Endless Delight

One of our young grandchildren is on fire for her Jewishness. I use that term to mean the whole nine yards. If she could speak like an adult, she would describe her delight as a mix of experiences and visual inputs that go beyond the walls of a religious tradition.

She is growing up in a family of experimental Jews who see the task of Jewish life as building community. It might have less to do with observing the commandments than convening, celebrating, and strengthening institutions. Her parents are both the children of rabbis, and they are at home in the flow and complexity of Jewish life, yet you would not take them for religious Jews.

But that doesn’t take away anything from our granddaughter. Let’s call her Yanna to protect her identity. Yanna is a pair of antennae, alert to the rustle of Jewish life. It’s not just home and school and synagogue, but everywhere she goes, the city she lives in. We were walking together the other day in Los Angeles and she picked out the shape of a mezzuzah on a doorpost, the tiny container for a short text from the Torah that is affixed to the doorframe of a house occupied by Jews. She reacted with excitement from her place on the sidewalk, as if she had discovered a four-leaf clover.

Last night in Boston at the celebration of a bar mitzvah, she spent most of the evening using a Playdough knockoff to create a multi-colored dinner suitable for the Sabbath. There was a braided challah, strawberries, and pasta—exactly what she would eat at home. After that, she squeezed out candlesticks and a Kiddush goblet to complete the setting for a traditional feast. Imagine a young Judy Chicago setting out a public banquet celebrating, not the iconography of feminism, but the sancta of the Jews.

I worry, of course, that the center will not hold. We are living in a period of intense disruption. The normal forces of American assimilation continue to scrape at the forms of Jewish life, attenuating the tradition and dumbing down our inheritance. At the same time, we are in the process of disengagement, with Israel on one side and the World Jewish Community on the other. Meanwhile the background is become the foreground with Jew-hatred gaining in both ferocity and wiliness.

Will Yanna’s joy and enthusiasm survive? I choose to believe it will both survive and flourish. But whatever happens, it gives me hope. I want to be exactly like Yanna, regardless of what others thing of me, their hostility toward Israel, their suspicions about Jews. Our granddaughter’s appetite for the richness of her inheritance is exactly what I want for my family and myself: the constant stimulation of a multivarious tradition that opens pathways for nourishment and celebration. This is what we were put on earth to experience and share with anyone who joins our orbit.

Yanna’s Playdough goblet belongs to all of us, and I raise it joyfully to her health and her future.