l'dor v'dor

by Tamara Bailey

I BATHED IN THE SHARP AUTUMN LIGHT of the High Holiday season in Seattle under a golden sweetgum tree. The year was 2002—or 5763 in the Hebrew calendar. My boys bounced down the steps of the yellow school bus to the curb and raced ahead of me. But I caught up just enough to scuff through a pile of tiny maple leaves alongside them, red on one side, pink on the other.

“Remember we’re going to work on the sukkah today so it’s done in time,” I said. I took the little one’s hand and swung it high in the air. He let me hold it while we turned the corner and started up the hill.

“What? No computer time?” my eldest asked. When he spun around, leaves scattered all over our porch stairs. I wanted to finish the sukkah before it got dark, but I didn’t want it to be a totally unpleasant chore for my elementary school-aged sons.

“Okay, okay,” I said and unlocked our front door. “Twenty minutes each. But we’ve got to build the sukkah today.” I left them to negotiate their computer time and descended into the basement to find the bamboo poles for the sukkah. They were hidden behind our folded ping-pong table and balanced on a shelf above the vintage late 70s external frame backpacks we hadn’t used since the kids were born. I used a paint can as a stepstool and extracted the poles from between the heating ducts in the rafters and carried the poles outside, set them on the deck, and called the kids to help.

In my neighborhood, Sukkot, the end of the Jewish High Holidays, was my domain. No one else had a sukkah—a temporary structure under the open sky where you eat for the week. Building a small hut in the backyard and decorating it with fall fruits was perfect for DIY me. We had the neighbors over for cookies and coffee every fall, hosted a special shabbat, and even invited the local preschool for a field trip to our house long after my boys went on to elementary school.

The boys burst from the kitchen door and leapt over the bamboo poles I had dropped like giant pick-up sticks. They straightened them out and handed them up to me at the top of a wobbly step ladder, where I wrestled the slippery poles into a right angle and lashed them together with twine, trying my best to balance on my tiptoes. My methods weren’t conventional because no one had taught me how to build a sukkah. I’d grown up Christian and didn’t have any family memories to guide me. But there were plenty of rules to follow.

I didn’t always want to be Jewish. I was raised in the Church of Brethren and identified with my Midwestern upbringing in that historic peace church. The Brethren practice adult baptism and dunk people three times in a deep tub of water at the front of the sanctuary. I watched many friends get dunked, but by the time I was old enough to be baptized myself, I had stopped going to church.

I backed down the ladder and almost missed the last step before I caught myself. Maybe I did always want to be Jewish. As a seven-year-old, I loved All of a Kind Family, the book where I learned about the sukkah for the first time. I sought out immigrant stories, The Diary of Anne Frank, and loads of Young Adult Holocaust stories. I loved a strong Jewish heroine. I didn’t know many Jews growing up, but when I went to college on the East Coast, I went out with mostly Jewish guys. No surprise that I married one—our family's provider who was at work while I was building a sukkah with our kids.

I handed the hedge clippers to my oldest son, who was nine, and sent him over to cut a bunch of branches, our schach, from the laurel hedge that grew haphazardly into our yard. One rule is that the roof of the sukkah has to be made with plant matter. All the rules for the sukkah emphasize the impermanence of everything: our material comfort, our bodies, our lives—telling us all we have is a rickety structure to gather our family, feed our friends, and protect our neighbors. I climbed back up the ladder and the boys tossed the cut laurel branches up to me, and I attempted to lay them on top of our bamboo cube. The schach covering is supposed to be thick enough to protect from rain drops but sparse enough so you can see stars. I stapled a couple of old saffron sheets to our fence and the poles to make the walls. Technically, my walls may not have been kosher; they shouldn’t move in the wind. For decorations, the boys made paper chains out of construction paper, just like the ones I used to make for the Christmas tree, except these were orange and yellow instead of green and red. The first year of our sukkah, when my oldest was four, I wanted to add little twinkling lights, but my husband, Alex, nixed that idea; it was a step too close to Christmas for him.

I have to admit, the sukkah was like a Christmas tree for me. The tree was the part of Christmas I enjoyed doing with my family, and I didn’t want my sons to miss out. I celebrated the Jewish holidays with the gusto of the convert. When the rest of the world was celebrating Christmas, I could say, that’s not our holiday. Remember how much fun we had in the sukkah?

But can a sukkah really compete with a Christmas tree?

The sun was about to go down, but our sukkah was finally ready. With a lot of twine and some wire reinforcements, the bamboo supports were square and true. Our walls would hold up at least for the required week.

