Jewish Holidays and Assorted Insanity

This year, like almost every year previous, I totally forgot about the September high holy holidays - not because I'm boycotting Judaism or anything, but because on my list of daily priorities, religion tends to fall somewhere between "dust top of hallway light fixture" and "sweep out chimney floo." In my mind, Rosh Hashana is merely the all-day feast that gets me out of work early on a Friday in mid-September, and Yom Kippur is its bipolar companion best known for a twelve hour marathon of willing starvation and misery. When I was a kid, that meant no basketball for my Dad and no compulsive cleaning for my Mom and no TV or Nintendo for me, which totally sucked balls. By the end of the day we were all just staring desperately out the window, waiting for sundown, that magic hour when it would all be over, eyeballing the pantry like a group of retarded, stoned people. I still think it's a wonder all Jews aren't bulimics. Thanks for the psychological mindfuck, God.

In any case, when my aunt called last week and reminded me of my dormant heritage and the prospect of free food, I was immediately Jewish again, and after cleaning a bit, I hopped on a train to Long Island.

My aunt and uncle still live in the house my father and uncle were raised in, the same one I lived in for awhile before my parents moved us down to the sweaty groin of the United States, otherwise known as The South; the same house where, at one point, ten of us and four animals lived against code in four bedrooms and a den. So heading out there literally feels like taking a trip back to the cluttered era of Barbie and the Rockers, in which all of us kids shared the same Rocker. The little blue clubhouse my Dad built for us is still in the backyard. The wooden deck where we would sun ourselves in summer is still right outside the sliding glass doors. The kitchen where my grandmother put us all to work decorating her dirty novelty chocolates (for sale at Bingo halls across the tri-state area throughout the late 1980s) is relatively untouched. And living in this house, still, is my aunt - a loud, gossipy Italian Jew, and my uncle, who at one point, while working for a Jewish day school, had lovingly nicknamed the bus he drove, "The Yom Kippur Clipper" (complete with an impression of that sound yarmulkes make when wind whips through them.)

Classy folk, my family.

My aunt had set the table for the next day's "actual" Rosh Hashana dinner, which she claimed is the best way to do these things - a week ahead of time. As she explained to me, it takes days to polish the silver and set out the pumpkin centerpieces and organize the name-cards and fold the napkins into diamond-shaped envelopes and set out the M&Ms in saran wrapped crystal goblets (there are two of these,) and arrange the platters in alphabetical order according to which foods they'll hold - all platters clearly labeled with hand-written post-its. She does this every year, by the way. And every year, my uncle comes in after she's set what we'll call the first draft of her table, and says, "watch this" to anyone who will pay him any attention, and switches all the post-its and name-cards and place settings. Hours later, when my aunt inevitably returns to the dining room to finish some food item, we'll hear her agonized cries over the destroyed piece of art that was the dining room table, followed by, "Jon, you asshole."

The night before Rosh Hashana, therefore, is Hands-Off-The-Table night, so instead of eating in we headed out to a nice little Italian restaurant, and afterward, attacked and destroyed my aunt's infamously gobletted M&Ms ("Fine, just eat them all and ruin the ambiance, you assholes.") This period, otherwise known as a Jewish bonding ritual, involves a lot of uneccessary snacking and snarking at one another until someone finally tells someone else to fuck off, and a new dish is taken out and we start all over. I would assume there are more traditionally accepted rituals involved with celebrating Jewish holidays, but damned if any of us can name what they are outside of insults and food.

"Look how much weight you've put on," said my Grandmother to my cousin Sue, who was eating a mouthful of M&Ms. Meanwhile, my aunt was pulling some non-ambiance food out of the pantry (which is alphabetized by taste and genre, by the way) and offering it to us in the hopes of saving her precious display goblets.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," said Sue.

"You misunderstand," said my Grandmother. "It's not an insult. At all. You were always such a beautiful girl. So tall and slender, with real curves. I'm asking you what happened."

