I had a fairly schizophrenic religious upbringing, as my parents don’t exactly agree on religious matters. They had both a Reform and an Orthodox rabbi officiate at their wedding because they couldn’t agree on which would make the ceremony authentic. My mother is convinced that my father is a fanatic, and my father thinks theirs is a mixed marriage because of their differing viewpoints. I am now a shomer shabbos hippy wannabe, and my brother’s been an atheist since age eight.
When my father’s mother died, my dad went to an Orthodox shul three times a day for a year, which made for some fun times in our household. And by “fun,” I mean we all screamed at each other constantly. “You’re having an affair with G-d!” yelled my mother.
“You want that my mother should suffer because I’m not saying Kaddish!” My dad would yell.
“Do you think G-d will hurt her if you don’t pray?” demanded my brother.
The G-d my brother doesn’t believe in is apparently a forgiving and reasonable sort.
When my mother was pregnant with me, I am told my father would occasionally bend down and say in baby-talk to her womb, “When you come out, I don’t want you marrying a non-Jew! If you marry a non-Jew, I’ll sit shiva for you!”
Once I emerged from the womb, the number of lectures I received increased exponentially. In my first home-video appearance, I was eight days old and wearing a horribly frilly dress. I am not a particularly feminine person now (I have a “Things to do to appear like a properly socialized female” chart posted on my door), and I apparently was not then either. My newborn self is seen trying to squirm out of layers and layers of terrible pink frills.
“Have you no modesty?” my father asked me in the video, as I lifted my dress above my stomach. I looked at him in confusion and continued to wiggle out of my horrible outfit. “No chupa, no shtuppa¬!” he admonished, teaching me the approximate Yiddish phrase for “no sex before marriage.”
“Robert!” protested my mother, “You don’t think it’s early to start lectures on premarital sex?”
“It’s never too early,” said my approving grandfather from behind the camera.
When I was four, I remember my father turning to me and saying, “Amanda, I love you so much that you could kill a million people and I would still love you. But you know the one thing you could do that would make me stop?”
I didn’t even have to look up from my Cabbage Patch Kid tea party. “Marry a non-Jew?” I offered.
While my father dwelled on Jewish procreation, my nursery school abided by the educational philosophy that it is more effective to teach toddlers stories about Jews’ near destruction than to linger on the evils of intermarriage. I later thought of it as the Nightmare-of-the-Month Club.
Every few weeks the teachers would introduce a new food and a story about attempts to murder Jews. “Class, this is a latke,” one of them would say. “We eat this because they tried to kill the Jews in ancient Israel.”
Then it would be time for Purim. “This is a hamentaschen,” my teachers would say. “We eat this because they tried to kill the Jews in Persia.”
Passover came next. “Here,” they would begin, and I would look up in fear, knowing that if they interrupted block time for a snack, stories of dead Jews were sure to be involved. “This is matzah. We eat this because we were once slaves in Egypt. Then we escaped and were given a lot of laws.”
With three seasons worth of snacks in my memory, I’d lie in bed every night as still as I possibly could, because I feared that if I moved, I would be taken back to ancient Egypt and forced to build pyramids. Even at the tender age of four, I knew that I was destined to have back problems, and that building pyramids would give me a slipped disc, just like my dad’s.
Now when my dad calls me to harass me about wanting me to marry a Jew he always adds, “If I didn’t lecture you about wanting you to marry a Jew all the time, you wouldn’t be able to make fun of me. Then it would be harder for you to make friends, because you wouldn’t have funny stories to tell. I am really just trying to provide you with comedic material and a social group.” Not to mention writing gigs.
Thanks, Dad.
