Lovesong: Becoming a Jew
LESTER, JULIUS
Lovesong Becoming a Jew Who ever heard of a black Jew? Does the soul accept for its identity the color of your skin? My soul wants me to hear its Jewish loi>esong. JULIUS LESTER I« the winter...
...II I were recommending a play of Shakespeare's to a twelve-year-old child of mine, it would be "Romeo and Juliet' But "Merchant of Venice" with its two complex plots...
...Even with her beside me, I feel like I'm seventeen again as I walk into a girls' dorm...
...JULIUS LESTER I« the winter 'of 1974, while on retreat at the Trappist monastery in Spencer, Massachusetts, one of the monks told me, "When you know the name by which God knows you, you will know who you are...
...I am nervous...
...I know only that it is...
...There are almost as many haggadot as there are Jews," he told me, laughing...
...I'm only sorry it has taken me forty-one years to accept that...
...What does it mean that Naomi's husband and two sons die...
...Becoming a Jew is not memorizing a set of beliefs and principles...
...I had decided to begin the course with a lecture on slavery as the womb from which Jewish history and American black history are born...
...it is the narrows of attitudes and emotions that do not permit God to enter, that keep us afraid of being vulnerable to the world...
...Was I the last to know...
...The most I can say is, I am exhausted...
...All those years I sang folksongs, spirituals, blues, worksongs and always knew that something was absent, that as much as I loved spirituals, I was not wholly present when I sang them...
...I am not good at languages...
...I am sitting in Judie's, a restaurant my wife and I like to go to for lunch once a week...
...I know now...
...My father's brother and sister both married gentiles...
...Until now I believed that beneath the particularities of cultural expressions flowed a river of human experience m which we all swam and from the depths of that river rose the night-pictures glistening with promise...
...No, it is more than that...
...What you've written is quite good...
...7"~\ oes anti-Semitism exist because Jews are 1/ wedded to each other in their souls but are connected to their gentile fellow citizens only by the civil contract of law and custom' My wife said she understands how a person could join a religion but not become part of a people I do not know what to say...
...One morning every other week, I meet with Rabbi Lander...
...Even saying it that way, it sounds arrogant and superior...
...Am I to believe that God has favorites and Jews are it...
...We have become music...
...My wife worked around the house on Saturdays long before I decided to become a Jew Nevertheless, it is painful...
...I am Yaakov Daniel ben Avraham v'Sarah...
...One afternoon each week I learn the Hebrew alphabet with Aimee Tracey, a Smith College freshman whom Rabbi Lander asked to teach me...
...It is a Jewish song Christmas Day, 1951.1 am twelve years old...
...I know it is a question I will be asked for the rest of my life...
...I cannot follow the incredibly involved reasoning of the rabbis...
...I want Israel to be better than other nations, to set a new standard for politics and international relations...
...I choose to accept responsibility for the Sabbath...
...Judaism is a curious mixture of the rational and the mystical...
...Even midrashic exegesis leaves me bewildered sometimes...
...I return to the couch and when I come to the climactic scene in which Shylock is allowed a pound of flesh if he does not shed a drop of blood, I am outraged...
...I would like the Sabbath to be that real...
...I am not responsible for what Israel does as a nation...
...I thought about the millions of Jews who have uttered that phrase, for whom that phrase was their only hope...
...On this day we received the Torah O at Sinai...
...Please rise...
...That experience enters history with the Jews To guard and embody that experience with attentiveness to the nuances and intricacies of holiness is the Jew's task...
...But why do I doubt'' The joy is there each morning when I awake...
...Jewish survival depends upon the willingness and ability of Jews to act in their own defense...
...It is not possible for gentiles to experience this separateness as other than a rejection of them...
...It is usually translated as "law," which angers me...
...Two more weeks go by...
...It is learning to feel as a Jew feels...
...That will be my only function...
...Its impact and force must have been the spintual equivalent of a giant meteor striking the earth, because this tiny group of people separated themselves from everyone in their world and dared to be different, dared insist that there was only one God, invisible and indivisible...
...There is another set of books with the simple word, Midrash, on the spine...
...Did she need to wash away her identity as the daughter of Pharaoh...
...My dreams now are filled with alefs and lameds and shins swaying and undulating through a deep space, which they light like stars...
...In second grade the teacher played Paul Robeson's records...
...It is happy and sad at the same time...
...How odd and how marvelous...
...Why do Jews think they were chosen and no one else was...
