Personal recollection of Orthodox Jewish upbringing with no actionable investigative leads

4.2.12 WC: 191694 alien to my rational mindset. (And I suspect, to my parents, if they even bothered to think about it.) Everyone in the almost entire Jewish neighborhood (at least everyone who was part of the modern Orthodox community) followed the rules. Few, I suspect, accepted the entire theological framework that included the literal truth of the bible, the resurrection of the dead, heaven and hell (which were not in the Jewish Bible) and the incorporeal nature of a single God. What we cared about was the precise ingredients in a candy bar (no lard or gelatin), the number of steps you could take if your yarmulkah fell off (more on this later), whether you could wear your house key as a tiepin to avoid the prohibition against carrying on the Sabbath, whether it was permissible to use an automatic timer—a “shabos clock”—to turn on the TV for a Saturday afternoon World Series game, or whether you could ride on an elevator on Shabos if it automatically stopped on every floor and required no pressing of buttons. The rabbis answered these questions for us, but they didn’t always agree. My mother had little patience with most of the local rabbis because her late father, who was not a rabbi, “knew so much more than they did,” and always resolved religious disputes by accepting the approach that was “easiest” and most adaptive to the modern lifestyle. Even my grandmother knew more than these “phony rabbis,” my mother would insist contemptuously. My mother always said, “Respect people, not titles.” Then she was appalled when I showed disrespect for my frequently incompetent teachers! Most of the rules we were required to obey were negative ones: “Donts.” Don’t—eat unkosher, drive or work on Shabas, eat anything on fast days, marry a non-Jew, eat ice cream after a hot dog, wear leather on Yom Kippur, talk after washing your hands but before making a “motzie” and eating the challah. My grandmother—the enforcer—had a favorite Yiddish word: “meturnished’”—tt is forbidden to do! She would shout it out in anticipation of any potential violation. If she saw you about to eat a Nabisco cookie, she would intone the M word. If she saw you putting a handkerchief in your pocket on Shabas, the word would ring in your ear. If you even thought about putting your yalmulkah in your pocket, you would hear the word. Once I began to whistle a tune. My musical effort was grated with a loud “meturnished.” “Why?” I implored. There’s nothing in the Torah about whistling. “It is unJewish,” my grandmother insisted, “The Goyim whistle, we don’t.” It’s now more than 30 years, since Grandma Ringel died, but the M word still rings in my ears every time I indulge in a prohibited food or contemplate an un-Jewish activity (such as enjoying a Wagnerian opera). Freud called it the “superego.” He must have had a Jewish grandmother too. Of course we tried to figure out ways around these prohibitions—half of Jewish law seems to be creating technical prohibitions, while the other half seems to be creating ways around them. Much like the Internal Revenue Code. No wonder so many Jews become lawyers and accountants. It’s not in our DNA; it’s in our religious training. A story from my earliest childhood illustrates the extraordinary hold that religion—really observance of religious obligations—held over all of us. A few months before my brother was born, my father was holding my hand on a busy street, while my mother was shopping. She had just bought me a new pair of high leather shoes—they went above my ankles. For some reason, I bolted away from my father and ran into the “gutter.” My foot was run over by an 18 wheeler truck. It would have been much worse had my father not 22 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017109