The Holiday Spirit

I used to be a Jewish chauvinist. When I was a teenager, I refused to go to two cousins' weddings because they were marrying non-Jews. One relative, a first cousin of my father's, was making a commitment with someone who'd stood with her through the death of her mother.

But I sent her a note explaining why I couldn't attend her nuptials and felt I was doing the right thing. Well, they've been happily married for more than 35 years, both are wonderfully sweet, and, after I met and married a nice Catholic girl in the early 90s, I've apologized for my myopia several times in letters and in person.

Interestingly, after Verna and I got engaged someone sent me an article that said intermarriage finishes the work of Hitler. I'd love to say I had my interfaith-we-are-the-world epiphany before the ugly responses to my mixed marriage. But that would not be true.

I grew up in a very Jewish household. My maternal grandmother, who was never dogmatic, even tore her toilet paper before the Jewish Sabbath so she wouldn't violate the Biblical and Talmudic directives against work on the day of rest. My mother once threatened serious illness after I asked out a non-Jewish girl when I was 19.

But when I fell in love with someone who was not Jewish and I encountered varying degrees of hostility, I realized, shamefully, that my teenaged behavior had been unbecoming. It was easy to criticize those who seemed so narrow-minded, but my response when I was about 15 was certainly on the spectrum of insularity. So who was I to criticize?

On the other hand, many in the Jewish community continue during the Christmas holiday to wax religious about the Christmas dilemma. What should Jews and Jewish parents do when all things Santa, reindeer, elves, present, jingle bells, carols and more are splashed across every inch of our culture? Can we truly preserve our faith with a little Chinese food and a movie?

Obviously it's different for me now. As Maya likes to say, "Dad, you're Jewish, but Miguel and I are Jewish and Catholic." And that means we do celebrate both holidays. We have a Christmas tree and each light a menorah.

After my early dalliance with Jewish chauvinism, I can easily admit that I like Christmas, and have always liked the spirit of the holiday. Like many Christians, my biggest issue with Christmas these days is that we've allowed the holiday to become way too commercial. Even Maya responds that Christmas is about "getting presents," which I know is normal for an almost six-year-old, but I don't want that idea reinforced much longer.

So we go give as much as possible, to each other, to strangers, with time and money. Last year we bought Starbucks gift cards and handed them out to people on the streets. It was a small (and maybe token) gesture, but I want Miguel and Maya to be exposed to giving. And I try to model that all year long.

I do see how people devolve into confusion and outright nastiness towards cultural and religious differences at this time of year, and it's not good for us as Americans or as people of the world. Several years ago, the local Jewish paper, which I've freelanced for since 2003, ran an article about an Orthodox rabbi who forbid his congregants to read from the Torah (first five books of Moses) on Christmas Eve or Christmas day, saying it was a mark against God. When Verna and I read that, I cringed and she railed against the prejudice of some of my religion's adherents.

"Now you know why I would never convert," she'd said.

Judaism and Catholicism are part of my religious and spiritual life now and will be for a long, long time. And that's a good thing. I am Jewish, but I do enjoy celebrating Christianity with my loved ones. And learning more about faith from different perspectives.

I wish the fringe religious group in Florida who pressured Lowe's to pull it's advertising from a reality show based on Muslim Americans could have absorbed some of the wisdom I came to later in life. I finally learned that if there is a God, then we are all that Deity's children. Instead of railing against people who worship and celebrate differently, why don't find time for tolerance, respect, inclusion, and sublime wonder at the diversity of our country (and planet)?

If I had to do it all over again, I'd attend both weddings, celebrate with abandon, and share familial joy. But maybe my early chauvinism and later renunciation of that behavior has helped me become more sensitive to my interfaith family and to solidify a commitment to preserving that appreciation (and all that entails) for the rest of my life.

Heart of the Matter: Easter 2011

I celebrated Easter long before I married a nice Catholic girl, which is why I labored so hard this year, as the sole and Jewish parent, to offer Miguel and Maya something substantive about the holiday.

See, as a kid my parents took us to Filley Pond in Bloomfield, CT, where I grew up, for the annual Easter egg hunt. Colored eggs, chocolate shaped bunnies, jelly beans, Easter bunnies in costume--all very cute and safe in a homogenized way for children of any and all religious backgrounds. But not what Easter is truly about, I think, any more than Christmas is just presents galore and a jolly fat man in a red suit.

The first thing I wanted to do was bring Miguel and Maya to church, to honor Verna and her mother. Almost every Easter that is what we did: attended Mass, usually at Mission San Rafael (where we held Verna's funeral), with Verna's mother while her father waited for us at Starbuck's.

"Miguel," I announced the other day, "we are going to church on Easter."

"But the Heat (Miami's professional basketball team) are on (TV)," he said. He is an uber fan of the Heat.