...As I hear the voices from the congregation rising to meet mine, there is no separateness between me and them...
...But I drive safely into the parking lot behind the white* chapel...
...Rabbi Lander explains that chosenness is not a mark of favor but of responsibility...
...The revelation of God as One enters history through the Jews...
...One feasts and drinks wine at the seder and yet, for eight days, you do not eat any leaven...
...When would you like to do it...
...It's a problem, because Ashkenazic Jews consider rice and legumes to be leaven and not to be eaten during Pesach...
...I can back out and go home...
...Coming out of miizrayim is the necessary prerequisite, not the completion...
...Being neither, I am going to be Sephardic for Pesach...
...Though my wife is not converting, she is studying the alphabet with me...
...I'm not sure if I'd prefer being buried beneath the stove or the garbage disposal or just stuffed into a large Glad bag and left behind the garage...
...I wonder if I have been always and playing "Kol Nidre" on the piano when I was seven was a tiny act of affirmation that I am able only now to embody...
...It is over...
...You live the story of the Jewish people from Abraham to the exodus from Egypt...
...It is the same look I see in photographs of some Palestinians and some Israelis...
...Each evening I watch Beirut O being bombed by Israeli jets...
...Do I want to be an object of curiosity, a sideshow freak: Julius Lester, former black militant, former anti-Semite becomes a Jew...
...Even before he made this discovery...
...Superior...
...The next week I met him and two other rabbis at the mikveh in Springfield...
...I thank Momma effusively...
...I think of the spiritual, "Let My People Go," and realize now that it distorts what God said: "Let my people go so that they may serve Me in the wilderness...
...The letters themselves are magical and alive...
...Did he learn nothing in class about the responsibilities suffering imposes...
...There is no need to ever study anything else What do I understand Torah to be at this neonatal stage of Jewishness...
...Right now I am convinced I was born in the kitchen and, if sundown doesn't come soon, I am going to die here...
...On Shavuot we read the Book of Ruth, but reading Torah is not merely saying the words of the text...
...Blessed are You, O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who has sanctified us by Your precepts and enjoined upon us the reading of the Hallel...
...The name of the composition is 'Kol Nidre...
...It is not going to do that That saddens me...
...I squeeze my wife's hand and walk slowly down the side aisle, ascend the three steps to the bimah and stand behind the broad table on which the Torah scrolls are laid...
...When I explained that that was not true, she wanted to know, "Does this make us Jewish now...
...But the children were watching cartoons on Saturday mornings long before I decided to become a Jew...
...A year has passed...
...I wish I knew in my flesh what that experience was...
...How can a former student of mine so readily take sides, so easily feel that he knows who is right and who is wrong...
...The music winds itself around me and wants to take me somewhere but I am afraid and do not go When I stop playing there is a painful yearning in my This tombstone marks the grave of Julius Lester's great .grandfather Adoiph Allschul...
...rhe Chosen People...
...Deciding on the food for tonight as well as what I am going to eat for the next eight days reminds me again that culturally, I do not have a Jewish tradition...
...To perform such an act, she had to open to something within herself first...
...I am very happy for my wife's willingness to have Jewish practice in our home...
...She gets up and\ comes back to me "My name is Sarah Berger...
...Or is it simply that through Shylock I learn that blacks are not the only people in the world who must ponder in their flesh the meaning of meaningless suffering...
...I enter quietly, unobtrusively and sit in a back pew...
...I remember what Max Wohlburg said over and over last summer, "Sing sweetly...
...The daughter of Pharaoh comes down to bathe in the Nile...
...None of the published haggadot I've seen wholly say what I want to say on this night...
...Please come sit with me...
...If Jews do not hold to separateness, Jews cease to exist...
...The joy returns Or maybe it is that I return to the joy...
...A tall middle-aged woman turns around to see at whom the rabbi was nodding...
...The oldest member of the synagogue offers me his hand and says "Tasher koach...
...Did she need to cleanse something more than her body...
...I am now, and if anyone had told me being Jewish meant so much work, I might have tried to be content finding an identity as a Red Sox fan...
...It only took forty years for me to believe m what I knew...
...I stopped writing...
...I know I will be asked countless times how it is possible to be both black and Jewish T~\ uring my New York years I had dinner -Z_V one evening with Diane Wolkstem...
...That's not exactly the way to insure good relations with your neighbors...
...At long last I know what my voice was meant to sing...
