My friend, Amy, is ever so slightly disdainful of my Midwestern corn pudding.  Nonetheless, her mother, Evelyn, loves it, and I believe it is this humble concoction of canned corn, eggs, margarine and corn muffin mix that provides entrée to her Thanksgiving dinner, for which my children truly give thanks.  

The sumptuous feast is prepared not only by Amy but also by her Filipina housekeeper, a lovely, soft-spoken woman with a quick smile and an unexpectedly dry wit.  She came to the United States fifteen years ago, leaving her children behind in the Philippines.  She was virtually enslaved by an American family, forced to work long hours, for no pay, and little food.  As an illegal alien, completely alone and ignorant of her rights, she was frightened of being deported or worse.  When she managed to escape, she was practically starving. Her son and daughter live here now, and they feel blessed that their hard work has given them much more than they had in their homeland.

We are a country of immigrants, founded by a religious, monotheistic people who believed in a Divine Eye watching over us, the same Divinity who ordered Abraham (perhaps the first recorded immigrant) "Lech licha!"  Go, get out!   Obediently, he left his thriving Mesopatamian family and culture for Israel, for no apparent reason except that he was told to do so.  God promised Abraham that he would be a bracha, a blessing.  I understand that God has the power to bless us, to touch us with Divine favor, and that we feel blessed when we get our hearts' desires, but how can an ordinary person serve as a blessing?  Weird.  The etymology of bracha  is sometimes cited as being bereicha, pool or reservoir, with the interpretation being that each of us can be a source, the headwaters, of blessing. 

My friend, Casey, lives in Nashville, and she e-mailed me recently about an immigrant incident that disturbed her. 

 I was driving home last night after teaching ESL to Hispanic people.  So it's sort of ironic that at an intersection near where I live that a Hispanic man with a sign came towards my car speaking Spanish. I immediately locked my door and he was asking to use my phone. I thought it was a scam.  Then I saw he had a swollen eye.  He was saying he had been robbed.  I called 911 and still kept my door locked. He turned to go away and I saw that the sign he was carrying was hiding his nakedness and he was bleeding on his back. So I got out of the van and gave him a blanket that I had in the back seat. 

Then some other people stopped and one of them spoke Spanish.  This guy had been jumped by 5 guys at a check-cashing place.  His boss had giving him a $7,000 payroll check to cash.  The guys who jumped him then made him drive to his house so they could get more money. This guy either didn't have the keys or wouldn't let them in and they got mad and started beating him up and jabbing him with a screwdriver.  He was also bloody on his legs. While we were waiting for the cops, I had my workout bag in the back of my van.  So I dressed this guy in my sweatshirt, sweatpants, socks and sneakers, gave him a granola bar and put $20 in his pocket and let him use my cell phone to call his brother. Then the cops and ambulance finally came.

I don't know how many cars passed him by before I came along.  So I feel the angels helped me to help him and I thought of the Good Samaritan tale in the Bible. I can't believe the meanness of some people, to toss him out in this cold weather naked, taking everything from him--his clothes, his wallet, his keys, and leaving him so beat up. Thanks for letting me share.  But it makes me feel like we are all in this world to help each other and I feel privileged that I had the opportunity to help last night.

hugs,                     
Casey Bliss


These friends who have us to their homes, who laugh with us, and commiserate with us, who contain our deepest secrets and dreams, who feed us and make blessings over wine and bread with us, who open their door on a cold night in a strange neighborhood are a fine cornucopia of  blessings in this still young, hope-filled immigrant nation which I'd like to believe is being watched over and guarded by that same Divine Eye. 

I bump into Benjamin on Amsterdam Avenue and we're walking together for half a minute--hey, how are the kids, what's going on--and then out of nowhere he skirts to the curb, walks several steps, then returns to my side. At my "Are you trying to shake off the Mossad?" look, he explains, "A funeral home. I'm a kohen. I can't enter a funeral home."

"We weren't going in," I point out, as if to a not-very-observant child.

"I can't walk under the awning. The awning is considered part of the building, and I can't enter a building in which there might be a dead body."

