Intuitive Jewing |
Anyone who knows me well will probably tell you I’m hotheaded, a flamethrower, a free radical, untethered to the norms other folks follow. As a rabbi told my husband, “Nina is honest. To a fault.” Guilty as charged. None of this serves me terribly well in a world–especially an American Jewish world–that expects certain kinds of behaviors and adherences, few of which I’m willing to sign on to without getting answers to my questions, i.e., why? why now? why this? why me? why you? why us? what for? And so on.
I did not become bat mitzvah until my fortieth year. My parents lived to see that day, but my father, z”l, only two more years after that. I was too terrified by the cantor to learn Torah trope, so I stuck with chanting the Haftorah with another classmate. I recall little of what I learned through that process, but am incredibly grateful I went through it with my older sister.
I tried to make sense through the years of my father’s explanations and non-explanations of things Jewish, of why we do or don’t do this or that. It took me well into adulthood to realize that a large part of why I couldn’t get explanations that made sense to me is that my father didn’t have them. His Jewishness lived in his bones, in all of his internal organs. Asking him to explain the details of this or that practice was like asking him to explain the particular rhythms of his heartbeat.
I have pursued my own adult Jewish education, trying to get many of the answers my........