Love

In my first post, I explained the first wrong way to read the Bible; the second lesson is that the Bible is not always as deep as we think. Of course, because it is the word of God, it is going to be bottomless, and the deeper you can make it, the more honor to God. I think about that passage where Paul says in Romans 14 that everything that is not done in faith is sin—and any theologian who reads that statement gets the existential quivers. What a wonderful statement. But when you read it in context, it seems to mean that whatever is not done out of conviction, but just to play up to somebody else’s opinion, lacks authenticity and is sin. Or, when Paul says that we should work out our salvation with fear and trembling, for God works in you both to will and to work—that’s what they call a paradox. But it’s no paradox there in Philippians 2—Paul is just saying: You were pretty good when I was with you, but now I’m gone; but remember, God is with you, so there is no reason why you should not work just as hard.

Light and quick: Float like a Lutheran, sting like a BaptistBut we like it to be so terribly deep. One of the best rules for reading scriptures is the very same as for preaching: It should be light, it should be quick, and it should be tender. It should not be ponderous, it should not be labored, and it should not be heavy.

Third, in the scriptures, sometimes it ain’t as sure as you think. St.Paul—I like him, but he was arrogant. He had a lot of human flaws, but he was great. He was a great, great theologian. A theologian is someone who sees problems where no one else sees problems, and sees no problems where other people see problems. Once, when he is speaking (I Cor.7)—it happens to be about family matters, divorce, and sex, and things of that kind—he says: On so-and-so, I have a word from the Lord, but then on so-and-so, I have no word from the Lord. I think he was the last preacher in Christendom who had the guts to say that. New situations come, really new situations. What shall we then do? And Paul says: I have no word from the Lord, but I’ll give you my advice. I’m doing as well as I can. And I think I am right…. That’s wonderful insight. What a lovely Bible that tells us that sometimes we might need to think, and not just to think that it is settled.

The fourth “no”: not so uptight. Apologetics, defending the Bible—defending God, for that matter—is a rather arrogant activity. Who is defending whom? I love to use the old Swedish expression, “It is pathetic to hear mosquitoes cough.” I don’t know why that is funny, but in Swedish it is funny. And apologetics is mosquitoes coughing. It kills so much of the joy in reading and practicing the love of the scriptures.

It is always a little moving when believers want to help God. There was a man in the second century of the Christian era whose name was Tatian, and he was so terribly bothered that, in the various Gospels, Jesus seemed to say things a little differently. And some things that were described in one Gospel were described otherwise in another—not to speak about the Gospel of John. So he thought he should help God by creating a unified Gospel. It’s called the Diatessaron. And it was very tempting for the church, because those who wanted to attack the church said: What is this? Jesus says that, and then Jesus says that. And the apologists tried to say: Of course he said it more than once, but a little differently.

The Gospels don't match: But they'll set your world on fireWell, that wasn’t quite convincing. So we got four Gospels, which do not always match, but Irenaeus, blessed be his memory, decided that it was more valuable to have the richness of the four than the streamlining of the one. And so the four Gospels are wonderful lessons in the fact that God is not pedantic when it comes to telling the story; rather, God wants it told a little different to catch as many aspects as possible. As I like to say, when you have four portraits of the somebody you love very much, you don’t make transparencies of them and send the light through—that becomes blur, holy blur because it is the Gospels, but still blur. You look at one portrait of a time. And actually where they are different is usually where the artist has something important to say. If you get the apologetic devil in you, then you get bothered by the richness and by the variation. And the more I have lived with the scriptures, the more loving my feelings for them have become. The more important thing for me is to make them as different as possible, in order to catch as many insights and as many perspectives as possible.

PART THREE: Who Owns God?

My earliest crush was on Shaun Cassidy. Oh, he was hot. I played that damn “Da Doo Ron Ron” song over and over, traded pictures with other Tiger Beat readers, put his toothy dimply poster on my bedroom door. And of course, I watched “The Hardy Boys” obsessively. My favorite episode was the one in which Shaun is in a terrible accident and has to be rushed to the hospital on a gurney, shirt opened to the waist. His naked, concave chest is as hairless as an egg. In an early act of pre-teen rebellion, I decided to feign illness and play hooky from a Holocaust-remembrance service simply to watch a rerun (A RERUN!) of this episode.