While I was aware that members of the priestly tribe are barred from contact with a dead body, which means not attending funerals or visiting a cemetery, I hadn't realized that the awning was included in the prohibitive umbrella. Learning to zip around funeral home awnings is something Benjamin learned as a child from his father, and something his teenage son also does automatically. Recently, scientists claim to have found a commonality on the Y chromosome which priests share, but not other Jews. From Europe to America to India to Africa, though geographically separated over a thousand years ago, their identity has been preserved not only by oral transmission from father to son, but now, it's clear, the transmission was physical as well. Their common ancestor lived about 3,000 years ago (give or take), which would have been around the time of King David and the First Temple.

Ambling about the Upper West Side wearing jeans, sneakers and a baseball cap, Benjamin appears nothing like the Temple priests, who wore tunics, breeches, and turbans of white linen and spent their days futzing around with frankincense and sacrifices. With the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the priests' services were no longer needed, and one might think they would have been silently absorbed into the larger Jewish population.

On the contrary, 2,000 years later, the men who today call themselves priests can do so because Judaism didn't marginalize them or ask them to take a retirement package. Instead, they are given the first aliyah, the call to the Torah on Saturday, and they stand in front of the congregation on the High Holidays and festivals and bless the people. Palms facing forward, fingers parted between middle and ring fingers, (which every Jewish kid knows is the origin of the one-handed Vulcan salute on Star Trek, created by the first Jewish Vulcan, Leonard Nimoy), they chant in Hebrew: "May the Lord bless you and guard you; may the Lord shine His countenance toward you and be gracious unto you; may the Lord lift up His countenance toward you and give you peace."

The priestly blessing is the oldest known Biblical text. Amulets with these verses have been found dating from around 600 BCE, when the First Temple still stood. The words were co-opted by Bob Dylan for his song, "Forever Young", which opens with: "May God bless and keep you always." I think Aaron would be proud that something so ancient can be forever relevant, forever young.

While Benjamin acknowledges that his status as priest makes him feel slightly elitist, he also feels humble that he's been chosen to serve. "We're not allowed to be angry with anyone when we go up to bless the people, and I genuinely feel that I've let go of all my anger. I feel that I am doing God's work when I'm duchening." (Duchen is Aramaic for "platform" and recalls the antechamber that stood in front of the Holy of Holies in the temple where the priests prayed.)

But today, it's harder to hold onto one's priestly status than it was in days of old. Divorced and in his forties, Benjamin wants to marry a woman who is also divorced. According to Jewish law, if he does so, he has to surrender his status as a kohen. When I first heard this, the ever so pragmatic part of me weighed his future happiness on one hand against the privilege of chanting the priestly blessing. I voted for happiness. There are plenty of priests, but probably not so many women who are going to satisfy the ancient requirements of marriage to a priest: she must never have been previously married, unless she's a widow; she is not allowed to have had relations with a man she could not marry; and she can't be divorced nor a convert, as the convert might theoretically have had sex with a non-Jewish man before she converted, rendering her impure and through contact with her, the priest as well.

Being a priest is not essential for Benjamin to continue to be Jewish. Nonetheless, I know that Benjamin's reluctance to give this up is about far more than a nostalgic unwillingness to part with an old couch that no longer serves a purpose (one of my children suffered from this particular malady for a long time. I understand separation anxiety). It's about the hold that the past has on you; it's about the quirks in one's genetic make-up that confer identity; it's about what remains the same over the course of thousands of years, even as everything else changes.

I understand Benjamin's dilemma; what is less clear is why we, too, want the priests to remain in place. Without a temple, the priests aren't essential to our being able to practice Judaism. They are figureheads, reminders of a past world, and for some, they are placeholders for the time when the Third Temple will be built and the priests will resume their service. (I'm not holding my breath on that one.) Not only don't priests serve any real purpose, but it's an inherited position, not an accomplishment they've achieved on their own merit and it's a sexist, guys-only club. This is antithetical to what we believe to be true in America: that you are not your genetics, that you can be whatever you choose to be--our new president being a case in point.

Reform Jews no longer recognize kohanim as being different than any other Jew, and they aren't accorded any extra privileges or honors in the synagogue service. Adherents to the Reform view will argue that we don't need the priests to chant the blessings--we can all bless one another. And since the priests no longer offer sacrifices, they don't bring us closer to God. Priests are redundant, irrelevant.

