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Beyond Chocolate Bunnies and Passover Baskets

[additional-authors]
April 15, 2015

As I prepared for Passover last week, one of my co-workers asked me if I made “Passover baskets” for my kids.  When I replied no, she asked, “You mean your kids don’t get bunnies and Easter eggs?”

And so it begins.

Soon, my co-workers file in and the questions begin.  I am never asked about Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur.  However, it is assumed that Jews celebrate Christmas and Easter with a twist.

Most of my co-workers have met a few Jews.  Some even have a Jewish relative by marriage.  I am told their Jewish relatives are nothing like me.  I am the only observant Jew they have ever met.  At this point, I am the CEO of the Jewish people.

The Jews they have known don’t keep kosher or observe Shabbat.  Those Jews informed my co-workers that Jews do not eat pork because we didn’t know how to cook it properly.  They told my co-workers that ham was fine after the rabbi blessed it.  Lobster and shrimp were kosher because they are fish.  I would rather explain the meaning of life than dispel the nonsense of Jews who are ignorant of their Jewish heritage or embarrassed by it. 

We live far away from a large Jewish community.  It is easier to find little green men in New Mexico than Jews in the South.  It should not be this way.  The American South has never been devoid of Jews.   Some of the oldest synagogues in America are in Charleston and Savannah.  Richmond, Virginia is home to the only Jewish military cemetery outside of Israel.  The cemetery contains graves of Jewish Confederates who died at Manassas, Petersburg and Gettysburg.  There are thriving Jewish communities all over the South, but it is not New Jersey and my co-workers are curious.

As the questions fly, in walks my mentor.  She is African American and deeply religious.  A few years ago she accompanied her pastor on an Easter trip to Israel.  The stops included Masada, the Sea of Galilee, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.  She saw people rolling matzos and preparing for Pesach.   She looks at my co-workers and says, “You are all a bunch of idiots.”  She explains that the Last Supper was the Passover Seder and that Jesus (not his real name, she explains) kept the Sabbath.  His religion was not theirs. She told everyone about her dip in the Kinneret and said and that a little water on the “keppie” (she has been around me a lot) is not the same.  She was thrilled to visit a Jewish country.  I am proud of her.

Now she has her own questions, and I am the focus of attention.   I used to be uncomfortable answering questions about Judaism.  I don’t hide who I am, but I don’t advertise it either.  Sometimes I am “outed.”   My experiences with anti-Semitism have made me find the backbone I did not realize I had.  I explained that matzo is not the same as the communion cakes Father Norman showed me when I was in college.  I bring in a box for them to sample.  One woman heard on a Christian television show that the stripes on matzo represent the lashes the Romans inflicted on Jesus.  I explain that the stripes are because of the baking process and tell her the entire process cannot take more than 18 minutes. The questions continue, but the last question was the same as the first.  “Don’t your kids want chocolate bunnies and eggs?”  My mentor rolls her eyes.  We are back at square one.

My mentor says, “You guys are really limited to your little world. You need to go Israel.”  Then it hits me.    The root of the word Mitzrayim is metzar or limit, shut or narrow.  Travelling to Israel during Pesach, she found a different world, a world that is not limited to chocolate bunnies or Sunday church services.  She saw a Jewish country that is political, spiritual and far removed from her own.  I realize my co-workers consider themselves religious Christians, but one of them made a connection with the mother of her religion.

Pesach is my favourite holiday.  I still struggle to make sense of the other holidays, but not Pesach.  I read the Haggadah in Spanish and translate for my family.  I am free, and Pesach is finally mine.

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