DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)

By: Mandy Keifetz
April 4, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.

FAITH

I come from a long line of atheists. My pedigree is pure. My great grandfather ran away from Russia so he wouldn’t have to become a rabbi. My dad’s family — who had fled Ukraine at the turn of the previous century — went back when Lenin took power, so profoundly did they believe in Marxism. (They had to flee again, of course. Anti-Semites don’t care what you believe.)

Raised in the ACP, probably the entirety of my Jewish identity was that I had a casting-office cabdriver Great Uncle Izzy who taught me Yiddish curse words on the sly, and told stories about old-skool New York street life which would make all the poets of New York grit green with envy.

When my daughter, who was then attending a majority-Muslim NYC public middle school, began to express interest in her Jewish identity, I feared the worst, and for me, the worst was that my kid might start believing in a Sky Dude. When she decided she wished to have a bat mitzvah ceremony, I still hoped to discourage her.

“We’ll have to read the whole Torah,” I said. “And it’s pretty deranged.”

She persevered. And we read it. At this point, I still hoped she’d lose interest. She agreed the Torah was a misogynist freak show, but was undeterred. We read a queer guide to the Torah. We read a feminist guide to the Torah. Reason was on my side, but curiosity was on hers. She agreed there was no passage she had any interest in interpreting; however, she consulted with a close friend of mine who’d been raised Orthodox, and together, they read the laws a person who becomes a bat mitzvah is agreeing to.

There are 613 mitzvot. My kid said most of these were insane (you can keep slaves, just not other Jews) or else rendered irrelevant by time (this is your set of responsibilities to a building which has not existed for millennia). But she found 6 she could live by. The don’t-be-a-dick ones, basically. Don’t gossip; don’t put a stumbling block in front of a blind man, that kind of thing. My friend taught her the Hebrew — my kid now speaks Hebrew with a Bengali accent — and we bought about 25 bucks’ worth of fruit tarts from a local bakery and right there in our Brooklyn courtyard, my kid, the first in generations, committed to a small corner of our faith.

The next year brought us the Israel-Hamas conflict. Having committed to not be a dick, with god and fruit tarts from Montelone’s as her witness, my kid was horrified by the atrocities in Gaza. And felt, somehow, personally responsible. But rather than drive her away from her heritage, this made her long for a community of like-minded Jews. We found a queer, god-optional, pro-Palestine shul born of the Radical Fairies, and steeped in performance art. Even I have to admit that the services are pure art, and the community a balm. I bought her a tallis and she looks so beautiful in it, I am moved despite myself.

This year we even celebrated Hanukkah. Our sympathies are with the Hellenized Jews, of course, and we told the story that way. But setting things on fire in the dark of late December felt right, and giving kids presents is always good. Anyway, while practicing my ancestral faith is definitely something I deferred for half a century, where I really wanted to leave this at was January 20, 2025.

Because as the republic (which guaranteed my right to be a godless Jew with a relentless kid, a wisecracking cabdriver uncle, and a queer Rabbi) collapses, I realize only now what it is I have truly deferred for a lifetime, and my family for multiple generations — prayer.

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DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (1)

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