It’s 1979. I’m high in the air. For a split second I look down and below me are ten dark men with large hats and larger beards. I come down into their arms, safe, and they toss me up again, smiling, laughing, shouting. I have been in this room with them for less than an hour, yet they are tossing me around as if I was their own son. I spot my mother peeking out from behind a long white sheet that cuts the room in half. She winks at me.

It’s my bar mitzvah, and I’m a Reform-raised thirteen-year-old in the house of a Hassidic rabbi in Florida. I’m watching myself take to the air as if powered by some esoteric magical spell. I know this is happening, but something about it is quite unreal, like the fantasy world I have been designing in my room with ten- and twenty-sided dice.

* * *

Miami: Nothing like some kosher cuisine while lounging under a palm tree The rabbi's home was a quiet, dark enclosure filled with the wafting smell of fruit punch and cleaning fluid. The television was up on top of a high shelf crowded with books. The TV could not be really watched from that height, but it still wasn’t exactly hidden, suggesting it had some use. Later my father told me that the Hassidic men in the community would gather at the rabbi’s house to watch the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, then the messianic leader of the Lubavitch sect of Hassidic Judaism, address his followers over cable access.

There were three of us that came every Sunday morning to this Miami Chabad house, each of us twelve, preparing for our bar mitzvahs. The house was an island floating in an ocean of strip malls, country clubs, gated communities and swamps. I never asked myself what I was doing here. This was like nothing I had ever known, an expression of Judaism as foreign to me as Israel. Yet, there was something familiar, something in the preparation and practice that, like a magnet, pulled me into its center.

Still, every time I asked what it might all mean, the rabbi gave me quick and infuriating answers. I begged to be shown that what we were doing here on these Sunday mornings was something I could take home with me. I wanted this Jewishness, his Jewishness, so different from my own, filled with mystery, arcane secrets, knowledge. My home was too much in the goysiche world, I knew, despite the other lovely Jewish families on our block. It was a world where I was learning biology and Shakespeare, reading my older brother’s dirty magazines, watching Doctor Who, and eating ham and cheese sandwiches. (At least they were on rye.) It was nothing like the home of the rabbi. But to the rabbi, I was an alien: a pork-eating Jew who didn’t know Hebrew.

Well, slichah: Late-70s-era Hassidic rabbis just don't appreciate Steve Martin When it came time for my parents to decide what to do about my bar mitzvah they needed to act quickly. We had just moved to Florida from Massachusetts and didn’t belong to a synagogue, so our options were to the Chabad house in nearby Miami. After a few phone calls, Rabbi B., a leader in the community, agreed to teach me on Sunday mornings. The bar mitzvah itself would then be performed in his home, which doubled as a place of community worship and prayer. My parents knew that this was not the Judaism of our own home. Still, they seemed to hope I might find something to relieve my private anxiety. They also might have had some regret and guilt for not having a more traditionally Jewish home. The other extreme, if only for a year, must have felt like a mitzvah.

Rabbi Borowitz was a large man, with broad shoulders and arms like pillars. But he never seemed weighed down, at least not by his own body. He was jubilant and patient, but he had no time for anything outside our studies. That year Steve Martin had gone on stage in bunny ears and exclaimed, “Well, excuse me!” Once when reading from a text, the rabbi remarked the meaning of slichah, “excuse me.” I kept disrupting our study session with outbursts of “Well, slichah!” in my best Martin voice. Rabbi Borowitz never once laughed. He didn’t have any idea what I was referring to. He also never asked.

No matter the rabbi’s selective ignorance of 1970s American culture, I still believed he knew something I didn’t—that he walked in two worlds, the one where he taught me the aleph-bet and another where he knew the real power of the letters, and what power could be wrought through their correct permutations. I wanted to know how these two worlds spoke to each other, what the common language might be. We read from Genesis, and while I knew it was myth, I also believed that myth stood for something real. Myth was the language of the numinous, a bridge from what was secret to what could be known. I couldn’t have put it into such words at the time, but my insides were on fire with a desire to glean secrets from the other side, looking for answers to the riddle of my restless soul.

Rabbi Borowitz reeked with God’s potent charm. This was a rabbi who purposefully kept the family television just out of each, who kept the lights in his home only bright enough to read in. This was a rabbi who prayed, who really tried to speak to God, a word he wrote only as “G-D.”

The twenty-sided die: No dungeon master worth his weight in geldings leaves home without one I had been going to the rabbi’s home on weeknights during the few weeks leading up to the day. I even had him recite my blessings into a tape recorder that then I played back over and over again, memorizing the sounds, not the content, until it became perfect music in my head: “Baruch ata adanoi...” It was theurgy, where mysticism becomes magic.