Hairy or Hairless: Dare to bare your hair. Today, I promise you, I would not skip a Holocaust-remembrance service so I could salivate over this man-child’s baby-rat-like smooth sternum. As a fully formed sexual grownup, I prefer my men with hair. And not just a tasteful little patch, dead-center, either: I like a full-on chestal pelt, hirsute arms, be-furred legs, even a butt rug. Body hair turns me on. Once, when I was on a blind date with a reasonably cute boy, we sat next to each other in a restaurant, forearms on the table, almost touching. I looked at his tanned, hairless arm and knew I could not have sex with this person. I’d like to think I’m open-minded, but he looked like a fetus.

To some, body hair is icky, smelly, sticky. It gets in the sheets and clogs the drain. But to me, it’s primal, manly, sexual. I view my Lycanthrophilia (ok, I made that word up—it means love of werewolves in Greek) is a sign of sophisticated taste. Hairy men are mysterious, Other. Hairless men are…well, girlie. Comfy. Familiar. They look like…me. Hairy men are imported dark chocolate; hairless men are drugstore malted milk balls.

Of course, teenyboppers have always loved and will always love the hairless boys. They’re training wheels on the road to real men. They’re slender, feminine girl-boys: Unthreatening. (There’s a reason Justin Timberlake was the cute one and Joey Fatone was the funny one.) But why do so many grown women skeeve at the sight of male fuzz? Is it because they see hairless men as gentler, more likely to respect a woman’s equality? Is a womanly preference for dainty smoothness a statement about our growing economic power and the mainstreaming of feminism? Or does it show our own ambivalence about gender roles?

Hugh: Your mutton chops are dreamy. What am I, a social scientist? I do know that the average human has 5 million hair follicles, as many as an ape, and I want to see a hair sprouting from every single one. OK, that’s an exaggeration; no one loves back hair. I used to make fun of it, same as everybody else, while worshipping at the altar of the Baldwinian chest. But when you actually fall in love with a guy who has a dorsal rug and doesn’t wax, well, you start not caring. Love doesn’t start off blind, but it becomes kind of nearsighted.

Luckily, I’ve got some friends who share my predilections. My friend Margaret calls her hirsute honey Randy “my mink husband.” My friend Daryl-lynn and I sat glued to HBO for the entire run of "Six Feet Under,” jabbering over our shared crush, Peter Krause. During an extended shirtless scene, we observed that our man was sporting much more hair than he did a few years ago, during his lone topless scene on ABC's "Sports Night." (Yes, it’s stalkerishly tragic that we tracked this. Shut up.) I maintained that he’d grown extra fuzz. Daryl-Lynn blamed his earlier sparseness on chest clippers. (I will never understand this grooming choice, beloved of gay men and actors. I understand the love of bare skin, though I don’t condone it, and I endorse the love that dare not speak its name: the love of full-on fur. But why would you want a chestal crew cut? That’s not a happy medium; it’s an abomination.) I have yet to see Dirty Sexy Money, Krause’s current show, but my friend Jessica has kept me apprised of Pete’s peltal progress: “Not too much, but it’s there,” she emailed. “Also a little fuzz on the upper belly. DO YOU NEED THIS LEVEL OF PELT GRANULARITY?” Yes. My friends are givers.

David Hasselhoff is back: Now here is a man that I wouldn't mind being saved by. Still, one generally sees shaven and waxed chests everywhere one looks, despite Tom Ford’s determination to make chest hair the new black. Many people positively associate hairlessness with youthfulness; others think bareness looks neater; others think hairlessness shows off musculature better. The critic Clive James once described the look of a tanned, hairless, bulging body builder as “a condom filled with walnuts.” Ew. I find it curious that testosterone plays such a large part in male features like body hair, and testosterone is so fetishized by body builders (who may chug it, pop it or shoot it), yet they choose to pair their bulging muscles with skin as hairless as an Olsen twin’s. The guys on the covers of Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness look scary to me. All those bald chests surging, so pumped, so empty. Nair for Men was introduced in 2003, a dark year in hair history.