...I showed it to Rabbi Lander for his approval, though I didn't have to I am not wholly used to the fact that Judaism is not a doctrinaire religion and I don't need the rabbi's imprimatur...
...I am grateful and move to the front to where she is sitting...
...neither does it move, but it does not stand still...
...Now I know: everything is in Torah...
...There is the story of the man in Auschwitz who raised his eyes to heaven and said, "If we are your Chosen People, then do us a favor...
...This year I prepare a seder for my home and wonder if a gentile can understand Judaism and Jewishness...
...That is the lesson of the Holocaust...
...I will be an object of derision, scorn and jokes...
...Passover is only partially a statement of political liberation...
...I thought you couldn't be Jewish unless you were born Jewish," Jody said...
...I am not sure any longer that that is so...
...Israel is mine...
...I see the volumes in red binding and the gold-colored letters on the spine that read The Talmud and I want to cry...
...How I wished I belonged to something so vast Now, each Friday, I do When I raise the two loaves of challah and we sing the blessing, I think not only of Jews in Boston and New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore who are doing the same, but of all the Jews through the centuries who performed the simple act Tonight when I begin the seder, I will be participating in an act that not, only links me with all Jews in the world this night but links me to an event that, even if it did not occur in historical time, occurred in the souls of a group of newly-freed slaves and transformed them into a people called Jews, a people joined to each other not by race or nationality, language or culture but because of . . I don't know what to call it...
...I have not been to Israel and will probably not go for many years, because I do not want to see Jews treating Arabs as blacks were treated in the South...
...How odd that in him I encounter myself in literature for the first time...
...Give me a break, God...
...It must have looked like a tiny coffin...
...I keep hoping the car will skid on a patch of ice so I won't be able to keep my appointment with Rabbi Lander...
...Though it is a simplified arrangement of a Bach fugue, the lines of music move away from and back to each other, never merging or separating, like wind-blown ribbons on the tail of a kite...
...I love Bach's music more than that of any composer, but my favorite composition is m a thick book Momma bought me There is no composer's name and I do not know how to pronounce the title because it is in a foreign language...
...But now that I am entering the covenant, I experience it as a blessing and a curse, a burden and a joy, but arrogant...
...As I hear the voices from the congregation rising to meet mine, there is no separateness between me and them...
...Well, at least I didn't give him an 'A...
...I do not know...
...One of Rabbi Lander's concerns was the effect of my conversion on the family...
...I call Rabbi Lander...
...It is odd because I did not grow up unaware of black history and literature...
...I don't like it1 It sounds arrogant and superior...
...I am learning songs—z'mirotl Shabbat begins with songs of welcome to the Sabbath Queen...
...its essence is the dedication of soul and body to God...
...Then, most remarkably, instead of ordering the slave to open the basket, she opens it herself...
...I know it is deep and loud, which is why I tried to sing quietly But there had been Saturday mornings when joy banished timidity, especially during the repetition of the Amidah when we sang "Tismach Moshe" and "Sim Shalom...
...When I begin the uptempo and very rhythmic melody for Psalm 115, I hear a soprano voice from the congregation doing an ascending obligato at the end of each line and I smile, recognizing the voice of Janice Friedman, the rabbi's wife, and I think about the words we are singing: Hashamayim shamayim I'adonai, v'ha'aretz natan livnai adam ("The heavens are the heavens of the Lord but the earth He has given to children of men") and it is as if our voices are fusing the two into one so that heaven has now become earth and earth is heaven and the two are one as God is One...
...My wife had not been surprised...
...I've also taken paragraphs from Arthur Waskow's chapter on Pesach in his superb book, Seasons of our Joy, as well as paragraphs from other haggadot...
...Ashkenazim traditionally have chicken for the main course...
...For the rest of my life, do I want to hear people say, "Gee, you don't look Jewish," thinking they are being clever and witty...
...I know how harsh that sounds, but it is not enough to appreciate Judaism...
...I play and beauty becomes pain and then beauty again and in a half-step is inverted into pain once more until beauty and pain wrap around each other like braids of a girl's hair, and beauty and pain become 3 piercing that holds me pinioned and I feel old like "In the beginning," old as if I was never born and will never die...
...Julius Lester will lead us in Hallel...
...I think I understand what anti-Semites mean when they talk about "the international Jewish conspiracy...
...What if I forget the melodies...
...Because we were the only ones present who did not read Hebrew, much of the haggadah was read in English Daniel explained anything he thought we might not understand...
...But I am not Israeli...
