Change

We have spoken about love for the Bible. But let me lift up the larger aspect of this love and refer you toward the end, to one of the most beloved passages in the beloved book: I Corinthians 13, the Ode to Love. Here Paul has to deal with the question, How can diversity and pluralism be an asset instead of a liability? How can we learn, as some of the feminist theologians have taught us, to turn the old statement around and say, How much diversity do we need? How much unity can we afford? We are used to asking, Can the center hold? How much unity do we need? How much diversity can we allow? Paul has an image that love is measured by how much diversity can handle. And he had to learn it hard, because in Galatia, in an earlier part of his ministry, he thought that by stamping his foot, he could get his way. You remember what he says in Galatians I: If anybody preaches and teaches otherwise than I do, be it so an angel form heaven, damned be that one. That's chutzpah. But now he knows in Corinth that he is one of the many, and he is even, perhaps, low man on the totem pole, so he gets ecumenical.

It's so moving. Oh, how I love that book which tells me these things. It's so moving: he says that we now see like in an old-fashioned bad mirror, in a glass, darkly. And now our knowledge is only partial. That's called relativism. It is when he thinks about the diversity that he has to tell us: Don't be so cocky about the truth. You have your insights, but you are just at the beginnings. And then he ends by saying, so there remains those three: faith, hope, and love, and greatest of them is faith. Well, that's what he should have said, according to his own thinking.Love: It's the best The basic line: He is the apostle of faith, everything depends on faith. But here, suddenly, there is a breakthrough in his thinking, and he says: And the greatest of these is love, agape, esteem of the other, not "insisting on its own way," as the RSV puts it.

So, it is proper for me to end these five points where the Bible teaches us to deal with it-as a friend, not to give it honor by just inflating it, but to hear it as that strange way in which the divine has broken in through human thought and human words and human experience.

Finally, let me leave you with a word which is the one that, in my own long love relationship to this book, I want to have in my mind when my end comes. It reads, in 2 Corinthians 3:18, like this: "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the spirit."

Ultimately, I came to learn that there are at lest three quite distinct symbol systems, or paradigms, for Christian theology coming out of the Bible. One is dominated by the idea of God as the judge, and what is going to happen to us on the day of judgment.God is the judge: Arnold is the bailiff

Everything circles around God's judgment, and sin and forgiveness and redemption and the cross-that's Western Christendom in Catholicism and Lutheranism. Then there is God as Lord. And that has to do with God as Lord and we as subject, and the world is full of covenants-that's Calvin and also the Jewish tradition. And the model gave the basic model for the federal structure of the United States; foedus in Latin means convenant. It's the sociopolitical model of God.

And then there is the third, the Johannine. It's all about life. Sin is sickness, not primary guilt. It's not about obedience and Lordship. It's life: He came that they should have life, and have it abundantly. In him was life. Out of his innermost parts, streams of living water will flow (John 7). And everything is to be born anew, born out of water and blood (John 3). That's John, and that's Eastern Christendom. There is no crucifix in an Eastern church; there is the icon, where the divine life shines through the human image.

These are three different ways of thinking about God. What a richness. And you don't see them until you lay them apart. Of course they flow into one another, in all our traditions. But it is by studying the scriptures to get the integrity of each of these that they come to life. It is a little like the Gospels: if you mix them, you don't get the feel of how many theologies there are in scripture. It's like with homogenized milk: when you homogenize milk, you can't make whipped cream anymore.Dairy products: Thick like Scripture And for sermons, that's a deadening thing.

So when the preacher preaches Luke, it should sound like Luke. And even the Lutherans should not mix in a little Paul to make it kosher. So, not so uptight. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Richness. Plurality. Plurals. Yes, meanings is better than meaning. Isn't that, in a way, what the Trinity is about? Isn't that odd, these confused monotheists who speak about the Trinity: We couldn't quite settle for something which was just oneness, we had to have more of a fullness of an interplay, of a giving and receiving. Do you remember how it is with the oneness in John 17, where Jesus prays that they all be one? And you, father, are in me, and I am in you, and they are in us. It's like the biological world: Everything is interdependent. It's a giving and receiving. It's a oneness that is not a glob, but a living interplay. Plural.

Which leads me to the fifth point: Not so universal. And here I come full circle. I said in the beginning that I read the Bible as if it was just about me. And now I say, the Bible, my beloved Bible, it is indeed my Bible. There might be other holy scriptures-and that might not be as threatening as some people think. Not to claim universality and uniqueness? I always felt that to speak about the uniqueness of Christianity or the uniqueness of Christ does more for the ego of the believer than it does for God. Has God Only One Blessing? is the wonderful title of a recent book. How can I sing my song to Jesus with abandon, without telling negative stories about others? What one religion says about another religion, what one beloved scripture claims to be over against other scriptures, comes pretty close to a breach against the commandment "Though shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." What we say about the others is usually self-serving. We say, Is it self-serving? Oh no, it is just giving God honor. But think about it. Think about the scriptures themselves. Jesus said, "Let your light so shine before people that they see your good deeds and become Christian." That's not what it says. It says, "Let your light shine for people so that they see your good deeds and praise your father who is in heaven" (Matt. 5). Your father-so that people have a reason to be happy that there are Christians in the world, instead of getting irritated at them, if not worse. Jesus said, "You are the salt of the earth." But who wants the world to become a salt mine?

We are born as a minority religion, as a religion among religions. And we are heirs to the Jewish perspective on these things: that's what I learned from the scriptures. It says, to Israel, that Israel is meant to be a light to the nations. That's what Jesus speaks about: a light to the nations. The Jews have never thought that God's hottest dream was that everybody become a Jew. They rather thought that they were called upon to be faithful and that God somehow needed that people in the total cosmos. What a humility, but we called it tribalism. From the enlightenment, everything had to be universal. But when Christianity started its universal claim, and got power, it led to the crusades. We couldn't really think that it was not God's hottest dream that everybody be like us. So I say, no, the Bible is my Bible. The milk of salvation: Suckling from the gospelsThis is the breast that I, as a child of God, have been nourished from. And for the little child, when the child is born that's the whole world, the mother's breast. But maturing means to recognize that other kids have sucked other mothers' breasts. That belongs to growing up.

Now this is my Bible. It was given to me as a gift, and it is full of love, for which I am grateful. If I have found a doctrine, that is my doctrine. I don't need to bad-mouth all others. This is theology for the next generations. Paul was on to that. Paul, late in his mission, had to learn to deal with plurality.