Fortunately for those of us who like to objectify others while cattily dismissing tastes that are different from our own, there are always Bears, happily hairy big gay men. I used to retreat to a delightful outpost called Fur on Film. I was not the demo, but I adored this exhaustive compendium of images of hairy movie stars, modern-day and historical (James Gandolfini, William Holden, Chris Isaak, Hugh Jackman…oh, I could go on and on in alphabetical paroxysms of joy). Tragically, the site is now called hairyceleb.com and is no longer free. And I am a cheap Jew.

Tom Selleck: I'd shag you any day. But here’s a sample of its genius: the entry for Liev Schrieber. “In the film Denise Calls Up, none of the characters ever speak face to face…there are great fur scenes as Liev dabbles in some phone sex. The camera follows his hand as he runs the hand piece all over his hairy torso. In another scene we see Liev completely naked with a telephone carefully positioned over his genitals. This is a great film if you have a fetish for hairy men & telephones.” Okay! The site also features debate from purists wondering whether stars like Antonio Banderas and Val Kilmer are hairy enough to warrant inclusion. (Hey, I'm open-minded. I’d let them stay. However, I'd suggest you avoid clicking on the pics of Ed Asner in the bathtub.)

A wonderful Nick Cave song begins, “Last night my kisses were banked in black hair.” He’s not talking about chest hair, but the song speaks to me. There’s no feeling like being nestled in forests of dark, warm fur, safe and loved and warm. You girls who are still loving the Shauns and Justins of the world don’t know what you’re missing.

* * *

ALSO IN JEWCY:

Izzy Grinspan and Andy Selsberg debate hipster beards. Are they creepy and dad-like? Or do they speak to some kind of primal male fashion urge?

RELATED STORIES OUTSIDE JEWCY:

Andrew Sullivan says "I am bear, hear me roar" in Salon.

Charles Paul Fruend considers the connection between Jews and our furry ancestors the Neanderthals in Slate.

Christopher Hitchens gets his thighs waxed in Vanity Fair.

Rabbi Eliezer says, "Whoever teaches his daughter Torah teaches her lasciviousness.”—BT Sotah 20a

“So,” he says in a low, soft voice, leaning across the table. “Tell me, what does Judaism say about sex?”

“Be fruitful and multiply,” I say flatly, and start laughing.

“What does that mean?” he asks.

“It means that the Torah and the rabbis thought sex was a good thing. None of that abstinence and celibacy for them—that’s Christian. No ascetism, no celibacy. Judaism’s not really into celibacy. It thinks sex is natural, and beautiful, and sacred. Or that it should be anyway. There’s no guilt attached to it, really.”

“No guilt?” This makes him happy.

“Yeah.” I say, “Which is great. But then there’s that clause. The one that says that once you sleep with someone, you’re supposed to keep them.”

Get thee to a nunnery: Judaism doesn't require celibacy“For how long?” he asks. He’s a law student. He knows about clauses.

“Life.” I say, raising my eyebrows and shrugging.

“What do you think?” he asks.

I grin. “Remains to be seen,” I say, and return to my sushi.

Over the last three years, I have had this conversation on at least five different dates with five different men—all of them Jewish. Before rabbinical school, and before divinity school, my dates didn’t ask me about sex. But ever since I became “Jordie-the-almost-rabbi,” the men I’ve dated have been intensely curious about my sexuality and what Judaism does (or doesn’t) bring to bear on it. I’ve become—without my desire—a one-woman sexual ethics committee.

Dating never starts this way. It starts at a party, or a lecture, or a meeting. I meet someone new, I turn on my Jew-dar, we make small talk, he asks me what I study. I say religion. He says, “Oh really? What religion?” I say, “Christianity and Islam,” hoping to prolong the inevitable, and then I feel guilty and say more softly, “and Judaism.” If he’s obnoxious or pretentious, or if he has a sense of humor, I’ll add, “Circumcision and smiting, too.”

“What do you want to do with your degree in religion?” he asks.

“Become a rabbi,” I say.

If I like him, or think that I might, I’ll do whatever it takes not to tell him that.

“Oh,” he says, and goes quiet. He’s now picturing the rabbi at his home synagogue, comparing me to the bald guy with a gut who dresses up as a baseball player every Purim. “That’s intense,” he says. The R-bomb, it’s fail proof. It always shuts them up.

