Here it is, the 28th of August and I have gotten myself into a minor "jam" with my Synagogue and the ad hoc music committee, which has the brilliant Marjan Helms on it, as well as a few lesser luminaries, such as myself. The Rabbi wanted to have a night of Jewish folk music, traditional and modern, and I volunteered my services. On November 21st after Havdalah ( the celebration of the ending of the Shabbot) we will have a jam session with me in the lead. In two weeks I have to get my playing up to an acceptable level of skill and meet with one of the Glickmans to work out a program of music. I am in WAY over my head. I am basically a cultural Jew of Ashkenazic origin who was not raised in an observant tradition and come to the party rather late in life. But I jumped at the chance to help the Synagogue do this jam session. Oh, why, oh, why, oy vey! I haven't pulled out my trusty Martin in about a month and the mandolin not so long ago. I have got to really put the skids on my skid real soon. This nasty leg business has to come to an end with me on two instead of four legs.
In any event, I am learning more about Jewish observances and traditions than I expected to. Aunt Marilyn said to "affiliate" with a Synagogue and I would feel like I belonged. I don't...yet. And the Yet part is what is compelling me to go to services and be among my people. It is a comfort as it reminds me of growing up, surrounded my my grandmother's large family and the telling of stories and, more important, Uncle Jack Epstein telling dirty jokes with the punch line always in Yiddish so the kids wouldn't understand. My Yiddish is better than my nonexistent Hebrew, which really isn't saying that much.
My real journey to Judaism began when I went to a Jesuit university as an undergraduate. I minored in Religious Studies and I took a few courses taught by Rabbi Richard Hertz. And that was the first time I went to a High Holy Days service. Thus my journey began. We had a Passover Seder put on the the Honors College and the Jesuits were all in attendance as well as all seven Jews at the university at that time. A friend from school whose mother was a survivor of the camps prepared the whole meal we served and it made for a more memorable evening because of this. Forty years later I went to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and realized the true horror and the sense that I didn't think I could have survived the conditions the Jews were made to live and die in. All the past, and the past is prologue, lead me to my "affiliation" with my little schoolhouse synagogue and my brazen attempts to belong. Music is my in and I hope my salvation.
Maybe not so much an Ashkenazi as an Ashcan Jew. Whatever has been tossed on the heap, that is what I am. The sum of my parts, my gestalt.
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