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4.2.12
WC: 191694

game that got rained out half way through. We ran to the train station only to find no one tending
the token booth. My uncle had one token and so the two of us squeezed through the turnstile on
his one token. As soon as we got home he took a dime, put it in an envelope and sent it to the
transit authority, apologizing profusely for temporarily cheating them of their dime. A year later
he did the same thing, but on a much larger scale. My Uncle Itchie stowed away on a ship headed
for Palestine in order to participate in Israel’s struggle for statehood. He did not have enough
money for passage, so he hid in a closet during the nearly month long trip, getting food from a
friend who was paying his own way over. My Uncle then swam from the ship to shore, evading
British authorities. After working for several months he then sent the full fare for the lowest class
of service to the shipping company. Those were the values with which I was brought up. You do
what you have to do, but then you pay your debts.

Religion in my home was not a matter of faith or an accepted theology. To this day, I have no
idea what my parents believed about the nature of God, the literal truth of the Bible, heaven and
hell, or other issues so central to most religions. Ours was a religion of practice and rules—of
required acts and omissions. A cartoon I once saw perfectly represented my parents approach to
religion. It showed a father dragging his reluctant young son in the direction of the synagogue
and saying:

“Atheist, Shmathiest, I don’t care—as long as you come to shul.”

Our Judaism was entirely rule bound. Before every activity, there was a required “brucha”—a
formulistic blessing appropriate to the activity. “Baruch ata Adonoy”—“blessed be you our
God”—followed by a reference to His creation: “who brings forth bread from the earth” or “wine
from the grapes” or “fruit from the trees” or “produce from the ground.” Then there was a
generic brucha that covered everything not included among the specific blessing: “Sheh-hakol
Nihiye B’Dvaroh.” My grandmother Ringel, who was the religious enforcer in the family, would
ask demandingly, if she saw me drinking a glass of water, “Did you make a “shakel,” referring to
the previously mentioned generic blessing. My grandmother, who spoke no Hebrew, probably
had no idea of the literal meaning of the blessing, but she knew—and insisted that I knew—you
had to recite it (even just mumble it) before you drank the water.

There were rules for everything. If you accidentally used a “milichdika” (dairy) fork on a
“flayshidika” (meat) item, the offending (or offended) item had to be buried in the earth for
exactly seven days. That restored its kosher quality by “kashering” it. After eating meat, we had
to wait precisely 6 hours before eating dairy—after eating dairy, however, you had to wait only
half an hour to eat meat, but a full hour if the “dairy” meal contained fish. Not a minute less.
When my parents told me the rules of swimming after eating—wait two hours after a heavy meal,
one hour after a light meal, half an hour after a piece of fruit and 15 minutes after a Hershey
bar—I thought these were religious rules, because they paralleled the rules about how long you
had to wait between meat and dairy. (I later learned that the swimming rules were based neither
on religion, nor upon science, but rather on questionable “folk wisdom.”)

From my earlier days, I accepted the highly technical, rule-oriented religious obligations imposed
on me by my parents and grandparents. It was a lot easier for me to obey rules—even if I didn’t
understand the reasons, if any, behind them—than to accept a theology that was always somewhat

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