If he thinks I’m cute enough, if he’s not getting bible-beater vibes, he’ll continue, and then he’ll ask me out. Nothing like going out with the guys for a beer and telling them you’re dating a rabbi. A cute one, he’ll add. In tight jeans.

The erotic lure of religious leadership: From Leonard Nimoy's "Shekhina Project" (yes, THAT Leonard Nimoy)The eroticization of this profession is stunning. He’ll call me up from work and whisper, “Hey, Rabbi Gerson.” Flinching, I’ll look around for my father, Rabbi Gerson the first. The mystique of this profession turns him on. He thinks it’ll be like being in bed with God. He wonders if I’ll speak to him in Hebrew.

But far worse—and more common—are the men who fall for me but won’t touch me. For many Jewish men in their 20s, you can’t just date a rabbi. You have to be serious about her. This Madonna-whore complex has wreaked utter havoc on my dating life, and produced more conversations with the word ‘marriage’ in it than I want to recall. (“Marriage?!” I want to say, “Are you crazy? I just want to date you, for God’s sake. Just relax!”). But too many Jewish men think that they have to be serious—on-the-road-to-marriage serious—to even casually date me.

Even now, I’m still trying to figure out what serious means to these men, but I think it’s mixed up with the possibilities of what could happen when something as messy and complex as sex and sexuality becomes mixed up with God and what we hold most sacred. Sometimes I feel like the enormous ambivalence evoked by the meeting of divinity and sexuality is an ambivalence I provoke in the men that I date, and the repercussions of this have complicated or ended relationships that in any other universe would have been just great. There’s nothing as frustrating as dating a great guy who adores you but is afraid to touch you because he’s worried that he’ll incur the wrath of God. (Or be smote. Be careful when and with whom you joke about smiting.)

The bottom line is this: too many of the men I date make significant assumptions about me without getting to know me first. They assume I’m Shomer Negiah (I'm not), they assume I'm strictly Shomer Shabbat (I’m not), and they assume that my commitment to a lifetime of Jewish leadership makes me—or should make me—a Puritan. If I’m comfortable with my sexuality, they’re shocked. If I wear a low-cut shirt, they’re scandalized.

I’ve had my share of flings since graduating from college. Almost all of them—before rabbinical school—were with non-Jewish men. My relationships? With Jewish men exclusively. Believe me when I tell you I didn’t plan it this way, nor did I intend, for better or worse, for this to be the case. We don’t fall in love with people, even if our mothers would like it, because of the religion they were born into.

Amen, sister: Why doesn't Jewcy sell this shirt?But the non-Jews, they knew better. They knew that in my world they were not welcome, at least not for long. Well, by me, maybe, they’d be welcome. But not by the places I was going, and in the communities I would someday lead. Non-Jewish men assumed our relationship couldn’t become serious—and after the Jewish men who put me in the serious category automatically, this was an enormous relief. Ask first, I say. Because you don’t know.

Dating as a rabbinical student has made courtship—an ordinarily fraught, and occasionally painful endeavor—that much harder. It’s hard to ask men to see me as a woman first and clergy second. It’s hard to explain that I want to leave the baggage and blessings of my work at home (or at synagogue) when I’m on a date. And sometimes, as anyone who’s ever dated in New York City knows, it’s just hard.

By being enough of a feminist to train for the rabbinate, I’ve unintentionally saddled myself with age-old gender stereotypes, issues that the majority of women my age don’t have to address anymore. Questions about how to talk about my career—or whether to talk about it all—and issues surrounding how I dress, whom I date, and what I do on those dates crop up in ways that “Free To Be You and Me” never warned me about.

The problem is this: I’m not willing to give any of this up. Not my sexuality, not my spirituality, not my Judaism, and not my career. I want it all. And as a third-wave feminist, I want to believe that I can have it. I expect it. So mah la’asot? What to do?

For the moment, I’m working on kicking the “rabbi” word out of the room on dates. My title doesn’t belong on a date. It doesn’t belong between me and my lover. So these days, I’m looking for a man who can ignore it, or at least realize that this word is not me, that I am more than the sum of its parts. Then, I hope, he can get to know me as me and not as the role I will someday have.