PART FOUR: Final Thoughts 

Most people my age would take a trip to a village ruled by fortunetellers for its ironic value, but when I pulled up to the spiritualist community of Lily Dale, New York, I genuinely believed I would reach the ghost of my father. After all, I had in the past.

My father died when I was 20. We held the funeral service in the same Roman Catholic Church where he had been an altar boy. All three of his wives—two Jewish and named Linda, one Catholic and named Ginny—and all six of his children sat in the front row. As the rest of our dad’s family stuck out their tongues for communion and made the sign of the cross, my Jewish brothers Paul and Daniel and I stayed in our seats. The priest talked about how we’d be reunited with my dad in heaven, and I wondered whether this applied to us as Jews. If someone had told me that forsaking my Jewish beliefs meant I’d see my father again, no doubt I’d have done it.

Song of faith: The single of "Only the Good Die Young" Here was my basic understanding of the two faiths present in my family: one focused on what happened when you were alive, and one on what happened after you were dead. So once someone close to me was dead, I shifted from a Jewish to a Christian point of view. The night before my father was buried I prayed to God to be reunited with him, and I fell asleep fantasizing about blasting Billy Joel’s “Only The Good Die Young,” his favorite song, from a boom box outside his funeral. I hummed it under my breath during the service, clutching the crucifix the priest had given me in one fist and the hand of my six-year-old brother in the other. Losing my father convinced me that Christianity was like magic life insurance: Believe and there was no death.

Once I started thinking about the afterlife, I began to notice all the opportunities society offers to connect with the dead, from the five-dollar fortuneteller living next door to me in a basement apartment in the West Village to the young man in pancake makeup who came on TV every afternoon with the promise of “crossing over.” Because my father’s religion was all about saints and spirits and holy ghosts, it was easy for me to believe in his spirit. Suddenly I found profundity in things that had once seemed invisible or ridiculous to me before his death.

I'm not the only one willing to pay for a conduit to the Great Beyond. Around the country, an entire movement has been summoned up to service the needs of bereaved relatives desperate for one last chance to commune with the dead. TV psychic John Edward (watch him here) has managed to cash in on the trend twice, starring in shows on the SciFi Channel and Lifetime. Even science is getting into the game: University of Arizona psychology professor Gary Schwartz has published The Afterlife Experiments, in which he scrutinizes published, peer-reviewed studies of mediums to figure whether they pass muster with the scientific method. They do indeed, he says.

Ten years after my father’s death, I decided it was time to see whether he was still with me. I wanted to hear from him, but even more, I wanted confirmation that he was hearing me every time I spoke to him silently, with my eyes closed. And consulting a spiritualist medium didn’t feel like a compromise to my Jewish identity. It was my Jewish mother who’d long ago given me faith in after-death communication.

Just after my father died, on a trip to England, my mom met with a man named Mr. Molinari, a medium at the Hogwarts-esque London College of Psychic Studies (LCPS). At dinner the next day she insisted I visit him as well.

Medium not-so-rare: Once you start looking for them, psychics are everywhere I protested. I was about to be 21 and what had happened seemed so unreal to me—my healthy, 54-year-old father rendered paralyzed and speechless, then dead, of a spontaneous brain hemorrhage—that I had to work constantly to convince myself of the reality of it. If I was ever to "get over it," I couldn't allow myself to believe contact was possible.

A waiter appeared at our table with a silver platter of marzipan fruits. I had always hated the chalky paperweights—simulacra of more delicious things. My mother reached for a "grape," then offered the tray to me.

"Yuck!" I said, "I hate marzipan."

"Fine by me," she said, in a singsong voice, "But Daddy loved it."

"OK," I said, gesturing up to heaven, "Daddy, if you like marzipan, tell me tomorrow."

At LCPS the next day, Mr. Molinari gestured for me to follow him into a musky room on the third floor. "Different mediums work different ways,” he said. “I see things. I am going to close my eyes, and I want you to do the same. Then concentrate on nothing. Just be here and give me a minute. Then I'll tell you what I see."

He had a soft British accent and he didn't seem at all the type of person to be involved with the dead. If I saw him on the street, I probably would've taken him for a small business owner—the kind of man who runs the family sweet shop. I closed my eyes and put my hot palms on my knees, thinking, Please God let this be real.

First, Mr. Molinari saw a woman. He thought it was my grandmother, and she said my apartment needed plants. Disappointing. Then another woman, this one all in black. With her was, according to Mr. Molinari, “Your father.”

Chills. I was a reasonably young girl—anyone would assume both my parents were still living. And my mother had promised she'd told Mr. Molinari nothing. She'd made my appointment over the phone, giving the receptionist just my first name, so as not to give anything away. I stayed silent, waiting for more. He said some cheesy things, the sort of things a person would think a grieving child would need to hear—be strong, follow your heart, your father will always be with you—but then there was a surprise.

"One more thing before you go," said Mr. Molinari, "And I must admit, this has me confused. Your father is holding out a tray of those little fruits Italians make out of almond paste, and he says, "This is not just for proof, but also to remind you to treat yourself once in a while.’ Do you understand what that means?"

Afterlifeville, USA: The gates of Lily Dale Wow, right?

This story has served me many times in the past eleven years, most recently to justify my trip to Lily Dale. Founded in the mid-1800s, this town of small, ramshackle, pastel-colored Victorians—more summer camp than gothic hideaway—about an hour southwest of Buffalo, in Chautauqua County, not far from Lake Erie, is the home of the spiritualist movement. While its members consider themselves a congregation, they are much more focused on connecting with the dead than with God.

Driving there with my friend Betony, who also doesn’t not believe in ghosts, I was sick with anticipation. I had reserved a reading via email and immediately regretted it because, as all my friends said, “She can just Google you then!” But I didn’t care if my medium had access to facts about me—if she said something authentic, I would recognize it.

We rang my medium’s doorbell, but no one stirred. Inside the screen door was a little podium covered in pamphlets with the medium’s headshot and posters listing her upcoming talks, as if she were a life coach rather than a conduit for the dead. I motioned to one of the more ridiculous posters and whispered, “Maybe it’s best if I miss this appointment!”

Just as we were skulking out the screen door, we heard a frantic voice coming from inside. “Just a second! I hear you!” A plump, sixtyish lady with thinning white hair and the face of the fairy godmother in Disney’s Cinderella emerged from the house, radiating heat.

“I was answering some emails because I assumed you had cancelled. You’re late. Which one of you is Rebecca? Come on in. You,” she said, motioning to Betony in an oddly accusatory fashion, “can sit outside here, or you can go over to the Crystal Cove and do some shopping.” She said “Crystal Cove” with the same anticipatory tone one might use for “Barneys Warehouse Sale.”

