I'm Not Very Religious

What does that mean?

Very little, in fact. There is no word in Hebrew for "religion" so when Jews say they're not religious, they could mean one or more of many different things. Among the possible meanings:

• I sometimes go to McDonalds, sometimes even on Saturdays.
• I love doing a Passover seder every year, and all my social activism is based in Judaism's ethical teachings about תיקון עולם, but I don't belong to a synagogue or think about God at all, and I don't believe in separatism or any of the ritual trappings of religion.  
• I belong to a synagogue, but I only go there twice a year.
• I belong to a synagogue and go there every week, but it's not Orthodox.
• I belong to an Orthodox synagogue, but it's not as Orthodox as Rabbi T's synagogue.
• I belong to Rabbi T's synagogue, which I suppose people will call "ultra-Orthodox," but I'm still willing to go to movies and let my children attend coed summer camps and public schools.
• (men) I don't wear a black hat; a modest little crocheted yarmulke is good enough.
• (women) I sometimes wear slacks in public, and I only cover my hair in the synagogue.
• I belong to a synagogue, but I don't pray three times a day; once a week is about all I can handle.
• I don't really believe in God so much, at least not the kind of God who cares about whether I pray or not, so even though I go to synagogue twice a day to make everybody else happy, when they do all those prayers and stuff I kind of tune it out and think about the book I'm writing.
• I'm proud of my Jewish heritage and I send my kids to parochial school and summer camp and I love studying all the Jewish religious texts, but my own personal focus is more on the ethical aspects of Judaism than on all the rituals.
• I'm into the Jewish holidays, the ethics, and the rituals, but I just can't get into all that spirituality/prayer stuff.   

Most often, in this country, it also means, "When I was a kid growing up, I wasn't really exposed to the Jewish religion, and I don't really know very much about it at all."


This post appeared on my old blog about a year ago, before we began experiencing technical  difficulties.

What a Doll!

This post appeared on my old blog about a year ago, before we began experiencing technical  difficulties.

This is one of my pet peeves. What could I say to these people? As much as I wanted to slap them across the face or scold "HOW DARE YOU!" I realized that many people might not understand what was bothering me. They might have even thought I was the one being rude.

Of all the sounds I heard umpteen years ago, from midnight colicky cries to accidentally tripped car alarms. none annoyed me more than this remark from people looking into my Snuggli or stroller: "Oooo, she's just a doll!" To make matters even worse, some of the same people who called my daughter a doll would see which toy she was waving in her chubby little hand and say, "Yes, you have a baby!" Even among educated adults, the stuffed or molded plastic toy purchased at a store, a toy representing a nine-year-old or an adult fashion model with exaggerated breasts no less, was allegedly a "baby," and my own living, thinking, breathing human child, the fruit of my womb, was "just a doll" as far as these people were concerned.

My husband used to shush me when I reacted to this error on people's parts and he would tell me the polite response was "Thank you." I disagreed. Thanking people for saying such a thing about one's child will simply allow them to believe that it's acceptable to go on saying such a thing about other mothers' children. To him, it was "no big deal."

But to me, it was, and remains, a very big deal. A baby is a living, breathing, thinking person who just happens to be extremely new on the job. A doll is an inert, mindless object produced by some manufacturer for somebody's amusement. I would argue that the inability of some people to tell the difference between a person and an object might well be the most serious problem in the world today.

I wanted to do something to let people know that it's wrong to confuse human beings with objects. Telling someone that she has offended one with a remark intended as a compliment is no simple matter. Eventually, I thought of a response which, while perfectly polite, might gently help people realize that they might want to take their feet out of their mouths and reconsider whether parents want to hear such remarks about their children.   What I did was to shake my head and whisper, "I'm so sorry you feel that way." If that didn't get an apology or a flustered reaction, I would add, "We like to think that our child is so much more that that."