Essay Contest: 3rd Place: Claire

                              Jews in All Hues Are A Source of Light

                                             Rabbi Claire Green                                               

I was on the fourth–grade playground in D.C.’s suburban Springfield, Virginia when a group of kids surrounded me and taunted me, pointing at me and shouting, “Nazi!  Nazi!”

I protested and said, “Dat is not a nice ting to say to a Jewish girl.”  When they didn’t stop, I ran home to my Mom and asked her. “Vhy are zey saying dat?”  That’s when I started speech therapy to get rid of my German accent.  I arrived with my family in the United States in 1964 when I was eleven years old.  My parents adopted me and my brother, Mike, while my father was stationed in West Germany as a civil engineer for the U.S. Army. 

When people hear I’m adopted from Germany, they assume that I was orphaned by the tragic loss of my Jewish parents.  When I tell them that I was born in 1953, after the war was already over for a few years, they are confused.  I explain that my parents were in Frankfurt am Main for eight years because my Dad was a civil engineer.  It was the mission of the Marshall Plan to rebuild ravaged war-torn Germany.  My parents had been married for a decade without the family they so much wanted.  The head of the JWB (Jewish Welfare Board), Rabbi Bernie Mehlman, told his good friends that the orphanages of post-war Germany were crowded.  He urged them to adopt.

My mother was horrified by the notion of adopting the offspring of the anti-Semitic German nation.  She was the daughter of Russian immigrants who came from Kiev and settled in the Midwest heartland of America.  When she fell in love with a Sabra who had been sent abroad to America to study, she assumed that they would marry and make aliyah to live in Israel where her husband would follow in the footsteps of his father, the first municipal engineer of Tel Aviv and builder of so many of the famous modern Bauhaus buildings.  Shocking his young wife as well as his family, he opted to stay in America after having been drafted as a friendly alien.  My father believed in critical reasoning and right thinking and the liberty of choice.  He chose to stay in the Army and live his life as an American because, as an American, he could be a liberal thoughtful Jew in the United States where modern Judaism did not require him to be a hypocrite.  So, my father’s desire to adopt a German child was but one of many surprises for my mother.

After all, my father reasoned, a child is what the parents raise the child to be.  Any child will speak fluently the language of the environment in which he is raised.  My father was sure that all meaningful identity is about choice.  Period.  And anything that is not about choice from eye color to skin tone is important because it is personal; but it is not the basis of a philosophy.  It can’t serve to bind a community and give it a mission and a sacred history to motivate the group toward its lofty goal.  My mother did not approach the issue of adoption from a philosophical stance.  Her understanding was visceral and personal.  She says that the transformative moment was when I called her, “Mom.”  My parents adopted my brother, Michael, and a few years later, my parents were surprised with a non-adoptive child, my brother Jonathan Yosef.  JJ, as I like to call him, is a rabbi on the North Shore of Chicago.  We like to say that our mother nurtured three rabbis: her husband along with her eldest and youngest kids.

I was adopted as a toddler.  My family lived in Germany until I was eleven.  Unlike the many kids adopted from China celebrating their B’nai Mitzvah nowadays, I had lots of opportunity to hear and smell and talk and eat and sing in the culture of my birth.  Germany and its Germans have never been a mystery to me. But they seem to be disconcerting to Jews.  In the U.S. of the ‘70s, I always heard Jews say that they would never own a German-made automobile.  I somehow feel compromised when the headlines feature the deportation of an old Nazi who slipped into the United States after the war.

I grew up in a very committed and active Jewish home. My family moved often, always seeking out an affiliation with a Jewish congregation. That was always our focal point, our fort, our basis of operations.  I don’t recall not attending Friday night services with my family.  So, I have experienced being in a Jewish family in two different countries.  My identity was shaped by my parents’ definition of us as a “Jewish family,” not an American Jewish family although we definitely were an American Jewish family.  We were the kind of Jewish family that can’t happen anywhere else but in America.

As it turns out, my father went back to school after he retired to attend seminary and was ordained as a rabbi when he was 50 years old.  My mother went back to school to get certified as a English teacher specializing in Shakespeare.  So, I had two parents who were each teachers of the language and literature of a civilization.  We never celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday. Stratford-upon-Avon was not a designated pilgammage site.  We studied and enjoyed the Bard, but, the plays and sonnets were not recited ritually.  It is the Shema that echoed through the house when we all sang it together from our different bedrooms every night.  It is the holidays and Shabbat that made any place we were special by connecting us to the entire Jewish people.   

My heritages are more than two because all American Jews already have two identities.  But, because we American Jews tend to assume that all Jews are like most Jews who have Ashkenazic and civil American backgrounds, it is up to those of us with a less common duality to talk how our background informs our identity.  As usual, it’s those of us on the margins who serve as a corrective to the assumption-making nature of pretty much everybody including Jews. 

The Asian kid who shows up at Hillel’s Seder might well be asked, “Who are you here with?”  The kid adopted from Germany who applies to rabbinical college might be asked, “So, does your ‘real’ mother have a Jewish name?”  The Jewish kids with blue eyes and aquiline noses might be critiqued for not looking Jewish or, alternatively, they might be complimented, as my sons, were by my mother-in-law, for not looking Jewish.  My eldest

tells me that his fellow students at the JTS List-Columbia program really liked him “because many of them hadn’t met a goy before.”  I was never able to figure out how

snarky that line was; but, it certainly is a reminder how assumptions are ever present.  Maybe the comment wasn’t based on his looks, but, his non-traditional behavior since he wasn’t brought up in a Conservative movement affiliated household and was never socialized in that movement’s Camp Ramah culture. 