This is rationally correct, I'm sure, but I'm irrational and I am always moved when I see the kohanim stand in front of the congregation on the high holidays and chant the blessing in that ever so unattractively off-key way of theirs. I accord them respect precisely because they didn't choose to be priests, but have nonetheless continued to maintain the priestly standards of "purity" with no Temple in sight simply in order to uphold their end of the bargain to be "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." Their presence reminds me of a much bigger, and holier, world. It reminds me that "Holy" means not being better or more moral, but being separate.

Benjamin tells me--with diffidence, with continued ambivalence--that, as painful as it has been and continues to be, he's ready to give up "the kohen piece." He is ready to step forward into a new relationship. Even though one foot will always remain firmly planted on the altar of the Temple in Jerusalem, the other is reaching out to stomp on the glass under the wedding canopy somewhere on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. This time, when he hears the glass breaking, symbolic of the destruction of the Temple, I wonder if it will be even more poignant than it was at his first, now broken, marriage.
.

The minister jokes that there are three topics guaranteed to draw a big crowd to church: sex, the End Times, and "Is there sex in the End Times?"  The sex premise isn't the only reason that I'm sitting in church along with a rather large crowd on a Sunday morning in my hometown in Indiana with two of my sisters and my seventeen-year-old daughter, Anna.   It's also an opportunity to be with my sisters in a more meaningful context than yard sales, and to experience again attending church together, as we did many years ago.  Anna came along out of curiosity, to bond with her mother and aunts, and because my husband and sons were playing golf.  Secretly, I hope that my Jewishly-raised daughter learns something - about me within a Christian context, about Christianity in general, and perhaps about sex being a more spiritual undertaking than it's portrayed in the media.

Today is the last of a three-part series entitled "Sex by the Book," the Book meaning the Bible.  The previous two sermons had been:  "What the Playboy Wants You to Think" and "What God Wants You to Know."  This sermon, "What Your Spouse Wants You To Figure Out," is conducted as a dialogue between the two young, clean-cut ministers who sit on stools at the front of the large, modern, non-denominational church, which draws Catholics, Lutherans and unaffiliated Christians from the county.   It's a far cry from the church in which we grew up, with its lack of sex, and excess of End Times. 

The ministers open by pointing out that everything that we use comes with a set of instructions formulated by whoever created it.  Sex is no exception.  God the Creator gave us  instructions on how to use sex in order to get the most out of it.  Those guidelines can be found in the Bible, specifically in the Song of Songs, a model for sexual intimacy in marriage.  "God felt strongly that this book should be in Bible," the minister says, as if he'd personally conferred with God as to which books would make it into the canon.  Having studied the Song of Songs, (whose characters are not specifically described as being married, a fact which would wreak havoc on the "sex only within marriage" argument) I know that it had been a tough sell, as there is no mention of God at all in the book.  It wasn't until the second century when Rabbi Akivah argued that the book was in fact a love song between God and Israel that it was cleared for canonical status.  Christians borrowed the idea that it was an allegory, and touted it as representing Jesus' relationship to the Church. 

I can't imagine that they'll quote the poem's erotic and explicit language - "Let my beloved come to his garden and enjoy its luscious fruits!...I have come to my garden, eaten my honey and honeycomb."  In my experience of Christianity, sex is viewed as being at odds with spirituality, perhaps because Jesus, whom Christians strive to emulate, is assumed to not have had sex.  I never understood why having sex would undermine his credibility as the son of God.  If the guy could talk and walk and eat and have bowel movements and still be regarded as God, why couldn't he have sex? 

The words from the fourth chapter of the Song of Songs are projected onto the huge screens in front, and a sonorous, male voiceover reads the biblical verse: her lips like crimson, neck like the Tower of David, breasts like two fawns...(This is the ancients' version of "She's so hot.")   The minister concludes from this that women need communication - the man in this poem took time to excite his wife with words and poetry.   The quote ends with, "You have captured my heart."  

"Women want to be cared about," the second minister continues.  "Women want men to leave their world and enter into the woman's world, just as Jesus left his world and came into this one."  The three things that women want from their spouses, they conclude, are: communication, care, and cuddling-- with no strings attached. 

Men, however, have other sexual desires which they wish their wives could figure out:  creativity, frequency and affirmation.  As if we are teenagers sitting in church and passing notes with the deacon lurking nearby, I scribble in a notebook and tilt it toward my sister, Wanda:  "Creativity=blow jobs...Affirmation=That was so great!  You're so BIG!"  We smirk together. 

