My Hebrew is knowing prayers by heart, feeling their meanings when I chant them in services but I can’t tell you the English translations. It’s sitting in a synagogue turning thin pages of the Bible and running my fingers over inked letters I know the names of and can transform into sounds but don’t know how to create my own words with. It’s a 9th grade world history class pop quiz question “What do Jews call their God?” and responding “Adonai” because that’s one of our names for God and getting the question wrong because it wasn’t the answer my Christian teacher chose to be right. And I didn’t fight back because part of me wondered if she knew Judaism better than I did, even having grown up Jewish and going to Hebrew school on Wednesdays and Sundays and synagogue on Friday nights, I still wondered if she knew my religion better than I did. It’s feeling like how I practice Judaism isn’t good enough, it’s having friends who didn’t grow up with the same Yiddish slang that I did. It’s feeling alone when I’m with Jews who had bar or bat or b’nei mitzvahs because I’m not as Jewish and feeling alone when I’m with non-Jews because I’m too Jewish.
It’s going to a non-denominational school for 6 years with yearly mandatory tree-trimmings, as if one tiny Star of David ornament on a huge Christmas tree makes the pagan tradition co-opted by Christianity somehow less of a Christian tradition. That’s on the school’s website, “Founded on Christian tradition,” like that even begins to cover the isolation I felt when most of my classmates celebrated Christmas and Easter and there were only 2 other classmates who celebrated Hanukkah. Like it provides a sufficient disclaimer for the tokenization of non-Christian students because sure, they’ll say they value diversity while teachers schedule tests on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Sure, they value diversity, but in high school, I only had one Jewish teacher and she taught an extracurricular subject. Sure, they value diversity, but advisory groups had Secret Santas every year and people joked about my Hanukkah bush to my face.
My Hebrew is having to remind people I’ve known for years that I’m Jewish, and they’ll say that I don’t look Jewish, like that should be considered a compliment. I’m sorry if your ignorance keeps you from seeing my horns but your head may be too far up your ass anyway. Or it’s having them tell me I do look Jewish, and I’m not sure whether or not I should say thank you because I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean it as a compliment but an observation’s a weighty thing when it’s loaded with several millennia of crusades to erase my people. My Hebrew is not knowing what to do when faced with anti-Semitism in the news, whether I lean into or retreat from my Jewishness and always choosing to be more Jewish to hide the fact that I’m scared. My Hebrew is knowing the likelihood of being the only one in a room who’s Jewish and still feeling inadequately Jewish but too Jewish to relate to anyone else. My Hebrew is answering questions about Judaism and thinking I know the answers but not being sure, it’s wondering if I’m a bad Jew for not being more certain.
It’s the panic attacks, the shaking and crying, when I see a swastika spray painted somewhere to tell me to KEEP OUT because it wasn’t that long ago that people marched in French streets in 2014 screaming “Gas the Jews” and “Get back in the oven.” It’s arguing with a Christian friend that Nazis are still targeting Jews, that anti-Semitism hasn’t gone away just because they don’t see it. It’s being exhausted when I’m forced to choose my womanhood or my mental health as more urgent than my Jewishness because that’s the current crisis. It’s discrimination being pushed to the side again, and again, always on the back burner because “Never again” only applies to physical aggression, not the microaggressions of hearing that Jews never give away money or that someone must be a Jew because “look at that nose.” My Hebrew is Microsoft word underlining Adonai in red because it doesn’t recognize God’s name as a word if it’s English transliteration of a word that’s been used longer than I’ve been alive. It’s 21 years of being the Jewish friend, the one who jokes about becoming the Jewish bubbe stereotype because I worry too much and knit and use Yiddish slang. It’s 21 years of not being sure if people think of me as a stereotype, 21 years of people mispronouncing my last name, 21 years of knowing that hatred exists.
But my Hebrew is more than that. It’s crisp apples dipped in honey on Rosh Hashanah to welcome a sweet New Year, it’s Shabbat dinners with candles lit, baking challah with friends and eating it on overstuffed sofas. It’s lighting Hanukkah menorahs and spinning dreidels and feeling so blessed to have this community to call my own, trading Yiddish with each other and comparing the differences in the prayer melodies we grew up with, praying together for a better world. My Hebrew is bitter like the herbs we eat on Passover, but it’s sweet like the orange we put on the Seder plate to show that women have a place on the bema and LGBTQ people have a place in Judaism. My Hebrew is recognizing this world has real problems and resolving to help fix them; my Hebrew is “tikkun olam,” heal the world. My Hebrew is welcoming the Sabbath bride at the end of a long week, knowing that I’ll have a fresh start tomorrow.
The sculpture in the photo is the Hebrew word “ahava,” which translates as “love.” My heart goes out to everyone affected by the horrific murders committed at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.