I DREAM THAT DEGAN AND I are taking the JIC; that I am—we are—happily engaged in meaningful learning about Judaism. When I wake up, Degan is lying on his side in his blue plaid pyjamas, head propped up in his palm, looking at me.
“I had the best dream,” I say.
His face lights up. “Oh?”
“Not that kind of dream.” I squint, rub my eyes. “I dreamed we were taking the JIC.”
“The what?”
“The class. The Jewish class.”
He sighs. “That’s what a ‘good dream’ means to you now?”
I run my tongue over my teeth.
“Can’t you take it yourself?” he says. “The class?”
“I’ll ask,” I say. But I remember what Rabbi Klein told me, that the partners of all potential converts are required to sign up, as well. I think of the crowd of baseball caps and their gaggle of fiancées.
“For some reason I can’t stop thinking about it,” I say. “It feels like the next task the world is presenting me.”
From down on the street we hear the beep, beep of a snowplow reversing.
Degan rolls onto his back, exhaling heavily. “It’s one night a week?”
I hesitate. “And a few extra weekends.”
I tell him about another couple Rabbi Klein mentioned, Tom and Diane. Diane is Jewish, so their baby is, also. Tom is considering conversion. “He’s wrestling with the big questions, too,” Rabbi Klein told me.
“Why don’t we get in touch?” I ask Degan.
He nods, noncommittal, yet I know the prospect of another man with the same quandary is appealing. But when an email comes back from Tom, he sounds confident that he will convert, like it’s a done deal. “Why don’t we meet up at kiddush next Shabbat and talk?” he writes.
Isn’t kiddush the blessing over the wine? Or the prayer for the dead?
Tom emails back, suggesting gently that it is a luncheon after the Saturday service.
I freeze, insecure in the face of his certainty. I don’t reply.
On the third day of Hanukkah, Degan approaches me from behind at my desk. He puts his hands on my shoulders.
“I’m working,” I say.
He backs away, his arms in the air as though he’s in a stickup at a bank. “Okay, okay. I just wanted to tell you I’ll take the class with you.”
I swivel my chair to face him. “Which class?”
“Which class do you think?”
“Really? You’ll take it?” I pause. “For me?”
His brow furrows. “Not for you,” he says. “Well, partially for you. But I’m also interested in it for my own reasons.”
I don’t push my luck by asking what those reasons might be, although I know it is some combination of his desire to support me, and his intellectual curiosity. Degan’s brain is insatiable; he can get interested in anything.
He can also lose interest just as quickly.
“Sign us up,” he says.
“Are you sure?”
“I said I’d take it!”
I recant. “Okay! Great! I’ll call the rabbi.”
On the fifth day of Hanukkah, a bright sunny morning in Tevet, Degan and I go to meet Rabbi Klein. “What do you want me to say to her?” Degan asks as we pull into the synagogue parking lot.
“Just be yourself. You’ll be great.”
Truthfully, though, I’m as nervous as a teenager bringing home a first boyfriend. I feel a desperate desire for everyone to show their best side, to end up, against the odds, liking each other.
In the front foyer of the synagogue is a swarm of mothers dropping their toddlers off at the preschool. They are all Jewish, I think. The children, their parents. And then I feel a strange, undeniable relief. I don’t need to hide.
We climb the spiral staircase under the domed ceiling, past the row of framed portraits of rabbis. It’s been months since I’ve seen the lovely Rabbi Klein. Her dark curls spill over her shoulders like those of a Greek goddess, or a woman in a Pantene commercial. “Chag Sameach,” she says.
“To you, too,” I say. “This is Degan.”
They smile and shake hands, and we seat ourselves in the two red armchairs across from her. After a bit of small talk, the rabbi turns her attention to Degan. “Tell me about yourself,” she says.
“Sure. Uh, where should I start?”
“Did you grow up in a religious home?”
“Anti-religious, more like it.”
“How so?”
“My mother was raised Catholic, but the brutal, abusive version. She spent my childhood teaching me to avoid religion. Socialism was her god. And charity. So tzedakah is very familiar.”
The rabbi gives a nod of acknowledgement at Degan’s correct use of the Hebrew term. He’s been reading up. Or perhaps he already knew the expression. He often surprises me with his breadth of knowledge. He couldn’t fix a toaster to save his life, but he knows the intricacies of the stock exchange, the relationships among all the pre-Socratics, the play-by-play of the Battle of Britain.