"Miguel, we are going to church to honor your mother and grandmother," I shot back.

"But, Dad, it's the Heat."

I've got a lot of work to do.

So we went to Church, and it was packed, with people lined up in the lobby and tucked into the small altars on the perimeter of the sanctuary. I had been hoping that Father Paul would be the officiant. I knew him and respected his theological worldview (as I understood it), plus he delivered the Last Rites to Verna as we were huddled around her and several weeks later did her funeral.

But we got Father Dave, the assistant clergy, as he is listed in the Church program. Father Dave sounds exactly like a sincere version of Steve Carrell's character, Michael, on The Office. Father Dave was high energy. Father Dave was perfect for a Jewish guy like me who finds most synagogue and church services interminably boring.

At one point soon after the Mass began, Father Dave exhorted the crowd to repeat after him, "Indeed he has risen," but the response was tepid at best, so he charged forth and basically said, "You can do better than that." God's cheerleading squad has no better representative than Father Dave.

I closed my eyes during the service, not because I was about to nod off, but because I wanted to listen and let Father Dave's words wash over me. I was hoping for some insight into Easter that I could share with Miguel and Maya beyond Christ died for our sins. I just don't think two kids who have had little if any religious instructions will find the words "Christ died for our sins" or "Christ was resurrected to guarantee us all life everlasting" very meaningful right now.

During his sermon or homily, Father Dave said a few things that I quietly and quickly jotted down on the back of a business card. He said, "Easter is the time to be bound up in the rapture of joy." And, "God raised Jesus from the dead for us, in order for us to see the way to lead our lives."

He spent a lot of time talking about God's bountiful love, which certainly resonated with me as I sat in the pew next to Maya and Miguel. I thought about all the love we've been surrounded by since Verna was first diagnosed with cancer in 2006. How our neighborhood, Miguel's school, and my synagogue prepared us meals and delivered them to our home. How Johann Smit, an apple farmer and friend, brought us 10-15 lbs of apples each week and refused payment. How so many friends and family wrapped up Miguel and Maya in play dates and overnights and kept them safe and fed and warm and dry, and happy.

The love that blessed our lives, and continues to do so each and every day, seemed and seems unconditional, a gift, a miracle, a true, true blessing. But is that the core message of Easter? Unconditional love as a manifestation of God or the Divine Spark?

Speaking of love, our dear friends, the Steins, invited us over for Easter lunch. As I sat with John and Liz, each 33 and married for 14 years, with their three girls (one of whom is almost 13 and a friend of Miguel's) bounding in and out of the house, I asked them how they explain Easter to their kids.

"We tell them the story," said John. "We tailor it for each kid."

So Liz and John do get into the Last Supper and Pontius Pilate and how Jesus died and was resurrected. And they are not worried about whether or not the girls understand the Biblical version of those events. They hope that repeated tellings of the story with seep through to them just as water dripping onto a stone eventually makes its mark.

John, Liz, and I also talked about sin, which John (thankfully) defined as "missing the mark," which I found fascinating because that is the definition of the word "sin" in Hebrew.

John and Liz attend a non-denominational Christian church that has grown in popularity in Marin County over the past dozen years. I actually think Liz has larger and Christian plans for me even though I am firmly Jewish and a somewhat shaky agnostic. But they are both loving and kind and funny and fun to be around. So our friendship will deepen even if I don't take a plunge in the same waters that comfort them.

Their youngest daughter has never spoken to me no matter how hard I've tried to coax a simple greeting or a mild high-five from this 3-1/2-year old cutie. But today, as I was discussing Christian theology and the meaning of the Easter story with her parents over macaroni and cheese, marinated asparagus, and Faro salad, she popped out from underneath the kitchen table and uttered her first (and I hope not last) words to me, "Jesus died on the cross."

Quite possibly a minor Easter miracle.

Before Maya bounded out the front door this morning for the 4th annual neighborhood Easter egg hunt, I said to her, "Maya what is Easter about? What did they tell you about Easter in preschool?"

"Candy and Jesus," she answered.

"What about Jesus?" I asked, hoping for an insight from my little princess that would sustain my ability to better communicate the holiday to her and her brother, who'd just helped hide dozens of candy-filled plastic eggs on the two-acre park lawn outside our home.

"Jesus is going to come down and have candy with me," she said.

Yes, I have a lot of work to do. Hallelujah.

Searching for God with a Three-Year-Old

I have an interesting relationship with God. I don’t really believe in any Deity.

For the first 19 years of my life (at least the ones in which I had a basic understanding of theology), I believed in God like just about everyone else. I imagined him to be a kindly but authoritative old white man, sort of a cross between the Wizard of Oz (the fiery image) and the heroic airline pilot, Sully Sullenberger.

