat.
As I watch the news report, I think back to a hike with friends in the Golan Heights a few summers ago. It was sweltering outside. When we reached the natural pool, we were dripping with sweat. We stripped down to our bathing suits and jumped into the refreshing water with the rest of the Israelis. After cooling off, we got out and sat on the rocks and began eating our packed lunches.
As we ate, a religious woman with her two young kids turned to me and politely asked me, “Do you mind putting your shirt on? My husband just left because we are religious and he feels uncomfortable being around women who aren’t modest.”
I reluctantly but politely agreed.
Her husband came back. And then a second later, she whipped out her breast and began feeding her baby.
I looked at her in shock. I don’t have anything against breastfeeding in public, but don’t ask me to cover up my stomach when a second later you go and show your nipple to the entire world like you’re at Woodstock.
Everything they do is as hypocritical as the Shabbat elevators1. I wish I hadn’t put my shirt back on.
My phone rings in the middle of the news report and brings me back to the present. It’s my parents. I walk into the other room and shut the door.
Ever since Meydan made his conversion demand, I talk with my parents every day, especially my mom. I need their support as much as they need mine. In all the years I have been here, I have never missed them as much as I do now. It is strange to me that Meydan, who seems to be so close to his family, has yet to tell them about what we are going through. I’ve begun to notice that even though there is always laughing and noise at his family meals, they never talk about anything real. Instead the entire conversation involves everyone asking one another if they need or want something, like food, clothes, laundry, or money. No one ever really talks about their feelings.
I hang up with my parents. I wish they were here.
I sit back down on my side of the couch. Meydan hasn’t moved. He’s still staring at the TV, which is now broadcasting an undercover exposé about a religious widow who has to undergo a humiliating ceremony called haliza, where in order to remarry she has to take off the shoe of her dead husband’s brother.
The woman is the only woman in the room that is full of what I assume are smelly, bearded penguins, examining her as if she is a specimen in a laboratory. In the voiceover, she tells of how her religious brother-in-law has been extorting her ever since her husband died in the Yom Kippur War.
I look over at Meydan.
“What do you think of this?” I ask him, in all seriousness.
“They are crazy. They are idiots. They are fanatics,” he says.
A feel a glimmer of hope. My eyes widen.
“Really? Then why do you want their approval? Why do you want to be married by the same people who believe in this crap?” I ask, honestly curious.
“Because, we live in Israel. We don’t live in the United States where there is Conservative and Reform Judaism. We live in Israel. Here there is the Orthodox. Here there is the rabbinate,” he states.
Really? You want the approval of the rabbinate? Why? They are so screwed up. The chief rabbi made an announcement during the swine flu outbreak that the media and public should stop referring to it as swine flu since pigs are not kosher. Then they went on to promote a flight full of praying and swaying rabbis to fly over the country to give the Israeli nation their blessing, as if that would work better than vaccines. Isn’t it bad enough that the health minister is from one of the religious parties, and instead of allocating part of the budget to medicine and medical equipment, he decided to add more synagogues in h
ospitals so people can pray away their illnesses? Based on this, Scientologists Tom Cruise and John Travolta have just as many qualifications to be Israel’s health minister.
“Well, I want to take our kids to a Conservative synagogue here. I don’t want them raised in an Orthodox synagogue where the women are separated from the men like when the South was segregated.” Trying to take a stand for my vision, I sit up a little taller.
“Are you an idiot? There are no Conservative or Reform synagogues in Israel.”
My hand instinctively moves to my ear and gently rubs it, remembering the pain I had the night he gave me the ultimatum.
“Of course there are. I’ve been to them. There just are not as many Conservative and Reform synagogues in Israel because the Orthodox synagogues are the only ones that get government funding.” I, the immigrant, understand more about the religious and political affairs of the country that he was born in. What should I expect from a guy who served in an army unit called moran2?
“Well, I don’t want to go to a Conservative synagogue. Every time I see a woman wearing a kippah it makes me want to throw up,” Meydan says, not having enough knowledge to win the argument on an intellectual level.
And why do Israelis think they are always right, even when they aren’t? They’re like teenagers.
“I grew up wearing a kippah in synagogue! Besides, it doesn’t say anywhere that women can’t wear them, it just says men have to,” I yell back as he gets up off the couch and heads toward the bedroom. I don’t bother mentioning that he isn’t wearing a kippah.
For someone who claims Judaism is so important, he really doesn’t know anything about the religion.
Turning around, Meydan says more calmly, “Listen, Jessica, the thing is that I’m just worried about our kids. I don’t want them to have to go through the same thing you are going through.
I look down at my hands, now in my lap, and think to myself, the only reason I’m going through this is because of you. Because you can’t see that if we marry outside the rabbinate, we would be living above the law. You see it as living below the law.
He goes on, “There must be some easier type of conversion since you are Jewish, since you grew up Jewish, since you served in the army and all. It is not like you are going to be converting from scratch.”
Did he just compare converting to making a batch of cookies?
He doesn’t get it! I scream in my head. Then I scream out loud, “The rabbinate doesn’t care about the army! They are the same ones that don’t serve in the army. They don’t think it’s their duty to serve in the army. They think that praying in a yeshiva is a more effective defense strategy. They’re the same people that don’t even believe that the State of Israel exists because God didn’t bring about its existence, but are somehow able to get over that belief and still take all of the funds of this ‘non-existent’ state for welfare and as a salary for working in the non-existent state’s government.”
He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t know the rules, the laws, the politics, and the complexities of what he’s asking. And he isn’t doing any research to try to understand. I’ve called my rabbi, rabbi friends, and rabbis of friends. He says he doesn’t even have a rabbi to call. I had to explain half of these laws to him. If I hadn’t explained this double standard of the “who is a Jew” question, then he wouldn’t even have known it existed.
