Stories

This post is a follow-up to The BSF.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about stories, and as always, the Big Scary Future.

We grew up learning, telling, hearing, loving stories that seemed completely detached from reality. Fairy tales, with their brave knights and fearsome beasts, folk-tales, with their witches and wise men. As a kid, I loved these tales. I ran to read my monthly Cricket magazines, eager to discover new legends from China, India, Russia, or the Congo. On the rare occasion a Jewish folk-tale was featured (usually a Chelm anecdote or a Chanukah tale), I gave a little shriek of joy.

I've saved every one of these magazines. Every once in a while, I look through them, rereading the Ramayana or adventures of Lohengrin, and all the time I wonder, why is it that I know about as much about the legends and myths of all these amazing cultures as I do about my own (that is, not that much)? Why is it that I spent my whole life going to Jewish schools and camps, and yet the most I’ve learned about the folk-culture of our generations, the superstitions and silly jokes, I learned from a magazine without any Jewish connections?

Oh, I’m not saying I don’t know my own culture. I grew up learning the Tanach and Halacha and Talmud on the surface and in-depth, along with enough commentaries and Midrashim to challenge those Shakespeare-typing monkeys in space any day. But to me, these seem like a different caliber of Jewish cultural education. I mean, think about it. Essentially, we’re being taught what we must learn in order to continue our faith and pass it down to future generations. They’re indispensible. But what’s to become of the lighter fare of our faith, those stories told by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, or the Chelm Tales, or even those medieval Jewish legends of the Ten Lost Tribes?

We didn’t learn them. Or if we did, they were told to us at a fire-side Kumzits by an energetic speaker, or on a Shabbaton, or on the bus to camp. And I don’t know about you guys, but I treasured those story-telling moments as much if not more than when I learned the authoritative lessons in the classroom.

I've had many discussions with people from all along the spectrum of Judaism: Yeshivish teachers, Modern-Orthodox friends, proud culturally-Jewish atheists, and High-Holiday-only family friends. Some have told me that those classroom essentials are basically just better-known folk-tales (a view which, I must admit caused me to flinch a little. I respect it, but I can’t agree with it). Others called them leftover superstitious nonsense. Still others recalled them with nostalgia, having heard them during childhood from their European grandparents.

My own view is that they have little to do with the essentials of the faith. These aren’t part of the guide to living as a Jew. They have nothing to tell us about keeping Shabbat or Kashrut, or about what Moshe Rabbeinu meant when he said “x”. They are not our faith, but they are our culture, as much as those Zemirot we sing at the Shabbat table, or the paintings of Chagall, or the reggae beats of Matisyahu. They are our past, and so we have what to learn from them. They were the stories fathers in the shtetls told their kids to alleviate the fear of the next pogrom. They were the jokes they told to deal with the Dreyfus Affair and the latest blood libel. They are windows into how we lived, and how we were treated not so long ago. Haven’t we been taught that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it? In the end, our history is all we have to shape our future. 

They are ours to be proud of, the influences of our modern sense of humor and comic-book superheroes. And, as I recently discovered via some book-shelf surfing and amazon.com searching, they are really, awesomely…well, cool. How often do you hear that about something undeniably Jewish?

Did you know that during the 18^th-19^th centuries, European Jews had their own versions of Snow White, Cinderella, and Rapunzel? I sure as heck didn’t. And why shouldn’t they? Every other culture did. Did you know that we had fairy tales starring brave princes who kept Shabbat, and princesses who played upon the violin of Eliyahu HaNavi? Some of these stories are so fantastically amazing, I can’t help but read them over and over, and annoyingly shove them in the face of everyone I know.

And now, it seems they’ve come to influence a lot more than just my sense of Jewish pride. My art projects echo them. My blog posts and cartoons mention them at every turn. And now that I’ve started that scary climb into real adulthood (eek!), they seem to have pushed me into a career path as well.

After years of agonizing over majors, then trying out internships in every field that interested me, then checking out programs in those fields, I seem to have picked a road to walk down. My first, real, every-single-day job starts this week, and I’ve begun the process of applying to graduate school, finally choosing an actual path of study. And it’s not what many would call a “safe” career path. I’m not going to be a doctor or a lawyer. I’ve chosen to combine my love of all things nonpractical: my love of art and culture, and my seemingly aching need to teach the future generation of young Jews to be proud of their background and realize there’s more to being a Jew than bagels with lox and being a nerdy Woody Allen caricature. It may not make me a dime, but it sure is fulfilling.

