“..but I do deny them my essence.”
So I went to a big Shabbat dinner last night, hosted by one of the music school professors…it was the first big, proper Shabbat I’d been to since my grandmother died, and our relatives in Philly kind of lost their center and drifted out to other parts of the world.
Whoops, I’m not counting the strange evening I spent with the Lubavitch in Pittsburgh, in 2001 I think…everyone seemed to be having a good time there, but the maternal-line exclusiveness of that crowd turns me off. (If I’d been born with a Jewish father and a Christian mother instead of the other way round, I wouldn’t be able to hang out with them.) A cousin of mine got dumped by his girl, who belonged to a similar fundamentalist branch, when she found out his Jewish mother was really his Jewish stepmother. As if anybody now living really has an unbroken maternal bloodline that goes back 2,000 years to ancient Judea!
I just finished reading Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee, where he argues that minority groups raised in majority populations tend to share the sexual preferences of the majority, and intermarry wherever society allows. If this is outlawed, well, people the world over tend to commit adultery at a steady, fixed rate…so one way or another, the boundaries of pure ethnic categories get nibbled away. In fact, because of this effect, you tend to share more genes with your geographic neighbors than you do with strangers who look like you–a black fourth-generation New Yorker and a white fourth-generation New Yorker are statistically likely to share more genes with each other than with their distant ancestors back in, say, Ethiopia and Germany. In other words, the maternal-line folks are just kidding themselves.
Where was I? Oh yeah, the dinner was great. And I got to hear a song in Ladino (the Latin spoken by Mediterranean Jews), too. I think this was my first taste of a real religious experience–not in any spiritual sense; it was more the experience of sitting down to dinner with a dozen strangers (about half of whom weren’t Jewish) and feeling a sort of unconditional acceptance.