It is quite appropriate that I write about this subject now, as we approach the High Holidays and what I have decided to do a month after they have passed.
My understanding of Judaism has of course changed during my long lifetime. My father was my initial guide to religion; my mother to ritual, mostly food, practices. As a child, we lit candles on Friday evening, ate challah which we purchased and had chicken soup and chicken to eat. We were not poor; it was however, wartime, when I was a child and I was eight, in third grade and in my first year of Hebrew School when my mother's parents, my Oma and Opa arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey on the first troop ship to be converted to carrying refugees from Europe to the United States.
I was there, at harborside, with my parents, my mother's brother Willie and his wife, my Aunt Lisa, plus Auunt Lillie, my grandmother's brother Benno's wife. Uncle Benno had to work and couldn't join us in the long drive, the wait and the drive home. My four year-old sister held my hand the whole time! To keep me safe or was I protecting her?
I am thinking about that now, as I finished watching the PBS documentary, Part one , the United States and the Holocaust which describes events in Germany from 1933-1938. My parents and grandparents lived through all of those humiliations.
I also just saw Tom Stoppard's new play Leoppoldstadt which so subtley portrays the tension the Jewish people felt during those years.
This was the tension between life and death, between beatings, and being made to scrub the floors, or to sign away all of one's lifelong earnings and possessions to flee with nothing, but their lives to begin again somewhere else.
G-d was nowhere in that equation.
My father told me quite plainly that I had to learn all about my religion because, as Jews we were never safe anywhere in the world, even in the United States of America which had held all of his hopes. I had to learn all about my religion because he wanted me to be accepted and able to attend services in any country in which I may someday live, among my own people. G-d was not there, either.
So I did. I was a decent student, when I applied myself, but I faced ostracism in my Hebrew School. I was treated less than, because I am female and becuse my father kept his furniture store open on Saturdays.
Meanwhile, none of my studies mentioned G-d either. .We learned to read Hebrew and to write the letters in script, we studied the prayers to read them quickly and without error. We studied the ritual of the Saturday morning service and were excused from any sermons, or from the memorial prayers on the High Holidays.
I was disrespected as a woman all the way up to 1976 when my father died and I was not counted as part of the ten people needed to recite the memorial prayers during the first seven days of shiva.
At those services, the small books included the twenty-third psalm, the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want.
I am now learning what the words in Hebrew in the Torah mean. It is of utmost importance for me to do that now.. And I am learning how to chant two sections of one week's chapter so I can finally read from that holy scroll.
I love the stories and the moral lessons we can relate to even today, from stories and explanations from so long ago, but sadly, I have not found G-d.
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