So here we are, in my fourth-floor walkup, lighting society candlesticks on my faux-wood, Yale-supplied desk. The candles have been lit and blown out so many times that their glass trees are moldy with wax. It’s a sin to light a shabbos candle and kill the flame. Tragic as it is, the smoke detectors in my dorm room offer no mercy to millennia of Jewish Tradition.
Our challah is a cold Taco Bell burrito that my roommate and her boyfriend DoorDashed while high. Our wine is a Yale-branded bottled water. It is cool to the touch; my roommate keeps a reserve of them in our mini-fridge for occasions less special than these. Five new friends crowd the ridiculous desk altar, trading names and residential colleges. I google ‘shabbat prayers jewish’ on my MacBook. I know the songs by heart, but I’m still terrified of fucking up.
I bless the candles in a velveteen voice left over from junior cantorship. Baruch Atah Adonai, I chant. Elohanu Melech Ha’olam. The tune turns the air in the room to molasses, thick and slow. I mellow. In singing the time-softened Hebrew, I feel like I’m borrowing an ancient scroll from the library of Babel. It’s not difficult to imagine the name-date-places on the prayers’ impossible loan cards. Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, 789 B.C., Jerusalem. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, 1703 A.D., Jewish Quarter of Prague. Stephen and Melissa Shiffman, 2004 A.D., Eastern scoop of Manhattan Island. The couple loop their signatures into the parchment, archiving their legacy in sticky blue Bic. Mr. Shiffman lifts their pinked baby to the candleglow. His wife unrolls the prayer book. They sing.
I move onto the Kiddush, the blessing over wine. I’m ashamed that I take my janky ritual so seriously. These Shabbos prayers are antique, splendid. As the sabbath moon rises, voices around the globe are singing these same prayers over rich, maple dining tables, over doilies and infused honeys and sterling silver platters. I offer Adonai ritual in the clothes of jest: crinkling plastic for a Kiddush goblet, muddy beans, and tortilla for bread. I cannot pretend this is dignified. But I cannot deny the sincerity of using what I have.
Hundreds of years ago, in Poland or Germany or Russia, a famous Rabbi sang with his congregation. In the back of the synagogue, a boy—I always imagined him around ten—chanted the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet: Alef, Bet, Vet, Gimmel. Alef, Bet, Vet, Gimmel. The congregants complained to the Rabbi: the boy was a distraction, and he needed to be taught a lesson. When the last Deborah Goldblum and Milton Solomon hobbled out of the temple, the Rabbi walked to the back pew and slid in beside the child.
“So here we are,” sighed the Rabbi. “Tell me: why were you chanting the alphabet?
“I don’t know how the prayers go,” replied the Boy. “I don’t know the Hebrew language. I don’t know how to read from the siddur. All I know in Hebrew are the first four letters of the Alef Bet. So that is what I sang.”
This is the story I remember best from religious school, from childrens’ Rosh Hashanah services, from PJ library books. Believing one isn’t “Jewish enough” is so quintessentially Jewish that it might as well have been amended into the commandments on the hike down Sinai. I have these conversations with friends from all Jewish sects: Hasidim, Reform Jews, even culturally Jewish Atheists. Is it un-Jewish to let men and women mingle during services? Is it un-Jewish to eat a Clif bar on Yom Kippur? What we miss is that asking these questions at all means we care. To care about our Judaism is to be Jewish enough. Whether my shabbat blessings are over homemade challah or little Debbie’s easter carrot cake, my respect and intentions make the ceremony Jewish. The best way to win is to try.