Betony scurried off and I entered the inner sanctum, which was a heavily calicoed room punctuated by a loud yet ineffective air conditioner. My medium, shiny with sweat, opened the reading with a prayer and asked in a snobbish, world-weary tone whether I wanted to connect with any loved ones. “Of course,” I answered, sounding more hostile than I meant to. “Why else would I be here?”

“Well, I also provide general advice and guidance,” she said, clearly a bit insulted I hadn’t grasped her role as a New-Age shrink.

Getting into the spirit of things: A ghostly urbanite I wish I could say this bumpy beginning was in no way indicative of the amazing insights revealed by my medium as she became a conduit for my father. I wish I could tell you she’d given me news direct from Daddy: he had heard everything I said to him in ICU, he loved my New York apartment, he’d left me a fortune in a Swiss bank account and here was the number.

But our reading, which was five minutes shorter than I had paid for ($60 bucks), consisted of my medium telling me my maternal grandmother was in the room (Rosie is not dead, thank God) along with my brain-injured brother (he’s not dead either!). Then she asked me about my ghostwriting projects in New York and bragged about her own, insisting we compare rates. Finally, she asked me who my agent was.

I left the reading livid. Betony could tell immediately by my expression that my medium had been a sham, but I think we were both surprised by how emotional I was. It was clear I’d really believed I would hear from my dad.

On our second day at Lily Dale, we stopped at a yard sale in front of a church. Among the piles of trinkets, LP’s, old toys and dresses was a solitary 1980’s-album-cover button: a young Billy Joel, leaning against a brick wall. Betony pressed it into my palm and said, “Your dad sent this to you.”

After all the little moments like this—the time I got lost in a part of Queens I’d never been to, only to end up at the cemetery where my dad is interred, the time I put a dollar in a slot machine I knew he’d love, and hit the jackpot—why did I need to pay someone to connect with my father when it was so clear I was already connecting with him myself? Commodifying something this ethereal was vaguely pathetic.

I still believe there is some life beyond this one—I just finally see through the people who claimed to be the gatekeepers to it. I’ll admit that I’m mystified by the persistence of my belief amidst such convincing proof to the contrary. But believing in a dead loved one is just faith, and what is faith if not the refusal to buy what everyone else is selling?

* * *

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Rebecca Diliberto has previously covered beloved-but-irrational phenomenons in her stint blogging The Secret. She's previously written about being the child of intermarriage in "The Play-It-Down Jew."

1985. United Airlines flight 80, SFO to JFK, seat 4B. I am a child of divorce, en route to visit my father for the summer. I’m unwrapping my third Fruit Roll-Up and humming along to the Xanadu soundtrack when Gargamel and Zorro appear in the aisles, holding AK47’s and wearing dishdashas. “All Jewish children, please come to the front of the airplane,” one screams, “It is time for us to eat you in the name of Allah!”

I think of my passport. American. My last name. DiLiberto, Italian. My blue eyes. My light hair. They’ll never guess I’m Jewish. I can pass. I can live. I tighten my seatbelt as all the good little Jews march, silent and stoic, to the front of the plane. Even at ten years old, I know I am a coward. Those little Jewish children will go to heaven and I will languish here on Earth listening to my conscience.

Identity hijack: Would you come forward?Wait, do we—Jews, I mean—have heaven?

1985 was the year Uli Derickson saved a bunch of Jewish passengers on TWA flight 847 by hiding their passports. I became obsessed with the news story and spent hours contemplating what I would do if I found myself in a stand-up-and-be-counted situation. I used my mother as a sounding board.

“There’s no way they would know unless I told them, right? Think about it. My eyes. My name. I don’t seem Jewish.”

My mother would roll her own blue eyes at me. “There are plenty of Italian Jews. With blue eyes.”

“Yes, but it’s less obvious. That they’re Jewish.”

“This is a ridiculous conversation.”

“What I want to know is do I have to tell them? The hijackers? Do I have a moral obligation?” I have always loved catchphrases.

“While I hope you’re proud to be who you are, I don’t think any rabbi would argue with using any means necessary to preserve your life in an extraordinary situation.”

“But during the Holocaust—“

“This conversation is over. I’ll be on the airplane with you, and I’ll decide what we do.”

If only my mother could come with me on dates. Here’s the dirty truth: I am a play-it-down Jew. Recently, I was on my first date with a sleepy-eyed patrician lawyer. We were swapping tales of our childhoods. After I told him about growing up in San Francisco among hippies and crab mongers, he told me about his hometown of Dearborn, Michigan. I said I had heard it had the highest concentration of Arabs of any American city.

Dearborn's favorite son: Henry Ford“And it’s no coincidence,” he chortled. “It’s the most antisemitic place in the world! Because of Henry Ford.”

I nodded. Ford was on my Jewish stepfather’s list of famous Jew-haters, along with Vanessa Redgrave and Louis Farrakhan. Never would our family buy a Ford or rent “Blow Up” or attend a Nation of Islam rally.

“I had a friend when I was growing up in Dearborn whose house had a tile floor, and inlaid in the floor was a huge swastika mosaic! Can you believe that?” My lawyer laughed and took a swig of his martini.

I snorted uncomfortably. Why was he telling me this? He had no reason to suspect I was Jewish, did he? And was he outraged—or amused?—by his neighbors’ antisemitic interior decorating? I needed to make an interception before one or both of us were humiliated.

“Whoa, you don’t have anything against Jews, right? I mean, I’m part Jewish.”

Part Jewish?

My mother’s mother is Jewish, but her father is a Southern Baptist. My own father was Catholic, and although he didn’t protest when my mother insisted on raising her children as Jews, he loved to tease her by claiming he’d had me baptized while she was at the beauty parlor (better safe than sorry). So I’m actually only a quarter Jewish, but the right quarter.

When we were young, my father’s three Catholic sons from his first marriage all found it hilarious to refer to me, their only sister, as “the JAP.” On the other hand, I started getting “You don’t seem Jewish” in second grade at my Waspy all-girls school—from both the Wasps and the other Jewish girl. In Hebrew school, the principal snickered every time she had to say my Italian name. In college, the first and last time I ate dinner at Hillel House during Passover, two girls I knew socially whispered to me, with a giggle, “What are you doing here? You’re not really Jewish.”

It was confusing. To gentiles, my quarter-Jewishness defined me, the way just one drop of food coloring turns a gallon of water bright blue. But Jews rarely accepted me as one of their own. I was stuck, and reasoned my way out, moseying down the path of least resistance. There was no question which identity was easier to take on. Certainly not the one who was supposed to know thousands of prayers in an ancient language, or actually enjoy gefilte fish, or trade stories about a drunken confirmation trip to Israel I hadn’t gone on. When it came to the Jewish experience, I could never measure up.

