So here we are, cheek by jowl with the life that we might have been leading had Peter and James sided with the conservatives in Jerusalem and decided that Christians did, indeed, need to be Jews first. My husband has his own yarmulke for those occasions when one needs a yarmulke. Our kids draw stars with six rather than five points and tell us jokes with Hebrew punch lines. If we get invited to a shalom zachor, we know, without being told, the day and time we should show up. We know all kinds of random halakhic trivia: Jews eat cheese on Shavuos and fruit on Tu B’Shevat, they don’t listen to music during Tisha b’Av, and they throw bits of bread into running water at Rosh Hashanah.
It’s lots of fun, but there have been some excruciating moments. Once, on vacation, we found ourselves in a museum elevator with an Orthodox family. Fearing what might happen, I jabbered merrily about the dinosaurs but to no avail—Catherine and Elisabeth chirped in unison “Oh, hello! You’re Jews!” The doors opened before I had time to stammer out an explanation. Then there was the time at the park when Catherine was playing with a little boy while I chatted to his very pleasant father. Catherine’s little friend mentioned, apropos of I can’t remember what, that he was Jewish, whereupon Catherine looked him up and down—no yarmulke, no tzitzis—and said coolly, “Hmm, you must be one of those Jews who don’t know their mitzvahs.”
Sometimes, like Catherine, I start to feel smugly that I’m an insider, that I “get it,” that I really understand Orthodox life. Of course, I don’t: far from it. When we’re invited to an “event”—a party, a bris, somewhere there is a large group—and I am on the fringes of conversations that are not organized around including me and making allowances for my ignorance, I realize how weirdly, bewilderingly different than our world is the world my friends inhabit. Like Catherine, I’ve made more than my fair share of klutzy faux pas. In the shul just the other week, at the end of a bris, I actually began to genuflect on my way out of the sanctuary: religious event, ceremonial space, force of habit. I don’t think anybody noticed. At the dinner afterwards I found myself at a table with strangers—the children had vanished with their friends, and Glen, of course, resplendent in his yarmulke, was sitting with the men on the other side of the room. A table full of strangers makes me a little shy—it probably makes most everybody a little shy—so I fell back on the usual vocabulary of female small talk: “How many children do you have?” and so on. After I had asked this for the third time and received an odd answer, the woman beside me gently explained that you’re not supposed to ask “how many” questions about people. Next time I’ll know. But for every mitzvah, and every halakhic gloss on a mitzvah, and every custom, tradition, legend, or belief that I stumble across, there are hundreds, probably thousands, I have no idea about.
At parties, when not actively making a fool of myself, I am interrupting. All conversations, whatever the topic, switch back and forth between English and Hebrew and Yiddish; there is no aspect of life—absolutely none—that is not touched by Torah and sprinkled with foreign words. I have become quite shameless about butting in: “Hey, hang on! So ten seconds ago we were talking about the sale at Penney’s and now we’re talking Hebrew. What is going on, and what is Jewish about Penney’s?” And they’ll grin and explain that there is a mitzvah about the kinds of fibers that can and can’t be mixed in the same garment, and that if you buy something made of wool, before you can wear it you have to send it for testing to make sure there is no linen anywhere in it. That’s what is Jewish about Penney’s.
There’s nothing unusual about my making a fool of myself. I don’t need to go to a bris for that; I can do it anywhere. But what is really quite unusual is for a Catholic to be even very partially at home in the world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. It is, by and large, a world that keeps to itself. There are any number of reasons for this: theological—God commanded the Jews to keep themselves apart from the nations; historical—they’ve been brutalized for centuries; practical—because once you start inviting Gentiles to your parties, you can’t get through half a sentence without having to stop and launch into complicated explanations of something or other.
Several factors have made our unusual situation possible. First, this isn’t a big city. Many of the Jewish families are transplants from New York (you can buy a six-bedroom house with a garden here for the cost of a closet in Brooklyn, which is useful if you have eight children), and they come here knowing that they will be mingling with a more diverse world. The community is thriving and growing, but it is too small—about sixty or seventy families—to be self-contained like the big Hasidic neighborhoods in New York,where shop signs are in Yiddish and a woman with her hair uncovered would stand out as much as a woman walking down the street in her underwear.
