THREE WORDS OR LESS

I have written and rewritten this post so many times, trying to get all of the unusual, complicated pieces worked down to their most basic ellements to avoid this being an entire documentary of the strange pieces of my life that seemed to come to a head this weekend. Each little detail could be an entire post all by itself, but to tell it all right now distracts from the real impacting moment I had at, what I’ve been calling, “a family wedding.”

I have always felt like I was born into the wrong skin. My father, growing up in an old Southern family, was mentored, couselled, and really raised by the black staff that worked at his family’s home, so I have always grown up with an appreciation for the African American community, and in the dance community been called black a time or two. In my middle school years, I had felt it a crime my skin was so darn white! My mom grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in St. Louis, MO. So while she was not Jewish, all of her friends, classmates, and highschool boyfriends were. Coming from a broken home, she found a great deal of stability in her friends’ homes, and so she grew up celebrating their holy days, hebrew blessings, and traditions. So when she was married and started her own family, she incorporated the hebrew calendar into our formative years.

I had always felt a mixture of excitement and frusteration at this. I liked the holidays, the symbolism, the blessings; they had been part of my life since before I was born. The frusteration came in with having been raised in a culture I couldn’t claim. In all of my twenty-one years, I have never been able to explain in three words or less why “mossel tov!” comes to mind when a lightbulb breaks (reference to a Jewish wedding tradition) or why I feel excited at the scent of chopped parsley (part of the Passover sedar), or any number of other things that are completely foreign to the mainstream of the culture. Any time I dared to voice these thoughts to those around me, it was a precursor to a long explaination to which the general sentement was, “That’s . . . weird.”

In the last ten years something called the Messianic Movement has emerged as a subset of evangelical Christianity. The thoughts behind this movement are the same basic thoughts that pricked my dad’s interest in this culture almost about eight years earlier when he had a crisis of faith—Christianity is built on the foundation of the law and the prophets. But while many of my friends joined the bandwagon around the time this movement was born, it had already been alive and well in my family for over two decades, not counting my mother’s childhood.

My father, a controlling and abusive man, had studied the Old Testement, Hebrew, the Talmud, Jewish history, and the writings of the rabbis for eight hours a day all of my highschool years, ontop of work. When he left, I let him take some of my identity with him. I couldn’t celebrate the holidays anymore. We gave away our Passover plate to the close friends that had been celebrating the holidays with us for years and had moved into our old home. Slowly in the last two and a half years, I have been able to reclaim this part of my heritage a piece at a time. While my dad was with us, I had defined this part of my upbringing as something I wasn’t—I wasn’t Jewish, so I couldn’t really claim any of it as part of me. I think some of that had to do with my internal distancing from my father.

In the last two and a half years, and especially the last six months, I have learned to identify with yet another heritage other than my own. Working in the food service industry, I discovered I had a lot in common with the Mexican value system and family ideals. Several of my friends had called me a Mexican stuck in a white body. One started calling me "prima" (cousin), because he insisted I was really Mexican on the inside. I have worked alongside them, been invited to their homes, gone to their family events, their weddings, their quensenaras. In some ways it fit so well, and I looked past differences as best I could. Yet in the back of my mind, I was aware of the culture that raised me, most especially as I chopped parsley for a garnish alongside one of the Mexican women I worked with, and tried to explain why I would occassionally take a sprig of it and dip it in salt water before eating it (Passover tradition)—she didn’t understand; she just called me the Spanish word for cow.

Last Sunday night we went to the wedding of an old friend, one of the girls I had grown up with within this movement. Her extended family had kind of been an extended family to me during highschool, getting together every six months for Passover and Succoth for that week of time. I felt less threatened by my non Jewishness in that surrounding. We used to joke about the poetic redemption of having three of four surnames within her extended family as well as my father’s being German and speaking Hebrew blessings during a holiday of a people our people had pursecuted.

We drove out to the nature reserve where the wedding was to be held, and we stepped into a sea of yammikas, tzit tzit, and “honorary family.” Her wedding had a remarkably Jewish flavor, complete with the glass breaking in remembrance of the Temple’s distruction, the Hebrew blessings, and the dancing—which was always the best part. I hadn’t realized how very much this was part of my heritage until I inwardly let out a sigh. For the past six months I have been attending weddings with just as many and just as foreign traditions and symbolism with my Mexican friends and loved every minute of it, but though these traditions would need just as much explaining as the Mexican ones had for me, they made sense to me and I understood many of the blessings even without the translations by my “uncle.”

I looked around and was struck with a sense of pride I had never had for this part of my upbringing. Jewish or not, this was part of my history, part of my heritage. I looked around at the others dancing in the circles with me: not a one, besides my own siblings, could claim twenty-one years of this. If anyone who hadn’t been born into bloodlines of this culture could claim it, it was me. The feeling was very similar to the feelings I had as I hugged and kissed the bride’s family. One of her uncles, the one that I have known since I was ten years old and have always had a very special relationship with, said to me during the reception, “Having you guys here . . . it’s like all of the cousins are back.” They weren’t my family any more than I was Jewish . . . I guess that gave a boost for my identifying with my own history.
Today, two days later my legs are killing me—too many pulled muscles from fancy footwork and high kicks—but I am finally feeling full, the first time in a long, long time. The inward struggle of “where do I fit” is diminishing. I am who I have always been, only now I can say it . . . but I still can’t explain it in three words or less.