Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2020
Images from the Internet
Losing My Religion
The part of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in which I grew up, 99 percent
of the population was either Italian or Jewish. Most of Bensonhurst was
Italian, but my little area was more a 50-50 mix. There were two Chinese
Families (both of whom owned the local Asian restaurants), two African-American
domiciles, a smattering of Irish, and then the rest of us. Our grade-school teachers
were all white, nearly all women, and a vast majority Jewish.
We were quite typical for that area’s Jewish Lower Middle
Class. That meant on the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we
went to the local synagogue, the Yeshiva of Bensonhurst on 78 Street (now a private
middle and high school called the Sinai Academy, geared towards the children of
Russian Immigrants), and that was pretty much the only time. You needed to buy
a ticket per person, and it sold out. It is not a small temple, and had an
enormous balcony (where we usually sat).
The Italian kids in our elementary school (PS 128, the same
as attended by the Three Stooges in their youth) got Wednesday afternoon off to
attend classes for their Communion and general Catholic instruction, while we Jewish
kids sat in the classroom, bored because the teacher didn’t want to do lessons
to just half the class. In the mid-1960s, however, a small synagogue and shul (Jewish
school) run by a Hassidic group opened up on 21 Avenue in a house a block away from
the school (now the Congregation Anshei Sfard Khal Faltishen). They started
sending the Jewish kids there for religious instructions. My memories of it are
vague because I would just zone out. My only remembrance of it was being taught
about King David.
During the summer, I would attend a three-week sleepaway camp
for a number of years called H.E.S. (Hebrew Education Society), run by the United
Jewish Appeal (usually just referred to as the UJA). It was a beautiful
location in Harriman State Park along Lake Stahahe, on the side of a mountain
called High Peak, which we climbed every year. There was Saturday morning
services and a prayer before and after each meal, but otherwise it was a normal
summer camp. Evenings were often spent in the rec hall singing Jewish songs (“Zoom
Gali, Gali”) and folk protest songs (e.g., Phil Ochs’ “Draft Dodger Rag” and others
like the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion”). I remember one year, the only 45
they had was Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” and during a social gathering, we’d
play it at 45 to dance, 33-1/3 for slow grinds, and 78 for fast ones; I don’t remember
them ever playing the flipside. Most of the time I had fun there, and the religious
part was merely a function of the routine to get to the rest. I acquired a new
black yarmulke each year, some of which I still own.
Within our household we were “Kosher.” My aunt Elsie (my
mother’s sister) was not as keen on this, so when I would go visit her for a
couple of weeks during the summer, she’d make me a pile of bacon. We were
Kosher in the house because of my dad, Leo. I really don’t believe my mother,
Helen, cared one way or another, and she found the whole Koshering process
(using salt water to drain the blood out of the meat) tiresome, but she kept it
up for him. I still have and employ the big yellow mixing bowl she used but not
for that purpose. When we ate outside of the house, including with my father, such
as when we ate at the local Chinese restaurant or at a friend’s house, we all ate
whatever we wanted.
Like many of my friends back then, our family had five sets
of dishes: there was the two daily meat and dairy set, the two in the upper
cabinet that were brought down for Passover week only, and then the one under
the sink that only saw light when a neighbor made lasagna and shared
(thank you Madeline), or on the very
rare occasion when Chinese food was brought into the house. We never did
the stereotypical Chinese food on Christmas thing. We also never had a tree,
ever.
At the age of 11 or so, I started attending Hebrew School
once a week at the Yeshiva of Bensonhurst, to prepare for my Bar Mitzvah. I was
a terrible student, as I was slow to learn Hebrew and I honestly couldn’t care
about the religious instruction. By the time of my Bar Mitzvah, I could read
Hebrew phonetically quite well (a skill I no longer possess), but I still could
not translate much. Around my house, my mother and father spoke Yiddish to each
other when they did not want my older brother Richie and I to know what they
were talking about, and so I never learned it other than a smattering of words
or phrases, and that also applied to Hebrew School (I took Italian in Middle
School and that was a failure, as well).
