Alef: The NEXT Conversation

Kalamazoo, MI (616)

By Emily Comisar

When I was five or six, my parents taught me to recite the blessings over the Hanukkah candles. My father transliterated the verses in his block print handwriting on green-ruled index cards that were small enough to fit in my little hands. For a week I walked around the house trying to wrap my brain around all of the new words with foreign pronunciations. It never occurred to me that six-year-olds all over town were not doing the same thing.

By “town,” I mean Pavilion Township, Michigan (just outside of Kalamazoo)–a place so small that the nearest post office was two “towns” over. We’re talking about a place where there was only one synagogue within reasonable driving distance, and it didn’t even have a rabbi. My being different from everyone else, though, only became clear around Christmas-time, when I was forced to present Hanukkah to all the other kids at school. They called it “cultural awareness;” I called it pressure. Imagine being responsible, at the age of eight, for thirty other people’s perceptions of the Jews. That’s power.

Needless to say, my family didn’t practice Judaism outside of the home. In fact, to fit in a little better, we celebrated the Christian holidays. I can safely say that I clung to my belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny just as hard as any other child at school. So, the time that my grandma came to visit for the holidays, my dad swore up and down that the evergreen in the living room was actually a Hanukkah bush.

The closest thing to anti-Semitism I ever experienced was that one day on the playground at recess when my best friend informed me that the only way to get to heaven was to accept Jesus into your heart. That night before bed I prayed harder than I ever had before, terrified that I was doomed to go to Hell because we never talked about Jesus at my house.  When I finally understood the role that Jesus plays in the distinction between Judaism and Christianity, I guiltily fumbled for a way to take those prayers back.

Moving to Texas changed everything. No longer did my peers rely on me to explain the Jewish holidays. Conversely, they all had formal Jewish educations and were able to explain them to me. It was strange to go from being so different from my peers to suddenly realizing that I belonged to something bigger. I transitioned from a high school that was 30% Jewish to a university that was 18% Jewish, and now I work for a Jewish non-profit (they might have made a movie about this sort of thing once). All I’m trying to say is that, with a little bit of happenstance, I found my way into something that I never knew I needed in the first place.

Photo by ashley_dryden, licensed under Creative Commons.

Tags: Area Codes

Posted by Sarah, Wednesday, November 18th, 2009, 4:45 pm, Area Codes.