Second, thanks to our education and profession, when we moved into the neighborhood we had a knowledge of Scripture, theology, and history well above the average, as well as a basic familiarity with the notion of strict Jewish observance. This meant that we could talk to our neighbors without their having to explain themselves from the ground up. I knew what Torah meant, and kosher and halakha and mitzvah and minyan, and why everyone walked down the street in their best clothes at dusk on Friday. The first time Yaffa asked her mum if she could come and play at our house, I knew enough to say,“Don’t worry, I won’t let her eat anything. Is tap water okay? Paper cup? Got it.” It only took one brief moment of embarrassment for me to learn not to attempt to shake hands with an Orthodox man. I ask an awful lot of questions, but they are usually reasonably well-informed questions, not the sort to elicit a “Gosh . . . er . . . I don’t really know where to begin . . .You see, we’re Jewish, and we have a lot of rules . . .” response. I’m sure our ignorance, coupled with our curiosity, is tedious at times, but it was never colossal enough to make it simply too much effort for our neighbors to talk to us about anything other than the weather.
Third,we got lucky with our neighbors. All the Orthodox we have met have been pleasant and friendly and are at least as happy to pass the time of day with us as the neighborhood Catholics and Pentecostals and secular humanists are, but we probably never would have got beyond passing the time of day were it not that, about a year after we moved in, the Gindoffs bought the house four doors down. We have all kinds of things in common: their younger children are the same ages as ours and have the same soft hearts and quirky, eccentric little minds; their house, like ours, is cheerfully chaotic, reassuringly messy, and perpetually cluttered with books; we all, adults included, share a geeky obsession with Harry Potter and Star Wars; we can all talk the hind leg off a donkey. We quickly became friends. Our kids are inseparable. Ahuva visits my classes to talk about living a Torah life; Zevi drops round regularly to talk politics and check that Glen’s fifteen-year-old single-malt scotch is still kosher. They find it entertaining to see themselves through our eyes: “Hey, Maria, guess what? If you slaughter a cow then find out it had milk in its udders, the milk counts as meat . . . Cool, huh? Not that I’ve ever heard of it happening—I mean, you don’t kill dairy cows for meat, do you? But still, you never know.” They also know absolutely everybody—she is the only kosher caterer in town, and he is the chair of B’nai B’rith—and are widely acknowledged to be probably the nicest people on the planet. “Friends of the Gindoffs” is an instant password to a welcome in situations in which non-Jews do not normally find themselves.
In the main, our experiences here have been important personally, for reasons only indirectly connected with religion. This is a really wonderful neighborhood in which to raise a family. It’s not fancy by any means—there’s a lot of peeling paint and cars with missing hubcaps and broken toys on porches—but it’s a real community. People know each other and look out for each other. Plus there are loads of nice kids around; kids who, like ours, inhabit a world without video games or cable television, kids who can be relied on never to set undesirable examples with regard to skimpy T-shirts or permissive curfews. I doubt the same could be said for many ritzy, SUV-lined suburbs in America today.
We have also learned some things about being friends with people who are different from ourselves. Learning these things is not only fun and interesting; it also might be quite important in a small way. The big world outside our happily diverse little neighborhood is shrinking rapidly, and we—the human family, long-lost cousins all—are bumping up against and getting entangled with people who are very different from ourselves. It is, by and large, a difficult business to live in close proximity with people who are different: always has been, always will be. But we have to learn to do it, or we may not make it into the next century. We cannot afford to retreat into bigotry and suspicion and triumphal-ism. On the other hand, we can’t afford simply to jettison whatever convictions and commitments might clash with the convictions and commitments of others, because when the going gets tough—and it will—we’re going to need our convictions and commitments.