On the first night of Sukkot, all four of us gathered in the sukkah to say the blessings and shake the lulav. The air was a chilly Seattle October mist, not quite a rain. I handed the lulav—a bundle of myrtle, palm and willow, along with its companion, the etrog, a citron grown in Israel—to my younger son, who was seven. We said the blessing that commands us to shake the lulav. He held the bundle and the etrog in his hands and extended them, shaking in four directions. The wind rattled our sukkah and some shach blew off.

“Do we have to actually eat dinner out here?” Alex asked. “It’s getting cold, and we already said the blessings.”

“It’s not even raining! Just put on a jacket. Let’s just stay out here for a little longer,” I pleaded. I told the kids to get their coats while I ladled pumpkin soup into our bowls. We huddled around our patio table. Two holiday candles flickered in the wind. Then it started to drizzle, so we dipped our homemade challah in the soup and ate quickly. Bigger drops fell through the leaves.

I wiped my nose on my damp fleece sleeve. “Okay, let’s go in now.” Maybe we could stay out longer on another less damp night during the week. The kids grabbed the bowls, and I carried the candles inside. I felt I had to remind them we were lucky enough to have a warm house to go back to unlike some of the folks in our neighborhood.

This was my fifth Sukkot since I became a Jew when we moved to Seattle from San Francisco. The move had been disorienting and isolating, and, looking for community, I signed up for an Intro to Judaism Class at a Reform synagogue near us. I wasn’t sure I would convert, but I wanted to explore it. Even though I wasn’t the Jewish parent, I wanted my voice to count. I had strong ideas about how I wanted to raise Jewish children. That we should go to synagogue. That we should observe the sabbath. Alex didn’t think it was necessary because he was a cultural Jew. I told him it’s easy to raise Jewish children in New York without having an intentional Jewish community. But here it felt different. The Jewish High Holidays fall at the beginning of the school year, and I found myself explaining to teachers why our kids wouldn’t be in school for Rosh Hoshana—even on the first day of classes—and to the soccer coach why our kid would be missing the game on Yom Kippur—even if the other Jewish kids were coming.

You’ve heard the joke: A father and son are going over business records late on Friday afternoon. As the sun starts to set, the son says to his father, “I need to wrap this up. My wife wants me home before the sabbath starts.”

The father sighs and says, “I told you not to marry a shiksa.”

I was that shiksa. Always wanting to do more, to follow all the rules, even though I’m Reform. I’m not even Jewish in many parts of the world.

At Hannukah, we kept the gifts small, played dreidel, and made latkes. I made the same sugar cookies I had made with my mom as a child—not with the Santa Claus and reindeer metal cookie cutters I inherited from her but with new plastic magen davids and dreidels.

The year I converted—1997, 5783 in the Hebrew calendar—we were in Indiana for one of the every-other-year Christmases we spent with my family that coincided with Hannukah. I remember sitting in the living room breathing in the familiar scent of the fresh-cut Christmas tree. Snow fell on the dry corn stubble outside my parent’s farmhouse. I lit the shamus and handed it to my son to light the first candle in the menorah. We said the blessings as my nephew looked on. We wouldn’t be making latkes because it was Christmas Eve. We’d have fondue: cheese and chocolate. A tradition my family carries from the seventies to this day. We’d make latkes and applesauce once Christmas was over because one great thing about Hannukah is that you don’t have to do it all in one night. Lots of other families must have been doing the same double festive celebrating throughout North America, but as I placed the menorah in the window, I was pretty sure we were the only ones in that neighborhood and possibly all of Elkhart County.

I had worked out a brilliant compromise with my mother. She wanted to do stockings, but I was anti-Santa Claus. I had a lot of issues with Santa—not just because I was Jewish now. Maybe it was my brother’s fault for telling me there was no Santa when I was three. As an adult, I hated the idea of lying to children. My mother and I agreed that we would hang the stockings she had made for the kids, but we’d tell them the cat, Willy, had filled them while they were asleep. It had a nice symmetry: magical, but not involving a Christian saint. On Christmas morning my oldest son, who was then four, was delighted with the Legos, oranges, and nuts in his quilted red and green stocking. After he finished building his Lego spaceship, he said to me, “Willy couldn’t have filled these stockings; he doesn’t have any thumbs!”

I asked who he thought really gave him those presents, fully expecting him to say one of his grandparents.

“Santa Claus!” he replied.

A sukkah could never compete with a Christmas tree.

