I’M DIGGING THROUGH MY WALLET for an elusive twenty-dollar bill when I come across Rabbi Klein’s business card. On the back she has written a single word: Kolel.
I check out the website: The Adult Centre for Liberal Jewish Learning. Something about the extensive list of programs and classes, this untapped store of knowledge about my family’s lost faith, makes me giddy with possibility. Their “signature course” is called Doing Jewish:
Begin with basics and explore Jewish life from a liberal perspective: holidays, life cycle, basic Jewish philosophy, and creating a Jewish home.
When Degan gets home from work, I tell him about the class.
“Why don’t you sign up?” he asks, tossing his bag onto the floor in the corner of the hall.
“I don’t know. I feel kind of nervous about it.”
“Nervous why?”
“I don’t know,” I say again. “I’m not Jewish, right?”
“You sort of are.”
“And I’m pretty tired.” Tired, we both know, means depressed.
“Maybe it will cheer you up,” Degan says. He goes to the fridge and cracks a beer, then starts digging around for something to eat. The top shelf holds two tubs of plain organic yogourt, the bottom a limp head of broccoli. The crispers are empty. “I’ll call for takeout,” he says. Since arriving in Toronto, we’ve had takeout almost every night.
“I’m going to get groceries tomorrow,” I say.
He reaches for the phone and the pizza coupons.
“Do you really think I should take it?” I ask.
“Take what?”
“The class.”
“Why not?” He lifts his beer and has three long swallows.
I nod. “Oh,” I say, “and there’s something else. I met a guy.”
He raises his eyebrows.
I laugh. “Not a guy guy. A writer.”
“What kind of writer?”
“A Jewish one.”
Degan runs a thumb lightly around the lip of the bottle. “Okay,” he says.
“I’m going to have dinner with him,” I say.
“Okay,” he says again.
He starts dialling the pizza number.
“Do you mind?” I ask.
“If I have dinner with him?”
“I’d like to order a large pizza for delivery,” he says into his phone. And then, to me: “I trust you.”
The Doing Jewish course starts on a Wednesday night in early October. I don’t know what I’m expecting: a large lecture hall, maybe, and a stuffy professor with horn-rimmed glasses and a PowerPoint presentation. Instead, I am shown into a small, brightly lit room decorated with young children’s crayoned attempts at the Hebrew alphabet. The teacher bustles in after me with her papers flying.
“I’m Rabbi Glickman,” she says, and nods curtly, challenging anyone to contradict her. She is small and thin, with her hair cropped close to her head. Her features have a tightness in contrast to the openness of Rachel Klein’s.
There is a dry-erase board at the front of the class. With a bold black marker she writes: WHAT IS JUDAISM?
The class is silent. Eight or ten strangers trying not to meet each other’s eyes.
“Is it a race?” Rabbi Glickman asks.
A blond woman in her forties with a wide gap between her front teeth puts up her hand. “It’s a religion.”
“Like any other?”
“It’s harder to join.”
Titters from our classmates.
“Your name is?” the rabbi asks.
“Debra.”
“Okay, Debra. Why do you think it is harder to join?”
“The Jews are the chosen people. You can’t choose to be chosen.”
Debra glances at an Asian woman sitting across the room. “At least,” she says quickly, “that’s how the thinking goes.”
“But what about conversion?” another woman asks. “I really want to convert. Or at least, my boyfriend really wants me to.”
Around the circle, several of the women nod in recognition.
The conversation quickly progresses to conversion, which is, I learn, the reason everyone else is here. To officially become Jewish in Toronto is a complex process. You have to take a yearlong, intensive class called the Jewish Information Course, or the JIC. To take that course, you have to be sponsored by a rabbi. Our class, it seems, is full of engaged couples—one partner Jewish, the other hoping to sign up before they get married—whose sponsoring rabbis have suggested they take this course first, as a kind of trial run.
The whole process is news to me. I have always assumed that I could reclaim my family’s Judaism when I wanted, like a lost suitcase at an airport security desk.
We go around the table and introduce ourselves properly. A man with dreadlocks and an Israeli accent says he is totally secular, but that he and his wife—the Asian woman—want to raise their children in a one-religion home. The next four women say they are dating Jewish men who encouraged them to sign up for the class. Debra tells us that she’s the daughter of a minister but wants to explore other faiths. She feels inexplicably drawn to Judaism, though a friend told her she could never be Jewish. Conversion or not. To forget it.
And what about me? I wonder. Will I ever be Jewish? Am I already?
A few years back, at a writing residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts, an older writer I admire told me that I had no choice in the matter. I was Jewish. Because my family died in Auschwitz. Because it’s in my blood.
La sangre llama.
But when it’s my turn to introduce myself, and when I explain my background to the rabbi, her reaction is more stayed.
“You’re Jewish,” she says. “Sort of. But to really be accepted, you would need to go through a process.” She clears her throat. “Because your mother is Christian.”