Meydan walks into the bathroom to brush his teeth. Sitting on the couch, feeling completely alone, I try to figure out who he represents in this journey of mine. Is he the scarecrow without a brain to think for himself, brainwashed by the rabbinate and its control in the government? Is he the lion without enough courage to take a stand? Or is he the tin man without a heart to love me and support me, unable to forget about this whole rabbinate marriage-conversion thing?
I think back to over a year ago, when I finally worked up the courage to tell him what my mom’s conversion actually meant for marriage.
Even though he had already known that my mom converted, I somehow knew that he didn’t know its impact. We had been sitting in the car outside his parents’ place after lunch when I, the immigrant, had taught him, the sabra, about the history of our country. I, the secular, had explained, to him, the “religious,” about Judaism. I told him about Ben-Gurion’s concession to the religious over sixty years ago. I explained to him that it meant that I couldn’t marry in Israel, because the rabbinate today has complete control over marriages, conversions, and burials.
When he heard this, I saw his whole body tighten and then he asked me, “What will this mean for our children?”
Like a movie was being projected on his forehead, I could see all of his thoughts flashing through his head—his grandfather behind the fences of Auschwitz, himself wrapping tefillin in the morning, lighting Shabbat candles with his grandmother, fasting on Yom Kippur, and his mother’s Jewish cooking on holidays. I saw all of his Jewish guilt from being a descendent of a Holocaust survivor cross his face. It was as if his Jewish identity was owned by his past as much as mine was.
I had told him then that they would be just like me, “Jewish in terms of the State of Israel, but not in terms of the rabbinate.”
He hadn’t responded. Instead he had given me a kiss, got out of the car, and shut the door.
I had sat alone in the car, with the truth out in the open.
I had tried to push the subject out of my mind after that conversation, but it stayed with me every day of our relationship. I guess somewhere, somehow, I always knew that he wouldn’t be strong enough to deal with it.
I should have just told him that I preferred getting married abroad and saved myself from these fights. I should just have used the forged ketuba and never told him about the purgatory that the state created for me. But, deep down, I needed his full acceptance.
The subject was not mentioned again until that fateful night when I willed the car to crash.
Standing up from the couch, I yell back at him, “There is no easier way!” I feel like I’m sinking and no one is throwing me a life jacket. “Don’t you get it? The rabbinate doesn’t care! They just want money and control!” I don’t understand how Bibi privatized everything from El Al to the Israel Electric Company, but marriage he left under the control of the Jewish Taliban.
He looks back at me with blank eyes and a mouth full of toothpaste. Meydan is as ignorant of the world around him as I had been naïve when I first came here and actually believed that the Zionism I was taught in Jewish day school was the same that existed in Israel. I grew up in a country where religion was individual, but he grew up in Israel, where the Orthodox own everyone’s Jewishness. This country is not the Land of Oz for Jews. This is not a land where all Jews are family. This is not a land where Jews are not discriminated against. This is not a Jewish democracy like the founders of Israel had imagined.
If Ben-Gurion and Herzl knew what this country has become they would be turning in their graves.
He comes out of the bathroom with fresh breath and a damp face. I put my hands on his biceps and look into eyes. “Meydan, this is my identity. It’s not a haircut. Being Jewish, being a Zionist is the core of my identity, and you asking me to convert is stripping that away,” I say calmly, trying to get him to see my pain. I feel like my sense of self is being chipped away, my idealism destroyed, my identity stolen.
I let go of his arms and look over at Meydan’s tefillin sitting on the shelf.
This Judaism, this Israeli Judaism, is not the type of Judaism I grew up with. I grew up with a Judaism that cared more about loving thy neighbor and treating life and people with respect. I grew up with a Judaism where community, justice, education, and social activism were at its core.
This Israeli Judaism is where people care more about avoiding lighting the Sabbath candles even a second too late, or picking the microscopic bugs out of rice. This is a Judaism where people throw rocks to prevent people from breaking the Sabbath, or spit at women who aren’t modest
enough. This is a Judaism where people refuse to make a phone call on the Sabbath to the police to save a child from being beaten, but will still use a Shabbat elevator or watch TV on Shabbat with an automatic timer. This is Judaism where the women wear expensive wigs to cover their heads after being married, but if they find out that the hair had been donated by Hindus during idol worship, they prefer to burn the wigs instead of donating them to cancer patients. This is a Judaism where they are so concerned with following the letter of the law to the strictest degree possible that they forget the spirit of it. These penguins, the rabbinate, the ultra-Orthodox, have hijacked Judaism from us, from Israel, from the world.
Meydan doesn’t respond. Instead he sits back on the couch to watch more TV. I walk into the bedroom. Without changing, I crawl into bed and quietly cry under the covers. I’m scared that if we can’t work this out, the life I’ve built will fall apart. I’m scared that Meydan will never accept me. The ketuba that I’ve been safeguarding for years to protect my Jewish identity can’t protect me from my need to be loved for who I am. I feel my future crumbling away. With the noise of the TV in the background, I feel my dreams of raising an Israeli family fade into darkness as I fall into a dreamless sleep.
Kosher is as Kosher Does
“I don’t understand. Shouldn’t there be an easier way for her to convert? She is already Jewish. This is just a technicality, logistics,” Meydan is finally on the phone with the rabbi from ITIM. We both stayed home this morning in order to make this phone call together.
Earlier that week, we had talked about the options of getting married abroad. He had finally agreed to consider it. I even made him sign an informal contract on a scrap piece of paper that he wouldn’t rule out the option . . . and good thing I did, because he totally forgot that he promised. I don’t understand why he keeps focusing on the conversion option with this rabbi. The whole point of the conversation was to look at other options. Options that we could both live with.
Chutzpah & High Heels Page 26