Our other sister, Liz, is a devout Christian and she is listening attentively to the sermon.  I am drawn to the ministers' passion and belief, to the way that they preface almost every statement with, "God wants you...God created...God's plan is...God forgives you..."  I feel comforted by the familiar feeling that God is ever-present in my life and has a plan for me, individually.  Yet, conversely, their certainty that they know what God thinks and feels makes me emotionally back off.  Certainty makes me nervous.  I'm far more at ease with ambiguity.

Anna is intently focused on the ministers' back and forth discussion about how, even as God wants us to enjoy sex, Satan is out there trying to get a foothold in our intimacy, tempting us to go outside the boundaries.  Satan is confusing this society with hypersexual images and trying to reduce sex and make it common, but God intends it to be used for a holy purpose:  To intimately bond two people together.  So don't buy into the lies that Satan, that ancient serpent that led Adam and Eve astray, feeds you.  We've all taken fruit from the tree.  We're all sinners who fall short of the glory of God.

Satan-speak isn't so popular in the Upper West Side synagogues of Manhattan, where Anna and I usually spend our time.  The rabbis tend not to refer to either God or Satan as if they are sitting on the edge of your bed and fighting over the decisions you make with your body.  God and Satan, good and evil-these binaries are just not part of our language.

Sometimes I wonder whether my children understand how much of this language they are missing. After all, as one of the world's 14 million Jews, Anna is decidedly in the minority, though it may not seem so in New York City.  My children can tell you the date of the destruction of the second temple, but would be hard put to identify one of the apostles.  I doubt they know what an "apostle" is.  Their Christian illiteracy is sometimes shocking to me, and I worry that as non-Christians, they don't understand "inside" Christian references in popular culture. 

I'm not suggesting they need to know  that "go the extra mile" or "reap what you sow" are Christian phrases, or that the title of Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure" is lifted from a line in the book of Matthew.  And they can certainly appreciate U2's music without being aware of the many allusions to the New Testament that suffuse the lyrics.  Yet, knowledge of Christianity would enrich their lives and deepen their understanding of the world they live in, which is largely a Christian world.  It would also have helped my son to write his paper on churches in his art history class.  He had no clue why churches were built on an east-west axis. 

On our way to the parking lot, I shake my head sadly and confess, "I don't think I've ever had sex by the book."  Wanda and I cackle (we are great cacklers) but my daughter says, as expected, "Mom, you're so gross!"  Then, Anna tells us that in Judaism, there are rules as to how often a man has to have sex with his wife, depending on his profession.  "Like what, for example?" I inquire.  She mutters something about how a merchant or sailor has to return home a certain number of times a month.  This is, I vaguely remember, in keeping with a passage in I Corinthians that says a wife and husband shouldn't deprive one another, so Satan won't tempt them because of their lack of self-control.  I refrain from mentioning this.

I can see how the End Times and sex are crowd pleasers.  Both subjects touch on many of our hopes and fears of mortality and immortality.  Our children are our immortality (God willing), and of course, in order to bring those children into this world, you have to have sex (okay, in vitro aside).  The French psychoanalytic world dubbed orgasm "la petit mort", the little death.   Sexual oblivion - losing control, and losing one's grip momentarily on this earthly reality - could certainly seem as if it might be what that final, big, End Time death will look like. 

Christianity is paradoxically based on sex and death: Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born; Jesus died a virgin - but didn't die.  And if you can only believe that, you can have everlasting life.  My rabbis don't talk about the End Times, the afterlife or if there will be sex in the End Times.  They're more concerned that we live in this world and transform our present into the Garden of Eden in whatever ways we can.  Yet whether you're Christian or Jewish, the Book continues to influence how we view sex, and how we believe that God views it.    As restrictive as the Book may regard sex, it worries me less than the soulless notion of sex that permeates society.

The minister ended the service with a prayer that we leave different than when we came in.  I hope that this hour and a half has demystified Christianity for Anna, and that perhaps she has a better understanding of Christians, and of me. 

For the record, I was teasing my daughter.  I have had sex by the Book.

 

 

In a taxi going through Central Park:  Traffic is slow, and my driver, Christos, is making political small talk.  He's from Greece, he explains, and he thinks America is wonderful.  Are you married, he asks me.  Children?  Yes and yes, I reply.  And you?

He tells me he's married but, "My wife is a beetch."

"I'm so sorry!" I sympathize. "Why don't you get a divorce?"