I knew enough about wizards and sorcerers from fantasy novels and Dungeons and Dragons to know that language was where power resided. There are legends of Jewish mystics who try to gain access to the various levels of heaven. At every step, fearsome angels bar their ways. The only way for the mystics to gain power over these creatures is to learn their secret names. Once they do, the mystics become magicians, wielding power rather than just hoping to know God. I wanted this kind of experience. I believed in these other worlds, but I didn’t want to encounter them to become one with God. I wanted power, a power over my anxiety, over my awkwardness in the world, over the world of adults where I didn’t belong. And so I learned the Hebrew—without knowing what it meant or why I had to say it—because I thought it could open some door to a world only my rabbi could see.

The morning of my bar mitzvah, I woke early, feeling a bit uneasy, but also excited. Whatever had been hidden during my studies on Sunday mornings would certainly be revealed on this day. I got dressed in my blue suit. In the kitchen, my father greeted me with a gift. I knew what it was before I even opened it, something I had wanted for so long: a digital watch. It was a Seiko, with a liquid crystal display, chronograph, alarm, with the date and day in tiny letters on the face. It was beautiful.

And it didn’t fit.

The band was made for an adult, and although my father promised that he would get me the right size, I started the day defeated. Whatever magical knowledge or experience that was being offered to me by Rabbi Borowitz and my family was lost.

So you think you can dance: Boys at a (non-Hassidic) Bar Mitzvah My brother had it made. He was bar mitzvahed in high suburban style in a little Reform synagogue in the suburbs off the Massachusetts turnpike. Uncles and aunts from all over the country were there, with little envelopes and kisses. And they shmoozed and had a few drinks and my brother giggled with his friends, hundreds and hundreds of friends, it seemed. Everyone danced into the late hours of the afternoon.

Seven years later, at my own bar mitzvah, none of my friends were there.

At the rabbi’s home my family was greeted by the rabbi’s wife and children. She led my mother and sisters into another part of the main room behind a long white curtain that had been affixed to create a separation. These are the kinds of surprises they should have let me in on during my bar mitzvah training. None of my friends were around; I would not be getting wads of money like my brother had at his bar mitzvah; and my mother, grandmother, and sisters were going to be hidden away. What little control I thought I might have over all this was quickly being taken from me. Once I could no longer see my mother, I tried to cling to my father, but he was lost in the sea of all these other men, none of whom—except for Rabbi Borowitz—I had ever seen before. They all looked the same, elders of a society to which I didn’t belong. But here they were allowing me a glimpse.

I was led to the front of a room where I met another rabbi who looked just as I imagined Tolkien’s Gandalf would. He unrolled a torah scroll and placed in my hand a remarkable object. The yad, or torah pointer, is a thin rod of silver, about the length of a fork. At the end is a tiny hand with its pointer extended. With the yad, you point to the torah without having to touch the scroll. I was then instructed to recite my “portion,” and the wizened rabbi held my wrist and guided my hand holding the yad across the torah. I tried to read the Hebrew, as it was, with no vowels, nothing like the Hebrew I had been taught on those Sunday mornings. I could barely get through, feeling more and more a separation between myself and whatever these rabbis felt was happening.

These old world Jews here in very contemporary Miami were not Jewish in the same way I was. My Judaism was suburban, a Judaism that had left its Jewishness mostly behind. Even more than that, though, I was separated from these men because of God. For them, this was a time of worship to a God with whom their relationships were intimate. For me, God was a vague sense of otherworldliness, something that haunted me. The God I believed was something hidden, a private thing to wrestle with while I tried not to fall asleep.

Hang on, kid: Today you are a man I was sweating, my hands were shaking, and I couldn’t see my mother. She was the only one of us who knew anything about any of this. I had watched her light the Friday night candles, watched her go into a trance of sorts, her palms resting over her eyes, the candle flames rising up, straining, to meet them. She knew the secret.

  When it was over, I thought I would be allowed to sit down. I badly needed to. But then there was singing, and all the men got into a circle and lifted me up, tossed me around with such joy, that for a moment, I felt like an honored guest. These men were so utterly happy, as if they had witnessed something miraculous, something that had transformed them and me.

I wanted to feel this change, wanted to believe I was now a man. But the watch didn’t fit. I was proud that I had at least gotten through it, but I was still afraid of the other, hidden reality. This other world had not appeared as I had hoped. Instead, as the men chatted and ate, and my mother and sisters continued to peek out from behind the curtain, my rabbi led my father and me over to a table of drinks. He poured some vodka into a shot glass and said, “You’re a man now.” I tossed back the vodka as he and my father laughed. It went down hard, burning all the way.