...I look at the books with Hebrew lettered on the spines and the letters dance as I danced in my vision...
...I'm afraid to The son of a Methodist minister, Julius Lester discovered as a child in the 1940s that his great-grandfather was Adoiph Altschul, a Jewish peddler who had immigrated from Germany and who had married an ex-slave named Maggie Carson...
...I think I want to become a Jew...
...Since you have converted to Judaism, one thing that may be of interest to you is that the Altschuls are Kohens (Kohanim) which means that they are direct descendants of Aaron...
...Is it because they are models of success and I need a model of suffering someone to reflect a child's pain and confusion at being con demned because of the race into which I was born, someone whose anger at outrageous injustice gives me permission to be angry and through that anger begin to defend my soul...
...Each time I look .il at a Hebrew letter and translate it into sound, I feel like a magician with the powers to transform moonlight into ribbons of gold, and water into a shimmering sun...
...I try to imagine a knife blade as thin as the wind and as keen as hope, but when I apply it oh so gently to flesh, lo, no blood flows...
...What am I doing...
...How could she not think that the body of a Jewish boy was inside...
...Becoming a Jew is not memorizing a set of beliefs and principles...
...I am play-I ing Bach on the upright piano in the living room...
...they are the means by which and through which one is led deeper and deeper into Torah In the fall of 1979 when I started studying Jewish history, I did not understand the stories about devout Jewish men who spent their lives studying Torah...
...Why did she suggest that...
...As long as I keep my Jewishness at home or in Rabbi Lander's office, I am fine...
...I should say, miizrayim, the Hebrew word for Egypt...
...If I am going to be honest I have to .say that it was a lonely experience...
...The segregated schools of Kansas City, Kansas, were secret training camps for the black leaders of the next generation...
...And so am I. 13Elul5746<® Adapted from the book Lovesong Becoming a Jew by Julius Lester, by arrangement with the publisher, Henry Holt and Company Copyright © 1988 by Julius Lester...
...During the service we read silently and then, suddenly, the cantor starts singing...
...I want Israel to be "a light unto the nations...
...They were visibly relieved and had nothing to say or ask...
...I listen to interviews with Israeli government officials, generals and soldiers who say that the presence of Israeli soldiers and war planes in Lebanon is to drive the Palestine Liberation Organization out of the country and give the Jews of Israel physical security...
...From sundown Fridays to sundown Saturdays I am maker of the bread but not its creator...
...Such a complex little word...
...I wonder what questions I will ask of the Book of Ruth when I'm 80...
...When I told the children I was converting, Jody and Malcolm were shocked...
...Every day after I finish practicing, I play it over and over...
...In fifth and sixth grade we learned about W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T, Washington, George Washington Carver, Mary McLeod Bethune...
...Along its Spine are the intimidating words...
...It is undoubtedly the same look that burned in my face during the Sixties As they march stolidly down the street, their chanting fades but I am left angered because their political posturing is a personal attack...
...I exclaim to my wife...
...The service is short and very beautiful...
...I have not lived through five wars in 34 years...
...I have a feeling it will be...
...If I were hearing that from someone, I would say he or she was crazy...
...Now I know the name by which God calls me...
...In a few moments the repetition of the Amidah will be finished and Rabbi Friedman will say, "Julius Lester will lead us in the Hallel" I will rise, walk to the bimah and begin to sing Psalms 113 to 118, those special psalms of praise that are only sung on holidays and when Rosh Chodesh coincides with the Sabbath At long last I will stand in a synagogue and sing Jewish liturgical music as a Jew...
...The iconography of the letters is so compelling that the language becomes not mere words but a way of conceiving and experiencing reality...
...It hurts...
...I am no longer decerned by the black face that stares at me from the mirror...
...How I would love to cuddle with the Sabbath Queen...
...At the end of the seder I almost cried when we said, "Next year in Jerusalem...
...The biggest shock is at the end of my cousin's letter...
...a peddler who had immigrated from Bavaria Altschul is buried in the old section of the Jewish cemetery in Pine ftutf, AfKansss, stomach, a wishing for something I have never had and thus do not know what it is, or a wishing for something which I had once and have forgotten what it was...
...Well, it's a Jewish way of exploring a text, a way of encountering oneself in a text without violating the text...
...Eagerly I look at' the Hebrew text but I never find the words she is singing...
...It is simply that to be like everyone else is to cease to be a Jew...
