Trope in the troughs

Ben and I are practicing our trope on opposite sides of the living room. It's a cacophony of hebrew cantation and it's grating on my nerves. His friend Spencer is sprawled out on the couch flicking a zippo lighter across his pants.  He mimics along: "Chal-che-ya-barkoo-aye-don't-know-fuck." "Please don't set the couch on fire," I tell him, as I've been saying all morning. "From the top?" Bens says, "with gum."

I'm still practicing my few lines of trope though my 15 minutes a day has shrunk to twice a week. It's just so incredibly tedious, the same thing over and over. Ben too is barely practicing. Together we are the worst role models. Meanwhile I'm paying Niki $40.00 a week for a half-hour of tutoring.

"He's not practicing," I say to her a few days later when she comes to the door. "Maybe you should start coming every other week."

"Well, it's up to you. But then there are the parents who think at least coming each week gives their kid some continuity. He actually is doing quite well."

Ben looks up at me sheepishly. "I practice more than once a week."

"What about yesterday?" 

"Yes I did. You were sleeping."

"What time?"

"After reading 'Ender's Game' in the basement."

"And the day before?"

"That was the weekend, you said I didn't have to on the weekend."

Meanwhile Niki is standing there and she doesn't add to the back end.

It's actually true what Niki says, he is doing well. I hear him in the dining room, he already knows much of his Torah reading and is nearly done with his haftorah. Ben is just one of those kids that can get away with little work. It's his memory, ironclad and intact, not like mine, an open sieve. Which is why it's actually more important for me to be practicing each day.

I guess I'm in a funk. No job, no prospects, and how will I pay for his party? Meanwhile each week we get another goldleafed confirmation invitation to some obscenely over the top country club where the dessert table is more than my entire Bar Mitzvah budget. How can we even afford Ben's party when each Saturday I have to fork over practically a food shopping bill's worth of money for one of his friends to go up to the Bima.

I guess I've officially turned into the Jewish Scrooge.  Just great. 

Passover blues

Feeling lost and lonely around this Passover holiday. I watch the women at our local Shop Rite fill their carts from the kosher section, confidently choosing the best brand of maror (apparently Gold's), blithely gathering ingredients for their homemade haroset. I'm at a loss. I've never made a seder before, have not the first idea how to set up that most formidable seder plate. How the hell does one burn an egg to resemble the burning of the temple wall, or find a lamb shank? We've always visited my older sister Beth in Harrisburg, PA, but this year she's cut back to just the second night so that leaves that first night, looming like a potentially disastrous rehearsal for Ben's Bar Mitzvah. It will be the three of us, plus Matt, Rob's thirty-two year old son from an earlier marriage, and Melissa, a friend from that marriage who's husband is forever traveling. Two Jewish women with non-jewish husbands. Both of us clueless.

I remember as a child it was our family plus my father's sister, Aunt Eileen, her husband Barney and their two daughters, Gail and Beth. It was an intimate, comfortable affair, a family gathering with no jitters attached. My brother Paul and I would mark up the Haggadah in our childhood scrawl, each relative's name next to their reading. As the youngest I got to recite the four questions, my big number, under the sweet, forgiving gaze of my family. So different from my sister's seder, with over 20 of mostly her husband Richie's relatives. Those first few awkward moments when we arrive, not just my shyness to deal with but Ben and Rob's. So much small talk, then hours of my brother-in-law dutifully going through page by page. I want to grab my sister by the hand and run out the door, laughing, just the two of us sitting on the curb swigging Manischewitz, gossiping to our heart's content. But there she is, firmly in the moment, supporting her husband as the good hostess. I have to fend for myself.

A few nights later we go out to dinner with our friends Jim and Melissa to make a final decision on the Italian restaurant I've chosen for Ben's Bar Mitzvah. We tried it a few months ago and the food was very good, but tonight, a Friday night, the place is mostly empty. The food is still good, but the staff is in a tizzy, our middle-aged waitress telling me all about her lower back pain and giggling as she reads through the specials. A few minutes later she tells us she's leaving and a younger waiter appears and can't seem to get our order straight. Melissa looks at me reassuringly but it's clear, this place can barely handle our table of four let alone a luncheon of eighty. Back to square one. And now it's almost springtime and I still haven't found a venue. In the back of my mind I figure if I'm still at a loss, I can simply have the kiddush a bit more done up and that will be the end of it. Our temple is expecting each family to pay for the kiddush for the congregation anyway, so it might be my only solution financially. But when I call our kosher deli to ask about catering a luncheon the prices that come back to me are even higher than at a restaurant: $39.00 a head for an adult and $29 for a kid. How much sable, whitefish and nova lox could a 13-year-old possibly eat that could warrant such prices.