Last year—twenty-five years after that Christmas—my mother fell in the middle of the night in the memory care unit of the senior complex where my mom and dad lived. Her hip was broken and needed surgery, but afterwards, she didn’t wake up enough to swallow. We brought her home after a week. Hospice delivered a banged-up hospital bed to my dad’s apartment.

I sat by her bed and held her hand. Her breathing was labored, but I didn’t want to give her too much morphine. I searched Spotify on my phone for the Chopin nocturnes and etudes she used to play before she could no longer coordinate her mind and fingers on the piano keys. We listened for a long time, and then I played Joan Baez albums and sang along like we used to when I was little. When my dad came back in, I gave him my seat and went to check another thing off of my death preparation to-do list.

My mom wanted to be cremated but hadn’t made any plans. The hospice people had given me a list of funeral homes, and I called the ones with the highest Google ratings. I found myself saying to several, “I don’t know how to do this. I’m a Jew. We don’t cremate.” I asked if someone would be sitting with the body—something that would happen as a matter of course at a Jewish funeral home. Or if I could accompany her in the hearse, and I was told no.

After three days, my mom took her last breath. I washed her body and called the People’s Memorial Funeral Co-op to pick her up. We moved her to the gurney and covered her with one of her homemade quilts. She rode alone in the back of a white Ford Transit van to the crematoria, and when the driver asked me what music to play down the highway, I told him to play Chopin.

Maybe I’m not that Jewish. I didn’t know when to light the shiva candle since my mom wasn’t buried. Or if I should light a shiva candle at all. All those rules I love, do I follow them for a non-Jewish parent? My progressive friends told me I could do whatever I wanted that brought me comfort, but I couldn’t figure out what to do. Every time I said Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead said for a year after losing a parent, there were less than the required ten Jews present. Did it count? Who is counting? Me? The G-d I’m not sure I believe in? Anyone who saw me davening alone by the California redwood on the Interlaken trail each time I went by on my morning run? For a year—in the drizzle, in the crisp air, or in the cool shade—I stopped. I took out my phone and read the Kaddish to myself and my mother and the tree, touching her rough and spider-webby bark. I prayed and looked up through the branches, the Fibonacci spiral of the boughs. I read the transliteration of the Aramaic, because I still can’t read Hebrew letters.

Why am I even Jewish anyway? My husband never asked me to convert, even though my in-laws brought it up long before we were engaged. He was having a glass of chardonnay with his folks at his childhood home on Long Island right after we graduated. He informed them we were moving in together.

“But your kids won’t be Jewish,” they told him.

“We’re not talking about getting married,” he said.

“Still,” they said.

Of course they were right about us getting married. But not about the kids not being Jewish.

We had a Jewish (style) wedding. We agreed to raise any children we had as Jews. By then, in my late twenties, I had lost any connection to the church of my childhood. I committed to raise one more generation of Jews in our family. Just like we say in services, l’dor v’dor—from generation to generation.

My eldest son was born in San Francisco before the turn of the last century. We didn’t know the sex of our baby until birth, but we agreed on a traditional Jewish circumcision, a bris, performed at home by a mohel if we had a boy. In preparation, Alex—at that point still in charge of All Things Jewish in the family—had contacted the best mohel in the city. We just had to let him know when the baby was born, and the mohel would come to our home to perform the bris, on the eighth day.

A few hours after our son was born, Alex left our birthing suite to call the mohel. After inquiring about the health of the baby and his mother, the mohel asked if I was Jewish. When Alex replied no, the mohel asked if I was going to convert.

“No,” Alex said and wondered why these questions weren’t asked before.

“In that case, I’m sorry, but I’m not comfortable performing a bris for a baby that isn’t Jewish,” the mohel replied.

Alex hung up and returned to our birthing suite. With our newborn son swaddled next to me in a plexiglass bassinet, Alex told me we had no mohel for the bris.

I started to cry. “I’m willing to ritually mutilate my child’s genitals for your religion, but I’m still not good enough!” I screamed, and I threw my water bottle across the room.

Alex picked the water bottle up, refilled it, and brought it back to me. He snuggled the baby’s blanket a little closer, kissed my forehead, and went back out to call the JCC; we only had eight days to find a replacement. The JCC had a list of Reform mohels, all of them pediatricians. But I started to have doubts. The Reform mohels might all be doctors, but were they really good enough to trust with a delicate operation on the privates of my precious child? I hadn’t worried much about that with the Orthodox mohel because he had done so many. I called my OBGYN to check on the pediatrician mohel who was available on the day of my son’s bris.