Things went along quite smoothly, and I accepted all of this Jewish
culture on face value, pretty much, until I was still young, when something
very subtle but ground shaking for me occurred. My father took me to the
Automobile Show at the Coliseum at Columbus Circle on a lovely Spring day. It was
morning when we got there and it was late afternoon when we were leaving. We
were both hungry, but I knew we’d have to wait until we got home, because it
was Passover, and on Passover you only eat Passover food. But my father bought
us both a salted pretzel (with mustard, of course) from a street vendor. Wait,
I thought, you can eat regular food on Passover? That was a thing? It took me a
long time to process this, but what I realized is that being Kosher was merely
arbitrary and was therefore meaningless. Keeping Kosher in the house sort of
balanced the outside world eating of whatever as a yin-yang thing of centering,
but this was Passover, and until that time we only ate Passover food
during that period. It blew my little mind.
A couple of years after that, there was another change, again
involving Passover: when the holiday came, my mother would climb up and take the
Passover dishes down from the upper kitchen cabinet, and put the daily dishes
in their place. Of course, living in an apartment in Brooklyn meant cockroaches
were a natural part of our environment, so my mother would have to wash all the
Passover dishes, and eight days later, when she switched them back, she’d have
to wash all the daily dishes. At some point she had enough. “Leo,” she said, “I’m
not doing this anymore. Enough!” This led to a multi-day fight that ended with
my mother – all five-feet of her – standing her ground and saying, “Fine, you
want it done, you do it!” And he did. That was the last year we switched
dishes. In fact, they got rid of the entire two sets (leaving the one under the
sink) and bought glass dishes at were used for – shock – both meat and dairy.
Again, it all felt random and pointless.
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Chai ("Living" or "18")
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The day of my Bar Mitzvah, May 18, 1968, was the last day I
set foot into the Yeshiva of Bensonhurst (YoB) until my mother passed away in
1981. You are supposed to attend synagogue every day for a year to say the
Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, when a close relative dies. The funeral
itself was at a synagogue on Long Island near where she was buried, so I
attended the YoB after the week of sitting Shiva. This also turned into a
negative experience for me. The people attending the regular service (who were unknown
to us) were dressed to the nines, showing off their new clothes in direct
competition with each other. I found that crass (“Sadie! $125 at Bergmans!,”
shouted across the aisles). Also, as Wikipedia explains, “In gematria (a form
of Jewish numerology), the number 18 stands for ‘life,’ because the Hebrew
letter that spell chai, meaning ‘living,’ adds up to 18.” So when you contribute,
you donate in “chais”; for example saying “I donate two chai” means $36, “three
chais” is $54, and so forth. The competition with the people there was fierce,
like an auction, on how many “chai” they were going to give. The final one stood
up and shouted, “I donate 12 chai! Anonymously!!” It was such a turnoff
and I felt ashamed just to be there. I never went back.
At PS 128, we Jewish kids were often picked on by the bigger Christian
kids. It was even worse when we got to middle school, the recently opened PS
281, which was rechristened Joseph B. Cavallaro Junior High the year after. I
was even called a “Jew Bastard” by one of the Italian kids in my class (my
response was, “at least I don’t bow down to one,” which got me a good solid
punch to the jaw). While it was 50-50 at PS 128, here we were far outnumbered
by various non-Jewish groups and races. I was running scared all the time
through middle school and at Lafayette High School, which a local news outlet
referred to as “The School from Hell.” No argument from me.
In 1993, thanks to my Masters’ program in Media Ecology, I
had the chance to take a class on communication methodologies in Tel Aviv for a
week, led by social critic and philosopher Neil Postman. I found Tel Aviv
proper quite uninteresting, and often referred to it as “Miami Beach with guns,”
as it seemed most males walked around with rifles around their shoulders even
on casual walks, in case there was a terrorist attack (SCUD missiles had landed
recently not far from where we were staying). It was very modern and very
tense, with lots of glass and steel. I felt more at ease outside the city, in
places like Jaffa (to which we walked a few times) and the one day we had the
opportunity to spend in Jerusalem on a bus trip.
While in Jerusalem, we went to the Wailing Wall and went
through the security checks as everyone did, both Jews and Arabs, and learned
where not to tread. At the Wall, we were told that men had to go to the left,
women to the right, and they were not allowed to mix (this is still true today).
I put a request on a piece of paper, and put it into the Wall, but it felt as hollow
as going to a tarot card reader at a fair, or a soothsayer with a crystal ball.