Private prayer: Jesus is not my homeboyStill, I squirm if I find myself at a church service, whether at a wedding, a funeral, Midnight Mass, or on a trip to a foreign country. Private prayers buzz about inside my head: I do not accept Jesus as my savior, just because I’m here or anything. He was a really stellar citizen, not a savior. Well, some people’s savior, obviously, just not mine, per se. Shema, Y’israel… At my own father’s funeral: Do I kneel when the priest says to, like all the good Catholics? What am I supposed to do when my brothers take communion? Is it more disrespectful if I eat the wafer, or if I don’t? Will it affect my father’s ascent? Because if yes, I’m opening my mouth right now.

Oddly, I’ve always felt I belonged in synagogue. Not in youth groups or classes or that terrible post-service lox-stinking brunch room, but invisible in the sanctuary, listening to ancient prayers whose meaning I don’t necessarily know, but which still resonate in some place inaccessible to my rational mind.

Part Jewish? Everyone knows that Judaism is a matrilineal religion—if you bloom in a Jewish womb, like me, you‘re a Jew. Entirely, not “part.” Why hadn’t I just told Mr. O’Lawyer , “I’m Jewish?” Because I actually liked this guy, and I didn’t want to risk nipping our nascent relationship in the bud. I figured I’d let him fall in love with me first, then drop the J-bomb. I am deeply ashamed to admit it, but I fear that my Judaism is something a potential suitor might hold against me. Family lore has it that a dashing Princeton boy fell in love with my mother while she was still in high school. She says that after he found out she was Jewish, as they nibbled roast pork at his parents’ manor, he never called her again. When I was a prepubescent, this story felt like a cautionary tale. My mother was perfect! Her Jewishness had to be the reason this guy dropped her! It didn’t occur to me that she might have used the wrong fork at dinner, or that he might have been seeing an older girl at Princeton, or that—heaven forbid—he just wasn’t that into her. My ten-year-old take-away was this: Gallant, rich, important men don’t like Jewish girls.

So, some forty-odd years later, I took the implied lesson to heart: Keep the religion thing close to your chest. But come on—how long could I stay on the Down Low if this guy and I actually got into a real thing? (Well, for quite a while, come to think of it, seeing as how I’ve pretty much abstained from religious holidays since my bat mitzvah, and there’s the Italian name thing, and the Southern Baptist grandpa thing, and the fact that the only Jewish food I can stomach are those little chocolate-covered jellies you get on Passover…)

J-Bomb: To drop or not?But—aristocratic suitors aside—how could I live with myself without full disclosure? It scares me to think that I might compromise my identity—Jewish or otherwise—to snag a husband. Or that I think so little of the men I go out with that I assume they’re antisemitic. But I am ashamed to admit that I don’t want to seem “other,” part of some creepy, horn-hiding, baby sacrificing cult. Do I really think anyone still harbors these ridiculous ideas of Jewishness in 2007? Come on!

Beyond all the Jewbilation ale, Kabbalah bracelets, and VHI specials, we all know that Jews remain the warty fairytale villains of the global subconscious. I don’t need to tell you that “The Passion of the Christ” grossed more, domestically, than any other R-rated film in history, or that “The Protocols of Zion” is reportedly a bestseller at countless bodegas, or that many liberals and conservatives alike blame the United States’ Israel obsession for this horrible war we’re in. No wonder little Noni Horowitz changed her name to Winona Ryder.

My impulse to pass has less to do with self-loathing than an obsessive need to be loved. I’m sure if I were to date more Jewish guys, I would be belting out Dayenu at Passover, and not only at the table. But for some reason I rarely find myself breaking bread with a lantsman. They just don’t seem to go for me, whether it’s that I’m not Jewish enough or simply that I’m voluptuous (everyone knows that Jewish guys, no matter how robust themselves, are weight Nazis). Besides, am I even allowed to call myself a Jew? My looks, paired with my nonobservant background, have contributed to a lifelong sense of cognitive dissonance: At once, I feel too Jewish and not Jewish enough. My Jewish self turns her nose up at my gentile side, and vice versa.

On vacation alone last year, I became friends with a burly, married Italian named Tony. In the first five minutes of our acquaintance, we bonded over our last names (which both end in the classic “o”) and our identical philosophies on the cooking of Sunday red sauce (pork being the crucial ingredient). We took long daily walks, during which he expressed unhappiness over the state of his loveless marriage. I nodded sympathetically when he told me he had decided, as a Catholic, never to divorce, but to have clandestine affairs instead (he felt a strong sense of “duty” toward the institution of marriage). He had assumed that, as a DiLiberto, I was Catholic too, and I didn’t correct his assumption. (I mean, I am a little bit Catholic, right?) In this case, I wasn’t interested in romance, just acceptance—a sense of kinship with another lonely stranger. And I was afraid that, like many members of my own Italian family, my Italian buddy harbored deep-seated anti-Semitism.

It’s my pesky pathological need to be loved: if I sense someone might be uncomfortable around a member of the tribe, I play my Jewishness down. The converse works, too: In the company of observant Jews, I suddenly find myself making comments like, “I wish I could keep kosher!” or “There’s something so sexy about a well-placed yarmulke.” And I should say that this see, we’re just alike! proclivity extends beyond religious affiliation.

* * *

Mirror, mirror: Jewish from multiple anglesNeedless to say, Mr. Swastika Mosaic and I went nowhere—things fizzled after a few dates. It would be convenient to say he stopped calling when he found out I was Jewish (which was my mom’s belief, of course—this from a woman who erects a 1000-piece miniature Christmas village every November), or to explain that the swastika comment was enough to send me packing—but we made out after both revelations, so the burnout had nothing to do with principles. And there’s no question I am more ambivalent about my own Jewishness than he was.

I realized after things were over the absurdity of my tendency to play the Jew thing down: I could end up married to an antisemite. What would my unsuspecting hubby think when my mom insisted he watch my bat mitzvah video, or when my Yiddish-speaking Grandma attacked his cheeks? More important, how would I feel lying next to this man in the middle of the night, knowing I had cheated both of us out of the best thing marriage has to offer: total honesty without judgment? Probably the worst feeling would be the lifelong shudder of self-betrayal, shouldering the guilt of lying to terrorists on an airplane every day for the rest of my life. Thank God Judaism has a built-in honesty clause: even if I were to marry a bigot, his children would be, officially, Jewish. An eighth, but the right eighth.