Most of what enables our Orthodox friends and us to get on smoothly around our differences is just a matter of common courtesy and common sense. It’s common courtesy to shut up and listen while other people tell you who they are, rather than deciding that you know already. It’s common sense that sometimes being around people who see things very differently can be awkward and that you need to tolerate a bit of awkwardness and not take yourself too seriously. We feel comfortable around the very different world our neighbors inhabit because nobody pretends that the worlds aren’t different. The boundaries between us and our Orthodox neighbors are unequivocally clear, and nobody tries to hide them or gloss over them. Nobody acts as if they are silly or embarrassing or as if they are superficial or don’t really matter. They do matter, and everybody knows it. We know they think our food is gross. They know we think some of the mitzvahs are weird and some of their traditions a bit nutty. We know that a marriage between one of their children and one of ours would constitute a major family crisis for them. They know that we wouldn’t be too keen on it either. We can all make jokes about it.
Of course, I know that we are merely dipping our toes in the shallows of diversity. While our Orthodox neighbors are really quite different in many ways, we are very similar in many, many others. We’re all middle-class urban Americans with minivans and snow shovels and cell phones and library cards and jobs. It would be absurd to suggest that our experience here offers an easy solution to the challenges of our moment in history. There are terrible injustices and cruelties in the world, and terrible anger and pain that are not going to be healed by the courtesy and common sense and humor that make our relationships here work. If we—the human family—are to learn to live in peace, we will need love (which drives out fear) and humility (which dissolves pride). But love and humility are deep mysteries; they demand that we give ourselves up, and that is a terrifying prospect. Courtesy and common sense and humor are within reach of more of us and are probably not a bad place to start.
Ironically, it may actually be the differences between ourselves and our Orthodox friends that make it possible for us to be friends in the first place. If they were Christians or we were Jews, I don’t think the friendship would work. If the Gindoffs, say, were Christians, they would still be kind, warm, friendly people; but I probably wouldn’t notice, because I would be driven beside myself with frustration by some things about them: a conviction that the universe is about 5,700 years old; a fascination with colorfully detailed apocalyptic scenarios; a cheerful assumption that they share with Abraham and Solomon and Habakkuk and Paul a single coherent philosophy called a “biblical worldview.”
I expect it would work the other way too. If we were the sort of Jews that we are Christians, we would keep kosher at home but not bother about it too much when eating out; we would make a sincere attempt to make Shabbos a special day but wouldn’t think twice about driving to the store if we were out of milk; we would prefer our kids to marry Jews but would suck it up and go to our grandchildren’s baptisms if that’s the way things worked out. Our neighbors don’t have much patience with that sort of Judaism.
I imagine that if we belonged to the same religion, we would probably keep each other at a polite but faintly disdainful distance. But as their religion is not our business and our religion is not theirs, our friendships are not derailed by our cherished prejudices and irritations and opinions. It does make one wonder why we so easily allow our prejudices and irritations and opinions to make such a splintered mess of the Church, of Christ’s body, when he told us so clearly not to. But that’s a whole other issue.
For Glen and me, the experience of crossing in friendship boundaries that are not usually crossed has been a fascinating and enlightening adventure. For our children, it is simply the way life is. That some people are Christians and believe in Jesus and some are Jews and don’t, and that Christians and Jews do things differently, is something they absorbed along with the fact that if they want ice cream, they have to say please. They know, without having to think about it, which coloring books, which movies, and even which episodes of VeggieTales are okay when their friends are round on a rainy afternoon. They don’t think it at all odd that they can have lunch at Yitzy’s house but Yitzy can’t even have an apple out of our fruit bowl. Navigating smoothly around those differences, without letting them interfere with the serious business of fun, is second nature to them:
“We’ve got to have lunch now, so you’d better go home, but can we come to yours after?”
“Leave Avi’s tzitzis alone, Adam. I know they’re nice, but you’re Catholic, and you can’t have them.”
“It’s time for me to go for my bath. I’ll try to come back later, but I’ll have my Shabbos clothes on, so we’ll have to play inside.”
“I’d better be Piglet, because he’s not kosher. Do you want to be Tigger or Pooh?”
It will get more complicated as they get older, as the differences between their lives become more apparent and friendships between boys and girls start to come under closer parental scrutiny. I confidently anticipate broken hearts that will take, oh, days to mend. But however complex the questions and answers will become, they will arise among friends for whom the differences between Jewish and Christian worlds cause less friction than burning questions about who pushed whom first, or whose turn it is for the sparkly shoes or the green light saber. As an elementary preparation for civilized participation in the global village, it’s hard to beat.