Afterwards, the rabbi and his wife would visit our house in the hopes we would join them for Shabbat, or that I would continue to study with him. My father would quickly but politely close the door, and that was that. Later, in my twenties, when I was struggling to identify as a Jew, I wished I had been a different kind of boy. Being secular didn’t make us worldly so much as it cut us off from experience. This is the problem with the secular fear of religion: It doesn’t believe it can participate in any way that wouldn’t be a compromise. But my family didn’t have to compromise anything. In fact, it was the rabbi that made the compromise, to bar mitzvah a boy he knew would likely never return.

Ann Coulter: wants to perfect jew Last Friday in the New York Times, on page A13, the World Evangelical Alliance took out a full page ad headlined “The Gospel and the Jewish People: An Evangelical Statement.” The ad expresses their "genuine friendship and love for the Jewish people,” and acknowledges the history of anti-Semitism. The declaration of friendship with Jews is repeated a number of times, leading up to the real purpose of the ad. Are you ready?

“At the same time we want to be transparent in affirming that we believe the most loving and scriptural expression of our friendship towards the Jewish people, and to anyone we call friend, is to forthrightly share the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ.”

Over the years I've been skeptical when evangelical Christians have suggested that their support of Israel is strictly for the good of the state and the Jewish people, and has no bearing on End-Time beliefs or a hope for the eventual conversion of the Jews. I have also had a number of conversations with evangelical and born again Christians who insist that their love of the Jews stems from the Abrahamic underpinnings of their own faith, and that God has a special plan for the Jewish people.

Reverend John Hagee: friend of the jews? On an episode of Donny Deutsch’s show The Big Idea last year, Ann Coulter discussed how Christians want Jews to “be perfected.” This message was seen as intolerant, bigoted, and smacking of anti-Semitism. No one wanted to accept that this is what Christians really believe—not even many Christians. Meanwhile, just last week in the New York Times Magazine, the ever-deposing Deborah Solomon interviewed the televangelist Reverend John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel. Solomon asked him if their mission was completely noble -- simply support for Israel out of Christian love for their Jewish cousins. He replied, “Our support of Israel has nothing to do with any kind of 'end times' Bible scenario. My support of Israel is based on a recognition of the enormous debt we gentiles owe to the Jews.”

We seem to be receiving some mixed messages, and last week's New York Times ad from the World Evangelical Alliance is no different. You see, they didn't just take out a $60,000ish (yes, these things can cost tens of thousands of dollars) full-page ad to let everyone to know they love Jesus. Instead, the ad goes on:

“We believe it is only through Jesus that all people can receive eternal life. If Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jewish people, He cannot be the Savior of the World.”

So there it is. Finally. And if you think that support of Israel can still be enacted by evangelical Christians without any future desire for a total Jewish conversion, note the last line of the ad:

“It is our profound respect for the Jewish people that we seek to share the good news of Jesus Christ with them…for we believe salvation is only found in Jesus, the Messiah of Israel and savior of the world.”

It is impossible, as someone like Rev. John Hagee would like us to believe, to divorce the theology of the Christian messiah from End-Time and rapture theology. And evangelical Christians cannot hope for their own salvation with the coming of Christ without the implicit necessity of the New Testament prophecies regarding Israel and the Jews.

Now, in a clear, unashamed, and unabashed message, evangelical Christians are admitting to Jews that they do not believe salvation is possible for us without Jesus. I am pleased about this admission. It openly confirms all the things I intuitively knew to be true. But what is disturbing about this ad is that is fails to recognize that the very idea of unredeemed Jewish people is bigoted, and foments anti-Semitism. I am not saying many signers of this document are anti-Semites but surely it is not enough to say in the ad “we do not wish to offend our Jewish friends."

Jesus: the jews are all right, and this lamb is cute, too. Every year on Yom Kippur Jews all over the world gather in synagogues and shuls to pray fervently for redemption—redemption promised by God in the very same scriptures that Christians use to support their own history and their own promised redemption. To suggest that Jews cannot be redeemed without Jesus is not only theologically unsound; it removes the very bedrock of the Christian religion. The Jews, Christians have always maintained, are God’s chosen people and are secured a place in God’s plan through Torah and mitzvoth. Jesus never reneges on this, and arguably would have believed it himself.