“I’ve been a spiritual seeker all my life,” Degan is telling Rabbi Klein. “In my teenage years, I would sneak off to church without telling my mother. I loved it. The community, the quiet reverence. For me, spirituality is a crucial part of our human existence. And church was where I first found that.”
I worry that he is going a little heavy on church, which he hasn’t attended in a decade, but who am I to say? The whole charade is so ironic. We are performing an identity of people with spiritual sides, with aptitudes or readiness for Judaism. We’re trying to make ourselves appear good enough, Jewish enough. According to the Nazis, I would already be Jewish two times over. Debra has emailed me a quote from the book None Is Too Many, its title taken from the Canadian government’s immigration policy during the Second World War. Under a Nazi decree in Germany in 1933, anyone with as much as one Jewish grandparent was legally defined as a Jew.
One.
My family history for the past three generations has been a long performance of Christianity. Now it seems we will have to enact the opposite performance. In order to be accepted, we will have to perform a Jewish identity in much the same way my grandparents performed a Christian one.
Rabbi Klein says to Degan, “Sorry if this seems like a silly question, but I just want to be sure. You want to take the class? The JIC?”
He nods. “I’m up for it.” He touches his glasses where they rest on the bridge of his nose. “Although I’m nervous about how much there is to learn.”
She gathers her long curls, holds them for a moment next to her neck. “The learning is the easy part,” she says. “Especially for someone as smart as you obviously are.” She lets her hair go. “It’s the identity reconstruction that’s harder.”
I draw in my breath sharply. Degan’s right arm is pressed up against my own; I feel his muscles tighten. Identity reconstruction? It’s like something out of Ray Bradbury, George Orwell.
“Of course, there’s no pressure,” she says. “Some people convert right after the class. For others it’s a much longer process. This is a happy story. Please know I’m with you regardless of the outcome.”
“I won’t be converting,” Degan says. “I’m just supporting Alie.”
The rabbi smiles knowingly but doesn’t say anything. Then, as we move to get our things, she asks, “How is Hanukkah going?”
“Good.” I nod. “We’re fumbling along.”
As I’m zipping my coat, I tell her about the visceral fear of putting the menorah in the window, how the fear turned to excitement and back to fear on the edge of a dime.
“Yes, I can imagine. That sounds intense.”
She hands Degan his bag and picks up the synagogue’s monthly bulletin, then leafs through it randomly, telling us about everything going on. Hebrew classes. Torah study. Then, all at once, she says, “Oh! You know Eli Bloomberg!”
I freeze with a hand halfway into my leather glove, trying to remember how she knows this. I give as small a nod as possible in acknowledgement.
“He’s reading here in January,” she says. “You know he wrote this great book about his Hasidic upbringing and what happened when he began to question it?” She searches my face for a reaction. “You do know him, right?”
Degan has turned his back and is busying himself with his scarf.
I point to the opposing page in the bulletin. “And what’s this? Shabbat Nation?”
She searches my face, then plays along.
“It’s a Shabbat service for people in their twenties and thirties. You should go. I think you’d love it.” She doesn’t know exactly how she’s blundered, but she looks as relieved as we are to change the subject.
One person’s certainty makes room for another’s reluctance. This is true of dynamics within a relationship, and true of the existence of the relationship itself. Degan’s ambivalence about conversion lets me be the one to hold the certainty. I can be sure precisely because he isn’t.
If I were with Eli, a born Jew, he would hold the strength around identity. What would have room to rise up in my psyche then? Fond reminiscences of Sunday school? Family memories from Christmas? A reverence for the elegance of the Holy Trinity as a symbol?
Am I denying myself the love of what’s already mine?
I am writing a novel about a Jewish boy who is baptized. Meanwhile, I find myself going in the other direction. We Picks are like a swing. Forward, then back. Joining a group, leaving it for another. It is the stuff over which wars are waged, over which civilizations rise and fall.
And I’m not the only one practised in shape-shifting. Driving home, Degan and I debrief our meeting with the rabbi. “I felt so uncomfortable,” he says.
“You did?”
“Like it was all a big show.”
“You seemed so present. So interested.”
He shrugs. “I do that for a living.”