"Money, the house, the children," he summarizes.  "Is okay.  I have girlfriend."

"Good for you.  I'm glad," I respond.

"Yes, but my girlfriend, she break up with me three weeks ago."

"Oh, I'm sorry!  Why?"

"She want me to make baby with her.  I say no, I no make baby with you."

"I understand," I flip-flop back to his side.  The guy is at least 50, and so I can imagine that being pressured to have a baby would prompt him to have to make tough choices.

Looking in the rearview mirror, Christos goes on to tell me that he'd gone over to the girlfriend's house in Staten Island and made love to her but then she asked him for a baby, and that was the last time he'd seen her.  "But it's okay," he shrugged again, that Mediterranean "Oh, well" shrug. 

"Maybe you can work things out with your wife?" I am ever hopeful, ever helpful, a veritable Girl Scout.

"Oh, no!"  His bushy eyebrows raise in horror.  "She is a beetch!"

"Why is she such a bitch?"

A dramatic pause, and then Christos pulls his arm back and punches his fish into the air.

"She hit you?" I am incredulous.  He nods sadly. 

"What happened?"

"When we make love," he holds my gaze in the rearview mirror.  I am riveted.  "maybe I finish first, she so angry that she - hit me!"  He punches his fist again.

"That's terrible!"  No matter how bad a guy is in bed, he doesn't deserve to be hit.

"I say to her, ‘You never see my dick no more!'" 

"No, of course not," I applaud his decision.  I guess he showed her!

"So, what are you going to do now?"  We are through the park.   I am less than a half a block from my destination, but I tell him that I have the address wrong, and so we go another two blocks.  He drives slowly, and says, "I don't' know.  I find another girlfriend, maybe."

"That's a good idea," I concur.  I tip him well, because it's been worth it.  "Good luck."

Nespresso, on Madison Avenue:  My friend, Talya, who lives in Sao Paolo with her husband and two children, is in town and we are meeting for tea.  It's a warm afternoon, but she's been battling a bad cold and is wearing a bright scarf around her neck.  She looks much like the teenager with long, thick brown hair and warm brown eyes I'd first met 27 years ago when we were roommates and students in Jerusalem.  

On Friday afternoons she'd stand at the stove and with a big bright shawl draped over her shoulders, stir some Lebanese concoction--maybe lemon and honey to wax her legs, or perhaps bamia, an okra dish, for Shabbat dinner.  Born to wealthy Lebanese parents, she grew up in Mexico, spoke French, Arabic and Spanish, then in Israel she spoke Hebrew and English.  She seemed international and worldly to me--I grew up surrounded by cornfields and woods on the Portersville Road (Portersville, Indiana, population about 300.) 

Back then, Talya had dated an American who read palms on Ben Yehuda Street.  He accused her of being bourgeois and conventional and of holding bourgeois and conventional values. This didn't seem like character flaws to me. But Talya, who railed against the West Bank settlements, who wept over the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon in 1982, and who was a fiery feminist, was highly insulted by this judgment as she felt that she'd overturned familial expectation and had struck out on her own as her own person. When she married a successful man of Lebanese background, I thought that she was disappointed in herself for having seemingly proven her ex-boyfriend right. Yet, I would argue that rejecting someone because he fit well into your life and you shared similar backgrounds was ridiculous.  Why make life harder for yourself?  Everyone is entitled to his or her criteria.

Talya coughs now and then, and confides that her husband has been so jealous of her being sick that he'd somehow made himself sick!  "Can you imagine?" she asks, with the same smile and the same sense of incredulity that I recall from so many years ago.  Her husband is contentious and combative, and while Talya never lacked courage in speaking up for her beliefs, I can't imagine this soft-spoken woman with the gentle soul living with such an aggressive personality.  She goes on, "I said, ‘Yossi, you have a demon in you, and I have to take the demon out of you.  I think God put me here on earth to turn the demon into an angel."

She's laughing as she says it, but she's serious, too.  Her older daughter told her recently that she didn't have to accept her husband's behavior, his moodiness, his temper.   "That's exactly what you told your mother when we lived in Israel," I remind Talya.  "And you weren't much older than your daughter is now."

We exchange a glance, so much like one we might have exchanged on a Friday afternoon when the sun was about to set in Jerusalem and we were listening to Neil Young and feeling ever so capable of being different women and making different choices than our mothers had made.

