September / october 2006:

The house without lights
How my Presbyterian mother made me a better Jew.

by Lilit Marcus



There was always a lot of religion in the house where I grew up, but not a lot of God. I understood from a very early age that Mom was Presbyterian and Dad was Jewish. These were not concrete things. Religions were not things that I was taught about. In my little eyes Presbyterians had blond hair and came from North Carolina, and Jewish people were dark haired and lived in Los Angeles.

Denominations were ways to explain how people were different from each other, simple adjectives that were entirely distinct from spirituality. My family had a Christmas tree and a menorah in our front room for the holidays. When I wanted to know who Judah and the Maccabees were, though, I went to the encyclopedia.

Growing up in southern California, I had friends from almost every religion, and no one thought my family was the least bit unusual. If anything, they were jealous that my sister and I got double the presents every year. Each December, my mother pointed out the other houses on the block to me, red and green lights meaning Christians and blue ones meaning Jews. Because we did not hang up any lights at all, we were neither of those things, I quickly discerned. But I didn’t know what that meant we were.

I never asked either of my parents why they didn’t care about church or synagogue, but after a while they told me. Growing up hard of hearing, my mother struggled to get by in a rural country school that didn’t understand how to teach her. Church was worse. She remembers that her mother, whom I grew up calling Grandmama, insisted that they go to church every week, always sitting in the back row. Mom couldn’t hear anything that was happening, the songs or the prayers or when you were supposed to say “Amen.” Grandmama says they always sat in back because she got her hair done on Mondays and by Sunday it looked awful. Mom says it’s because Grandmama was ashamed of the large hearing aid clipped onto the front of her daughter’s blouse.

For my father, who is completely deaf, understanding Hebrew was impossible. They grew up without interpreters, called disabled, and never understood why this God person would make His message so difficult for them to understand. A justice of the peace performed their wedding in the backyard of my mother’s childhood home. There was no chupah or First Corinthians. My father did not step on a glass.

I remember what my mother said to me after my paternal grandfather’s death: “We’ll always have each other.” Because no other relatives knew sign language, the four of us were our own little world. It was the very meaning of “family unit,” each with their own functions. Dad went to work. Mom cleaned the house. My sister and I answered the telephone. When anything happened to one of us — a bad grade, an argument with a friend — one or all of us would solve the problem. We always had each other. We always had our house with red shutters and bedside lamps.

My mother laid heaping plates on the table every night for dinner and insisted that we eat together as a family. Neither of us then knew the lexicon of the Passover seder, with the portions of food representing parts of the eternal journey, but we knew that the four people sitting at a table once a day emanated some kind of holiness. When pointing out the antiques in our house, my mother knew how far back each piece traced, how many wars and generations it had been through. She made noodle kugel and collard greens, matzah ball soup and fried chicken. Food is food and food is love. That much was always clear.

Perhaps it was that oft-discussed Southern hospitality. Maybe it was her innate Presbyterian gentleness. She used to tell me that when I grew up I could choose any religion I wanted. She made sure I sent thank-you notes, brushed my teeth after breakfast instead of before, and asked people questions about themselves. During my first breakup, the only thing that came to mind were her words: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. The night before I moved to New York City without a job or any money she told me I always had a home with her and my father. I took it as a sign of disapproval. She meant it as a comfort.

Whatever it was, my mother taught me to be a better Jew by teaching me how to be a better person and, when the time came, a better woman. Southerness and Judaism are the parts of my identity that I claim and that I wear proudly, but my mother’s steadfast, quiet faith remains an integral part of me. The unassuming Bible that she kept in the downstairs cabinet bears little resemblance to the heavy black volumes on my bedroom shelf now, and yet I know that they share entire words, entire books, entire ideas.

At Grandmama’s funeral, the minister read aloud from Ecclesiastes. A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot. I saw my mother, hearing aids in both her ears, mouthing the words in perfect rhythm. A time to scatter stones and a time to gather them. She looked over at me, eyes glistening. “This was always my favorite part of the whole Bible,” she told me. There was nothing I could say, so I took her hand.

The minister began to pray. My mother and I joined him. A time to be silent and a time to speak. In the eulogy he said that some people are light, and some people are the mirrors that reflect the light. But he did not say which one my Grandmama was. At home I looked at my face in the mirror and did not see any brightness there. I had not yet studied mysticism. I did not yet understand the principle of Kabbalah where the light spills out all over the world. I think that when Grandmama died, light shot out from her. I wore her jewelry in hopes that the light would land on me.

I am often asked whether my mother resents that I chose my father’s religion over hers. She knows that it is not my father’s religion; it is mine. Just like she knows that a house, despite its adornments, must be lit from within or else not lit at all.


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