november / december 2005:

What we leave behind
I converted, not for marriage but for me. Suddenly I was a Jew without a Jewish family, and the holidays are my annual reminder.

by Bradford R. Pilcher


My birthday comes at the end of August. It’s not long after that I begin noticing the changes. The temperature is just a bit cooler when I slip out from under the covers in the morning. It rains more, at least it seems to. Eventually I catch a hint of amber in the forests that dot the landscape of Atlanta.

This is my favorite time of the year. Never a huge fan of summer, I wait eagerly for the first signs of autumn. The shifting weather comes with the scent of football season, which carries me into October and the Halloween festivities. For some, Thanksgiving turkeys usher in the holiday season. For me, it was always haunted houses that put a twinkle in my eye and led the way towards Christmas.

Then one day, I awoke Jewish. It was the spring of 2002 when I emerged from the mikvah dripping wet. As I dried off in the towel, I had no idea just how much I was leaving behind in that pool of water. My non-Jewish self was washed away that day, but the experiences and relationships that shaped my identity remained. Learning to live with them while still building my Jewish self isn’t always simple.


Now the chill of fall and the color of the leaves is foreshadowing, a reminder of my orphan status in the tribe. Now my docket of holiday festivities includes Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and the balancing act between Chanukah and my family’s eggnog-laced merriment.

A Jew I am, and these new holidays I do celebrate, but there is a reality as chilly as the autumn air. I am a Jew without an immediate Jewish family. My parents have no game plan for breaking the fast of Yom Kippur, for gathering round the menorah, nor should they. Instead, we spent my childhood schlepping to grandfather’s house. There we would watch the Macy’s parade on Thanksgiving. My mother adored the end, when Santa Claus arrived to usher in the countdown to Christmas Eve.

A month later, we would return to that house, and waiting for us would be a gourmet meal complete with an officially printed menu. I usually found myself in a back bedroom with my uncles. Family tradition dictated they wait until the absolute last minute to wrap their gifts, and they also had to wrap them in a rather sloppy fashion. As far as my young mind knew, this was how everybody did things.

After everything was prepared, I would spend the rest of the night buried underneath the Christmas tree. We wouldn’t stop until I’d dug every last gift from beneath the faux pine branches. Most families give out their gifts on Christmas Day, but we simply couldn’t wait. In the morning, my uncles — they were wedged between my age and my mother’s — would wake me so they could discover what Santa had left for me overnight.

One year, when circumstances left me and my parents by ourselves on Christmas, I stormed down to the living room on Christmas morning to find all my gifts carefully nestled underneath the tree. They were also neatly wrapped, a clear breach of Christmas tradition. Utterly puzzled, I could think of only one thing to do. I climbed onto the couch and went back to sleep until my parents shuffled out of their bedroom to explain this dilemma.

As trifling as these little stories seem, they make up the fabric of my family’s identity. They are the shorthand of our clan, a way for us to celebrate holidays in more than just the standard, one-size-fits-all fashion. To borrow a cliché, they make these holidays our own. For me, as a child at least, it wasn’t fully Christmas without the hastily wrapped presents, or the chance to unwrap them an evening early. When my grandfather died, and with it his gourmet extravaganzas, a piece of the holiday puzzle died with him. Christmas would never be the same.

When I left behind my goyhood — my Christian beliefs were gone long before that — Christmas changed that much more. Not that my family would stop celebrating the holiday, or that I would stop joining them to exchange gifts and share in the fellowship that comes at that time of year. But in so many ways, it would no longer be our holiday. It would be theirs. Despite being among family, the feeling of being a few steps removed from the proceedings has come to haunt me.

IRONICALLY, the holiday vision I romanticize was virtually gone long before I finished my Jewish conversion. My grandfather fell ill shortly after my eighteenth birthday, and died just a few months later. The family he had brought together with gourmet cooking and all the holiday trappings drifted apart. My parents and I celebrated with my uncle and his wife. My other uncle celebrated with his in-laws. Gatherings were smaller now, and we no longer sat down to a feast. Mostly we ate turkey sandwiches off a serve-yourself buffet before opening presents.

At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to what was happening. Perhaps I was too young to grasp how significant the details were. There was still a tree and under it there were still presents. We opened them. What more was there to a Christmas? Perhaps I was too focused on my Jewish conversion, a process that began not long after my grandfather died and culminated a few years later, when I reached twenty-one.