I used to get really upset about people telling me how I don’t look Jewish.  Sometimes the comment was a charge; sometimes it was a compliment.  I remember going into the shoe store owned by a family in my Dad’s Sumter, South Carolina Temple, where he served for seven years until his death at the age of 57.  I’d come to my new family home from college in the Midwest and be confused and amazed by the Southern Jews.  First they asked me if I was a member of the DAR?  When I said, “No,” they explained that the Daughters of the American Revolution secured the very creation of these United States of America.  So, because I didn’t have roots to the Jews of the early eighteenth century, I felt second rate.   

Although I lacked DAR certification, my looks were admired.  What about my hair and face made old Jewish women come up and stoke my hair and skin and smile at my mother and tell her, “She doesn’t look Jewish at all!”  My mother explained that this particular lady’s entire family was swallowed by the fires of the Shoa and that if there had been someone in the family with the fluke of blonde hair and light eyes, that person could have snuck out of the ghetto to forage for food to feed an entire family.  Blondness was a survival trait during World War II.  After that explanation, I never got as upset about comments about my looks.  I now understand it in the context of the communal memory of the past.  That memory is passed down.  And, so, when I taught seventh grade Holocaust for a large suburban religious school, the students said I didn’t look Jewish.  I told them that all the rabbinical students were Jewish. 

To introduce the topic of the Holocaust to the seventh grade B’nai Mitzvah class, I closed the door and told the class, “Let’s be honest and put a list on the board of everything we know about Germans.”  I took their rapid-fire dictation:  Murderous, Evil Seed, Animals, Nazis, etc.  Then, I showed the kids my first passport, my German passport, and told them that I was born German, a native German.  Immediately, they made an exception for me, telling me that all Germans were terrible except for me.  We continued our conversation until we figured out a principle:

If you believe something about a person based on an association and you come upon a single individual, who does not fit your belief, you have to toss out the belief and revise you belief structure.

When I was a kid, the gang on the playground assumed that a German accent meant the speaker was a Nazi.  That upset me as a child all the way through college.  But, I’ve figured out how to use the particulars of my personal story to poke holes in stereotyping and help people think in a more informed and critical way. Maybe one of the reasons I became a rabbi was to prove that I really am Jewish.  Now, I feel free to stop trying so hard.   

My life story is just as good a teaching tool as the Torah’s story of Moses, who also had two heritages.  Even after he took off the garb of the court, I’m sure that he was teased by many Hebrews for talking like an uppity Egyptian Prince.  Maybe some of them suspected his motives.  Some Hebrews might have wondered if Moses were a spy for the Pharaoh only pretending to caste his lot with the people of his birth parents so that he could expose and crush anti-Pharaoh insurgents.  Moses did not help his identification with the Hebrew nation by marrying a Hebrew woman. Tzipporah was a Middianite, the daughter of the leader of the Middianite people, wife of the leader of the Hebrew people just as they begin a march toward identity and purpose.  It is Moses, along with his wife, Tzipporah, who understand what it will take for the Hebrew people to form an identity, distinct from the Egyptian people they must leave, unique from the people they must pass through right up through the settling of the Promised Land. 

As a rabbi in America, I celebrate the choice that individuals, couples and families have, regardless of their background, to access Jewish repertoire to make meaningful life choices. Just as I believe that every marriage between a Jew and a Jew is an opportunity to figure out what it means to be Jewish and why, I also believe that every marriage between a Jew and non-Jew is an opportunity to figure out what it means to be Jewish and why.  I believe that every child born to two Jewish parents is an advantage and source of strength to our people.  And, I also believe that every child who does not fit the normative paradigm of having been born to two Jewish parents is an advantage to our people’s ongoing quest to figure out the meaning of our journey.  As a Religion Department student, I recall my graduate advisor telling me that I should always study the marginal people of the community because the people who don’t conform to the broadcast rules of identity were the ones who informed us most about the real dynamic of identity.  So I studied Karaites and Qumran cave dwellers, Southern DAR Jewesses and Conversos. 

Later, as a rabbinical student, I realized that I was one of those marginal individuals.  What a great source for understanding.  For me, it is the study of Torah that’s redefined my attempts to harmonize the various elements that are me.  It message is stronger than the shouts on that playground so long ago.  I believe we Jews are still today responding to the flames Moses saw in the burning bush.  The bush was not consumed.  Its fire was many hues.  A people is still gathered ‘round that fire.  The flames compel us.  That flame illuminates us.  We see each other by the flame and sometime wonder:  Do you belong here?  Our backgrounds are varied.  We don’t all see the same thing in the flames.  We wonder:  What can this mean for me and how can I be part of the community which flourishes like the branches of this bush?  Some of us question more than others:  Can I be a leaf on the branch of the Jewish people?  But it is the spell of that bush that draws us.  The bush was not consumed.   It burns in many hues.  Let Jew in all hues be a source of light.