I also wandered into the Cave, and found many a man praying fervently (no women
allowed in such a holy place), davening and shaking back and forth. All of this
misogyny and exclusion was slowly eating away at the religious part of me.
As I said in an earlier blog, at the burial of the mother of
a good friend, I started talking to the rabbi-for-hire who would do the
ceremony. At some point, he asked me, what was my sect, and I told him
somewhere between reform and conservative (probably more to the latter in those
confused days). He grimaced and snarled, “No such thing, you’re either Orthodox
or you’re not really a Jew.” I turned from the hole in the ground to face him,
stuck my finger in his face, and said, “Whether you believe that or not, we
would have both been in the same gas chamber, so don't you dare tell me I'm
not a Jew.”
Jews have always been viewed as “Other” by the larger
majority Christian and Muslim world, and have been persecuted for it. This is
my connection to being a Jew. Whether I believe in the religion or not, it is
part of my literal genetics, and I am willing to accept that. As for the
religion, I refer to myself as either an agnostic, or secular Jew. We go to
friends on Passover and have them over for Purim suppers. At night I say thanks
as acknowledging what has happened to me during the day as a sign of appreciation
of the events that have occurred (e.g., “thank you for me just catching the bus…”).
While, again, I didn’t really quite have the words for it and
it would take me decades to figure it out, I realized that I was proud of my heritage
but my religion meant little to me. My paternal grandparents had been kicked
out of Hungary in 1910, and my maternal grandparents were forced from Prussia
around the same time. I felt and feel no connection to these sites, so my being
a Jew became part of my identity in a sense of culture, rather than religion. I’m
proud to be a Jew. I love Israel and believe it has a right to exist (though I’m
not always a fan of its government) as a homeland for the Jews (and others), as
I have experienced transgenerational separateness from the land in which my
family came.
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Tefillin
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I have felt a lot of pressure from religious groups through
my life. When I was a first-year undergraduate at Kingsborough Community
College in 1974, I was targeted by the Jews for Jesus for me to “gabba gabba
one of us” join their cult. At Queens College in the late 1970s, we were
inundated by a sect of Hassidism that would grab men (again, can’t touch women
because they might be having their “filthy” periods) and make them do their tefillin
prayers in a van (again from Wikipedia, tefillin, “or phylacteries, is a set of
small black leather boxes containing scrolls inscribed with verses from the
Torah”). During the summer of 1977, when I worked at the Baskin-Robbins on
Seventh Avenue South (a block south of the Stonewall in the West Village),
there was a constant flow of young faces asking me if I had “accepted Jesus as
my personal savior” (I’m sure they were there trying to “save the gays”). Over
the years, there have also been subway preachers who ignored the “Jesus is Love”
route and went straight for the “You’re going to Hell” line of religiosity. I
often challenged them. I came to see the anti-science of religion in the late
1980s when my apartment was visited by a couple of Jehovah Witnesses. They handed
me a little blue book “disproving” evolution using this argument: a computer’s molecules
are simple, and a monkey’s molecules are complex. If a monkey can turn those
complex molecules into an even more complex human, why can’t a simple calculator
turn into a supercomputer? I laughed in their faces, and said, “A calculator doesn’t
reproduce so there is no margin for mutation” (never mind that evolution takes
millions of years, and calculators have only been around for a few dozen at
that point). They were baffled by this, and tried to change the subject.
Now I am comfortable disassociating myself from religious beliefs.
Recently, an online Orthodox Rabbi said I should be reading the Torah with the
commentaries from beginning to end, and with an open mind. My reply was, “That
is the exact wording used by Christians (about the New Testament) and Muslims (the
Koran) who try to tell someone why they should believe their god without proof.”
When it is time for me to pass on from this world, I am
comfortable knowing that, well, that’s it, it is over. I joke about my mother
and father sitting at a bar in heaven with their friends Ralph (and eventually
Audrey), waiting for us to join them. It’s a lovely thought, and to me the imagery
is sublime, but I believe the reality is when the brain no longer functions,
the person is at a permanent rest.
So use your time wisely, and I wish you all the best of
health, a long and fruitful life, and when I go, I am content to know I won’t
think about anything.
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