It wasn't until coming to college that I began to identify, or be identified, as a Jew. Maybe I became identified as a Jew here, though I was never identified as one at home, because of the small population of Jews at Dartmouth, and the large Jewish community in my hometown. You see, my father is Jewish, and my mother is Catholic. This makes me, officially and traditionally, neither Jewish nor Catholic, as Judaism is passed down through one's mother and Catholicism through one's father. My parents never made a decision about which religion they were going to raise me ("we thought you could choose at some point, never expecting you to refuse this, to hold on to both," my mother says), and I spent most of my childhood alternately attending mass with my grandmother and temple services with my father's family. I went to a Jewish elementary school for five years and have many fond memories of getting dressed up as Queen Esther for Purim, wearing my mom's silk nightgown and a crown, or of dipping apples in honey at lunchtime on Rosh Hashanah. These memories, of course, are interspersed with those of fantastic Easter egg hunts in my grandmother's back yard and getting to stay up past my bedtime for midnight Mass. And yes, I receive both Hannukah and Christmas gifts.
My father seemed to hold on to his Judaism more, was less dissatisfied with his organized religion than my mother with hers -- we had many dinner table discussions supporting issues and positions the Catholic Church expressly forbids -- and because of this, I found myself, as the years went on, attending more high holy day services and seders, and less mass. Attending may be the wrong word -- I found myself being dragged, kicking and screaming, forced to fast and observe arcane holiday rules, to temple. I had a very antagonistic relationship with my temple in high school. This may have been because at least once a year, at Passover services or Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah (the three biggies), the rabbi would mention, casually, as casually as one could mention this, that he would disown his children if they married outside of the faith, that the Jewish people needed to stick together and stay strong and pure, that he would not consider his grandchildren a part of his family if their mother was not Jewish. This was the point in the service where I usually slipped out of the synagogue, got some water or thought to myself, "Who would even marry his kids? Michael is gross and does he even know that Adam picks his nose every day during geography?"
I've always felt spiritual in church, more spiritual than in temple. I'm an art history major and spend a good deal of my time studying cathedrals and churches, memorizing various naves and apses and side aisle plans, and I sometimes forget, in the midst of memorizing a stained-glass panel, that these buildings I commit to memory serve a far greater purpose than their mere beauty or groundbreaking architectural advances.
At my high school you couldn't throw a rock without hitting a Jew, and the entire school was excused during the High Holy Days. In high school, I was not even considered Jewish by my peers, just sort of a Jewish ally. Here, I find my goyim friends fighting for who gets to be the second-most Jewish person in a room of 20. They put forth the number of bar mitzvahs they attended back in Jersey, or that they went to a Jewish pre-school in Minneapolis, to argue their cases. Oddly enough, it was in a fraternity over the weekend where I felt welcome and comfortable about my odd dietary restrictions this Passover season. Discussing the endless supply of beery drinks at Psi Upsilon last Friday night and why I wasn't drinking them, a brother went upstairs and fixed me a Passover drink -- now that's what I call service, and a fine commitment to pleasing one's guests by the Social Chair.
It's strange to me that my Jewish faith has been affected, made stronger even, by being at Dartmouth, and that my Catholic faith has fallen by the wayside. My father's family worried that I would come to school and deny my Jewish heritage; they worried over the anti-Semitism that continually marks Dartmouth. Yet it is this realization that not everyone is familiar, not even superficially, with Judaism and its tenets that makes me cling to them.
Truth be told, I have a strong affinity for both Judaism and Catholicism. The rituals and traditions of both are sometimes so beautiful to me that I cry. Anywhere else, I probably would have stuck to both equally, as before. Yet here, I feel the need to be loudly Jewish sometimes, just to shout Yiddish words from the rooftops, or hold seders (something I have never felt compelled to do for my own spirituality) to inform my friends of what, exactly, goes on at them. Spiritually, I remain unsure of my religion, but culturally, I want everyone to know the feathery heaviness of a matzoh ball on the tongue, the meaning of the word mensch, the reason one doesn't eat leavened bread during Passover. I will continue to celebrate both halves of my faith, though one a bit more loudly than the other.
