Part of the challenge is that we are all dealing with the impact of thousands of years of persecution. There was so much for so long it has impacted us in ways that are not always so positive.
He makes an excellent point. Funny how I didn't really think about that until he mentioned it. I mean, it's so obvious, and yet . . . . I'll be the first to admit that we non-Jews in general don't really get the persecution thing, even when we think we do. I thought I got it until I read the first chapter of the Intermarriage Handbook by Judy Petsonk and Jim Remson. The chapter, entitled "Jewish-Christian History: A Legacy of Pain" was such an eye-opener for me that when I got to the end of those thirteen little pages, I knew deep down that my future children had to be Jewish. I knew I had come to an understanding that would change my life. I've asked myself a hundred times, "How did I not know all that before?" And I'm just smart enough to suspect that there's a lot I still don't get.
And it's not as if my husband was the first Jew I ever met. In fact, in a strange twist of events that I believe to be destiny, in the two summers before I met him, almost everyone I became close to during graduate school in D.C. was Jewish (and deaf -- I was attending Gallaudet University). I met them at different times, in different classes, and many of them didn't even know one another, yet somehow I "clicked" with all these people who I kept later finding out were Jewish. And there was even a woman I met from Tajikistan who barely escaped with her life; it was so dangerous for her family that her parents hadn't dared to tell her she was a Jew until she was old enough to accept the responsibility of keeping such an important secret. She had had to leave in a hurry, her parents pushing her sister and her onto a plane whose destination they didn't even know at the time; they had been given forty-eight hours to convert to Islam or be killed.
I thought I understood after I watched the terrifying stories she told with her hands. Yet the chapter in that book I read two years later deepened my understanding. So even when we non-Jews think we get it, we still don't, do we?
When people I knew were dumbfounded by the Jewish reaction to Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, at first I couldn't get why they didn't get it, but then I remembered my way of thinking before reading The Intermarriage Handbook. Several years earlier, I might have been equally baffled, although I like to think I would have tried to understand. I wanted to copy that chapter and just pass it out. In the end, it was this speech by Abraham Foxman that I sent to people instead.
To end on a lighter note, here's a perfect illustration of the conflict. In this excerpt from Stars of David, playwright Tony Kushner retells a family story of his life partner Mark Harris.
"The first year that Mark's parents were married, his Catholic
mother, Harriet, wanted to impress his Jewish dad's mother, Minnie
Moskowitz. So Harriet made this huge seder meal, and at the conclusion of
the meal, Minnie made a toast, saying, 'I'm deeply moved that my new
daughter-in-law, the enemy of my people, has made such a beautiful seder
meal.'"
Every time I read that, I laugh so hard I almost pee my pants.
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