Faith, continued....

Soooooo......

Dean and his technical Jew status threw him for a loop and I suppose he could not handle it. And to be perfectly honest I was quite unsympathetic to the whole plight. I am not the best person to, say, teach a person something. You certainly would not find a photograph of me next to the word patient in the dictionary, no sir.

And when it comes to Judaism, for me, it all seems just so obvious. I have been bred this way and I have been bred around other people who have been bred the same way. There was no teaching involved. My understanding of God came at such a young age that I no longer had to understand God in order to understand the rules I lived by, the practices I kept, the practices I chose not to keep, that tendencies my family had that were typically "jewish," the holidays I celebrated and the life I intended to lead in the future. God had been buried deep under that. God had also been buried deep under the tribulations my almost immediate family had experienced historically due to their religion. In no way did my grandparents walk around putting down or pushing up God for being a part of their experience or survival of the Holocaust. The experience simply reinforced their identity as Jews, defining their place in the world and therefore their responsibility to impart that place unto their children.

All of this has shaped me, with little explanation, more build up of experience in my surroundings, oh and of course, 18 years of formal Jewish education.

Though the Holocaust directly influenced Dean's history and directly influenced his destiny it was so buried that it really had nothing to do with his identity, not as a Jew and not as a human being. Also- though born Jewish he was no tied to any practice in any way and for the most part had no idea it was part of who he was until I told him so. The discovery came as a shock to both of us, him because it meant he was tied to a religion that simply scared him and me because, well, it meant I could LEGALLY date him :-). Still it meant a major project ahead of us and while it was an inherent connection it also became an inherent disconnect. I had experienced Judaism, I never thought I would have to explain it. He had never experienced Judaism, let alone religion in any capacity. For him religion meant conforming, it meant rules and it meant GOD. This freaks the hell out of him. Religion also meant the key to success for our relationship. And that freaked him out too.

And I had the hardest time abutting his nerves. How was it possible for me a believer/non believer/god fearing/god rebelling Jew supposed to explain in all my conflict that Judaism was great, that he should recognize that and that without that realization there would be no future for us.

I couldn't, I could not be the teacher. All I could do was give him books, hope he would take to them and hope that he would, himself, fall for the whole life style choice as opposed to it being me who forced him into it. The books did not work, the plea for him to recognize that my history was his history did not help either. None of it worked and it put a weight so heavy on the back of our newfound love that it broke.

And Dean broke up with me.

Did it last? You might ask, because here I am irresponsibly writing to you 5 weeks post break up (6 weeks post operation) and things have changed.

In fact Dean and I could not stay apart from each other, we tried a couple of times over the course of the month but realizing that we were utterly failing at the plight Dean decided on his own volition to reach out to some "Jewish sources" of his own. He set up meetings, began e mailing people, posting comments and questions on message boards and the likes. I convinced him he needed to do this on his own, that I did not want to be to blame for his one day accepting this way of life as his own, that he needed to pursue this as an individual. A female rabbi at the 92nd street Y convinced him otherwise. SO- I went with him all the way up to the upper east side for his big introduction.

Now this was not his first introduction to a Rabbi, this was his 2nd or 3rd. I had dragged him to synagogue on the high holidays, invited him to festive meals, introduced him to Jewish friends and so on....

But this 92nd Street Y visit was the first encounter out of his own volition.

It was not the regular for me....first off, I went to yeshiva high school and while my family is conservative and from an egalitarian background, meeting a female Rabbi was NOT what I had in mind, not at all. But here we were sitting face to face with a soon to be female Jewish Rabbi who had a past career in the music business working at Arista records. Irony or ironies.

For the first time, though I saw Dean for who he was, for what he was going through, for all of his questions, thoughts and considerations. This woman handled it beautifully and I listened. This is not to say that I completely understood everything he had to say, it is also not to say that I saw some sort of light or that he saw some sort of light. But we were both suddenly in it together. Whether this pushes us back to each other too soon, whether this religious conflict is present to simply cover up other issues we had been having for some time, we have decided to stay with each other for the time being.

So, as they say, faith brought us together....at least for now. I'll keep ya posted......

xRed Out Loud