A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl (4 page)

I reflected on the changes in my life in my journal in this passage from June 7, 1981:

I always had a sense of history. The next day I noted,

I started connecting with Jewish women. After a conversation at the Village Temple, I realized my circumstances had changed. I spoke with a woman after services, told her I was a new Princeton graduate, and she exclaimed, “You seem so together!”

Me? I thought, the guy who couldn’t even get a date at Princeton?

Even as I started to assess the possibilities of a real social and religious life in New York, the Baptist past haunted me. How deeply that past remained embedded in me soon became obvious. The culture clash hit me hard when early-’80s love interest Calypso (discussed in a later chapter) and I saw Robert Duvall’s movie
Tender Mercies.
In it, Duvall’s character, a dissolute country-western singer, turns his life around through Christianity and the love of a good woman and is baptized. With my background, I found the scene moving—but the New York audience laughed. Look at the yokels!

Another time, I met a woman, Beth, who was Jewish, jolly, secular and from Long Island. She invited me to join carolers bringing holiday cheer to Brooklyn. I reluctantly agreed and we gathered one Saturday. Was the first song “Jingle Bells”? I don’t remember. What I do recall is a sudden choking feeling. A wave of anxiety washed over me as I realized,
I can’t do this.
The songs all had personal significance and childhood associations far beyond secular celebration.

“
I’m sorry, I have to leave,” I told Beth as I hurried away.

I called her later to explain. Beth had no personal connection to the songs, but for me they reflected a faith I had been raised in and rejected, one that affirmed the birth of the Savior. To this day I do not sing or listen to holiday music—whether the topic is Jesus, a white Christmas or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

I finally settled on the conservative Kane Street Synagogue in Brooklyn as my spiritual home. I still recall my first Saturday morning service. I knew so little about Jewish customs that I recoiled and shook my head when a man offered me the honor of an
aliyah
during the Torah reading. During an
aliyah,
you read prayers in Hebrew before and after parts of the weekly recitation from the Jewish Bible. I had no idea what to do, so I declined. Who was I to deserve this? What if I screwed up?

I had reached an impasse. Spiritually, I was at ease in Jewish beliefs and had no desire to go backward, but I saw no way forward without ’fessing up to my ignorance and what I viewed as my twisted background. I finally decided to speak with Kane Street’s rabbi, a man I liked immensely. In this Jewish version of a confessional, I came clean—about my parents, the Baptist beliefs, the unguided drift from Christianity to Judaism, my sense of shame at what I had been.

To my surprise and delight, the rabbi expressed not the least bit of shock. He didn’t chuck me out of his office. It turns out that I’m not the first Jew to lack a bar mitzvah or an enriching Jewish upbringing. Imagine that. Our conversation marked my fresh start as a Jew. As the Baptists would say, I got right with God. I was relieved to have faced the facts of the past without being laughed at.

Over the last thirty years, I have built my version of a Jewish life. I have studied Hebrew and have become, if not fluent, then more aware of what’s happening during services. I studied Yiddish at the Workmen’s Circle; I cemented my commitment to the class by walking over the Brooklyn Bridge on the Fourth of July, 1982, to buy the classic textbook,
College Yiddish,
by Uriel Weinreich (being who I am, I wrote the date inside the book). In 1982 I also visited Israel for the first and, so far, only time, writing an essay about my experiences in what was then the
Jewish Daily Forward
newspaper, when it published an English-language weekend section:

Our guide’s live-and-let-live attitude impressed me. Speaking about the Israelis’ relaxed approach to religious practice, Benny pointed at the Wall and declared, “is our spirituality.”
This

After years of dating around, I met a woman I deeply cared for and connected with, as two creative outsiders in the city. We were married under the
chuppah
, or wedding canopy, at the Kane Street Synagogue in 1989 by a new rabbi, a woman I like to call “Rebbe Debbie.” In another cultural mash-up, the klezmer band hired for the wedding played Ernest Tubb’s “Waltz Across Texas” as the first dance. Has a klezmer band ever attempted a Texas honky-tonk classic so gamely? I doubt it. Let’s call the performance a noble experiment and leave it at that.

My wife and I took
ulpan
, or intensive Hebrew, when we considered moving to Israel, a plan cut short by the start of Gulf War I. (Playing our relocation slightly safer, we moved to Connecticut.) Since my divorce in 2003, I have dated Jewish women almost exclusively, finding them intelligent, passionate and adorable. The rhythms of Judaism seeped into me, so that I transferred the emotional response I had to Christian prayers and music to Jewish liturgy that I have heard hundreds of times—
Aleiynu, Adon Olam, Yedid Nefesh, Ain Keloheynu, Kaddish
and Israel’s national anthem,
Hatikva
. The writings of Rabbi Abraham Twerski, who is also a psychiatrist, gave me comfort during years of stress, as did the book
Jewish Meditation
by the late Rabbi Arye Kaplan. I still turn to both of them for guidance. My adult experiences are catching up to the intellectual leap I made as a teenager.

