Why wasn't I born a Jew?

I ask G-d.

For centuries people have asked why they were born a Jew during the many times of oppression, which is basically all the time. Why did G-d choose a people and watch them go through so much persecution? Greater minds than mine have explored that question. I have nothing to say about it.

I find myself asking why I was not born a Jew. Though we often imagine that things would have been better when they had just as much chance of being worse, I can see some very concrete things that I think would have been better.

I think that if my parents had been Jewish, they would have either married other people or would have stayed together. If my mother, who has two PhDs and is a great, innovative scholar with a brain too big for most of what she’s had to put up with in life, had been born Jewish at about the time when women were first starting to become rabbis, she might have become a rabbi instead of an ordained minister. She was a trailblazing woman in the Christian ministry, she could have been such as a rabbi. The focus on learning and education would have fit her so much better than the Christian church.

My father, also a scholar, also would have been a good rabbi, but I wonder if they had come from Jewish families if they might have married people better suited to them. My father had the incredible blessing of finding his ideal mate in my step-mother. She is home oriented, very smart but not a scholar, and good at everything my dad was not. They had a beautiful life together from their late thirties until he died at 79. 42 years. My mom, who I am so much like that it’s creepy, is quite the opposite of my step-mother. She wanted to be a stay at home mom and raise kids and support my dad’s scholarship and ministry, but it was not to be. They split before I was two and my mom spent her life working so hard just to make ends meet and to give me a chance at a better life. Being a single mom was so incredibly hard. If we had come from a Jewish community she might have had better luck finding someone who would have made a more appropriate match. My dad, though smart, was not as smart as my mom. He’s dead so I can say that now. My dad did wonderful things with tons of support from his family and his wife. My mom has done amazing things with no support from anyone except her daughter and some great cats. We have our weaknesses, but we have an inner toughness that most don’t. I wonder if she could have found someone who might have complimented that. Being with the father of her child would have made life easier, if it was the right match.

Maybe not. It was the late sixties when all family structures were going insane. But maybe so. My life has been affected in many ways by not having a father in the home. I’ll write about it for some other venue, and I’ve had it better than most as my parents both loved me and always got along, never fought about me or dragged me into things like that, but it’s hard to survive economically in a one parent household, and women alone are in danger. Men are good for protection, really they are. I wouldn’t mind having one about occasionally. Also, they lift heavy things and like to figure out how to fix things, which I find incredibly boring. Most of them anyway.

I strongly suspect that if I had been Jewish I would have married and had at least one child. And I would have stayed married. Oddly enough, I think I would have made a good wife. Perhaps I know a little too much about what makes people, particularly men, unhappy in a marriage. I suspect you know too. When couples get so bogged down in child rearing, career and other things that they put their relationship with each other last, they may stay together, but they are not as happy. Cracks start to appear. Some men cheat, others don’t bother or are too afraid or really do think it’s wrong, but I can spot a man who is not that happy in his marriage from approximately a world away. I am particularly good at the things that make men happy in a relationship. Not just sex, but actually paying attention. Unlike a lot of women of my generation and younger, I really like men, and with the exception of sports, I like a lot of the things they like. I could have even learned to pay some attention to sports if I had married someone who was really into them. Or not. My record with baseball is not good. I had to get an eighth grader to explain it to me on Friday because we were reading an article about it. He did better in four minutes than grown men have in an entire baseball game.

I really can’t imagine having married anyone who wasn’t Jewish. The only people I can imagine marrying are, and any time I date someone who isn’t I feel like something is missing. We like what we like. I have a thing for Jewish men named David with Joshua being a close second. In fact, I was starting to worry that I was developing the same kind of pathological Josh problem that I have with Davids, but it’s been awhile since a Josh crossed my path. I’m careful of any Jewish men in their thirties whose names begin with J, for reasons that need not detain us. I’ll leave it at: Never let it be said that Jewish men, even millenials, do not know how to flirt.

I used to joke about showing up at a synagogue and saying, “I’m looking for David.” “Which one?” “Any single one over the age of 35 is fine.”

But picking up guys is not my main reason for wishing I had been born Jewish. I am actually religiously Jewish much more than Christian, and it would have been nice to practice that in community. More than anything, I would have loved to have lived life as part of a Jewish community, and a strong one at that. I would have loved to have celebrated the Shabbat and had big dinners at my house. I would have loved to have learned Hebrew as a kid and gone to Israel and maybe even made aliyah. Maybe. I want to have the Seder at my house. I want someone’s Jewish grandmother to teach me how to make all the right foods. Maybe my mom and I should just hang it up here and move to Florida near AB and I’ll adopt myself as part of her family. Sound like a plan, AB? Do you have alligators? I’d love to be in a community that is mostly Jewish but I am afraid of alligators.

But if things were different everything would be different.

G-d must have some purpose for me that required me to be born of Scottish and English ancestry with hair that is only believable as red. I am regularly asked if I am English, which I am in a distant way.

The Chabad rabbi at Penn with whom I’ve become quite good friends says that if you are not born a Jew, be the best non-Jew you can.

So here I am.

I trust that G-d will lead me in the right direction, if I can be still and silent enough to listen.

Here is a yellow flower. I have not forgotten our hostages, and I never will.