Fifteen years ago, before the death of irony and cassette tapes, I fell in love with a girl while living on a kibbutz in Israel. At least it felt like love at the time. Like the affair itself, my arrival in Israel was an act of happenstance. I had just dropped out of law school, veering from a path that had been carefully cultivated by my parents since I was in the fifth grade. This semi-rebellious act left me rootless and ready to take on the world. I was looking to travel to any place, so long as it was away from home. Israel was not the only foreign port that beckoned me forth, but it was warm and far away and full of Significance. At the time, it existed for me more as a mythic abstraction than a geographic reality.

The start of the affair: Slacker + international intrigueFor years my father had been keenly focused on this tiny sliver of land, though I never really understood why. As is the case with many American Jews, Israel influenced his voting behavior, his philanthropic choices and even the books he read. Any decision was justifiable so long as it benefited the Holy Land. Thanks to this cultural cover, it was an easier sell to my parents than Telluride or Prague, other favored destinations for clichéd wanderers at the time. But my decision to move to a kibbutz wasn’t motivated by my father’s political myopia. I was just after the Zionist dream of living communally, turning the desert into a garden, and hooking up with adventurous young Scandinavians who volunteered for kibbutz life as a cheap way to extend world tours.

As it turned out, I never had the chance to enjoy that last rite-of-passage. On nearly my first day on the kibbutz, I fell madly in lust with Leah, an outspoken South African with pale blue eyes and lustrous auburn hair. She was fresh off six months of teaching art to Palestinian children in the West Bank, and her Johannesburg accent gave her an exotic, sophisticated air. This was a woman who had spent a year touring Europe as a member of a punk trio after graduating from one of England’s finest boarding schools. Had Graham Greene been asked write a sequel to Slacker, Leah could have been his female protagonist. I was in love with her at first sight—or with the idea of her, which was, frankly, the same thing to me back then.

As in college and prison, time spent on a kibbutz is catalyzed by severe insularity. Leah and I were together nearly every hour of every day. There were few literal or figurative walls of any kind, so our relationship simply leapt into existence without the incremental steps of courtship. Within three weeks I had moved into her living space, a large cabin at the far end of the volunteers’ compound. Luckily, she had not been assigned a bunkmate, so we pushed two rickety twin beds together and built a makeshift honeymoon suite.

This spontaneity was exactly what I was looking for after the bloodless experience of law school, not to mention my previous relationships. The girlfriend I’d had prior to leaving for Israel wanted nothing more than to settle down and live in a midwestern suburb. Leah was different from the other women I’d been with, most of whom didn’t own electric guitars or the complete works of Hunter S. Thompson. She was uninterested in defining our relationship, and she seemed unburdened by the concept of dating with a specific end goal in mind.

Nice work if you can get it: An avocado fieldThanks to the sub-tropical heat of the Israeli summer, clothes were optional, a situation that was tailor-made (so to speak) for young lovers anxious to explore their “cultural commonalities.” Leah and I formed a community of two, falling into a shared life. Our work took us to different parts of the kibbutz—she toiled in a dog food factory while I had to good fortune to work in the sun-drenched avocado fields—but in our free time we were inseparable. We tended to skip the group social activities in favor of our cozy co-habitation, reading, playing “shesh besh”, and indulging in the kibbutz’s main source of live entertainment: drinking cheap vodka while sitting around a bonfire.

But all was not milk and honey in our enchanted garden. Leah was a diehard proponent of Palestinian liberation, and she felt that any Israeli presence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was illegal, immoral and unjustified. She also contended that the military support provided by the United States to Israel made America, and all Americans, complicit.

At first I simply nodded at her passionate pleas without giving them much thought. But eventually the fruits of the political discussions my father had endlessly belabored began to rise to the surface. I started to assert my own views, or at least those that were then popular in The Jerusalem Report. But when I tried to suggest that Palestinian violence had helped create the current situation, or that there were viable scenarios that would allow for the creation of Palestinian state, she would label me a “lie-spouting bourgeois jackass,” which is an argument that was hard to counter intellectually.

My opinions on the complicated subject were irrelevant, really, because my nationality had, in her eyes, pre-determined my complicity. Had she listened to me, she might have learned that although I had been raised to view Israel as the righteous defender of its land, actually being there had broadened my perspective. I didn’t agree entirely with her arguments, but I saw merit in some of them.