Upper West Side:  I'm lying face down and his hands are pressing deliciously into areas of my body that didn't know they needed pressing.  "Russians say that the man is the head, but the wife is the neck.  She controls which way the head will turn," Edward explains as he kneads a tight muscle in my back. 

We are half way into the massage, and while in general I would prefer silence, Edward's stories have intrigued me and so I let him talk, putting in the occasional, "Oh, really?  Why?"  Edward is from Uzbekistan, and he is enthusiastically Jewish.  He has already rhetorically asked me why the commandment to honor your parents is found with the five commandments written on the first tablet, even though the other four are all about our relationship to God.  Why?  Because you can't honor and love God without doing so to your parents.  Your parents--and God--created you.  This he tells me with a certain flourish of certainty.  Edward lives at home with his mother in Brooklyn.  He worships his mother, and tells her he loves her all the time because she gave him life

Edward is about 25, and he has clearly given this a lot of thought.  "The most important thing to God is to recognize and appreciate God.  The most important thing is to be happy.  And that's the most difficult thing.  Being happy brings more good things - and vice versa."  As always, I am mentally taking notes, committing these words to memory, because they seem important.  Maybe not right, but important, for they are sincere. 

Edward tells me that God's creation is so complex that the complexity itself proves God's existence.  "A louse is so complex," he jumps to another topic, and I don't know where this is taking me.  "It holds on because it knows it has to hold on for survival.  Think of how complex we all are.  This - this world.  It's no accident, you know?"

"I agree," and in a flash it occurs to me that couples can be delineated into two categories: the lice and the non-lice.  Those in the lice group simply hold on to one another for survival.  In different ways, both Christos and Talya are lice.   And why not?

"I have a girlfriend," he confides.
"Oh, good," I encourage.

"We are getting married."

"That's lovely!  How long have you known her?"

"Three weeks.  But she's the one, you know? "

"How old is she?"

"Twenty-one."

"Very nice," I respond.  I only want people to be happy.  Let Christos find another girlfriend, let Talya and her husband stop fighting, let Edward marry this jailbait girl because after all, he believes that the wife is the neck and controls which way the head will turn.  I hope he always thinks she's so lovely.

 

 

On a flight from Florida to New York, my mother-in-law was chatting with another grandma, and one thing led to another, and they exchanged phone numbers.  Not their own: rather, those of their respective unmarried grandchildren.  When my mother-in-law gave my nephew Josh (who was 33) the other granddaughter's phone number, he inquired, "What's she like, grandma?" 

"Oh, she was lovely," my mother-in-law began.

"The girl, not the grandma." 

"Oh.  Well, she said she was lovely, too, I'm sure she was very lovely.  She's very successful, she's Jewish, she's lovely."  **

My children are still teenagers, and not yet needing intimate intervention from grandma.   But recently at the kosher bagel store here on the Upper West Side, I got a glimpse of my children's potential future - and I almost called the grandma hook-up hotline. 

It's Sunday, late morning.  I'd ordered bagels and whitefish salad and other assorted items in the hopes of heading off my children's ever-present, "Mom, there's nothing to eat!" While I'm waiting, I can't help but overhear a man sitting at one of the small tables saying very loudly, "I've had some non-Jewish girlfriends and it's hard.  You like them, they like you - I've had struggles, so yeah.  As you get older it's more difficult.  When I was younger, I saw guys who were my age now who weren't married and I thought there was something wrong.  I thought I'd be married by now.  I'm re-evaluating myself."

Ever so casually I turn my head to look at the man who is baring his soul.  He's 40'ish, and his companion is a woman in her early 30s.  Her voice is quiet, so I'm forced to edge closer to the refrigerated drinks and frown as if in deep thought over my Iced Tea selection, while unobtrusively perking my ears.  She says that her two sisters are not married but that her parents don't put pressure on any of them. 

Her parents' forbearance is unfathomable.  Someone should report them for child negligence. 

The man continues.  He grew up conservative but then became orthodox and observant.  For a while he didn't work on the Sabbath but now he does.  "I would never mix dairy and meat," he reassures the young woman, "or eat pork or shellfish."   This implies that he does or might eat chicken and beef out.  While many modern Orthodox people will eat vegetarian or fish in non-kosher restaurants, chicken or hamburger that isn't certified kosher is barely a step above consuming shellfish.