It is 1984 and I am nine years old and ready for my first sleepover at the home of Manning Montagnet, an impressively freckled youngster and my fourth-grade classmate at the Christ Episcopal Day School in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Manning lives in an antebellum mansion not far from the marina where the Montagnets—regatta types all—keep their sailing yacht. I am invited here less because we are close friends than for my newness both to the school and the Gulf Coast, having migrated south from New York with my mother and older brother a few months earlier. The combination of my brutish Yankee accent, adventurous use of four-letter words, and close personal friendship with Lawrence Taylor (strictly speaking untrue, but I did own his jersey) make me quite an exotic creature for Manning. The sleepover serves as a preteen version of scientific observation. Of course, I possess another trait he might find more intriguing than my slouching Northeastern cultural mores: I am a Jew pretending to be Unitarian.

Rubadubdub, thanks for the grub: And watch out for that stuff on the friesFor dinner that night, Mrs. Montagnet, a tautly strung Stepford type, serves a tempting platter of cheeseburgers, French fries, and Barq’s root beer. After strategically positioning my napkin on my lap, I greedily select a burger, pile on the fries, and cover them in ketchup and mustard. Then I draw a deep breath, bring the burger to my lips, and take a single ravenous bite. A long moment of transported chewing passes before I notice Manning and his mother staring at me, their hands folded primly in front of them, their posture unmistakably one of prayer. Manning’s cherubically speckled face is blank with shock, his mouth rounded into a stunned and disapproving O. Mrs. Montagnet smiles—to this day I can still see the flecks of red lipstick marring her enormous front teeth—and places a hand on my wrist.

“Taaeed,” she drawls, “I’m not sure about your home, but here, we ask the Lord’s blessing before we eat.”

Slowly, carefully, I return my hamburger to the plate and steeple my hands into the appropriately penitent position. I bow my head just as Manning begins: “Lord, thank you for this bounty we are about to receive….”

I am not invited back.

* * *

My mother first traveled to Mississippi in the late ’60s on a college road trip. Driving the coast in her obligatory VW Beetle, this nice Jewish girl from Queens, daughter of the local B’nai Brith chapter president, took in the great oaks and the Spanish moss, and, for reasons impossible to parse in any rational fashion, decided that someday she would live there. Two kids, a divorce, and a failed Manhattan medical practice later, she did just that. It was her belief that the area’s sick would never accept medical care from a New York-woman-Jew. Her solution was to discard her religious identity and construct a new one… as a Unitarian.

Mississippi marrano: Hiding in plain sight in the land of Spanish mossEven a Jewish girl in Jewish New York, surrounded by Jewish friends and family in a mostly Jewish neighborhood where whitefish was as available as White Castle, can feel overwhelmed by a sense of otherness. Blame it, perhaps, on her hooked nose (which she had surgically altered soon after moving South). Or perhaps it was the bland bigotry of the Italians residing in their part of Jamaica, Queens. Or maybe it was the constant reiteration of the Holocaust story, with its grim narrative of separatism, anti-acculturation, and death.

Our family was Americanizing anyway: our ceaseless clamor for Christmas trees; our substitution of sporting idols—and G-d said bless the Brooklyn Dodgers—for spiritual ones; our domestic diaspora spreading to white-bread enclaves in Minnesota, Arizona, New Jersey, and California; and the inevitable passing of our patriarchs and matriarchs, each survived by un–bar mitzvahed offspring who in turn marry non-Jewish spouses. Even if we hadn’t moved to Mississippi, my mother would have followed the trend in disposing of as much of her—and my—Jewish identity as possible.

In New York, I had received practically no religious instruction: no rabbi, no Talmud, no Hebrew school, no kashrut, no temple. My parents had provided me with a circumcision, matzah ball soup at Passover, Hanukah instead of Christmas, and little else. As such, in Mississippi, I found it easy to be a Christian, at least at school. Still, I never doubted that I was Jewish, and what’s more, my mother never actually asked me to. Our pseudo-Unitarianism was a pose, plain and simple. Because I never took the dislocation of my identity seriously, it wasn’t until later that I felt compelled to ask myself a simple question: Am I still a Jew?

Laundry's more fun on E: A Unitarian church in Washington, DC promises ecstasyAt Christ Episcopal, I found that I enjoyed Bible study class and its stories, even the New Testament ones. I attended Mass, prayed (not with any sincerity, but I did move my lips), followed the sermon, and even took Communion. I recall with great clarity the pride I felt at being asked to solo in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” during the school’s annual Christmas Pageant. Dressed in a white floor-length robe, I faced the old church ladies and their bored husbands, my stern teachers, the straight-laced parents of my Christian schoolfellows, and I delivered the Lord’s tune of righteous retribution upon the unbelievers. I hit the notes both high and low as the unsuspecting congregation fondled their prayer books and placed cold cash on the donation plate.

Although I must admit I enjoyed putting one over on the goyim, a part of me knew this was, at the very least, highly strange, and I always hoped to avoid discussing my sectarian affiliation. Occasionally, though, someone would directly ask about it and I would be forced to answer. I found this problematic for two reasons. First, although I wasn’t religious, I still felt Jewish, and lying about it unnerved me, even if, at that age, I wasn’t wholly aware of it. Second, lying, and more importantly living a lie, is stressful. I didn’t know the first thing about Unitarianism, and if I ever ran into someone who did, I knew the entire charade would immediately disintegrate. This worried me. Here, my mother’s selection of Unitarianism as our crypto-religion helped—no one knew what it was, and being Southerners, they were too polite to inquire.

Truth is, I never actually witnessed any antisemitism—not even Jew jokes, which had been de rigueur for both Jew and non-Jew alike back in New York. Christ Episcopal even boasted its very own “out” Jewish pupil, Hillary Dattel, a shy, chestnut-eyed fifth grader who skipped school for Passover and spent the Mass in the library. No one singled her out for ridicule or censure, except perhaps for the assumption that she inherently knew more about bagels and smoked fish. While this might make the decision to hide seem pointless, to my mother at least, it remained necessary. Avoiding the disapproval of peers who proved more tolerant than she had anticipated wasn’t good enough—she needed us to belong in a way that required no approval and implied no condescension.

A likely story: The flaming chalice, symbol of UnitarianismI can’t account for the choice of Unitarianism. I’ve tried asking my mother, but when I do, this glazed-over, faux-senile distance settles over her face, as if she were trying to reconstruct the mental processes of another person. What drives me crazy about it is the specificity. Why not just adopt some amorphous form of Protestantism (as she did later when she remarried, converting to Episcopalian)? Unitarians, with their flaming chalice symbology, their rejection of the tripartite Godhead, and the long history of their seminal leaders being burned alive, sounds altogether too much like someone wanting to be caught in a lie.

