Thursday, August 20, 2020

Losing My Religion

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.

Chai ("Living" or "18")

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.

Tefillin

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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