I spend the next few days approaching any jewish woman I know in town and asking for a recommendation. Even Debbie, my baseball mom friend who has spent untold hours giving me advice on the bleachers of our sons' games through the years, who eats out not just on weekends but most days through the week, can't think of a place. And finally it hits me, this is suburban New Jersey. Unless I'm willing to spend $100 a head, I better just settle. I decide to give our Italian restaurant another chance.

And still I can't find a job to pay for just the salad.

YMCA Camp, no surprise there

Ben and I are in a tentative way. We're sitting in the kitchen with the camp director from Avoda and it's pretty damn awkward. Here's a guy who has driven an hour from some camp conference near New Brunswick, NJ, and has unsuspectingly stepped onto our minefield of Ben's jewish camp aversion. But Ben is being polite, flipping through the camp yearbook, while Jeff tells me in rather joyous prose how he met his wife. We're going through the usual Jewish geography and come up with not one person we both know in NJ. As he's about to leave he tells me he's from Needham, Mass., and happens to know my old friend Wendy. Mostly he knows her husband, Jeff who apparently attended the camp. Wendy and I spent our thirties living in Brookline, Mass., frequenting the Jewish dances, only different from the pre-USY dances of my youth, now the guys were mostly nerdy and short, often harboring a lisp impediment. It was always that scene from "When Harry Met Sally," where I'd turn to Wendy in the middle of a dance with a beseeching, "let's leave." But she was much more patient, determined to marry a Jewish guy, whereas I decided it wasn't worth the headache. And she kept at it till she married Jeff. Shortly thereafter we stopped being friends. Rob and I visited once, and Jeff kept forgetting where his wallet was, as Rob paid for bagels and lox, dinner, driving us everywhere in his car. This guy was a creep. Not a good sign for Avoda. Ben looks relieved.

A few days later I reach out to Tracy, a mom from Ben's hebrew school class who just happens to be a Jewish camp consultant. Not that I knew such a job existed, but it did seem kind of serendipitous. She tells me of Surprise Lake Camp, which will be hosting a "meet the families" at our local Strawberry Fields Yogurt in the nearby town of Maplewood. That evening I coerce Ben to go, who in turn bribes his two friends who are in the basement stumming Guitar Hero. It will be free yogurt and add-ins he tells them, "fro yo for all!" Spencer finds a yarmulka that's floating around in my car and walks in as a jew. Immediately Ben and his big, ravenous friends attack the yogurt bar, and I'm feeling guilty. I see out of the corner of my eye that the cashier is weighing the yogurt and charging the camp. But then I think of the cost of camp for a month and buck up.

On the way home, Ben tells me he's thinking of Fairview Lakes, a YMCA camp in Newton, NJ. He knows a few kids from school going there and actually sounds excited to try it. I tell myself at least I won't need to look at camp photos of him sulking through Shabbat dinners. Or reading angry letters bemoaning how snobby the kids are and how they've known each other since age seven. But I'm also aware that this may be one of the last opportunities for him to connect socially to other jewish kids in such an intimate way. But it's out of my hands and maybe, at this point, that's not such a terrible thing. There's always Jewish Birthright when Ben hits college. That one is non-negotiable.

That night I e-mail Tracy and the guy from Avoda, thanking them for their time and saying that Ben has decided on a YMCA camp. I can just picture their eyes rolling and a bit of a shudder.

The Boogeyman

Just heard about the gunman in Toulouse, France who pulled up to a Jewish day school on his motorcycle and started shooting. So far three small children and the Rabbi have died. This scares me the most, this persistent antisemitism that just won't end. Perhaps he didn't see the movie "Le Rafle" or "Sarah's Key," both depicting the roundup of Jews in the French Velodrome. Or maybe he did and it emboldened him. Who knows. Whenever I drop Ben off at hebrew school I think about this possibility. There's always a cop sitting in a car in the parking lot, reading the paper, sending out the pretense of safety. Truth be told, I often feel like turning to Ben and saying "maybe not today," and going for ice cream in town. I picture the entire cataclysm in my mind. Ben is the only survivor from his hebrew school class. We were the lucky ones, like that CEO from Cantor Fitzgerald who was with his daughter for the opening day of kindergarten. The sole survivor from his offices on floors 101 through 105.

Each year Rona and I attend the Jewish Film Festival at the West Orange JCC and sit through at least one hardcore Holocaust movie. I'm always in the head of the heroine who takes off the Star of David and walks down the street wracked with terror, her head held high. Or the mom in "Le Rafle," who moments before stepping onto the cattle car to Auschwitz, runs back to her son and implores him to escape, not to wait it out.