...Rabbi Lander and I chat for a few moments about our children and then he asks, "What can I do for you...
...That is simply how it was...
...This is a midrash" he said...
...He learned that the Altschuls had come to the United States from a town in Bavaria, that two of his ancestors had been Confederate soldiers, and that cousins he never knew of previously had perished in the Holocaust Iwonder if it is only coincidence that of all the Hebrew names I could have chosen, I chose Yaacov, Jacob...
...I am a Jew...
...There isn't anyone on earth who wouldn't claim that How do you belong to the Chosen People without thinking yourself better than everybody else...
...It simply is...
...Such a bitter joy.* C\ havuot...
...We found it interesting that you converted to Judaism while our family has gone the other direction...
...I imagine myself into the text...
...As the short line of marchers passes the restaurant, I recognize them as belonging to Amherst's radical left fringe...
...They were commemorating and celebrating an event in the history of the Jewish people, I was a spectator because I was not a Jew...
...But when I go into a synagogue I am not strong enough in my new identity to continue seeing myself with my eyes...
...No," I said smiling...
...I had not been aware that he could hear my voice...
...I eat Christmas dinner quickly, angry at what is being done to Shylock...
...I suppose it was all worth it, but I'm not sure...
...I will not be converting to Judaism...
...That is why Jews are different...
...it is inherent in Judaism and Jewishness...
...I stretch out on the living room couch and begin reading, The language is too complex for me to follow the play's subtleties, or even to appreciate the extraordinary language I do not know even what a money-lender or interest are, but I know that Shylock is being mistreated because he is a Jew...
...Shylock...
...I don't know if I would've been so ready to become a Jew if I'd known I would have to endure life without cheese danish and pizza for eight days...
...Torah...
...I sit in the car for a moment...
...I have taken you as a people unto Myself," God says somewhere in Scripture...
...I look at the face of my former student and his eyes gleam with a dangerous righteousness, as if God had come down that morning and tied the cloak of truth around his shoulders...
...She smiles...
...Jewish worship is rooted in an oral tradition with songs of worship having been passed down for who knows how many hundreds or thousands of years...
...I will never be accepted as a Jew...
...In medieval Europe, Jews walked to the edge of town at sunset on Fridays, dressed in white, to welcome the Sabbath Queen descending from heaven, and then escorted her into the town...
...Neatly but quickly, f remove the wrapping paper and stare in wonder at the thick wine-and-gray colored volume...
...And I remember that I will not be going to the bimah to perform but to lead the * His earlier conversion had been supervised by a Reform rabbi congregation in" prayers of praise to Hashem...
...We hear shouting and look to see a group of students marching down the street carrying signs...
...What was I doing'' Was I violating Jewish history and Judaism by imagining myself into a sacred text in this way...
...But I am sure that that man, if he survived, did not choose not to be chosen...
...Miizrayim is that which confines the soul...
...Last year Rachel and Daniel Hillel JT invited us to their home for a seder...
...She writes children's books based on folktales, as I do, and she is now New York City's official storyteller...
...There are not many people present, and I doubt there will be enough for a minyan...
...And I know: What is within those books is who I am...
...This is extraordinary, because it is the belief in the reality of the Spirit...
...Then what about the rest of us, God...
...The joy is not with me as I drive from Amherst to Rabbi Lander's office at Smith College in Northampton...
...That does not mean I like it, or even that I approve...
...And in the context of the story, what would be the masculine principle...
...But Jews have never glorified martyrdom...
...Malcolm asked...
...I not only see it smiling at me like a lover when I open my eyes, but it takes me in its arms and strokes my body...
...All too soon it is over and I descend the bimah and begin walking up the aisle to return to my seat in the back of the synagogue...
...Yet in Shylock I see myself as I do not in DuBois, Johnson, Hughes...
...Julius Lester's wife converted to Judaism m 1986 Torah can also mean the entire Hebrew Bible, though this can also be referred to as the Tanach...
...Can't you only be born into a people' she asks I cannot explain...
...And whatever it was, was so powerful that it has been happening in every generation since, and Jews die rather than relinquish it...
...A kingdom of priests...
...I do not want to see how racist many Jews can be...
...I called myself Father, Writer, Teacher, but God did not answer...
...But Judaism does not believe in reason...
...Preparing the menu, shopping and cooking for the seder should earn me an advanced degree in being a Jewish woman...
...I must be sure that this is what I want to do, what I need to do...
...I see her walking beside the banks of the Nile and seeing the basket floating by the bank...
