Putting faith in your plan

In all the childbirth classes Emily and I attended, there was a lot of discussion regarding “birth plans.” What kind of music would we play in the delivery room? How loud would Emily need to scream before being offered an epidural?

But there was never much of a plan for once the baby was born. And now Gus is six weeks old and we’re only starting to get around to the serious business of figuring out how to raise him, the values we’d like him to have.

“We want him to be a good person,” we say. And so we speak of religious education. Emily’s a Christian but wasn’t raised with much religiosity, and my family, though Jewish, went to synagogue only on Yom Kippur. We begged God to forgive us our sins and inscribe us in the Book of Life. We did so while glancing at our watches every five minutes.

My father was never much for synagogue, complaining about the hard wooden pews, the incomprehensibility of Hebrew and how synagogue, rather than inspiring him, made him feel as though he were being suffocated in a claustrophobic coffin that smelled of old-man.

Although we did not speak Hebrew, we did toss around Yiddish words – half of which were made up, such as my grandmother’s word for the TV remote, “der pushkeh.” We did not study Torah, but we did watch The Ten Commandments every year on TV. Though never performing what one might call “good works,” we did enjoy accusing people of antisemitism every chance we got. We believed enough for that.

All of this to say that as we wrestled with our faith, we enjoyed the atmosphere of it. Atmosphere is no small thing. It’s where culture and art are born. As such, as a family we were less interested in the restaurants that were kosher than those that were “Kosher-style.” Kosher style was like the apartment across the hall from kosher. Whereas keeping kosher required rigorous observation of rules, keeping kosher-style required only a Jerusalem napkin holder on the table and the restaurant’s name written out front in large Hebraic calligraphy. These things taken all together recalled a certain feeling – a spirit.

I think Emily and I want Gus to have the best of both our people, we want a kid who might enjoy synagogue but also enjoy Christmas. We want a kosher-style kid who will love his fellow man.