Biblical Advertising

You totally know this would have happened had there been ads in biblical times:

No disrespect meant to Tanach or King David. Some meant to Avshalom. Girls, if a guy spends THAT much time on his hair when he should be in battle (or at work), there's a serious problem.

If Movies Were Real: Home Alone

Credit must go to my Law & Ethics professor, who first suggested this scenario. Were movies real, you know this would happen.

We Made It!

Alright then. Here we be. Finally, a home on the interwebz for a number of wandering souls just trying to find their places.

I've wanted to start a "life blog," for lack of a better phrase, ever since I was still wasting away in the seemingly never ending pit of hell society calls high school. Instead of taking to a public forum, I started a locked LiveJournal that, mark my words, will never see the light of day. Years later, I now find myself typing up a welcome post to an as-yet unknown public blog.

The posts below me discuss with the idea that we as Jews do not need to explain ourselves for anything whatsoever, because we are who we are. This is all very well and good, but there are those of us out there who don't have it so easy in that department.

I come from a heavily multicultural family. The United Nations ain't got nothing on me. My extended family members, for the most part, are not Red Sea Pedestrians. Some hail from the Islands, Africa, Ireland and more. (My parents are not converts; my extended family has almost completely intermarried. It's very complicated and I will spare you the particulars of my family tree.) They celebrate Christmas with tinsel, eggnog and a succulent Yule ham. If I ever felt the need to rebel, all I would need to do is take a trip over to my cousins and try a bit of grilled lobster, lightly buttered.

This leads to an interesting situation. My immediate family are almost the only observant Jews in the entire extended clan, with the exception of two of my second cousins who are not the most favorably disposed people on earth. Because we don't eat McDonald's hamburgers or drive on Saturdays, we are sort of... hopeless freaks.

Some of the men in my family who have chosen to marry non-Jewish women joke in front of us about their bar mitzvah experiences as if to say, "Load of good that did me." Awkward. To them, our Jewishness is not alright. It is archaic, outdated and just plain ridiculous.

But for the most part, we all keep the peace. We know we're sometimes an inconvenience. Family get-togethers need to be rescheduled for Sundays instead of Saturdays and since we choose not to frequent certain eating establishments, kosher takeout can be a bit expensive.

Thus far, I am the only person I have ever heard of who has eaten a kosher chicken and side dishes from Brach's for Christmas dinner with their half-black cousins. I certainly hope the fabulous gifts we brought made up for the fact that they couldn't enjoy their traditional succulent pig on account of us.

I seem to have acquired a taste for the bizarre because of my family situation, or perhaps I always had a propensity for the unusual. I have never known anything different than a hodgepodge of people in my family.

Ultimately, I do indeed need to explain myself. And to my own family, at that. From the ignorant questions I receive from family members who think that because I don't shop on Saturdays, I will shave my head when I get hitched someday to the simple questions about which brand of ice cream I can eat, I need to explain myself. I need to explain my lifestyle to my own flesh and blood, some of whom choose not to abide by the laws of Judaism and some of whom were never commanded by G-d to abide by these laws in the first place.

I would not have my life any different. I've met people from every race and religion, and they are all my kin. I actually think I'm heading out into the world with a huge advantage over my fellow Modern Orthodox counterparts because of the variety of people with whom I've come into contact. Time will tell.

So to Daniel, I say, indeed, I need to explain myself. And to Aliza, I say, being Jewish is not only "not alright" in some parts of the world, but it is also "not alright" according to certain members of my own family.

And so we wander on.

I Don't Think We Need to Explain Ourselves

Because, well, why should we?

We are who we are, and our feet are sore. Our backs ache, our noses and ears are sunburned, there's bread growing on our shoulders (don't worry, it's not rising, at least not if you're Ashkenazi) and we think we may have made a mistake leaving the old neighborhood behind. What's a little whipping when you have a roof over your head and job security?

Fast-forward a few years and a walk across the sea and we've trudged through every stage of national existence at least a few times. Namely, wandering, nation-building (Take I), wandering, nation-building (Take II), wandering, wandering, wandering... and, as of last century, finally, nation building (Take III). (Persecution, being a constant, cancels out.)