Which I never was. At twelve, I returned to New York to live with my father as a secular Jew. I visited Mississippi every summer and I continue to do so now that I am older, married, and have a son. Eventually, I told a few close Mississippi friends my story. None seemed overly surprised, apparently having already conflated my inherent abrasiveness with a generic Jewish identity—making all New Yorkers Jewish, even those who aren’t.

The true reckoning with this history relates less to me than my son, Jerod. Not that I’m concerned with how he might explain his religion to others when he visits his grandmother on the Gulf Coast. Unlike my mother, I am optimistic enough to believe he can safely acknowledge his Judaism. The real issue is here, in Brooklyn. When my wife returns to work full-time we will place Jerod in daycare. I am told by one of my (Christian) work colleagues that a local synagogue has an excellent program with steep discounts for those willing to join the Reform congregation. I find myself reluctant to do it, though—a hesitancy I attribute to the lingering impact of my childhood deception.

My mother always intended the Unitarianism we assumed to be temporary, a convenient untruth that would forestall further conversation. Yet it is still with me. I have never been able to slip fully back into the Jewish identity any more than I was able to shed it as a boy.

It might come as no surprise that I spent the better part of my twenties trying, with limited success, to get laid. Sure, there were flashes of passion, excitement, the humming thrill in my private places; a drunken kiss in a dim stairwell, a feverish grope in the back of a northbound bus, making out with a woman twice my age who called herself "Jane Smith." Mostly though, when it came to women, I was the Invisible Man.

Now, smiling women are stopping me on the street, as they gurgle and coo at the adorable baby strapped to my chest.Brad had the right idea: Then again, it's not like he needed the extra help

At first, I thought it was just my newborn son that drew their interest, but I soon realized from their light touches and lingering looks that they were also interested in the man schlepping him around and taking care of his every need.

My wife first noticed this sea-change at a reading I gave at Smith College when she was eight months pregnant. Afterwards, she was mobbed by a group of coeds, who, upon finding out that she was my wife, dreamily intoned, "You're so lucky."

I laughed at this novelty, because I'd been greeted by silence at dozens of readings and had gone to graduate school at a certain small liberal arts college where the female student body had shunned me.

This changing dynamic only accelerated after my wife gave birth. At the pediatrician's office, a receptionist admiring our urban sleek diaper bag said, "Nice bag. Does that dad come with it?" With my son in tow, waitresses flirt with me, laugh at my jokes and make sure to get my order exactly right. Then, turning to my wife, they ask: "And what does mom want?”

We all know that motherhood can be sexy. It sure hasn’t hurt Angelina Jolie or Madonna. But my wife feels she faces an uphill battle on the road to Milf-dom, and a return to that sex kitten she was before giving birth. She has not been hit on since she started showing in her fifth month of pregnancy. What was once an annoyance, she looks at with a sort of nostalgia as younger men speak to her with a deference usually reserved for schoolteachers of a bygone era.

The Ultimate MILF: Post-pregnancy, looking this good is harder than it appears. Colleagues, acquaintances and even some strangers publicly ask my wife whether her nipples are sore, if she feels like a Holstein when she pumps, and how much weight she has gained. Then there are the uncouth ones; they feel entitled to know whether she suffers from hemorrhoids. Motherhood has brought my wife to a land beyond etiquette and manners where people are unafraid to tell her how tired and pale she looks.

Fatherhood, on the other hand, has restored my long-lost boyishness and a new playfulness has re-emerged after years on ice. I can go days without shaving, forget to put on deodorant, dress in tattered jean-shorts, and my wife's coworkers suddenly tell me how cute and adorable I look, as long as the baby is strapped to my chest. For a father, a baby is a wonderful accessory, with or without his black CBGB onesie. Case in point: spit-up stains on a father's T-shirt are viewed as a sign of dedication, a mark of providing loving care for a helpless infant; the same stain on a mother suggests she has given up the ghost, beaten a haggard retreat from her youth, when she held the whip hand, dictating which suitor would have the privilege of buying her a drink.

It is ironic: now that I have started a family, I find that doors are opening for me that I could not have kicked down before. If only I had had a baby to tote around with me when I was single; it is the ultimate ice-breaker to initiate conversation, and I would not even have had to break a sweat crossing the bar. But of course, a baby was the last thing I wanted when I was single.

Perhaps it is the sheer virility of helping bring life into this world that now makes me attractive, or maybe it is the fact that I am now called "Dad," with all of its comforting, homey connotations. Or maybe it is simply the ass-backward reality that I am obviously unavailable, and therefore not prone to misread signals sent out across the battlefield of the war of the sexes. I think it is no coincidence that my upstairs neighbor now speaks to me at length when meeting me in the stairwell, while previously she had barely uttered a curt hello.

The fact is: I am safe.

Sharing Time: Oedipal anxiety runs both ways People tell my wife that she "looks good for having just given birth." That statement is meant to be a compliment, but my wife collapses into a jelly of insecurity, a perpetual reminder that she is no longer the same person she once was even if she is wearing her stiletto heels.

And that is the problem. In our household, it sometimes feels that my star is in its ascendancy, while my wife's is burning out, that she has lost a part of herself and I have gained an heir. We have had our moments and I can't wait for the doctor to give us the green light to start slamming again, simply for the fun of it this time with no other agendas, no counting days, no pillows propped awkwardly to facilitate a better drip. Problem is my newfound hotness is going to waste; when I roll over in bed ready to go, we hear our son's unsexy little voice over the monitor, reminding me, that for now, when it comes to my wife's body, I have to share, like it or not.

It wasn’t until my girlfriend and I were scanning the catalogs of sperm banks that I became aware of my Jewish identity. Suddenly it mattered, the fact that I was Jewish and my girlfriend was Jewish, and—most importantly—that the sperm with which we would merge first one of my eggs, and later one of hers, be Jewish. It didn’t have to do with Hebrew classes, Bat Mitzvahs, or Israel. Not being able to see or speak to our future children’s biological father, we told ourselves that our donor’s Jewishness would create a smidgen of connection in the artificial, anonymous insemination process. You might not otherwise mingle with your own, but in matters as dramatic as birth and death, there's comfort in sticking close to the bloodline. If I were to awaken one morning single, lonely, and straight, I know I would register with JDate.