I remember in high school, in social studies class, being shown the documentary "Night in Fog," with it's stark, black and white footage of emaciated jews being liberated from the concentration camp. The year was 1973, and in those days, even Jewish teenagers weren't being exposed to these Nazi atrocities. When the bell rang, I couldn't move. The rest of the class jumped up, gathered their books and left. But I just sat there, going over and over in my head, how was it possible that this happened only thirty years ago. How could I not have heard more about this, as more than just a footnote in hebrew school class or from my own parents. For the rest of the day, I was in shock. But mostly what I felt was fear. I remember taking solace that since it was so recent, we Jews were most likely in a period of safety, a calm respite, no way could this happen to us so soon after, certainly not within a mere three decades.

But now all bets were off. In the last few years I find myself holding my breath, waiting for just this type of evil to come pell-mell onto a train with Ben, or another skyscraper, or maybe as a knock on my door. Crazy I know. And it doesn't seem to enter anyone else's consciousness, certainly not the confident jewish moms I see dropping off their children at the temple. Maybe it's just me, aging, a fraying of the neurons, as worry seems to creep in ever so easily. Like today, with this blustering wind bending the tops of the old oak trees surrounding my house and throughout town. Is it safe for Ben to walk home from school I wonder?

Camp Avoda

I'm thinking of a Jewish camp for Ben this summer. In keeping with his atheist leanings, it's the last place he wants to go. I tell him it's reform, not so dissimilar from any nonaffiliated camp, with sports, woodworking, sailing, only with yarmulkas on Shabbat. And that's when he says no, that he'd rather be anywhere else for the summer, even back to the adult ed camp in our middle school which he's attended since he was six. "Aren't you tired of the pottery wheel?" I ask. "Even last summer you got bored there. How many eighth graders do you think will be going back?" We sit at the kitchen table and watch a sampling of camp videos online. I squirm at the highlight of the Friday night service, kids sitting in their crisp white shirts and khakis, arms wrapped around each other, swaying back and forth to Israeli guitar music. The camera zooms out to a clear, beautiful lake, then a closeup of the rustic Star of David made of boyscout-like sticks. It's a serene, organic Shabbat. Ben wants none of it. I tell him, it may be our only shot, considering these camps are giving a $1000.00 scholarship for any kid like himself, who goes to public school, who is Jewish and would rather be anything but. A self-hating Jewish tween. Ben is perfect. The camps all want him. We're actually being pursued.

Camp Avoda is one of the first to call. The director sounds sweet, tells me he went there as a kid, as does each and every camp director about their own camp, and that his entire family works there. They have sailing and woodworking with an actual industrial arts teacher on staff, where kids build chairs and tables, not a birdhouse kit in sight. It sounds kind of perfect. "I'll be visiting New Jersey on Saturday," he says. "I'd love to come by and meet Ben." I'm wondering which is the more looming disaster, the telling Ben of the visit, or the actual visit. Maybe this is just what Ben needs, to have this down to earth guy sit at our kitchen table and explain why this camp would be the perfect match. We set a date.

Later that night I get insecure. I'm all mixed up. I don't know what to do. I have friends who send their kids to Jewish camps, my friend Bonnie is one, but she's so, well, Jewish. Carol too, Jewish through and through. I'm looking for someone like me, an ambivalent Jew married to a non-jew, with an intransigent heathen child. A child who is too clever to just go along. Not that there isn't the blatant loophole of my own mixed marriage giving him carte blanche. But even so, how many of my friends have kids who are such skeptics. Who battle them till the entire family just falls asleep from exhaustion. I know if I honored all of Ben's requests, we'd back to square one, no Bar Mitzvah, no camp, heck why not just throw in that he'd simply hang out with his friends and play Black Ops all day on the computer. I do need to set some standards. Problem being, what are my standards?

In retrospect, years back I could have quietly slipped away from all things Jewish and joined up with the unitarian church in Montclair, NJ. Just me and other bohemian families, lesbian families, fellow lapsed Jews and Christians looking simply for a home, with a laid-back intellectual religious leader; someone who would recite a moving, thought-out sermon on a Friday night. Nothing kitsch like our temple's Rap with the Rabbi. A throwback to a kind of simpler 60s "Godspell" scene, sans Jesus, some acoustic folk music thrown in, a bit of Kumbaya. But the fact is, although I'm an ambivalent Jew, I'm a jew just the same. I feel most comfortable around Jews, and let's face it, my friends are mostly Jewish. In college it was Betsy (a socialist-leaning Jew, we'd play her mother's scratched albums of the Weavers and Pete Seeger till darkness filled our dorm room); in suburbia it's been Rona (grew up Orthodox only to turn her back and marry a non-jew from New Zealand); Richard, who got Bar Mitzvah'd but hasn't really been to temple since.

Not that living in one of the wealthiest Jewish suburbs in New Jersey has helped inject much spirituality into the mix. Maybe it would be different in, say, a quaint temple outside Seattle, or Albuquerque. But I'm here, in this spiritual wasteland, this is my home and time is running out. I really must put a stop to these vacillations. I'd better get my head around this Jewish identity crisis.