...I know there are many Jews for whom I will always be only black...
...There are tears in his eyes and I want to cry in my joy...
...But I am not...
...I immersed myself in the ritual bath and said the appropriate blessings, and it was done...
...A Reform rabbi, he is very traditional and is teaching me the tradition...
...I have become who I am...
...They are lovesongs to Hashem...
...For me, studying Torah is an act of engaging God with my imagination, my reason and my feeling...
...Yet she sends one of her slaves to get the basket...
...Jews are responsible for living in the world in a certain way, i.e., with ethical values, with a sense of morality and divine purpose...
...We still consider ourselves Jews even though we are not of the Jewish faith...
...But I have to tell him...
...I have been since the Saturday morning early in the spring when Rabbi Friedman said casually to me after services, "When are we going to get that wonderful bass voice of yours up on the bimah...
...But it doesn't hurt nearly as much as seeing a former student who is not angry, also, because Jewish life is threatened A few months after I started attending B'nai ^J...
...It is not lines or chords...
...My wife is excited about observing Shabbat on Friday evenings...
...If I don't die before sundown, I will probably fall asleep in the middle of the plague of frogs...
...Sing sweetly...
...I love lamb, and while I think I can exist without cheese danish for eight days, no rice...
...This is especially true because I am learning to read the printed, calligraphic script at the same time as I am learning to write and read cursive...
...Jews know something essential about each other regardless of where they live in the world, regardless, even, if they are dead or alive...
...I nod at Rabbi Lander who is chatting with someone at the front...
...It is a statement that negates literature, art and music, nullifies the realm of the imaginative and says it is impossible for human beings to reach out from one loneliness to another and assuage both...
...The mohel took a sharp instrument (I was too scared to look) and drew a drop of blood from my now-circumcised penis...
...I knew...
...My father married a gentile and converted to Christianity when I was three or four years old...
...A book...
...I forget that I am playing, and I slip through the lines to the other stde of the music where I understand all that was, is and will be...
...I close my eyes and begin to chant the opening blessing: Baruch ata Adonai Elohenu melech haolam asher kidshanu b'mitzvotav v'tzwanu likro et ha'hallel...
...It is that for which God chose Jews...
...How do you belong to the Chosen People without thinking yourself better than everybody else...
...Leading them is a young man who was in my "Blacks and Jews" course last semester...
...I needed Rabbi Lander to read what I had written...
...Now I know why...
...It is like learning two languages...
...What's that...
...I love that so much is in song, but there are no hymn books...
...You might want to start by reading the play called 'The Merchant of Venice...
...At havdalah there is a line we say: "We who were called at Sinai to be a kingdom of priests are charged to make havdalah...
...discuss it with Rabbi Lander, afraid he will say I can't be a Jew...
...Daddy subscribed to Ebony magazine and there were books by and about blacks on his bookshelves, books I read...
...basement of Helen Hills Chapel, I look at the books on the shelves...
...What do these words say about how Jews experienced themselves in relationship to the universe...
...I see myself through their eyes and am immediately convinced that my wife is right...
...My dailiness A fter his conversion, Julius Lester wrote to a cousin, Samuel Altschul, n asking for more information about his Jewish ancestors...
...When I open my Hebrew primer and begin to read haltingly, I am five...
...I can defend what Israel is doing...
...I sit before the television set and see buildings crumple and people run through the streets screaming...
...Was Momma thinking of her grandfather...
...assover...
...I'm not intuitive at all, but when you called me, something told me that you wanted to talk about conversion...
...Choose somebody else...
...When the music ends, however, I return to this side and cannot remember what I understood...
...Sephardic Jews say rice and legumes are not leaven...
...I choose to accept responsibility for bringing God into the world once a week...
...That is why Israeli planes are bombing Beirut...
...What a courageous young woman...
...Do we have to become Jewish...
...Robeson, or any other black figure...
...The food was good...
...I cooked popovers (with matzo meal, of course), egg lemon soup, spinach souffle, a leg of lamb, rice, and a Passover wine cake...
...They breathe and move with the litheness, grace and solemnity of ceremonial dancers...
...I would be less odd if I grew another head...
...Everytime I see that phrase in a book I am uncomfortable...
...Because I must do everything alone, the house will not be free of chametz, all traces of leaven, down to the last breadcrumb There is only so much I can do, and it was more important to prepare a haggadah and learn a few songs traditionally sung at the seder...