And it’s the stories that did it. That’s something I only realized last week, when I sat down to start my first graduate-school admissions essay. The topic demanded of me: “What connections can you make between (experiences in childhood and your background) and your present feelings…about children and youth…and your own patterns of action?”In other words, what about my past possessed me to do what I’m doing now?

And I realized: it’s my culture. It’s those legends I learned from my parents as we walked along the banks of the Danube in Budapest. It’s every gasp of excitement my five-year-old self issued when she realized this PBS kids’ show was going to mention Chanukah in its holiday special. It’s every ache of nostalgia and sense of responsibility I feel when I read one of these so-little-known stories, and my repeated thoughts: I can’t let these be lost. They’re too beautiful. They’re too enchanting. They’re too significant. They’re too Jewish. I’m going to write about them. About my culture, how it’s undertaught, and how that inspired me to make a career out of helping kids discover the parts of knowledge beyond the essentials: art, music, and yes, stories. 

And as a bonus, I've realized my faith and my culture are some unexpected weapons I can use in the fight against the BSF. When I feel like the monster's beating me, I have my faith, my culture, and my loved-ones who share them. I’m not saying that’s enough to win the battle, but it sure feels good to be armed with something that’s got as much of an investment in me as I've got in it.

Big Scary Future, let's dance.

An American Jew in Europe

New York, at times the center of the modern universe, seems to have a unique disconnect from the rest of the world, as if crossing the Brooklyn Bridge or the Midtown Tunnel changes the laws of science, or more topically, Halacha.

Since my very Hungarian family and I travel to our old Motherland an average of once a year to visit relatives and get reacquainted, I have front row seats to watch the disconnect. Most of the time it consists of my sister and I joking about how our spoiled American butts can’t handle European toilet paper (but this is okay, because we present-day Americans aren’t the most pampered people history has seen). 

The more fascinating, and sometimes deeply frustrating, version of the disconnect, though, is this strange Halachic language barrier between New York Jews and their foreign brethren.

You see, there is one system of Halacha, but many social standards based on it. These vary in practice and strictness depending on where you come from. Take, for example, Shomer Negiyah. I certainly see the reasoning behind keeping repressed and twitchy pubescent boys and girls from touching, whether or not I agree with it in every situation.  The kicker is that while we Relig-Jews in New York have been trained obsessively in this rule, we don’t realize that it is by no means standard globally, even among the Orthodox.

In Hungary, for example, even our most observant friends aren’t Shomer. I grew up getting polite cheek-kiss greetings from a family friend who wears a black hat. And sure, New York versus Europe is clearly a case of "Potato, Po-tah-to" (with a rolled ‘r’ or two), but it isn’t the difference that bothers me. Sometimes those who were brought up with the rule are not prepared to deal with those who weren't. My problem comes when the emphasis on keeping the rules (or our inability to deal with those who don’t) gets in the way of us acting like human beings, when it causes us to degrade and embarrass people on the other end.

A friend of mine who arrived “fresh off the boat,” so to speak, a few years ago (who grew up and remains Orthodox) told me about the first time he was introduced to a few religious, good, American, college girls.

Yes. They actually ran away.

What these tactless and clearly confused girls failed to realize is that they’d effectively tainted his view of American Jewry for a long time to come. Before I’d heard this story, I’d been surprised at what I saw as my friend’s unnecessarily careful way of tiptoeing around every movement and word when meeting new people. Nobody likes to be judged and made a fool, especially not the new guy. The girls were lucky he’s secure enough in his faith not to let their behavior turn him off from it. 

But the New York/Europe detachment stretches far beyond the borders of social standards, into the realm of serious, unarguable Halacha: Kashrut.

We New Yorkers may complain that more things aren’t available Kosher, or when Starbucks arbitrarily changes its drink base to apparently include slugs, but the truth is that we are incredibly lucky to even have those little OU and OK symbols to guide us, to have our pick of good (if insanely expensive) restaurants at our disposal. Most countries don’t have a system of Kashrut certification at all, or if they do, it is used on only a fraction of food items, due to lack of either demand or cooperation from food factory owners.

These countries handle Kashrut by their own methods. In Hungary, Kashrut “certification” goes by word of mouth. True, Budapest boasts three (really good) Kosher restaurants, an un-freaking-believable Kosher Café, and two or three grocery stores/butcher shops, but the selection of staple items are severely limited. And that’s in the biggest city in a country with one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. Forget the little towns in countries like Luxembourg.

