Holidays

Yesterday was Easter Sunday. This year the holiday follows Purim.

And Passover is just a few weeks away.

We celebrate them all.

As a child, our world consisted of Jews, Jewish holidays, and the

Beth Israel synagogue center in Derby, Connecticut. We went there

every single Friday night. My mother had some friends who weren’t

Jewish, but mostly, Jews came over to the house. We ate together, and

celebrated life’s occasions- there were always many. Jewish holidays ,

Thanksgiving, birthdays, new life, and death. We lived in the

Naugatuck River Valley, in a town called Ansonia. For many years I’ve

tried describing Ansonia to people who asked. But I never quite nailed

the ethos of the town. It was a craggy place, small and industrial.

Not beautiful, but compelling and even a little mysterious.

A big ball bearings factory called Farrell Birmingham was one of the

town’s centers. The factory started in 1848. Today, they employee

about 100 people (it was much bigger in my childhood) and now they

manufacture plastics.

It’s always been a working class town, founded by Anson G. Phelps in

1848. He was wealthy man who started the Ansonia Clock Company.

I spent much of my childhood walking through town, over the bridge on

top of the Naugatuck River to the beautiful old library.

The main librarian, Julia C. Steele, lived next door to us. She was not an

easy person, but she loved books and I did too and that connected us

both for years. My mother too was a big reader.

She belonged to three libraries in the area, and she spent a lot her time

reading. The town, like many places, was a tribal place. Religion was

often the tribal glue: Italians went to their Catholic church. There was a

Catholic church that was Irish. Blacks went to a Baptist church. The

small Jewish population were members of a synagogue in the

neighboring town.

School was where we all mixed.

I would ask my school friends to takeme to their churches. I wanted to

see more of the lives I didn’t know.

After my Bas Mitzvah, I had a period of wanting to be More Jewish

somehow. But I wasn’t sure what that meant. Our Rabbi, who taught

Aramaic at Yale, brought scholars from other religions to speak to us

at Hebrew School.

Eventually I left, for college and then, to make a life.

There was so much about Judaism that I loved then, and love today:

especially the way that studying the religion was more about questions

than answers. I worked hard all my life to have friends who were

different from me: different ideas, different religions, different notions

of what life can be. In the eighties I married an Armenian, who didn’t

have much relationship to any religion. We decided early on that we’d

celebrate everything – or as much as possible, anyway. We adopted a

child from Chile, who married a colored woman named Chesray from

Capetown. We helped raise her niece, who calls us her grandparents.

And we have a second grandchild, given the Hebrew name AHAVA, a

name she heard in a black church where her grandfather was a pastor.

One of Ahava’s favorite books is The Story of Purim. We celebrate

many holidays with the kids.

I know now what I didn’t know then: there’s a strong connection

between gaining and losing. Mine is a rich and colorful world, and

I am glad to celebrate all that I can. But last week at a funeral at

B’nai Jeshurun, a gorgeous synagogue on the Upper West Side,

I remembered for the first time in years what it felt like to go to a

Synagogue every Friday, to know all the people in the room, to have

the same beliefs.

This Easter we had a meal that Noah called Thanksgiving light. At the

meal we celebrated that we were all together. Our new neighbors

came by. People who live in the post office. They met because their

respective spouses were cheating with each other. A local baker from

Burkina Faso, his native American wife, and their two small kids. A good

friend, a Jewish woman who left New York City and lives in the country

full time. A single mother with an adopted son from Ethiopa. A couple

from LA who live in the country part time. There we all were,

together for a meal. Celebrating difference, and

togetherness, and what we have in common. Hamantaschen was one

of the many desserts we ate.