Then I hit college, that godless and secular universe. I was in a Sociology of Deviance class when I was a sophomore at Columbia University and the professor was talking about moral relativity. That was the first time I began to seriously doubt God’s existence.

My mother freaked out and begged me to make an appointment with someone at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where I was also an undergrad in the combined program between the two schools. I phoned the secretary of Neil Gillman, who would later win a Jewish Book Award and was a noted Jewish philosopher and scholar. He’d been my freshman Jewish philosophy professor and was the head of JTS’ rabbinical school.

He made me nervous. He was clearly very smart and had a finely honed arrogance to his classroom manner. I never really studied in his class and squeaked by with low Bs and Cs. I figured of all the students who’d sat in his classes over the years, he resented me most for wasting his time.

So I sat down in his office amid shelves and shelves of books, and he asked me, “What brings you here?”

I said, “I already explained it to your secretary.”

“I know,” he said. “But I want to hear it from you.”

“Well,” I stammered, “I don’t think I believe in God any more.”

He got up from his desk, walked over to me with an extended hand and said, “Welcome to the club.”

Professor Gillman, who also wrote The Death of Death, and I spent the next few weeks discussing God and theology. He gave me readings. One of Gillman’s points was that people move back and forth over their lives on a continuum of belief in God. Some times we are closer to the believing side and other times we move to the other end and become agnostic.

I haven’t really budged from the not-really-believing side since 1978. But now that I have kids, and don’t want to ram my views down their throats, I see my role as a father and transmitter of values and beliefs with greater urgency.

In addition, since Verna was first diagnosed with cancer and has now seen it metastasize, I am searching for some deeper meanings and connections with the spiritual side of the world.

When Verna was in the hospital in 2006 after she’d delivered Maya, six days after we found out she had Stage III breast cancer, we had a powerful moment with one of her night nurses whom we’d asked to pray for us. She said, “We could do it right now.”

So we held hands and she politely and slightly apologetically issued a prayer to Jesus (“He was Jewish, you know,” she said.) and the Divine sense of healing on our behalf.

Several weeks later, after Verna had just about wrapped up her chemo treatments, she and I had another powerful moment in front of my brother in church on Easter. Verna kneeled in prayer before a small altar at St. Raphael’s parish in our hometown and I did the same. It felt natural and supportive. I didn’t pray to Jesus, but I did want to be present for Verna.

Before any more of my Jewish family rises in indignation over the two examples I’ve cited, yes, I had powerful moments in a Jewish context as well. But I selected these two because I can’t write about everything.

I still don’t really believe in God, powerful moments notwithstanding, but (and this is really weird) I teach at a local synagogue and tutor bar and bat mitzvah kids and officiate at their ceremonies. I am Jewish guy.

While I am searching, I do feel drawn to the precepts of Reconstructionist Judaism. Reconstructionism, founded by Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan nearly 100 years ago, sees God as a human construction and posits that each of us possess a ‘spirit’ within us that calls us to act morally and ethically.

Spirituality and the Divine have been on mind lately not only because of Verna’s cancer, but also because I read The Bedtime Shema to Maya every night before bed. The book is a prayer of sorts and ode to the comforting words of the Shema, Judaism’s most important prayer, an affirmation of God’s Oneness, to let young people know they are not alone as the darkness envelops them before they drift off to sleep for the night.

“I rest myself in God’s hands. God is with me and I am not alone,” are the last two lines in the book, which Maya basically has memorized.

Listening to her sweet voice sing the first two lines of the Shema, an ancient prayer, is almost enough to make me believe in God. She is so genuine and filled with grace that her recitation of the book and prayer takes my breath away.

So I decided to ask Maya about God. I can’t remember how I phrased the question, but it was something like, “Maya, what do you think about God,” which is probably unfair to pose to someone who isn’t yet four.

She answered that God is in heaven with Grandma Chela. I probed some more but I could feel she was confused, so I dropped the subject. I didn’t want her screaming to Verna, “Mommy, why is Daddy making me talk about God? We just finger painted in school today and I am looking forward to the cookies you are making for the holiday party. All this theology is giving me a headache.”

I don’t have any answers or neatly packaged solutions. I am still searching, probing, trying to figure out the big and small questions and answers. I met with a Rabbi friend a few weeks ago and he said, “I don’t know if I believe either. But it is nice and comforting to feel that there is something greater than ourselves out there.”

He still prays and is a fairly observant Jew. He said he had recently spent 25 minutes during morning prayers just meditating one thought: God please help me get through this. I never asked the rabbi to elaborate, preferring not to intrude on his inner pain.

So I will see where my journey with God and the Divine Spark takes me as Maya gets older and Miguel lies on the cusp of being a teenager and seeing the world differently. They will need Verna and me to help guide them. Right now, I can only guarantee that I will be there as a moral force. The God stuff is still a work in progress.