But enough with the theology lesson. Now we can finally reach across the religious divide and feel the joy buzzer in the evangelical handshake. This is a watershed moment in evangelical Christian and Jewish relations. Many liberal Jews have looked with skepticism at some Jewish leaders’ willingness to go to bed with evangelicals over things like Israel and other policy issues.

How will it feel now, knowing with certainty that the people who claim to want nothing but the best for their “Jewish friends” really only want to see our eventual “completion"?

As I stood with the other congregants, I felt an old tension wash over me. I was so glad to be here, so proud that there was something traditional that would soothe my yearning. But as things got started, I noticed a kind of orthodoxy that has always turned me off. I have been just as turned off by the appropriation of tradition by outsiders, but at least they have sense of distance, and maybe even a little irony. But here I was with my people, and I couldn’t have felt more alone. They were just a little too hardcore for me, or maybe I was a wimp who had once abandoned them, here now with now my tail between my legs. As a Jew who grew up mostly secular, my return to Judaism over the past twenty years has been always walking a precarious line between looking for tradition and keeping a critical open mind. But I wasn’t at synagogue. I was taking archery lessons from Peter the Red, a Queen’s Archery Champion in the Eastern Kingdom of The Society for Creative Anachronisms.

There were a number of other folks there, who like me were a fairly un-athletic bunch. Their life long interests have usually kept them out of the sun and certainly not the people one imagines being proficient with a deadly weapon. Peter’s yeoman, an orthodox Jew by the name of Yaacov ben HaRav Eliezer was quick to point out to me where I had not found my correct anchor (a tooth that you press down with your index finger as you pull the bowstring,) and while he spoke his tztitzes blew in the wind.

But while Peter and Yaacov were gracious patient hosts, for most of the morning I had the strange feeling of not belonging. It’s a feeling I have long grown accustomed to. From the days in middle school when walking down the halls was like a walk across hot coals, to today if I am standing around a party when everyone is watching and talking about the football game on TV. More importantly it's how I've felt in many religious contexts, a believer whose not quite observant enough, or with my wife's family on Christmas, the tree looming over me like the inquisition. At archery practice with folks whom I know I share more than a passing interest in things like fantasy and role-playing, there was no friendly banter, no winking knowledge that what were doing was both awesome and awfully goofy. The nicer I tried to be, the more marginalized I felt. They could tell I just wasn’t one of them.

I hadn’t sewn my own quiver.

Recently I attended a science fiction convention in Boston, and looking at the list of events I was already feeling out of my depth. At what part of my geek life had I missed the transformation of dice wielding friendly misanthropes into polyamourous, leather clad martial arts experts? More importantly when did I stop being cool amongst the uncool?

I asked the science fiction author Jay Lake his thoughts on fan culture and he suggested my experiences are not that common: “One of the interesting characteristics of both the writer and fan communities within SF is a very strong social value placed on inclusion. When you see exclusionary cliquishness, it either arises from competition – the Star Wars people arguing with the Star Trek people, for example – or insecurity.”

But like any community with strong internal bonds, how easy is it for a newcomer to feel a part of? For two years or so I wrote a science fiction/fantasy book review column for the Boston Globe. I was pretty proud of it. Since sf/fantasy got so little coverage in the mainstream press, I only reviewed books I thought I could recommend, even as I was critical of them. After reviewing two books that I was quite fond of but suggested that too much science fiction is not character driven, I was lambasted on the now defunct, but extremely popular blog of the book review site Emerald City, which suggested that I was just one of those reviewers that hates science fiction. I felt like I had been kicked out of a club because someone in the locker room saw my circumcised penis.

A certain defensiveness, coupled with a kind of group aspergers, has forced many fans into a cliquishnesses that far exceeds anything I saw with cheerleaders growing up. In fact, while most cliques can have a mean streak built in, what I am seeing amongst geeks is a kind of righteousness due to their culture having been appropriated by mass culture: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, World of Warcraft, and even the popularity of Battlestar Galactica and the science fiction pretensions of Lost. I feel the same righteousness, a sort of chosenness that I am also part of the tribe, even though I don’t always worship at the temple. With most groups there is a shared orthodoxy that keeps the members bound together. It’s not enough to attend services. To really belong you have to agree the earth was created six thousand years ago or that exclusion of Tom Bombadil from the Lord of the Rings film was a grave sin.

Paul Di Filippo, a beloved and prolific science fiction author has had years of experience with fans and conventions. I confessed to him my feelings of inadequacy and he counseled me: “Anyone can plunge into the midst of any SF convention wholeheartedly and warmly embrace the most oddball geeks, nerds, dorks, pointdexters or otakus. You just have to cultivate your inner fan, and see past the superficial tics and mannerisms to the intelligent, entertaining people beneath.”