...I sit in Rabbi Lander's office again and wait until he finishes lighting his pipe...
...If I do, I will hate myself...
...Whether you choose to observe and follow it is your decision, but you must know it " ro give one day to God does not seem like a lot...
...My wife wanted to know if there was something wrong with the masculine principle in society at that time...
...I fear that if I go to Israel I will have to write a Hebrew version of Look Out, Whitey...
...There is only fear...
...I am eight or nine years old...
...I began reading the book of Exodus, but was immediately baffled: Why was the man who was to liberate the Jews raised by Pharaoh's daughter' And who was Pharaoh's daughter that she defied her father's edict that all newborn Hebrew male babies be killed'' I began writing, imagining myself into the questions...
...They are shouting: "Israel out of Lebanon...
...I understand the resentment of non-Jews in ancient times against this minority claiming it was chosen by God and everybody else wasn't...
...It is learning to feel as a Jew feels...
...He chuckles...
...Gimel...
...On the simplest level it is the Five Books of Moses, though these are generally called the Pentateuch or Chumash...
...I am who I always was...
...But I'm not sure Hebrew is a language even...
...I had a feeling that's what you wanted to talk to me about...
...It was in the fall of 1979, as I was preparing my first lecture for the "Blacks and Jews" course...
...Becoming a Jew is to learn a language, too, except this one is of the soul...
...We talked shop for a while, but what I remember most is a comment she made about being Jewish...
...I see myself through the eyes of others, with the eyes of those who have been Jews since time began, who probably have grains of sand in their shoes from the forty years of wandering in the desert...
...I am becoming, at long last, who I always have been...
...In its fullest sense, Torah means the Tanach, plus the Mishnah, Gemara and midrashim...
...I have been preparing for Passover for more than a month...
...I am not Israeli...
...He smiles...
...Yet the words are there: ' 'I have chosen you to be My people," God says...
...I remember the only other time I sat here with him...
...Each week I expect her to rap my knuckles with a ruler or have me stand in a corner where I would pull at my imaginary payis...
...Momma hands me her present It is big and thick and heavy...
...That is all the 613 mitzvot are, the midrashim, the Talmud, the Torah, kashrut, Izedakah, and everything else m Judaism...
...And yet, when a non-Jew attacks Israel I feel threatened...
...I nodded and smiled politely, understanding little and feeling nothing except a Puritan sense of waste at how much food was on the table...
...A lef...
...I don't know, even, what it is...
...All humanity lived in that river with Isis and Quetzalcoatl, yearning to live with and in wholeness...
...Judaism "conceives of the Sabbath as feminine...
...I am the only Jew left in the family...
...Contrary to the historical accusations of gentiles, Jews have not held themselves apart deliberately from non-Jews...
...Oh, you know more about Judaism already than many people in the congregation...
...Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Christians, Moslems and Nazis persecuted and murdered Jews because Jews insisted on their singularity...
...But as I listen to the music, that voice within that mocks me, that causes me to question why I want to be a Jew is not only stilled but is replaced by a wondrous love...
...It is an offensive thought, as repugnant to me as when blacks tell whites they cannot know what it is to be black...
...I choose and I am chosen...
...That makes sense, and yet, Christians, Muslims and humanists live with ethical values, a sense of morality and purpose...
...And yet, at their seder table, I was an outsider and there was nothing they could do to make it different...
...Certainly there are many laws in Torah, but the laws are not Torah...
...I've used it as the foundation for how we will tell the story of the exodus from Egypt...
...It is this music my voice was meant to sing It is this music of praise and love that releases my soul into my voice and I have known ever since I was seven years old and sat at the piano playing "Kol Nidre" over and over...
...I am a Jew and I am a lovesong to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a praisesong to the God of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah...
...It means narrowness, confines...
...I am a Jew...
...The unseen soul is as real as what is seen...
...I get lost very quickly when I try to read the Talmud...
...I can recognize all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet now, but translating those letters into words feels as complicated as creating a human being from the dust of the earth...
...I can't describe it, but it's the most incredible feeling in the world...
...While writing my haggadah I began to feel how Passover is a magnificent drama enacted at one's own table...
...I sit at the back of the synagogue, a brown velvet hppah on my head, my multi-colored talhl wrapped around me and flowing down to my hips...
...As I allow the Hebrew word to seep into me, my associations to Egypt the country dissipate and I see that Jews do not have an obsession with Egypt...
