Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht
[Or, for those not familiar with the Yiddish: Man Plans, and God Laughs.]
It’s another weird pandemic Passover, which I find myself in the strange position of being grateful for; shortly before the era of social distancing began, my husband Rowan and I attended an event which made it clear that a branch of my family was pretty deeply transphobic. I’m not going to go into details on that here, even though well-meaning cis people in particular always seem to think they want them. “How did your family take it?” they often ask, when the subject of my being trans comes up — their tone of funereal seriousness never quite hides the less savory aspects of this curiosity.
The truth is that transphobic family stories are largely pretty boring. The trans people involved are interesting, of course, but bigotry isn’t actually novel, and it, by nature, doesn’t really change. I think sometimes cis people are hoping for an after-school special kind of tale, a confrontation that ends with a slammed door, a shouted, “You can’t stop me from being who I am!” and a tremulous but proud smile into camera as triumphant music swells. I’m sure that sort of thing happens sometimes — there’s a lot of people toddling around on this earth, so almost everything does — but usually reality is a lot less climactic. Most of the transphobic family stories I’ve heard (and I’ve heard a lot of them) boil down to, “A bunch of people told me for years that they loved me unconditionally, but it turns out they had a couple of significant conditions they forgot to mention in advance.” It’s not salacious or satisfying, just shitty, wearying. It just makes you wish, fruitlessly, for a world populated with better people.
I’m lucky enough not to have lost my whole family to transphobia — the people closest to me, thankfully, turned out to be supportive — but that’s a bit like saying someone is lucky enough not to have lost their whole house in the fire. Obviously it is better, if there must be a fire, for the conflagration to leave some rooms unscathed, but the gratitude for what remains doesn’t magically repair what was charred and consumed (and, of course, the only way to have been truly lucky would have been not having the fire at all). I am glad for the family I have left, but the smell of smoke lingers on memories of birthday parties and life lessons and childhood milestones, on dozens of items that once brought me comfort, and on all of the Jewish holidays.
Even for Reform Jews, my family isn’t the most observant bunch — the joke that we were “Jewish, heavy on the -ish” was often bandied about — but we still all reliably gathered for Passover, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. Most of us went to temple, if only sometimes. My brothers and I attended extra-curricular religious school, and all had Bar Mitzvahs (technically what I had was a Bat Mitzvah, but I’m certainly not going to do it again, so my ancestral guilt and I have made a tentative agreement to call it a wash). And all of us, to use a phrase that has become weirdly complicated over the last few years, are deeply culturally Jewish. What I personally mean by this is that being Jewish, for us, has always hinged more on the Jewish traditions and cultural practices than it did on anything else.
I’ve loved food, and specifically Jewish food, as long as I’ve been alive, and so I’ve always loved Passover the most of all the holidays. The sweet nuttiness of charoset, shot through with the unmistakeable flavor of Manichevitz wine; the rich tenderness of the brisket, cooked at a low temperature until it can barely hold itself together; the golden chalice of warmth that is a bowl of matzo ball soup, the first dish I ever learned well enough to truly make my own; these were comforting flavors, once. They still are, but it’s a sadder kind of comfort, now. The sort of comfort that comes at a price.
Passover, like so many Jewish holidays, is about triumph and despair, celebration and grief. Understanding the way that joy and sorrow are twined together is an essential part of being Jewish. The traditions and rituals, the prayers, even the food — they always felt like something of a consolidation to me, a balm against the capriciousness and cruelty of the world. It was hard to ever feel truly alone, knowing that I was doing something that people like me had been doing for thousands of years. This, of course, is hardly a concept unique to Judaism; I’d argue that it’s a bedrock part of being a person, this desire to walk in the footsteps left behind in the snow. Life is so complicated, so beautiful and painful and hard to predict or understand; I think it’s natural to want to feel part of something, to be but one pair of many hands at work.
I haven’t kept Passover in a few years, though there was a time, not that long ago, where I was the most observant Jew my family had ever produced. It’s harder to muster the energy for all of that than it once was. In 2019 I was working two jobs to make ends meet, and didn’t have time to worry about Passover; in 2020 the pandemic was in its early days, and anyway The Incident had already happened, meaning I wouldn’t have gone to Passover even if the world wasn’t being ravaged by a deadly plague. This year we’re largely inside again, but my various feeds are covered with Jews happily promising, “Next year in person.” I’m glad for them, but I’ll admit seeing it makes me feel something twisted up and ugly, too, something that brings me no comfort at all.
I don’t know what will happen when the pandemic ends. For the last year most the members of my family I still speak to and I have lived in this weird limbo, where the cavernous rift is vaguely acknowledged, but never fully discussed. I’m not sure they all understand that my husband and I will not break bread with people who’d treat us the way that branch of the family did — like embarrassments worthy of ostracism. Like we were too disgusting to be associated with in public. Once you’ve walked out of a wedding snarling, “I’m not going to Hava Na-fucking-gila with these people,” as though you are someone who was just brought to life from a Larry David show, it’s hard to turn back. Once you’ve seen who someone really is, it’s hard to avert your eyes.
When the vaccines are distributed and the danger has lifted, I’ll find out what’s going to happen on the Jewish holidays. Maybe my remaining family and I will throw smaller, more private celebrations, or maybe they will quietly return to attending the larger functions without us, awkwardly avoiding the subject when we talk. It’s hard to know how things will go. Whatever the case, the period of my life where I understood my Judaism through the lens of my large Jewish family has ended. In a way, this whole essay — this whole year — has been me sitting shiva for it.
Like a lot of Jews I’ve known over the years, my concept of God doesn’t really line up what’s laid out in the Torah. I have a hard timing believing any kind of higher power could be gripped with emotions like anger or vengeance; that’s human mess, something I know when I see it. If I was a different kind of person, or a different kind of Jew, I think I’d be quite angry at God about all of this. But — as a rabbi once warned me, far too young to understand him, as we discussed the story of Jacob wrestling the angel — faith as Judaism understands it leaves a lot of room for argument. You can spend your whole life challenging and questioning and wondering, tearing apart the text for new angles or meanings, not sure you trust the idea of God enough to rail against it in moments of despair, and still be doing it right.
At some point in the next two days the chicken on the bottom shelf of my fridge will thaw. When it does, I’ll put it into a pot with carrots and celery and parsnips and garlic, yellow onions whose skins I’ve left on, a sprig of rosemary from the plant by the living room window that survived the winter somehow. I’ll cover it all with water and let it cook together for a few hours, until the stock is brilliant gold and the whole apartment smells like finally coming home after a long, exhausting day. I’ll add parsley and fresh vegetables to replace the ones I started with, which will have gone limp after lending all their flavor to the soup; I’ll trade the whole onions for pearl onions, and shred the chicken off its bones until each piece is perfectly spoon-sized. I’ll make the matzo balls, drawn back into a dozen memories by the feel of the sticky dough against my palms, and what was once only joyful will now be an act of sorrow, too — that’s Judaism, I suppose. I may have stopped believing in the person who taught me these steps, but I still believe in the steps, in the meal that they make; I will look down into my bowl, fix my eyes upon the swirls of golden broth only knowledge and time can produce, and tell myself it’s something holy.
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