My food is bagged and I pay, but I'm not ready to leave, so I sit at the counter, drink my coffee, and surreptitiously pull out a piece of paper, and start transcribing this couple's conversation.  With great effort,  ( as if I need more space, I push my stool out, a few inches closer to their table) I manage to hear the woman say, "I read an article about how people in general are staying single longer, but in the Jewish community it's even higher.  Jewish women are more educated and more independent."  The subtext, I imagine, is, "I'm single because I'm smart and independent, and you better be okay with that!"  The guy goes on to mention somebody who got engaged and then broke up - I'm not sure what that signifies.  They are throwing information at each other without saying a thing about their favorite movie or book or a weird dream they had or how they love falafel on King George Street in Jerusalem.  It is as bloodless as a job interview.  They are taking great care to skirt anything personal.  If their criterion for a partner is first and foremost that he or she be religiously observant, why don't they talk about how they feel about God, or ways in which God is important to them?  Were they Christian, they would already be offering to pray for one another.

In the background, John Mayer is crooning, "Say what you need to say, say what you need to say."  Over and over the words drone, but the couple doesn't seem to hear, or maybe they do and this is exactly what they need to say: I don't eat lobster. 

The last thing I record is him recounting a Shabbat dinner at which the question was posed: if your mother told you that she was not, in fact, Jewish, (which would render you not Jewish according to Jewish law,) would you convert or not?  He said that everyone at the table had said they would convert if such a thing, God forbid, happened.

At home, I find my 19-year-old son, David, in the family room clutching his golf club and practicing his swing.  I relay the conversation I'd overheard, and how weird it was that they hadn't seemed interested in discovering who the other person was.  All they'd talked about was their level of Jewish observance, because obviously that was the deal breaker.  If that wasn't compatible, then nothing further could transpire.  My sense had been that it was all about how the other person fit into the larger Jewish community, not whether he or she fit well as an individual.  David shrugs and pulls the golf club back in a mock swing.  "I better not find you in the bagel store 20 years from now," I warn him. 

"Ha ha.  Very funny," he swings. 

With effort, I control the urge to suggest to David what my father routinely (and seriously) advocated to us kids growing up.  My father believed (and believes) that the Biblical ways were the right ways.  Consider him a Christian Tevye - Tradition!  Back then, parents were responsible for finding their children a partner, and Daddy felt that he could do a good job of it.  The mere thought of Daddy choosing anything - a pair of socks! - for me was frightening.  Not that he wasn't discerning and didn't have decent taste.  But I figured if he'd had the chance, he'd choose a guy who could change spark plugs, drink shots of whiskey and discuss Eternal Salvation, as opposed to the swarthy, foreign type that I wanted.   I found someone who would not have been my father's pick, nor was he my "type," proving I guess that there is no formula, but by dumb luck it's worked out, anyway. 

But the thing is, luck doesn't always prevail, and then you end up on endless Dates-To-Nowhere, in which you recite your resume while mentally evaluating how well the other person meets the requirements of your check list.  Why not let mom or dad or Grandma help out?  And that is why when I'm at an Orthodox synagogue on a Friday night, and the man on the other side of the mechitza, (the curtain that separates the men's section from the women's), pokes his head through to ask me to get his daughter's attention, I whisper back, "That's your daughter?  She's lovely!"

"Thank you," he whispers.

"My son," I mouth and point at David.

"Oh!" he says.  "He's very handsome."

"It could be good," I suggest.  At this point, we've practically pushed aside the mechitza for the sake of making a match for our children.

When it comes to my children, I'm not above collecting phone numbers or pulling aside the curtain.   It's Anatevka all over again.  Call me Tevye.   I'm gonna play the fiddle, even if I know they will dance to their own tune.

**Josh did call the girl, and they met for dinner downtown.   "She wasn't terrible looking...she was a runner, so she had a nice body.  She had no personality, though.  Worse than that, she didn't react to anything I said, and she had nothing really to offer.  We had a horrible table...my feet were jammed up against a floor unit/space heater, and it was blasting hot air on my legs.  When we walked out, I saw the actor David Cross (from Arrested Development and Mr. Show), and that was by far the highlight of the night.  I can't even remember if she and I really said good-bye to each other.  We basically just walked in different directions homes.  Never spoke to her again."

Next week: Part II  She/He Was So Lovely.  So What Happened?