So where are we now? Everywhere, carefully checking rocks for kosher marks before drinking anything from them (AFTER filtering for copepods) and impatiently waiting for the first minute of the third, fifth, or sixth hour so we can finally eat that Hershey's bar. And we're doing all this in abnormally dense urban accumulations where we build shuls two blocks from our houses so that we can walk the walk without actually having to do anything of the sort, and also because we don't like the rabbi at either of the shuls two blocks away in the other direction and God forbid we should be seen mingling with the Conservatives.

Somehow, maybe because of our wandering and maybe despite it, we've become so inwardly focused that we've stopped looking at what's around us. And who, for that matter. We just keep trudging ahead simply because it's what we've always done, with a little shuffle to the right or the left as the times dictate. Somehow the people who stop for a moment to check out the wilderness from whence we came, to breathe the air out there, to wander a little themselves, are the daring few, and far between.

Being Jewish is alright here, yes. Thank goodness. But it's worth reminding ourselves -- not others, but ourselves -- that being Jewish is alright out there, too. We of all people believe that this wide world was created for us to enjoy. So maybe we should make it a point to do that a little more often.

I Suppose We Should Explain Ourselves

Congratulations. We're on the internet. A life blog for sarcastic Jews, for lack of a better description. So let's take this opportunity, when no one has yet heard of us and the only one reading is the internet void, to explain the meaning of our title.

So, what is a Red Sea Pedestrian anyway? If you've read Tanach or seen The Prince of Egypt or The Ten Commandments or Life of Brian, you know. The short answer is, a Jew.

We're Jews, but we're also walkers, wanderers in an endless sea of faces. That's right, not only are we Jewish, but we're also New Yorkers. Beat us over the head with Woody Allen and call us Katz.

New York is the city of millions of anonymous faces, or to be less depressing, hundreds of people waiting to be met and discovered. But somehow, the sea seems even more vast when you're one of a few, when your particular species of fish is on the endangered list. Or, to look on the bright side, a rarer breed.

One sweltering day this past summer, I was walking in Columbus Circle, heading for the travelling sauna that is the subway, when I thought I should probably preempt the dehydration and pick up a drink from one of those hot dog carts NYC seems to have on back order. This was when Gatorade had just become Kosher, a milestone for us on the Orthodox end of things. Finally, a product that had technically been Kosher for years now had the reassuring label! So naturally, I went for the most plastic-looking flavor, some kind of techno-sounding blue liquid.

Now, I'm normally a bit of a food nut, the type who won't pick up a snack with artificial flavors or anything that advertises "Real Fruit Flavor." But this was New York in July. It looked like the fountain of life to me.

The man behind the cart, a shortish skinny guy fresh off the plane from somewhere looked up at me and asked: "What's that?"

"What's what?"

He pointed at my chest to be clear. I realized he was referring to my Magen David necklace, which I constantly wear because yes, I want everyone who comes within eight feet of me to know where I come from, at least religiously speaking.

"Oh, this?" I asked casually, trying not to sound like I had a complete stranger poking me in the chest, "It's a Star of David."

"What's it mean?" he asked, "Is it from where you come from? Where'd you come from?"

"Um... here? New York? It means I'm Jewish. It's a Jewish symbol."

He took his pointing hand back and looked at me like I'd just declared Play-Doh a new gourmet seasoning.

"Oh." he said, handing me my change, "Well don't worry about that. That's alright here."

I was in too much of a rush and a little surprised to have the presence of mind to ask where he'd come from, where it wasn't alright. Somehow the comment stuck with me.

That's alright here.

I can feel lucky, I guess, that I live in a place and time where it is alright to be Jewish, not like the world where my parents and grandparents grew up.

Or I can wonder what he was implying, or better yet laugh the thing off as another typical New York daily event.

I'm one fish in a sea where, at least for now, it's alright to be a pedestrian. It's okay to have crossed the Red Sea on land a few thousand years ago. I kind of like it.

And the Gatorade tasted like cough-syrup flavored plastic.