Someone who knows me very well asked me today why am I calling my blog Musings of a Jewish Mom, especially when my first two posts had nothing to do with Judaism and more to do with turtles.
My answer was: because that is who I am. I didn’t think it needed explanation but since the question came up I will answer more deeply.
I do wonder, if I had been a Black woman, and I called my blog Musings of a Black Mom, I wonder if the same question would have been asked. Never mind, I’m not going to play the antisemitism card for now. And I certainly have no intention of this blog being political in any way because that is not my focus or mindset.
I have always considered myself a spiritual-minded person. I went to Hebrew School until third grade and then decided it wasn’t for me. Interestingly my parents never pushed me about that. From third grade until I was 28 years old I was always looking for mystical paths, mystical connections. It was not until I met my husband, who is Jewish and Israeli to boot, that I realized that what I was looking for was right under my feet. By under my feet I mean, my roots.
One of the reasons why I turned away from Judaism in my younger days was because I thought it was just too sad. My father was a Holocaust survivor, and I grew up on a steady diet of stories of very close calls with certain death by the hands of the Nazis. This imagery tormented my young mind. So much so that by the time I got to college one of my majors was German Literature. In my naive mind I thought that if I study German Literature I will understand the German mind and I will understand why the Germans wanted to kill the Jews. I was going to figure this whole antisemitism thing out! I was even awarded the Outstanding Student of German Literature Award at my college (not that there were too many of us), and I’m sure that part of the reason that I was awarded that was due to my German professors’ collective guilt. Needless to say, I learned a lot about German literature but got no closer to understanding why the Nazis wanted to kill us.
When I met my husband, who is also a Moroccan Jew, I got exposed to a very different type of Judaism than I had been aware of. When I went to Israel to get married I entered this big, joyful, noisy Jewish family! They were not crying and kvetching all the time! Even their prayers had uplifting melodies that were quite different than the tunes I had grown up with, which always sounded to me like crying.
After being together for 38 years, my husband’s life-affirming expression of Judaism has rubbed off on me. I am very proud to be a Jew. I recall a time when I went to study at the University of Vienna that my father warned me not to let anyone know that I was Jewish. I kept my mouth shut while there until one day one of my professors point blank asked me what church I went to and I told them none because I’m Jewish. Luckily this was 1977 and not 1937 so all I met with was a shrug. Well, I don’t want to hide being a Jew anymore. I don’t want to hide any aspect of myself (as previously blogged I have come out of my turtle shell). So if there is anyone that is uncomfortable that my blog is called Musings of a Jewish Mom, please, don’t come in. There are so many other houses to visit, you don’t have to come to mine. But if you want a nice chicken soup and some homemade challah, come on in. The door is always open.
Musings of a Jewish Mom 