If you want to keep kosher in Budapest (and few Hungarians do), you’re going to have to cough up an arm and a leg for a package of salami, and travel to the former Ghetto to pick it up. There’s simply no way to only eat certified-kosher products.  Many European countries work the same way, if they have any Kosher restaurants at all. Going back to Europe means I get to live this interesting sort of double-life, relying on unofficial lists and friends’ recommendations instead of a convenient label for two or three weeks a year. It also means I get to see many variations on this discussion once I get back:

What truly cracks me up is when those products which are available Kosher in Europe and Israel, which are made in one factory and distributed globally, are denied in only one place, and that’s the one with the largest Jewish population in the world: the USA. The perfect example of such an item is the old favorite: Bailey’s Irish Cream Liquor.

Bailey’s is “not recommended” as Kosher by the Orthodox Authorities in the United States. It is, however, used in such delicious food items as Ben & Jerry’s Dublin Mudslide ice-cream and Bailey's-Flavored Haagen Dazs, which bear Kashrut certification. It is also certified Kosher in places such as England, Australia, and Israel. The mysterious case of Bailey’s has confused me for years, and I’ve heard every answer from “it’s actually perfectly alright” to “there’s a separate bottling plant in the US which is not Halachically acceptable.”  I’ve asked around and researched online, discovering along the way that yes, there is just one recipe and one bottling plant, and yes, the stuff I get in Budapest is fine. But it’s not fine here. I truly don’t get how this works.

Anyone who has known me for about five minutes knows of my interest in the varying standards of social and Halachic law across the globe. I enjoy my chance to see both worlds. I adore the Hungarian Kosher Café and love my time in Budapest (which I highly recommend as a beautiful and culturally rich travel option). I often complain about how closed-minded and cliquey New York Jews are.

But of course, there’s a reason my parents left the place, the same reason all of my European friends left their hometowns, and it isn’t because they were bored. This summer, I finally got to see it firsthand.

Things in Hungary (and Europe in general) are not great for Jews right now. With the economy the way it is and with an ultra-right wing party in parliament, it’s becoming increasingly acceptable to be a full-blown xenophobe, Gypsy-hater, and anti-Semite. I’ve been told about graffiti in France and rocks through windows in Greece. I know my parents’ stories of hiding their religion during communism and of their escape to the US. I remember when my sister got called “a dirty Jew.”  But a week ago (finally, it seems), I got to see it myself.

My parents took me to the south of Hungary, to a beautiful little city where cobblestones line the streets and porcelain fountains make the town square interesting. We had an awesome time touring, and at the end of the day, we sat down in the town square for a snack, and my father realized he had to daven Mincha.

He walked to the edge of the square and stood behind a tree, as any davener might do in public, and started to pray while my mom and I dug into the sandwiches we’d brought from our Budapest apartment.

As we ate, we began to notice the huge, apparently steroid-popping guys sitting near us, joking amongst themselves. I thought amusingly about how one of them bore an uncanny resemblance to a character from my neighbor’s old Street Fighter 2 video game (the other one looked like a fat hobo). But the farther along we got in our sandwiches, the more my mom, and then I, began to hear what they were laughing about.

  

Eventually, my dad finished praying and joined us. And the Street-Fighter guys got louder.

That was about as far as they got before my mom said “That’s it!” and told my dad (who hadn’t heard or noticed anything) that she needed to find a bathroom in a building across town NOW. She ushered us out of the town square before telling my dad what happened. He shrugged and said, “We’re here. What do you expect?”

The truth is, I love going to Hungary anyway, and this little incident wouldn’t keep me from it. After all, I’ve been travelling back and forth since I was born, and this is the first time I ever got “Jewed” (in Europe, anyway). But at that moment, I couldn’t help my sudden longing for New York, for my friends, for Kosher-Certified pizza, even for speeches on sleeve length technicalities to roll my eyes at.  

We New York kids, who grew up in the States, who have never been beaten up for wearing a kippah, who have clicked our tongues at the awful anti-Semitic things they do somewhere else… we are so lucky that we can complain about Bailey’s lack of a label. As we sped-walked away from the town square, all I could think was man, am I spoiled. Am I lucky to live where I do, when I do. Well, that and Steroid Man, someone really ought to kick your butt. 

The BSF

In childhood, we all had our monsters. Some were hairy and lived in closets; others were multi-fanged and slept under a bed. We were told as kids that if we ignored them, the monsters would go away, back to whatever tortured chamber of our subconscious they had come from. What grown-ups didn’t tell us was that as we got older, those scary (but at least nighttime-bound) creatures would be replaced by worse ones, specters that would haunt our late teenage-early twenties years day and night, whether we were asleep or awake.

They never warned us about the BSF.

