A while back when I was out walking solo in the neighborhood, I thought back fondly on all my passions and deep interests of the past, and got a bit teary eyed, missing them. There are current obsessions, of course, but I miss the Old Friends.
One of those Old Friends was Judaism, triggered by reading and rereading and obsessively rereading the Diary of Anne Frank in approximately 1992-1993.(Please note that her full name was Anneliese, and the shortened version is appropriately pronounced AH-neh FRAHNK. She was German, not Dutch, though of course the house where her family hid from the Nazis was in the old part of Amsterdam; I have been to it, now a museum, twice. Her father, the only member of her immediate family to survive their eventual internment in the death camps, died on August 19, 1980. I felt significantly tied to their family through this small piece of chronology, as I was born the following day.)
I studied Judaism fairly extensively from the vantage point of my middle school bedroom in an era without internet, but with reasonable access to various small libraries at home, school, and church. I did create some various small religious artifacts which I stored on the second to bottom shelf of my chiffarobe, including the small metal box containing the Shema (which observant Jews tack onto their door posts.) Mine was fashioned from the lid of a tin can: cut, bent, and then embellished with markers. The Shema itself I wrote in Hebrew on a piece of handmade paper, although I don't still remember the materials or process. This thing I still have in the glass cabinet in my disaster of a living room. I also went so far as to hold a private and secret Pesach Seder in that same refuge of a bedroom.
For 29 years I have wanted to add a Hannukah menorah to my collection and use it for the holiday, but every year I can't quite justify the purchase to myself.
Today I spent a couple of hours moving furniture in the living room and cleaning up the discovered scourge, in an effort to create a cozy spot for our recently secured Christmas tree. That mission was accomplished, although I do wish our tree were quite a bit larger. As I finished up this process I was nearly in meltdown for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, and I dashed out on some errands. While I was walking through the store wiggling my hands and muttering to myself under my breath (just try to imagine Don Weilerstein in Target) I very purposefully bought myself the long awaited cultural object. It is now installed I my living room window.