Zeroing in on Jewish sperm was also a way to mimic our heterosexual peers, which helped normalize the process for our families. We found ourselves publicly declaring our desire for Jewish sperm the way some women announce they want to meet a nice Jewish man. Our parents’ preference for Jew-on-Jew mating likely had more to do with eugenics than our own. But when my partner Faith and I forced ourselves to imagine having a baby with one of our male friends, we always preferred the scenarios that involved Jews. Even the ickiest of our own kind was in some way warm, fuzzy, and familiar. Maybe our parents were right; we were probably better off taking a chance with one of our own.

To satisfy this hunch, we paid a hundred dollars to register with a sperm bank in Georgia that featured photos of each of their donors. First we read the essays the men had written about why they wanted to donate sperm, making a list of the best. Next we looked at pictures of all the men and made a new list of those we thought were the most physically appealing. Mind you, it was not drop-dead handsome we were after, just a friendly, benign-enough face we could bear melding with our own and then have reflected back to us over breakfast each morning for the next eighteen years, or the rest of our lives, whichever came first.

After three hours of strenuous research, we were ready for the climactic unveiling, the cross-referencing of language-arts skills and ethno-religious identification.

While not every articulate essay had been written by a Jewish man, every Jewish man, indeed, had written an articulate essay! We yelped with joy, if not for having validated our sperm-shopping approach, then for being Jews ourselves—daughters of an enterprising people who valued education and could write so well.

Now trusting fully that our Jewish donor would be a decent chap who could pen an essay, all we had to do now was find one with a clean medical history. This decision narrowed the sperm-shopping field dramatically. Out of hundreds of possible sperm donors nationwide, we were left with approximately twenty. We found three identity-release Jewish sperm donors who fit the medical bill and numbered them in order of preference: (1) Tall, Dark, and Handsome; (2) Unibrow; and (3) Baldie. Numbers one and two were no longer available. And so, $3,000 later, Baldie was granted the gift of fathering our Jewish children.

Faith and I began inseminating the romantic way—at home with a syringe and a smoking cauldron of liquid nitrogen. When that failed, we decided to enlist a professional sperm handler to inject Baldie’s donation intracervically. When that also didn’t work, we moved on to intrauterine inseminations, the insertion of chemically washed vials of Baldie’s semen directly into my uterus. When four months’ worth of intrauterine inseminations proved unsuccessful, my fertility was called into question, invasive medical procedures were initiated, and a treatment with synthetic hormones was kindly but firmly suggested.

Baldie let us down six months in a row. Finally, I called the sperm bank and asked if Baldie had gotten anybody else pregnant. Their answer: No. It seemed that at least three other women had failed to conceive via Baldie, that Baldie had chosen to donate sperm because his spouse could not get pregnant and he wanted to get his genes into the next generation, and that the sperm bank now doubted Baldie’s fertility and was taking him off the market.

Back at the drawing board, everything had changed. The days of looking for a Jewish donor were over. It wasn’t just that there was not a decent Jew to be found (the other identity-release provider seemed to be running a special on Jews with mental illnesses). But another factor had begun to assert itself—something deep, primordial, and blindly determined. My biological clock was ticking loudly.

Demanding nothing less than pregnancy by the time I was forty (two months from the news of Baldie’s infertility), I suddenly found myself wanting the seed of someone entirely different—from Baldie, from me, from our people. I imagined Baldie was so genetically similar as to be almost invisible, as if my eggs didn’t even notice his passive little sperm, which slouched into my womb like spoiled, familiar brats. Now I wanted foreign sperm, sperm that shouted, “I’m here!” and looked so utterly different from my Ashkenazi eggs that they perked up and took heed. Raising children with our Jewish hearts and Jewish souls would have to be Jewishness enough. We were inseminating with the first medically sound identity-release donor we could find, religious background be damned.

As it turned out, the future grandparents agreed. Their new overriding wish: Do whatever you must to give us a grandchild! I’d like to think that watching us go through the trials of trying to get pregnant had made them see us not only as parents, but as an independent couple. My guess is that once the idea of a Jewish donor pried open their hearts, the gap just kept widening. Would they have preferred we found a Jewish donor? Maybe. Would they have preferred we were two married women impregnating with husbands? Definitely. But what mattered most of all was that the next generation got here as soon as possible.

Nine months before Faith and I became doting Jewish mothers to a beautiful baby girl, I closed my eyes and imagined a school of uncircumcised spermatozoa crossing themselves before swimming toward my little Jewish egg. I hoped they were not anti-Semitic, those microscopic Catholic/Buddhist sperm, and wished that they would treat my egg with respect and roll back their foreskin before doing the deed.

The insemination was the first time I ever had non-Jewish sperm inside me. Lying back on an exam table, feet in stirrups, it struck me any man or woman I ever had fallen for, dreamt of spending my life with, and regularly shared bed and bodily fluids with, had been Jewish. Without ever joining a temple, learning to count to ten in Hebrew, or comprehending the meaning of Purim, being Jewish had informed everything about me—from my sense of humor and taste in food to the process by which I finally found a donor. Jewish law aside, there was no way a child of ours could be anything but Jewish—at least in the way that it mattered to Faith and me.

Monica LewinskyIn France, they called me Monica—and boy, was that the joke that wouldn’t quit. They chuckled “Monica” when I walked down the street, winked “Monica” when I picked up a baguette, sniggered “Monica” when I bought a bottle of wine at the corner store. This was back in 1998, the post-college year I spent loafing in Paris, and here’s the weird part: At first I didn’t even know what they were talking about. My name was, and is, Lauren.

“Non, non, Mon-ee-ka!” exclaimed my pal Eric, making a vulgar gesture with his hand and his mouth. Eric was a balding Parisian who waited tables at the restaurant next door to my apartment. We smoked cigarettes together, and if I came in to the restaurant during the late afternoon, he’d give me free bowlfuls of runny rice pudding.

“Mon-ee-ka Levinsky!” Eric said, then looked at me questioningly. “I am saying it right? Tu comprends?”

He was saying it right, but I was not comprending at all. Did the people on the street, at the boulangerie, at the wine shop—did they really think I was Monica Lewinsky? No, that couldn’t be it—as far as the world knew, Monica was sequestered somewhere in DC with her lawyers. So then they must have thought I looked like her—but I didn’t look like Monica any more than I looked like Brigitte Bardot (which is to say, sadly, not at all). So what was it, then, that the French found so Monica-esque about me?

“I hardly resemble Monica Lewinsky,” I informed Eric. “She has long hair. And a teeny nose. And she’s, you know…” I tried to make the international gesture for “chubby,” tracing the outlines of a round woman’s figure in the air with my hands.

“Yes,” Eric said thoughtfully. “But of course,” he added, “she is Jewish, no?”

“Monica?” I blinked. “I guess.”

