By luck of the draw, I was one of 9 students picked from a signup sheet to have dinner at my civil procedure professor's house. But this was no ordinary dinner party. Rather, my professor is a fairly devout Jew who constructs his own sukkah in his backyard each year to celebrate the Jewish festival of Sukkot. Basically, the sukkah is a temporary wooden shelter, where the family eats its meals during the festival. It's meant to remind Jewish folks of their ancestors wandering 40 years in the wilderness following the exodus from Egypt. Needless to say, I got chosen and I went. Conveniently enough, it turns out he lives about a block and a half from my place up here in St. Paul. So I walked. Literally maybe 3 minutes away.
And you know, it was really insightful. His wife cooked an amazing meal which the 11 of us shared outside in the sukkah. Some great salad, sun-dried tomato/pesto lasagna, and this amazing apple cake with cinnamon ice cream for dessert. It reminded me a lot of our family meals in Nottingham, where 11 of us would gather around a table to eat and share stories with each other. In fact, I daresay it reminded me how much I missed those times. Food has to be one of the most powerful tools of unification in the whole of human existence. That's for another blog post though.
Anyways, his wife spent a lot of time explaining the customs to us, attempting to parse out the various blessings that she and my professor laid upon the food for those of us who don't understand Hebrew. Needless to say, I was incredibly moved, in an odd way. Here were two extremely intelligent individuals, people who have devoted their lives to teaching others. Prof. C was a teaching fellow at Harvard. His wife was a Jewish school principal for her whole life. They lived in the sort of house you expect intellectual people to live in: hardwood floors, art on the walls, a sort of soft dim light pervading, books strewn everywhere. Their front yard was festooned with Obama and Al Franken yard signs (much like the one that was heinously stolen from me), and Mrs. C. proudly displayed an Obama-Biden button on her coat as she talked about canvassing for votes in Mendota Heights. She talked about local food and environmental sustainability in a most thoughtful way that would probably make my friend Benjamin's eyes well up with pride. Proudly she remarked about the completely local aspect of our meal, she having purchased nearly all the ingredients either at farmer's markets or her local co-op. Prof. C. drives an electric car to school everyday that doesn't travel over 30 MPH.
In short, they were the epitome of the cosmopolitan liberal intelligentsia that is so often ridiculed in mainstream society. The kind of people that I can only assume, do not live in Gov. Palin's "pro-America" parts of the country.
But yet, they exhibited a faith and sense of their own place in creation that astounded me. One of the first things Mrs. C. did was let us know that the Jewish people have been performing these rituals for thousands upon thousands of years, and it comforted her to have that sort of historical precedent. She said that it was a connective trail to generations of people seeking to touch the transcendent. I mean, here are these sorts of people that we are usually trained to think of as godless, and they exhibited the sort of faith that is so real you don't even think it could exist.
It's a sad critique on society, I think, when we are trained to compartmentalize people into these small boxes. You're the liberal one. You're the godly one. You're the environmentalist. You're the soldier. And this sort of ideological block is only furthered by a power establishment that has sought to the best of its ability to expose and exploit for 8 years. It's as if people who are both simultaneously progressive and religious are an anomaly. Like you can't be an outdoorsman and still care about climate change. Life cannot be so black and white.
Anyways, I had a good time eating in the sukkah. I don't anticipate a pending conversion to Judaism, but I really appreciated the opportunity to participate in some Jewish customs and gain such a stunning peek into the lives of two folks who really seem to get what it means to be Jewish. I remember back in Nottingham, I knew a guy in my American History seminar who was a Belgian-Spanish-American Jew. One day, he invited me to come up to the Jewish Fair that the Jewish student group was holding in the union. So I went, and Daniel was manning a booth promoting travel to Israel. Bemused, I asked him what Israel was like, since he traveled there at least once a year. I distinctly remember him saying, as I ate a piece of baklava, that he didn't get what the big deal was, because you walk down the street in Jerusalem and you think, "Hey, everyone's cool." Or something to that extent. If that happy Jerusalem street in my mind is populated with folks like Daniel and Prof. and Mrs. C., I have to go take a trip.
This was a scattershot post, but I'm tired. I must alert my loyal readership though to the fact that I finally possess new glasses. The photo below doesn't quite distinguish them too clearly, but they're quite nice.
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