...it uses it as a tool of worship, but reason itself is without intrinsic value Value is found in suffusing the daily with holiness, and that is the ma mystica...
...Israel, I told Rabbi Friedman that I wanted to have my conversion done halachi-cally* I did not know if he would ask me to study with him for another year or what he would say, but I told him I would be willing to do that if he thought it was necessary...
...When the shofar is blown on Rosh Hashana, I think about the sound of the shofar being heard that day in synagogues all over the world, and I think about for how many thousands of years the sound of the shofar has been heard in synagogues all over the world...
...I sat at Daniel and Rachel's seder table and was an outsider...
...I started to ask Rabbi Lander his opinion, but I'm Jewish enough already to know that if you have to ask the rabbi, it ain't kosher...
...t hurts, sometimes, that I will never be able to experience Shabbat in its purity...
...I imagine myself into the text...
...He smiled...
...I am fortunate my wife is so open to something so new and so enveloping...
...I think about chosenness historically, and I begin to understand that, yes, Jews are the Chosen People...
...Aimee is yeshwa-traxncd and is very serious...
...For me, studying Torah is an act of engaging God with my imagination, my reason and my feeling...
...I cannot join a people...
...As much as I love Judaism, as much as I want to be a Jew, I know already that unless I make peace with the concept of chosenness, my conversion will be stillborn...
...She wonders sometimes if I am pretending to feelings that are not mine, if I am not trying to be something I'm not And I am silent and alone with more joy than my thin body knows how to live with, a joy that separates me from her...
...Thus the Lester Haggadah was made...
...More strength to you...
...That son-of-a-bitch...
...Winter 1982 I am a Jew...
...In junior high school we memorized poems by Countee Culler and James Weldon Johnson...
...Julius the Jew...
...What if I fail...
...The melody is my own and it is simultaneously joyous and mournful, because that is the essence of chosenness...
...What an absurd and marvelous notion...
...Don't non-Jews understand that, after the Holocaust, Jews feel more alone and isolated in the world than ever" Jews no longer expect non-Jews to approve of them, accept them and certainly not love them as members of the human family...
...It is simply called The Family Seder and was prepared by a Rabbi Alfred Kolatch...
...My dailiness does not include memories of sons, fathers and brothers killed in one of those wars...
...Lester felt stirrings within him that drew him to Judaism...
...I do not board a bus wondering if a bomb has been planted beneath one of the seats...
...Yet they are close friends Daniel, a veteran of Israel's five wars, offered to physically protect me and my family in the fall of 1979 when he feared (and I did, too) that my life might be threatened because of my article on black anti-Semitism...
...Several older members of the family have told us this fact, and many of the tombstones say this or have the Kohanim symbol.'' I laugh aloud...
...We try to talk about it, but for me the seder was a personal experience and it cannot be that for her...
...Something happened to them, something very real and transforming happened inside these former slaves that gave them a special, unique and singular relationship to the Divine...
...we are embodied prayer...
...What is unique about the via mystica in Judaism is that it is not an experience for the few...
...Q1 ummer 1982...
...If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning...
...It is not an experience of grace but is integral to practicing the religion...
...I searched for that name with the passion of one seeking the Eternal Beloved...
...Only now do I learn that it was the name of my great-great-great-great-grandfather...
...That's what kids used to taunt me with when I was in elementary school and I never understood why they thought saying that would hurt my feelings...
...I know now who I am...
...If that were true, I would not see aspects of myself in the haiku and the poems of Sappho, the music of Bach and the watercolors of Winslow Homer...
...Dakt...
...There is something about Judaism that she really loves, but I am aware that she is still an outsider...
...Orthodox Jews believe that at Sinai God gave Jews not only the Tanach but also the commentaries that were to be written, i.e., the Talmud...
...Rabbi Lander is not surprised...
...Sephardim traditionally have lamb...
...The one I like most was found by my wife...
...The Complete Plays of William Shakespeare...
...When I enter Rabbi Lander's office in the Julius Lester chanting prayers in 1987, two years after he shifted from Reform to Conservative Judaism...
...does not include walking the streets seeing soldiers with rifles on their shoulders...
...I love Judaism because of the questions I ask The answers will change as I change and from each new answer will rise new questions as beautiful as lotuses...
...It is Shavuot and as I walk through the tall, white double doors of the Jewish Community of Amherst, I hope the trembling in my stomach does not show in my hands or legs...
...Jews are never foreigners to each other...
Vol. 12 • December 1987 • No. 9
