.”
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
