Good Jew, Bad Jew--Which Jew Are You?

Making Fun of the Jews

KATE FALLON-LANDAU: So what¹s this I hear about you turning Wolfie into a Jew? LISA: I am. A little Jew-boy. You know, I went to temple on Yom Kippur--that¹s the biggest day to go to temple--and there were about 25 people there. So that means that out of 25,000 Dover residents, there¹s only 25 of us Jewish people. KATE: You aren¹t a Jew yet, baby! "Us." LISA: I know--well, I¹ve been calling them "they" and it sounded a little rude. It¹s bad enough I¹ll say stuff like "Jew-boy." KATE: "Hebe." LISA: My sense of humor hasn¹t changed. My father found his latest girlfriend passed out in the bushes. If I can find that amusing--and that¹s tragic (I mean, the man¹s 50 years old), and make jokes about my white trash heritage, I can make jokes about the Jews. I¹m not gonna stop just because I light some candles. KATE: "I¹m not gonna stop making fun of the Jews just because I¹m turning my son into one." LISA: You know, my father once said you can tell you're a good plumber when you can squeeze a turd with one hand and eat a banana with the other. I want to be a good plumber of life, Kate. That's why I have to tease the Jews while embracing divinity. KATE: I love your father. I can¹t wait to meet him. I¹m gonna like Dover. LISA: Plus, I better get any making fun in now, because now I want to have a Jewish home, so I¹ll only marry a Jew, so when I have another kid, I¹m gonna be surrounded by Jews. I¹ll be the goy in their midst. KATE: You should really think hard about this, OK? PETER [Kate¹s husband]: Don¹t try to turn her away from Judaism! KATE: I¹m just saying that maybe she wants to think about the future of being surrounded by Jews. I joyfully immersed myself in the company of many Jews, and now sometimes I think, "Fuck, what was I thinking?"

Taking the Jews Seriously

God is a language, a whisper, a ray of intensity, between you and everything coming down in the air, in the rain and in the wind, up from the earth, the past rushing into me and right through me to the future. Elusive but forceful (the way patience is forceful). I hear it, I hear it! How can I answer back? Who are you??? It is a language between me and the sky and the ground and drops of water on leaves made of the same moisture of a drop of water a girl licked off another leaf a thousand years ago. I understand it with a different part of me than the part that deals with English or French. I need to talk about it. But my atheist friends won¹t admit to it--won¹t admit God the language. And the religious people are so different from me, how can I talk with them? There are like zoo bars between us. I¹ve always been looking for it--holiness?--and catching tendrils of it in the weather, in a feeling, but I never heard anyone say it out loud before. Now I hear these words, sacred, divine, miracle--all these words, all together, being said out loud at temple. Blatantly! It¹s just too much. I look around, and people aren¹t even blushing. These words sound OK to them, normal. I hear these words and I feel like a crowd is looking at my nipples and commenting on them, and I¹m tied to a stake and I can¹t do a thing about it. It¹s your private relationship to life. I know my relationship to sex; I couldn¹t say what is my relationship to God. Sometimes he doesn¹t write back and I don¹t know where I stand. I don¹t believe in God, but that¹s no reason not to believe in God. I see signs, like the lifting up of the wind, and the fact that I feel it as something else. There¹s this place, this knowing, beyond everyday, yet exactly, exactly everyday. I feel my heart and my soul, but to connect them to the big wave of being of heart and soul--how to do that? There are many ways, many toboggans to ride down the slippery slopes of being: a frenzy in the wind and the rain, in the seasons, in the feel of the grass, in a feeling of expectation and joy, in the rushing of death, in the aliveness of history, in the kiss of a dead girl I¹ve never met, in falling in love, in electrical currents, in the ocean, in drugs, sex, reading, lying drunk on a cold highway in a southern town. Jewish traditions is another way, another toboggan, why discard it? It¹s training. Religion is training to reach that state of awareness of the wind even when you can¹t feel the wind, of timelessness. To reach for it instead of just waiting for it to catch you at odd moments, in stray gusts. For instance, Kabbalists say that God did not create the world; he pulled back and made room for the world to happen. You can apply that concept and see what happens: don¹t try to make your boyfriend a good boyfriend for a minute, pull back and see what he makes in the new space. You might not like it, who knows, but it¹s interesting. That is creating mystical possibilities. I¹ve been looking for God everywhere, I feel him but I don¹t know how to say his name. I¹ve been too heavy-handed for many months now, thinking and thinking and feeling. I¹m burning up. Something has to give. I can actually feel a blooming within me, so tender and true, but also overwhelming. I¹m shy about what is happening to me and I feel like an oaf.

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