February 21, 2007

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Ash Wednesday

My parents were never all that strict. I was allowed to stay out late, sleep over at people's houses, they never watched very closely over how I spent my money, etc. But in one respect, I was a very sheltered kid. I was religiously sheltered.

First of all, I'm Jewish--or my father is Jewish, so I'm at least pseudo-Jewish, or maybe full Jew depending on how reformed one is. Anyway, I consider myself Jewish. But I was never told about my being Jewish until I was eighteen years old! I don't know why I had never pieced it together before, but in my defense, neither had my little brother. I was on my way to my freshman year of college at Vanderbilt, stopping to visit my neurotic, passive-aggressive little grandmother. Over her usual breakfast of bagels and blintzes, she was talking about her childhood in Belgium, before World War II when her family came to America. So Grandma Barzelay was chatting away about being a little kid in Antwerp, when she mentioned going to synagogue.

"Synagogue?" I asked.

"Yes, of course. We went to synagogue. Sometimes. We weren't that good about it."

"Wait... What? We're... Jewish?"

At this point, Grandma Barzelay paused and looked at me with a puzzled expression, the way she might look at me if I walked out of the house with my underwear on my head. "Are you kidding?"

I paused to reconsider my question, not wanting to seem like the kind of idiot that would wear his underwear on his head. "No."

"But I've told you about how my family fled Europe to escape the Nazis!"

"Yeah, but... during the war it was... dangerous for everyone. There was... bombs. And stuff."

"Oy gevalt! I didn't schlep my tuckus all across the Atlantic just to have my schmuck grandkid thinking he's a goy! Now be a mensch and pass your grandmother the lox. I haven't had a nosh all morning."

Okay, so she didn't really say that last quote. But in retrospect, I'm pretty sure everyone who meets her knows within the first twenty seconds of talking with her that she's Jewish. But that fact was certainly well-hidden from us, her grandkids.

I was religiously sheltered. Not only did I not know I was Jewish, but I was raised completely ignorant of everything outside Protestantism. My mother was Baptist, and I grew up in Baptist churches, so I knew the Protestant Bible fairly well. But when it came to any apocryphal books, or Catholic traditions or dogma, I was about as knowledgeable as Martin Luther's pet goldfish. And so I was entirely oblivious to the Ash Wednesday tradition until my freshman year of college (it was a year of great spiritual growth).

I walked out of my dorm one afternoon, on my way to class. There was the usual mix of fratty George Dubyas in pastel polos, and skinny white girls in sorority shirts. Just before I got to the student center, I noticed one of those attractive girls, looking all put together in her pleated mini-skirt and button-down shirt, her cable-knit sweater tied around her shoulders. She was walking my way, meticulous curls bouncing along with the swing of her hips. And as she approached, I noticed that something wasn't quite right about her confident look. There was something, I didn't know what, but something on her forehead.

As she got closer, I realized that she had some giant, dirty smudge, right there in the middle of her forehead. "How can she not have seen that?" I thought. "Wow, she's going to be so embarrassed the next time she looks in the mirror." I thought about helping her out, and letting her know about the dirt on her forehead, but I didn't know her, so I decided not to. But I laughed to myself, thinking that it was hilarious that that girl, with everything else just so, was walking around with a huge dirty mark on her forehead.

She passed me, and I kept walking. And then another two girls approached. Much to my surprise, it turned out that they both had dirty foreheads, too. I was shocked, and my mind immediately leapt to all the possible explanations for this. Perhaps something interesting had been happening outside a window, and everyone had pressed their heads up against the window to get a good look. Maybe they'd all been reading newspapers, and then wiped their foreheads. It could have been some new rap song, "Wipe that dirt/On your head." Or maybe the steel was starting to wear through their synthetic skin, and their robotic insides were showing through. None of those seemed plausible. So when they got up next to me, I asked them, "What's that stuff on your foreheads?"

They looked at me as if I had my underwear on my head. And as if the underwear on my head had Lambda Chi letters. One of them shook her head at me. The other just said, under her breath, "Asshole."

But I wasn't making fun of her. I'm just religiously sheltered.

Posted at February 21, 2007 11:23 PM | Comments (7)

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