Complications in love and war: Israelis protesting the war in Lebanon, May 2006But I was not bothered by the name-calling. As far as thickheaded zealots go, Leah was captivating and cute. In fact, the furious verbal sparring gave our evening liaisons an intense additional jolt. I don’t know how Arafat was in bed, but to do this day I say there is no better aphrodisiac than political disagreement. Still, her inability to see any side but her own made me worry about our long-term compatibility. Compromise is a necessary ingredient in any relationship, whether between mismatched lovers or ethnic factions that have been warring since the biblical age over a landmass the size of Maryland. Extremism, on the other hand, is a dangerous portent, in both love and war. It got to the point where we couldn’t read the newspaper in the same room. The only solution was to avoid the subject of politics altogether.

Avoidance was a skill I had in surplus as a young male, but something about our purposeful lack of communication felt false. How could we be so synched in every aspect but this one? Leah often spoke of “the privileged blindness of Americans,” but I never felt it applied to Americans like me. Perhaps, in truth, I was not as worldly as I imagined myself to be. For all of the open-mindedness I thought my time spent traveling had engendered, was I simply another over-privileged suburbanite with a well-stamped passport and a worn North Face backpack? I was living with a woman to whom my very nationality was an affront. For a person who claimed she preferred to live without borders, Leah had defined ours pretty sharply.

The détente we’d established went on for a few months, until one night when we were camping on a desolate Mediterranean beach. As we cuddled in one large sleeping bag beneath the stars, she said that, as much as she cared for me, she couldn’t be with someone who didn’t share her worldview. I had seen this coming, but it still sent me reeling. I’d been dumped in the past, but usually for reasons that related to my own personal shortcomings. Leah and I were splitting up over a geopolitical morass that the best minds in statesmanship had been unable to solve for several millennia. Like the peace process itself, we had apparently taken the middle road off the table.

Even Bill couldn't have helped: Clinton encourages a peace-process handshakeBreaking up on a kibbutz is impossible. I moved out of her cabin, but we still slept less than fifty feet from each other and ate all our meals in the same cramped cafeteria. Somehow we managed to tap into a wellspring of maturity that allowed us to weather the proximity, establishing a cordial acquaintanceship but avoiding any prolonged interaction. Heartbroken, I took solace in the consistent regimen of workaday kibbutz life, turning myself into the fastest avocado picker in the Middle East. My downtime was spent clutching dog-eared volumes of Rilke, which didn’t help my cause much. Taking the advice of my male bunkmates, I tried to woo several of the Danish volunteers, who were especially receptive to male attention. But I was “Leah’s ex,” and nobody wanted to make time with a marked man.

The ever-popular Leah had no such problems. She was quickly pursued by a soft-spoken Argentine named Luis who also lived on the kibbutz. With his laissez-faire South American attitude, Luis offered her political commiseration, not to mention a long-term commitment. They ended up getting married, making aliyah and becoming permanent members of the kibbutz. As far as I know, they’re still there today. I came back to the States a year later, after long stops in Morocco and Mexico, to begin graduate school.

I’ve thought about Leah a lot in the interceding years, but any feelings of loss have always been buttressed by the fact that we broke up for external, impersonal reasons. It never occurred to me that she had merely used our political differences as a means to let me down gently. Or that my tendency to mythologize certain geographic regions had also extended toward the concept of Love itself. But apparently the same blind passions that keep nations divided prevented me from seeing what was happening right before my very eyes.

Often, I find myself sneering at Christians in a way that would be completely intolerable were my aim squared at any other cultural group. Making your kids pay for college themselves? Goyish. Not serving food with drinks? Goyish. Intelligent design? Goyish. Wal-Mart? Goyish to the Nth. I call it like I see it.

“That’s just an old Lenny Bruce routine,” says my husband, Ben (confirmation name: Paul), whenever I trot out my list. “You know, New York is Jewish; Butte, Montana isn’t.”

“Exactly,” I say, delighted that in the six years we’ve known each other, my husband’s become such an observant Jew.

