A Goy at the Shabbos Table

Photo: Rachel F. Young/Fotolia

Ever since I met Yitz and his friends, I’ve been struggling with the question: How do I explain Williamsburg to my mother and Alabama to the Chasidim?

When I first mentioned my new friends to my mother, she was less than thrilled. “These don’t seem like your people,” she said. “Are they freaks? Is that what you like about them?”

I went on to explain what I liked about them—their warmth, their humor, their apparent unconditional acceptance of me, a shiksa, in their midst—but my mother only listens to me half the time, and only haphazardly remembers what she does hear.

“Here’s the takeaway, Mom. They’re welcoming. I’ve never met a group of people so willing to take me in, sight-unseen.” These friends have mostly rejected the tenets of Chasidism, they tell me, but there’s still something about them that appears rooted in their culture, the emphasis on family and community and opening their doors to a stranger. “Maybe I’m honeymooning,” I said to my mom after a moment’s thought, “but I’m enjoying it for now.”

With that, she gave me a break. No doubt I’ll have to explain myself again next week, but for now she’s content that I haven’t sold my soul to a cult.

I was considered a gifted child. Aside from an absolute inability to carry a tune, I excelled at pretty much everything. I started speaking single words at nine months, full sentences by a year. I read Steinbeck in the second grade. When I didn’t score perfectly on a standardized test, I still reached the 98^th percentile. When I sketched storybook characters, no one believed I’d drawn them without help. I was pretty sure I was normal. My mother was convinced otherwise. Ever since I was little she has been monitoring my life anxiously, afraid that one day I’ll turn my interests to something misguided like heroin, or worse, the Moonies, and she’ll lose me—and all my precious gifts—forever. To my mother, the Chasidim are just another entry in her long list of worries.

As a child, others around me, too, had great expectations: either I was going to save the world, or I was going to shatter, too fragile to be useful. While still in elementary school, adults used to ask me ridiculously mature questions. “What med school do you plan to attend?” a friend’s mother once asked as we waited for the bus the morning after a sleepover party. I was eleven.

Now, as an adult, those who’ve known me since childhood think I’ve fizzled. I haven’t accomplished much to speak of, which my best friend Maggie has been reminding me a lot lately. “You seem interested only in—I don’t know—autistic kids, vagrants, trannies… For godssakes, get a real job.” Not only have I failed to cure cancer, but I’ve developed a fascination with outliers, people on the fringes of society. Chasidim, Maggie seemed to say, are just more of the same.

On the phone again the next day, I reminded my mother that I live five blocks from Maggie and I rarely get to see her. I have to text her two weeks in advance to get a slot in her busy social calendar. But these Chasidim—they get together every Friday night. “Can you picture that, Mom? Can you imagine gathering up your family members and friends for a big dinner every single week? No soccer practice, no work meetings, no trips to Wal-Mart?”

My mother admitted she couldn’t. Sure, families in the secular world have dinner together, but it’s not a drop-everything affair and it isn’t imbued with a sense of sacred importance.

And then, as we were talking, Yitz called. “Gotta go, Mom,” I said. I was meeting Yitz and his friends for the Shabbos meal, and the z’man—one of the many words I was learning—was fast arriving. I felt bad for cutting my mother off, but my guilt was assuaged by the sound of the TV in the background. She wasn’t exactly giving me her full attention.

Yitz told me to pick up some booze for the Shabbos meal, and I hastened to get dressed. I shimmied into some black tights and the one tznius dress I owned, then pulled on a long wool coat to complete the ensemble. My black lace-up ankle boots instantly marked me, by the scrutinies of real Yidden, as an outsider playing an odd game of dress-up. Fortunately, I could still pass as young enough to have my hair uncovered. The important thing was that I was present and genuine. And that I came with whiskey in hand.

I used Shabbos dinners as an opportunity to improve my vocabulary—mikvah and heimish and gefilte fish. I particularly liked saying Yiddishkeit, playing with the emphasis, spitting it out forcefully. If anything, I was dedicated and it endeared me to my new friends. I still didn’t quite grasp why they liked me, though. I was openly critical of some aspects of Judaism, and I couldn’t suppress my laughter when Yitz explained niddah to me after a few drinks. “Really? God cares when you have sex?” But yet they embraced me, and I basked in their warmth. I’d never met so many people so willing to accept me.

Saturday morning, I lay in bed and my eyes drifted to the framed college diploma on the wall. “The Savannah College of Art and Design awards, on this first day of June in the year of 2009…” After my college graduation ceremony, my favorite professor pulled me aside for a tight hug. He told me I was one of his brightest students, and he really believed in me. What would he think about me now? That day isn’t so distant, but it turns out that I’m just an average adult. Quirky, yet average. He might be disappointed. I’m disappointed, for Christ’s sake. Thinking about this made me want to call my mom.

“I’ve decided that it’s okay that I’m never going to save the world. I’m okay with it. I am still special in my own way. I have friends that love me.”

“Does this have something to do with those Jews?” she asked after a pause. “I get why you like them, but why in the world do they like you?”

I thought it best to change the subject. “Can we work out the Thanksgiving menu now. Does Emily want that cornbread stuffing this year?” I’d decided to host our family’s Thanksgiving dinner at my apartment in Brooklyn. My family is flying in from Alabama and I’m gathering up a few wayward friends for what I hope will be a heart-warming union of loved ones. I even purchased a new dinner table which makes my kitchen look like it belongs to a large Chasidic family–hardly enough room for the diners. The oversized table is a visual declaration of my revised values and a chance to edit my life’s script for the positive.

“Maggie said she’d come over the night before to prep the soup, and Yitz offered to bring a loaf of challah. That’s bread.”

“As long as it doesn’t taste funny…” Mom trails off and I roll my eyes. “I’m interested in meeting one of those Chasidics, though. Lord knows they’ve got to be more normal than those green-haired kids you brought home in high school.”

And more normal is all the approval I need.