"She's almost 30," reasoned my Uncle, who then went over to the pantry and said, "watch this," and proceeded to rearrange all the boxes and jars until the genres mixed unnaturally.

"Do you see what I put up with?" said my Aunt, "He just wants a rise out of me." And then she sat on her hands (I assume) to keep from immediately putting everything back.

"How is that not insulting?" said Sue. "You just called me a fat ass."

"Now you're putting words in my mouth. I never said the word fat ass. Why would I say something like fat-ass? Such a negative perspective."

"She's a beautiful girl," pointed out my Aunt.

"Yes," agreed my grandmother. "And I love her. She's just bigger now and there's more of her to love. Like a different girl. It's almost startling."

"Fuck you," said Sue, downing the rest of her M&Ms.

"Jo, on the other hand-" And my grandmother wagged an oatmeal cookie at Sue's older sister, Jo, "Looks amazing. Stunning. How much weight have you lost? Ten pounds? Have you been eating at all?"

"Fuck you," repeated Sue. "I work all day. I have to make more time for the gym. I know that." She popped a York Peppermint Pattie into her mouth from a wholesale-sized box my Uncle had pulled from the Sweets, P-Z portion of the pantry.

At that point, we moved on to a bowl of chocolate covered cherries, and as it's impossible to feel anything but joy and good humor while eating delicious maraschino cherries covered in creamy milk chocolate (The Dove commercials are true!) we segued onto pleasanter topics, like past holidays, and how we're all becoming old and feeble and developing weird physical ailments; that, of course, prompted me to (foolishly) mention how strange I thought it was that I'd once sprinted around this very dining room in nothing but socks and a diaper, which immediately prompted the "when is Jamie going to use her ovaries" discussion - an often popular topic at family functions - which then trickled into dessert number four - tea cookies with jam and chocolate chips. Delightful.

"Have you tried J-Date?" said my grandmother.

"How do you even know what that is?" I asked. "You don't even own a computer."

"I watch Dr. Phill," she said, wagging a tea cookie at me. "And according to Dr. Phill, everyone's online now. I'm sure you must know that. You have one of those space phones. So how do you expect to meet anyone if you don't even try? You're not working, you're not dating... Are you just choosing to be alone?"

"Yes," I said, "I'm purposefully endeavoring to have as little contact as humanly possible with the opposite sex."

Fast-forward an argument about the validity of J-date versus Eharmony (neither of which my grandmother had any sort of experience with), and she concluded, "I'm not saying you need to get married right now. I'm just saying, I'm old and will probably die soon."

"At least you're not the fat one," offered Jo.

"Fuck you," said Sue.

And with that, we moved on to Challah and diet soda, and Jo changed the subject, and we proceeded to gossip meanly about all our common relatives who weren't around and were thus easy targets, and after about an hour or so of that (fun times!), I was back on the train to Penn Station - rockin' out to Beyonce and recalling a Rosh Hashana from long ago; one that ended with all of my cousins and I in the foyer of (then my grandmother's house) playing that Halloween game - Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. We were all deadly serious about it, and had each set two fingers underneath Sue, closed our eyes, and dutifully chanted "light as a feather, stiff as a board," when Jo asked for a sign from the other world and my uncle laughed like Dracula and hit the light-switch, plunging us all into darkness. We screamed, we dropped Sue, and then we proceeded to trample over everything in sight in our terrified, no-holds-barred zeal to get back into the living room. Some of us cried. Some of us told our fathers to take a hike. Dogs were barking, cats flitting all over the place; it was pandemonium; meanwhile, my father and uncle were laughing hysterically. My aunt smacked my uncle in the head and my mother called my father an asshole, and either one or both of them felt bad enough to let us all have a second round of dessert. Thus the evening ended in what I feel is true Jewish spirit- everyone gathered together around six different cakes from Walls Bakery. Again. For the eleventh time. In one night.

Oh, Judaism.

The older I get, the more I believe that religion actually has very little to do with what's important about your heritage.