Now, as we enter adulthood, so many of my peers and I are plagued by questions of the future. We were led to believe that if we were polite to grown-ups, followed the rules, worked hard instead of watching TV, and brought home good grades, these questions would practically answer themselves. But I’ve found that the questions of what am I going to do and who will be there with me while I do it can strike at any time…

…And without so much as a blink transform themselves into uncontrollable, drooling monsters the likes of which I have never had to face before. The future has become the BIG SCARY FUTURE.

The BSF. The haunter of any college grad’s nightmares.

You can recognize the BSF by its two heads, the Drooling Head of Love and Marriage and the Sharp-Beaked Head of Career (also known as the What-The-#$%&-Are-You-Doing-With-Your-Life Head).

The scariest part about the BSF is that is cannot be fought off. If you ignore it, you risk turning into a character to be played by Seth Rogen (also starring a 40-year-old Michael Cera). Eventually, you must face this monster with every weapon you’ve acquired over the years. The problem with this is that you have little-to-no way of knowing which weapons will be effective, or if the only way past the BSF is sheer, dumb luck.

In facing the Love/Marriage Head (recognizable by its distinctive gold ring and constant drooling), I’ve gotten every form of advice from “attend more parties” to “grow your hair” to “wear more/less makeup” to “don’t think about it and it will drop into your lap.” So far, the monster keeps roaring in my face, and its breath stinks. So far, I’ve watched many of my friends tame it with varying levels of effort, from “bat my eyelashes and I’m taken” to “this is my sixteenth Shidduch date and at least he’s tolerable.”

As for the Career Head (with its sharp features and under-eye bags), I’m armed with a little more: a few part-time jobs, an internship or two, references from kind people, and a shiny new college degree. However, it seems that the monster has built up a resistance to this type of weaponry, considering that every knight it faces nowadays is armed with exactly the same things, especially in a city like New York.

Blech.

Our battle with the BSF can wage for months, even years, and between our weekend attempts at meeting new people and our scores of cover letter/resume combos, we still have to live our daily lives, whether we attend school, wait tables, or take advantage of the pause in life progress to try the programs we know we’ll never have time for again once the BSF has been defeated.

There come moments in this day-to-day living where we may decide: forget it, I’ll defy convention. Let’s start our own path, our own way to dodge the BSF. Travel! Start a business! Inherit billions! Become a reality superstar! This discovery is elating. You may feel like you want to shove your new method in the faces of all the other yuppies with their suits and ties, and sing defiant anthems from the rooftops. This is ill-advised.

Whether or not the action is metaphorical, shoving your plans at other people while screeching My Chemical Romance will get you egged.

Whatever you do (especially if your battle with the BSF has, like mine, forced you to take repeated trains to Flatbush), never wait for public transportation in the rain, in Brooklyn, while listening to Radiohead.

I don’t care if you’re the most cheerful, luckiest person alive. Trips to Brooklyn in bad weather accompanied by depressing alternarock will turn you suicidal. And it will take many comforting phone calls, multiple favorite movies, and several types of pie to get you out of that funk.

If you do decide to face the BSF in your every waking hour, whether by job searching full-time or studying for big tests and kissing professor butt, beware. Tackling one head can often weaken your fight against the other. And even if it doesn’t, occasions like this may arise:

If this happens, no one will care how stressed you are or how good your intentions. You have become a jerk, the opposite of the admirable time-organizer/prioritizer I discussed back in December.

I think it’s safe to say that at some point, we’ve all tried almost every one of these approaches to dealing with our impending future. And as Jews, we may feel the added pressure of knowing that we’re expected to answer these questions sooner than we thought. 22 is very, blissfully young. I’ve heard that statement more often than I’ve heard advertisements guarantee satisfaction or my money back. And yet at times I feel like I can see 30 rounding a corner. I can name at least a dozen girls I know who were married before 21, and many more friends of mine who seem to have found their perfect job/mate/apartment/sword to slay the BSF. We seem to have forgotten that we’re still at the beginning of our journey.

On bad days, this thought depresses me, and I have to resort to one of the above methods of distraction (wipes tomato off face and accepts pudding sheepishly). But on better ones, I can remember, with a deep breath and a smile, that worrying about it now will not allow me to tame the BSF any sooner, and I decide to enjoy the time I have (I think that link illustrates my point better than I do, and the song partly inspired this post).

Because no matter what, I’ll have to meet the BSF eventually. Hopefully, I won’t have to fail in too many attempts before I finally stroll, victorious into the sunset. And having typed this, I realize that this sentence alone gives me reason to hope, because despite my fears and nightmares, I still see myself coming away from it happy, having found what I’m looking for, even if it’s only a long while from now.

And that can only mean I haven’t let the BSF beat me yet.