I gave myself the Hebrew name
Ze’ev
(wolf) to use in synagogue events and language classes. In 2010 I joined Beit Chaverim (House of Friends), a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Connecticut. At the age of fifty-three, I finally figured out how to put on
tefillin
, the leather straps for your arm and head. The straps hold boxes with biblical verses and are worn during morning prayers. I’m now trying to lead a less digitally driven life on
Shabbat
, primarily by not signing in to email or Facebook. It gets easier, although I sometimes give in to the Devil and backslide into old habits. Oops, there I go again with the Baptist terminology.

While I’ve made peace with my past and current beliefs, I am still aware of the split in my life. My Jewish friends remember childhood seders; I remember Easter egg hunts. They played with dreydls (the spinning tops used for gambling for chocolate coins at Hanukkah), I decorated Christmas trees. They hated Hebrew school, I liked Vacation Bible School. My childhood and adult sides are mostly separate. These worlds collide on Facebook, where secular Jewish friends from Princeton and Israel encounter my evangelical friends from Texas and their straight-talking professions of belief. Their views on faith differ sharply. My attitude? You’re all big boys and girls; you can sort out your differences. But I am tickled to be in the middle, seeing people from the opposite poles of my life interacting.

The chasm yawned widest whenever I returned to Mission in the 1980s and visited with Mrs. D. My change saddened her. “Could you ever believe the way you used to?” she once asked.

“
No,” I said. “I’m happy with who I am now.”

To this day, my evangelical friends and relatives will try to win me back over to the Christian team. One cousin wrote, “I’d be curious to know your thoughts on the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah to come. I believe Jesus is the fulfillment of those prophecies.”

I responded, “As far as the Old Testament prophecies, I used to think the way you do, but I gradually changed my mind and think of them on their own, with Jewish meanings that differ from the Christian interpretation.” I then directed her to the group Jews for Judaism, which counteracts missionary efforts aimed at Jews.

Christian pitches never work now because I am at peace with my Jewish beliefs and don’t care to engage in fierce theological disputes based on their interpretation of the so-called Old Testament. They can call up every possible “proof text” of fulfilled prophecies and logic arguments pointing to Christianity, and I politely demur. However, I’m never insulted or even bothered by their efforts, because I understand that they are motivated by faith. Each one is a dedicated salesperson, driven to make a pitch and ask for the sale.

Some shards of faith, old and new, bridge the distance of decades. As a mirror of my personality, the transition from conservative Christianity to conservative Judaism makes perfect sense; new-fangled forms of spiritual expression never worked for me. Indeed, I joke that if I were a Catholic, I’d learn Latin and grumble in favor of the Tridentine Mass.

Like a good Baptist, I watch my language. You’ll rarely hear what we quaintly called “cuss” words pass my lips. The importance of Bible reading remains in me, so I try to keep up with the
perek yomi
(Torah chapter of the day) program published by the Orthodox Union, although now I limit my scriptural readings to the, ahem, Old Testament. I have faith in faith and don’t spend much time in agonized arguments with God about His existence, mercy or common sense. He is what He is. Community engagement matters, so I attend synagogue when I can, bringing my post-bar mitzvah son along so he can round out the ten-man
minyan,
that is, the group of men required to say certain prayers at Orthodox services. I truly feel as if we’re contributing. Through Facebook, I’ve connected with Jewish relatives in Texas, other members of the far-scattered Schwarz clan.

Politically, I lack the intense anger many of my Northeastern and/or liberal friends feel toward evangelicals; I may disagree with the Christians’ views, but I understand where they’re coming from and I keep the differences on the political level. I know enough to subdue my maverick political and economic views around certain liberal friends, lest their eyes bug out in disbelief and they dump bowls of boiling matzoh ball soup on me.

On the Jewish front, I have the family menorah and the Union Prayer Book from Mission, and historical books on Texas Jews mentioning that hardy Prussian on the prairie, Rabbi Schwarz. Mrs. D gave me her wonderful antique edition of
The Works of Flavius Josephus,
inscribed with the date, December 30, 1916. Ornate formal photographs from the 1890s of my great-grandparents, Esther and Lehman Michelson, have pride of place in my apartment. The
chai
worn around my neck? Mom gave it to me for Hanukkah, 1979, four years before she died of cancer. While a Baptist preacher presided over my mother’s funeral and she was cremated, her older sister Charlotte, a fervent Baptist, placed her tombstone in the Jewish cemetery in Gonzales, Texas, next to their parents’ graves. My son had the bar mitzvah I never had, and my brother and his son Tyler were among the honored guests. Whenever I’m in McAllen, I attend services at Temple Emanuel—where I feel most welcome. And I still say the
Sh’ma
every night, the way my mother taught me.

[In the summer of 1979, between my junior and senior years at Princeton University, I had a plum job as an intern feature writer for
Newsday
, a major daily based in Garden City, New York. After the summer I wrote this piece for the September 12, 1979 issue of
The
Daily
Princetonian
, for incoming freshmen. The anxiety in the piece about driving and gasoline reflected the gas crisis of that summer, which led to long lines at gas stations. My harebrained efforts to conserve gas and limit driving in my 1971 AMC Hornet put me into ridiculous situations. I’ve added bracketed explanatory notes to flesh out the last thirty-three years of life experience. Looking back, I’m surprised that I didn’t put any effort into Jewish dating events—but I did attend one at a church.]