“So then you see.” He shrugged one of those awful Gallic shrugs and lit a cigarette. “She is Jewish, you are Jewish. You have that Jewish face, that body. Very, sexy. Very beautiful. But it is the face and the body of,”—here a thoughtful exhale of cigarette smoke—“a Jewess.”

When I didn’t respond for several moments, Eric’s expression shifted from worldly to anxious. “I said the wrong thing, heh? The right word is not Jewess? That is a bad word?”

Jewess. It’s certainly better than a hundred other derogatory names you could call a Jew. But still it rankles. The word Jewess brings to my mind heavy locks of thick black hair, long skirts, clinking bracelets, a musky odor. A Jewess sounds juicy and slightly dirty, like a lot of other words that end in the feminine suffix -ess: mistress, seductress, stewardess. Never mind that most of the Jewish women I know are wildly overworked, too stressed to be seductive. Never mind that in their current pop-culture depictions, Jewish women tend to be emasculating shopaholic Princesses bearing Daddy’s AmEx, not shaking tambourines. And never mind that, as far as clinking bracelets and long skirts go—that ain’t the Monica I picture, and it sure as hell isn’t me.

Intrigued, I did a little digging on the subject. First of all, it was no shock that I came face to face with the term in France. The Jewess, or “la Juive” in the native tongue, seemed to be an especially French construction, rife with all the dualities that France shows its own Jewish population. In the literature of Balzac and de Maupassant she was a courtesan, while in de Goncourt she was the buxom model of a Christian painter. Chateaubriand claimed that the Jewess’s beauty was compensation to the accursed, humiliated Jewish man; Alexandre Dumas warned that the wily Jewess could, snake-like, loosen the morals of French society. The Jewess even got her own French opera, Fromental Halévy's La Juive, in which she played, à la The Merchant of Venice, the gorgeous daughter of a tyrannical hook-nosed Jew.

These days, the sexy Jewish woman, both in France and elsewhere, is the subject of a different kind of fascination. To some, she’s a bronzed lady of leisure, tanning in South Beach or shopping at Saks. To others, she’s the whiny, raven-tressed Nanny from the sitcom of the same name. And to still others, she remains the Orientalized Other; if you have the misfortune of visiting a skinhead website you’ll see the nineteenth century Jewess stereotype lives on in all its terrible Alexandre Dumas incarnations. But for most people, the platonic form of the sexy Jewish female is “that woman” from Beverly Hills who sucked on Bill Clinton’s cigar.

Even now, eight years after the Lewinsky scandal, Monica’s impact remains profound. She is the lascivious “portly pepperpot,” a lingering late-night television joke. Certain ultra-Orthodox Jews hail her as a modern-day Queen Esther. Golda Meir doesn’t score a quarter of her name recognition, and Gloria Steinem doesn’t get an eighth. For better or worse, she is the Jewess of our age.

***

“But it does say something about us, doesn’t it?” This was from an acquaintance of mine, a Jewish woman a few years older than me. We were at a café in Manhattan a month after I’d returned from Paris, talking about the newly-released Starr Report, which had been printed in the Times in its full filthy ickiness.

“ ‘According to Ms. Lewinsky,’” she read, “ ‘she performed oral sex on the President; he never performed oral sex on her.’ It’s so typical. Jewish women are such givers. They give and give and give. Even when there’s no hope of receiving.”

“You know, I’m not sure the Starr report is a testament to the Jewish woman’s generosity,” I said, shuffling the Times to a different section.

I headed home unnerved. When I was in Paris, whatever discomfort I had felt about the whole Monica-Lauren vector I had attributed in part to the general discomfort of being an expat. But here, back on home turf—New York City, the Jewish capital of the world!—I still couldn’t shake that feeling of indictment.

It’s not that I was a prude, exactly, but I had always been averse to talking about sex in public. And now I felt like the whole world was talking, not just about Monica’s sex life, but also, by extension, my sex life. All of our sex lives. De Goncourt’s Jewess was reclaiming her place on the public stage, crowding out our own ideas of ourselves.

***

At the end of that summer, the knot tightened. The House Judiciary Committee announced that it would release the tapes of Bill Clinton’s X-rated grand jury testimony on September 21, which just happened to be the first day of Rosh Hashanah—the first day of the year 5759. Was this anti-Semitism at its most insidious? Making our New Year a national smut fest? Why couldn’t the House Judiciary Committee have waited one more day? September 22 would be a very nice day to humiliate the President too.

Desperate for someone to gripe with, I called my mother in New Jersey. A wickedly smart woman, she is usually a reliable source of good old-fashioned Jewish liberal indignation. But all she said was, “Well, I’m glad I’ll be in shul so I don’t have to watch.”

“But Mom!” I sputtered. “Don’t you see? It’s like they’re waiting for all the Jews to be in temple so they can talk behind their backs about what it’s like to fuck one of them!”

“Watch your language,” my mother said. “So will you be joining us for erev Rosh Hashanah services or what? You need your dad to pick you up at the bus station?”

“Mom!” I said, dismayed at her lack of dismay. “Don’t you get it? Monica’s a Jew. They’re airing the testimony on a high holiday. This is totally all about the Jews!”

“Listen to yourself,” my mother chuckled. “You sound like one of those people who boycotts the Timeswhen they write a good review of an Arab movie. Listen, if you could pick up two challahs on your way to the bus station that would be a help.”

Really, who had time for self-definition in the days before Rosh Hashanah? The leaves were changing, the air was cooling, there was poultry to roast and apples to cut up and serve with honey. Kids needed to be picked up from airports and bus stations, and grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were preparing to take their places at the holiday table. This was what mattered. This was what was real.

On the day before Rosh Hashanah, most Jewish women I know go to work, hurry home, order someone to set the table, heat up the soup, pour glasses of Manischevitz, pass bowls of chopped liver and candied nuts, serve and eat a big dinner, put on their good suits, go to synagogue, and pray. They do not contemplate how Monica’s blowjob defines perceptions of their sexual identity. Their minds are on bigger things.

Two days after talking to my mother I sat by her side at Rosh Hashanah services. I listened to the rabbi begin his prayers. I listened to the rabbi’s son blow the shofar. I knew that it was time to stop my Monica-mania and my paranoia; it was a new year now. After services, I did not read the paper, nor did I turn on the television. Instead, I took a walk to the local creek. Throwing my bread down the river, I let myself off the hook.

NEXT

GO: Want to hang out with a bunch of Jewesses doing Jewessy stuff? Head over to the launch of Aish New York's women's division on November 12. Aish says that "soulful diva Esther Neistein" will be performing!