So I wasn’t paying much attention when the first holiday season post-mikvah rolled around and my mother started asking questions. Rosh Hashanah was around the corner. My mother wanted to know if she should cook a meal. I didn’t know what to tell her.

For months, I’d wrestled with how to observe my newfound faith despite my gentile surroundings. None of my closest friends were Jewish, and I had no Jewish family members to speak of. I longed for something more than just a large Jewish community. As a teacher at my synagogue and an intern at the Anti-Defamation League, I had plenty of interaction with the Jewish community. My writing got me speaking engagements in front of Jews up and down the east coast, and my trips to Israel had garnered me a scattered network of Jewish friends and acquaintances, all of whom lived in different cities.

But what I wanted was a Jewish family, and all the observances and idiosyncratic traditions that went along with it. Thinking about where to break the fast on Yom Kippur, looking for invitations to holiday meals, or finding a way to light Chanukah candles with others, were not things I looked forward to. My feelings were as a visiting witness to my own observances rather than an active participant. Somehow I imagined that people who grew up with Jewish families didn’t have to worry about these things quite so much. They could always just go home and find parents and siblings, for better or worse, sharing in all of these festivities.

And somehow, up until my mother asked, I had managed to avoid thinking about all of it.

ROSH HASHANAH dinner is not exactly Seder-esque in its liturgical requirements, so a home cooked dinner with my parents works out fine. I am usually able to make plans to break the fast on Yom Kippur, and for the past few years I’ve been able to assure myself that Chanukah is more a children’s holiday. Since my family’s Christmas celebrations have been seriously curtailed from when I was a child, it’s easy for me to minimize the Festival of Lights as well.

Diminishing holidays, in fact, became an art form for me. Rosh Hashanah was reduced to synagogue attendance, and perhaps a meal with my parents. Yom Kippur was more time in synagogue and a fast, and if I couldn’t find a Jewish gathering with which to break the fast, I simply looked in the fridge and grabbed the nearest piece of fruit. I began to give regular lectures on how Chanukah had been turned into a materialistic competition with Christmas. Indeed, it became a matter of principle to make as little fuss as possible about menorah-lighting and dreidel-spinning.

Then my Holiday Reduction Syndrome spread beyond the confines of winter. Passover came, and initially I had a sense of excitement. My mother cooked a meal. Her bosses, both family friends and Jewish, cater their holiday meals, so their caterer provided extra items for my house, including a fully-stocked Seder plate. I even invited friends, but a Seder with only one Jew is forced at best. No matter how much I rewrote the Haggadah to make it my own, the liturgy couldn’t make up for the lack of Jewish companionship.

Initially I made a big deal of the opportunity to act as teacher for my parents, using the Passover service as a way of teaching them about my views and observances. They were eager to listen and take part, and they still are. Nevertheless, sitting and leading a Seder feels like the work of a father, one who is passing down these traditions to his offspring. Passing them up to your parents isn’t quite the same.

So I began to minimize Passover as well, along with the “lesser” holidays. I had nowhere to build a Sukkah, so it was easy to minimize that too. Shavuot also got the reductionist approach. When I would date, I’d try to riff off the traditions of my girlfriend’s families, but it never seemed to fill the void. I remained closeted in my holiday avoidance.

TO BE A JEW without holidays is oxymoronic at best, maybe even blasphemous. Maybe I should’ve known better, should’ve thought about this before I made my way before a court of rabbis asking for a Jewish identity. One rabbi even pointed out, quite prophetically, that my journey towards Judaism had been, in a sense, a solitary excursion. Not having done this for marriage, I had no partner to help me fully embrace Jewish life. The rabbi signed my conversion certificate, and while the ink was drying, reminded me I would now have to find a less solitary way to grow as a Jew.

I took these words to heart, but I didn’t fully understand them. The conversion I completed on the 25th of Iyar four years ago, was a formal process. The laws of Torah and Talmud, the basic observances of the tribe, were imparted to me. I grappled with sanctions on kosher diet and the Sabbath, and I studied Hebrew. The rabbinical court quizzed me on my motivations and my knowledge, but they never quizzed me on beliefs. Their questions were not particularly spiritual.