Like my religious life, my geek life has me torn in two directions. I long for tradition, to be with those that understand the sacred texts, can argue about the finer points, and embrace ritual and custom. But I also need a little distance, a little critical reflection, and maybe a little humor that sometimes, from the outside, this stuff can look a little goofy, and many folks are skeptical, if not downright atheists (one of my best friends is still oddly irritated that I like fantasy and comics books). But I will still attend. I will carry my tattered Dungeons Master Guide into the holy places with pride and hope that I can be accepted, even as go home to my gorgeous (and not Jewish) wife who will insist I put down my polyhedral dice before I roll around with her.

* Cross-posted at Mystery Theater

For a time, Christmas felt like a kind of kryptonite, in all its various colors and effects. Christmas carols, lights, Santa Claus, and even the inexplicable Stollen, produced in me various levels of discomfort, confusion, and even a little misplaced nostalgia. I grew up a very secular Jew, and while we acknowledged that Christmas had come and gone, like most Jews we basically kept our heads down until it was all over. I watched the surreal animated puppets in Santa Claus is Coming to Town with the same hunger that any child watched the annual television show that let him stay up late. I once even sat on Santa’s lap in the mall. But even then I knew I was only a visitor in a foreign land. Santa was a Christian, and his workshop didn’t employ any Jews.

Who needs a crackling fire on Christmas: When you've got the glow of neon?Over the years I took on more Jewish observance, and surprisingly my relationship to Christmas changed, even deepened. I looked forward to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as moments to define myself against what I wasn’t. I sat in empty coffee shops, went to the movies with friends, and had Chinese food. The cold air and the deserted streets were glorious. I loved the lights in the trees and the darkened windows of the stores. Christmas meant lovely isolation and I felt deeply Jewish.

I would give my friends Christmas presents, but none of those people were really Christian. The obligation felt weird. If they didn’t believe Christ was really born on this day, why weren’t they all in Chinatown with me? My only devout Christian friend eschewed really owning anything. Whenever I gave him a gift he looked at it with the discomfort of a man struggling with a live fish He seemed to worry about it flopping on to the floor. I secretly hated his devout Christianity that was ruining Christmas. What else was I supposed to do for him on this day? There was no way I was going to eat Stollen.

Hanukkah, on the other hand, was always a letdown. The attempt to match Christmas in spirit seemed contrived. I would feel irritated when the local mall would put up the obligatory menorah next to the Christmas tree. I didn’t want Hanukkah to have to compete with Christmas. It couldn’t. What is winter without Christmas, without the blinking lights, without the giant plastic peppermint sticks covered in snow? Like this year, Hanukkah sometimes comes so early it doesn’t even feel like winter yet.

But then I married a gentile and everything changed.

My wife came from a family even more secular than my own. They never talk of God or Christ, and I have never heard them mention the Virgin Mary or the manger. But they celebrate with the fervor of postulants.

I grumbled my way through the first few years. I would read The Forward while they busied themselves with wrapping presents and keeping the fire going in the fireplace. I looked out of the corner of eye for any sign of a baby Jesus so I could leap up with an “Ah-Ha! I knew it!” Eventually Johnny Mathis and the smell of the tiny pine cones used in decorations got to me.

Take your holiday cheer: and stuff itWhat finally undid me, however, was the joy they took in giving. Stockings stuffed to overflowing, the old family photos lovingly framed, just the right sweater, all the perfect books. I would have called it out as obsessive consumption and ugly consumerism, but they always had wonderful things for me. (On Hanukkah, my non-Jewish friends always gave me “Jewish” things, as if Hanukkah presents are supposed to be about Hanukkah.)

As I began to embrace Christmas as part of my wife’s tradition I realized that Hanukkah was also special for me as a Jew. It’s just a coincidence that Hanukkah and Christmas fall around the same time of the year. My mistake was thinking that since Hanukkah is really a minor Jewish holiday and didn’t have anything about it that was distinctly seasonal, it wasn’t worth making a big deal about it. But Hanukkah is a Jewish day, and it marks, like so many other Jewish holidays, the sheer fortitude of the Jewish people. Over and over again we survive. Our lights keep burning, even when they are not as nearly as bright as my neighbor’s giant automaton reindeer.

And so for the last few years, Hanukah has been another time to mark being Jewish. In my home, we don’t celebrate the two holidays together, but go by where they land on the calendar. And secretly, I hope when I light the shamash and the first candle of the menorah that it will start to snow, and that it will be snowing all winter, especially when one year I take my family to Chinatown, and show them how Christmas is really done.