Why I've Always Hated the Word Assimilate

In spite of what he may like to think, my father's relationship to religion is not casual; it is extreme. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household, attended yeshiva until he was in high school, and was surrounded by adults who spoke in Hebrew or Yiddish until he left home for college where, not coincidentally, he immediately pledged a Jewish fraternity. And then, he graduated from college, moved to Boston, and became suddenly, miraculously, not Jewish.

Except he didn't. That was a simplistic way of saying what I want to say; I wrote it for dramatic effect. What he really did was somehow neutralize himself in a superficial sense. He always identified himself as having been raised Jewish but conveniently left out how just to what extent, and from as early as I can remember would claim to have no interest whatsoever in organized religion, which he found more deleterious than good. Except for family ceremonies, he never set foot in a synagogue.

As I got older, this explanation became less and less satisfying to me. For one thing, I had a Jewish grandmother, who lived in my hometown, no less: a Bubby. I had second cousins who all had bar or bat mitzvahs, which we attended, and although he didn't know I was watching him, it didn't escape me that my dad seemed to know all of the rituals and the prayers. And there was more. Almost all of his close friends were Jewish. On certain occasions, such as at any overt display of Christianity, he became visibly uncomfortable. He didn't like entering churches. Culturally, from the food he liked to his taste in books and movies to his sense of humor, he identified--voluntarily or not--as Jewish. And then there was the fact that people almost always assumed I was, because of my name. 

From a very early age, when people asked me what religion I was, I would say I was half Jewish, half Unitarian, Unitarianism being the compromise my parents had made when they married, when--again in a revelatory fashion--my father had said to my mother something along the lines of, "I'm fine with whatever you want to do, but I just don't want them raised Christian." Hmmm. Not Jewish, but not Christian, which Unitarianism is, technically, although there were so many mixed marriage families at The First Parish in Sudbury that we honored all of the Jewish holidays along with the Christian ones, built a sukkah each year in Sunday school and were never taught about any religious beliefs or traditions without also being taught about their context in world religions at large.

This was a tolerant, open-minded, expansive, and informative way to grow up, religiously speaking, but it wasn't very satisfying in a gut way. I have friends who were raised Catholic and haven't been to church in years but will cross themselves involuntarily when the car stops short; I have friends who were raised Baptist who loathe the hypocrisies of their church but can tear up at the sound of gospel music. Their religion is visceral; it may not be something in which they believe, or believe wholeheartedly, but they feel it when they see it. When I hear hymns, I automatically make them gender-neutral in my head. When I learn about molesting priests or sexist rabbis, I think: Well, yes. 

And then there is my father, whose mysterious connection to his very deepest roots, is a puzzle I will be puzzling all my life. There was a rabbi who favored the more socially prominent families in town, including the boy whose bar mitzvah fell on the same day as my father's. There was the fact that he felt his own parents were adhering to convention more than heartfelt belief in their own practice. There were the hours of religious study in lieu of baseball, the obvious discrepancies in the ways men and women were treated in the Orthodox faith, the fact that although he loved them, in a way, his own parents were not people he truly admired.

Last week I got a message on the answering machine from my father, passing on some chatty news, a message that ended with the words, "Oh, remind me to tell you a funny story about the minyan." I played it twice. Funny story about the minyan? I called him back. It turned out the Orthodox congregation that meets in his office building, down the hall from his office, had asked him in the past if he was interested in joining them for any events. He had said no, that he was not interested. But this day, he had been asked to please consider giving just a little bit of his time for a minyan, the quorum required of ten men in Orthodox Judaism for certain ceremonial functions; they had nine, needed a tenth, and there was nobody else to be asked. 

Begrudgingly, my father said yes. I could imagine this interaction: the asking, and my father's response, and I found myself very glad he had said yes, even before hearing the rest of the story. We cannot choose the groups we are born into, regardless of how far we stray. Sometimes, I think, we find that the journey is a circle, and not the line with an arrow we'd once imagined, or hoped. And, as he told me on the phone, trying to sound bemused, I think, but actually with a measure of awe in his voice, it "all came back." I remembered the Hebrew, he told me. Fluently, he said. I was always good at reading it. I understood everything. I didn't stay for very long, he added, and I was silent, still. Frankly, stunned.

Of course it came back, I wanted to shout, then. Of course it did! This was your life, the language you heard spoken, sung, since infancy, the sounds of your childhood, the prayers of your adolescence, men who looked like your father and uncles, dressed like them, speaking like them, assuming you into the fold not for what you believe, necessarily, but for who you were born to. This, I wanted to say, not even understanding the feeling, was your heritage.

The thing is about your past is that you can't ever get away from it, and you shouldn't really want to. We can choose so much about who we become, but in a way, we become who we already are.