That side of Judaism, I have learned, doesn’t come from formal study. It arises from living as a Jew, being steeped in the laws of Torah and the culture that has sprung up around them. My rabbi knew this, even explained it to me. He pointed out his own childhood, how his parents made him sit down for a Sabbath dinner every Friday night. He didn’t know anything about the importance of family, or community, and his parents never explicitly spelled it out for him.

“The very act of having those dinners every week taught me these values,” I remember him saying to me. “That is how Judaism expresses itself, by doing.”

MY NON-JEWISH MOTHER ultimately reminded me of this. Since I’ve moved out of the house, my parents have made a point to travel and see our extended family, mostly my father’s brothers. My mother has also made a point of kvetching on a regular basis how little I come home to see them.

“One dinner a week, is that so much to ask,” she says to me in her best wannabe Jewish Jersey accent.

I asked her why they travel so much to see family, when they hadn’t done it for years. It was a serious question, but it was also a way to get her off the topic of my lack of homecomings. Then she answered my question, but she did it in that way people do sometimes. You ask them a little, inconsequential question, and they give you the answer to a bigger question, the one you never even thought to ask.

“They won’t be around forever,” she said. “We want to see them, to share time with them, while they can still enjoy it and remember it. After all, family is the only thing you can always count on.”

My father, who has gotten in on the guilt-your-child act as well, chimed in. “You should go see them sometime too.”

It sounds terrible, but it had never occurred to me how important it was to them that our family comes together. I’d spent most of my adult life running away from family gatherings. My mother’s side of the family was shattered by my grandfather’s death, he being the tie that bound us all together. I looked at my father’s side of the family and saw — through my own pampered city-dweller eyes — a collection of simpler people from the country.

For whatever reason, I didn’t get it. There are still so many ways that I have little in common with my extended family, but they remain my family. It took a Jewish life, having to face the holidays and experience the void that comes when you have no relations to hold on to. That’s what it took to make me understand what so many have tried to remind me of. By doing, or in my case, not doing those things that convey the values of my people, I have experienced the profundity of loss.

In my case, there is a lucky and happy ending. My loss was not final, and though the same concerns still linger, I can at least reclaim something of what I have left behind. I will always want that Jewish family, a home in which I can explore Judaism as much as I have within the walls of a synagogue or a classroom. I look forward with longing to a day when my own children are settled around the Seder table, listening to their father explain the traditions of Judaism. Ultimately, my parents and my friends can’t provide that. Only my fellow Jewish people can.

But my family and my friends can and do supply their own gifts. New meaning has been given to the times I spend with them. I removed myself from events like Christmas, because I was not comfortable embracing their non-Jewish overtones. I was resentful of how much I lacked in the celebration of my own Jewish holidays. But in failing to face these concerns head on, I ran away from the people who are, in my mother’s words, “the only thing you can always count on.” I ran away from my family, indeed the very idea of family.

I had to come to terms with the ways in which I stepped away from my family and into the Jewish fold, but I’ve also come to appreciate how much I need to remain committed to those times when my family needs me — and when I need them.

GUIDEPOSTS are few and far between in lives as chaotic as ours. So many things shift so fast. Our financial situation, our relationships, even our favorite TV shows, can be altered in a moment. Nothing, not even those things most dear to us, last forever. Navigating those rapids is made easier by the parts of our lives that remain constant. Our families are one of those things. Holidays are another.

Regardless of how thankless people may be, Thanksgiving always falls in late November. Darkness, be it war or poverty, hatred or injustice, may cloud our world, but with Chanukah, eight nights of candlelight always serve to remind us of miracles and hope. This is the way of holidays. They don’t come early or late or not at all. They simply arrive exactly when they always have, never waiting for convenience.

This is also the way of families, I’ve learned. Our parents and grandparents grow old, even die, and babies bring newness to a family, but the sense of connectedness, the traditions that bind us remain. In our rush to live our lives as individuals, to break away from the things we had no choice in, we leave these traditions behind.

I went one step further, adopting an entirely new people as my own. But traditions linger, and mine certainly will. As Jewish as I am, and certainly as Jewish as my future family will become, I remain more than the man I became when I joined the Jewish people.

As much as I am Arnon Kotriel bar Avraham v’ Sarah, my Hebrew name, I am Bradford Pilcher, son of Harvey and Debbie. Both sets of traditions are my own, and that will do, for now.



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