As Ben has discerned, I’ve turned the red-state/blue-state divide into a goyish/Jewish divide. This makes demographic sense, of course: A high Jewish population is one of the most reliable ways to tell a blue state from a red, and although polling numbers say that 24 percent of American Jews voted for Bush in 2004, I’ve never met a single one of them. Further, while intolerance is generally verboten in my multicultural circles, it’s fine, even encouraged, to lash out at the anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-evolution zombies who have given the past two elections to the worst president in American history. Some call them red-staters; I call them goys.

It’s so easy to take potshots, in the same way it’s easy to be against any large corporation—with a sort of screw-the-powerful thumb against my nose. It almost feels like a victimless crime. Who cares if I sneer at the foodways and folkways of the goyish hegemony? If I snigger “how goyish,” after a friend mentions attending a wedding where guests had to pay for their drinks? If I never watch a rerun of 7th Heaven?

***

But of all the Jews I know, really, I should know better.

Jew Don't Believe In This Kind of Heaven: Reverend Camden and familyMy husband comes from a family of deeply faithful Christians—Bush-voters, in fact, and red-staters in all but the zip code—yet they are people I respect, and for whom I feel enormous affection. Meeting them has helped me see why so many capital-C Christians vote the way they do. The Catholic Church is profoundly powerful where Ben grew up, and people really do believe what their priests tell them: that legal abortion is state-sanctioned murder, that faith is the most important quality a leader can have, that integrity is synonymous with belief in God. These Catholics differentiate themselves through their beliefs. They have faith in their religious destiny. To diminish their way of life as stupid and tacky—goyish—is to be not only cruel to my husband, it is also to be willfully reductive.

Oh, and by the way, not once has any of them given me any shit at all about being Jewish; in fact, they never fail to wish me a happy whatever-Semitic-holiday-it-happens-to-be. They would no sooner make jokes about my coreligionists than they would about their own. At our wedding, Ben’s grandfather toasted us with a hearty “Mazel Tov!”

I cringe, because I am not nearly so good.

***

In my desire to be more accepting of the goyim, to be more tolerant—to be more Christian—I keep bumping up against the fact that Judaism doesn’t seem to want me to. Fundamental to Judaism is the idea that we Jews are distinct, that we are different, that we are chosen—and they are not. There is no separate-but-equal in Judaism. My sincere effort to look at heartfelt belief in Christ (and all the political choices that go along with it) as just another way of marching along in the world is, according to traditional Judaism, intellectually and spiritually baseless.

Listen to the Aleinu: It is our duty to praise the Master of all, to exalt the Creator of the Universe, who has not made us like the nations of the world and has not placed us like the families of the earth; who has not designed our destiny to be like theirs, nor our lot like that of all their multitude.

Throughout Jewish history, we have set ourselves apart. We have dressed differently, kept different days holy, married only one another. Now, however, the division between my Jewish life and that of my Christian neighbors is so slim it’s almost invisible. How do I separate myself? By craving matzah ball soup when I have a cold? By a lingering reluctance to visit Germany?

Separate from the Nations: The world's oldest ghetto, in Venice, ItalyThe truth is, I am not nearly as distinct as my religion asks me to be.

There is something very Jewish in me that makes me want to separate myself, but I can only express that separation through scorn. Fundamentally, how am I different from the goyish masses? How am I Jewish if I am not a pro-choice blue-stater, a latte drinker, a Times reader, a person with a master’s degree in the arts of all ludicrous things? I have no other way to distinguish myself, although I know that this is not enough.

Since our marriage, my husband has found it easy to become “Jewy,” (his word)—to attend synagogue, to keep a vegetarian-kosher home, to subscribe to Tikkun. Of course he’s found it easy. The tradition he grew up with allows him a certain commonality with Jews; a post-Vatican II child, he grew up with the Old Testament and never learned to blame the Jews for the crucifixion. He has no cultural insecurity or religious mandate to keep him from attending a Christmas mass with his mother a day after Shabbos services with me.

But I will never feel equally comfortable with my Christmas presents, my candy canes, and my mealtime grace, and although I’d love to say, “Sure, I’ll check out mass with your mom,” the thought gives me the creeps. I love Ben’s family, and I’ve learned to respect their cultural choices—even their votes for Bush—but the Jew in me will never let me be too catholic in what I wholeheartedly accept.

***

Related in Jewcy: Why we changed the headline. Also, Lauren Grodstein considers Monica Lewinsky in Jewess Studies