“She’s great!” my OBGYN said. Their families were friends and my OBGYN and the mohel had gone to medical school together. “You know she’s Chinese.”

I guess my OBGYN didn’t want me to be surprised. Our Chinese mohel was a Jew by choice and performed the bris of both of my sons. But even then, I didn’t think I wanted to be a Jew.

I have heard myself say that I converted for my children, but that’s not entirely true. My mother wished I had rediscovered our Brethren/Mennonite heritage at the time of my conversion. But I didn’t. I became a Jew and refused to have a Christmas tree in my house. I chose to be a Jew because I wanted the ritual and new language I was helping the kids learn to be mine as well. Compared to the austerity of the Pietist church of my childhood, Jewish rituals felt full of movement and poetry. It felt right to connect a blessing to an action instead of a belief. I was attracted to the hands-on aspect of a religion where the observances centered on the home. In my weekly Torah study, I could wrestle with an ancient text without having to abandon my modern intellect. This was the structure I wanted for my life. I had one last question for the rabbi before I embraced the covenant: Could I be a pacifist and a Jew? He mentioned Martin Buber and Ernst Bloch and the many Jews who participated in nonviolent resistance during the Civil Rights Era. I told him I was ready.

I had a sense I had been preparing my whole life for the Beit Din, the formal questioning of your intent and knowledge before you become a Jew. Always the over-achiever, after all my reading and study, I wanted harder questions. After the Beit Din, I went to the mikvah, a bath for ritual cleansing. In Orthodox communities, women must submerse in the mikvah after their periods, and men visit (a separate pool) before Yom Kippur. Both submerge when they convert. Our Reform synagogue didn’t have one, but my rabbi reserved the Sephardic Orthodox mikvah in Seward Park for me.

On the day of my conversion, I entered the women’s side with two female Jewish friends. No one was in the changing area except for the bare heads of the faceless wig holders for the sheitels of the women who visited the mikvah once a month. My friends helped me undress, and I put on a robe. We entered a small white-tiled room where steps descended into a simple pool. The mikvah was much bigger than the baptismal at the York Center Church of the Brethren. I slipped off my robe and handed it to my friend because you must go into the mikvah naked.

The rabbi, being male, was in a separate room and called out for me to enter the pool. I eased into the tepid water and stepped down to the bottom. My rabbi shouted the blessing to me, and I repeated it: Baruch atah Ado-nai Elo-heinu melech haolam… Then I submerged myself, not touching the sides or bottom. My friends confirmed to the rabbi that this was true. The water embraced me, my heart echoed the rhythm of the blessing under the water, and I came up to breathe. I dunked three times. When I stepped out, I was a Jew.

Two years ago—thirty-two years after Alex and I struggled to find a rabbi to officiate our wedding—my son and his wife had many options to consider when they had what they called “a Big Fat Jewipino Wedding” in the Bay Area. The rabbi they chose as the officiant was more than happy to include Catholic Filipino elements in the ceremony. My son and his bride circled each other and broke glasses. Their aunts and uncles on both sides paired up as sponsors, wrapping them in the silken cord and draping them with a lace veil. We lifted them up on chairs in the hora at an elegant winery just as Alex and I had been raised up by our family in the barn on my parents’ farm. They had a money dance; we had a bluegrass band that sang some hymns without saying the word “Jesus” during the ceremony.

When my son and daughter-in-law were having a baby last year, we weren’t told the gender of our grandchild until we joined them in the recovery room, along with the other grandparents, to greet our brand-new granddaughter. I was so relieved there was no bris question.

Both of my sons are now grown and live with non-Jewish partners. They watch all the Christmas movies. My daughters-in-law love Christmas for the family closeness and happy childhood memories. My sons like being a part of the festivities. This year, the first night of Hannukah is Christmas night. I’m giving big Hannukah presents even though I spent my kids’ childhood insisting that Hannukah is only a big holiday in the United States to compete with the consumer Christmas. It’s not even in the Torah.

This fall, we helped my eldest son’s family move to California. We drove their car and dog down from Portland, and they flew with their baby girl. Rosh Hoshana was in a few days, and we flew back to Seattle from California. We left them with a supply of Pacific Northwest apples and local honey. My son and daughter-in-law are building their own family life, just like Alex and I did. I was glad they had something sweet to start the New Year, and I was grateful my granddaughter would have the devotion of her Lola and Lolo and the protective eyes of the Virgin in every room. I hope that was how my mom felt all of those every-other-Christmases.

L’dor v’dor.

About the author:

Tamara Bailey, a former grant writer and early childhood educator, writes, runs and knits in Seattle.