Spoiler alert: Those of you who are reading my memoir, there are details in this essay that you won’t learn about until as late as Chapter 32. If you don’t like spoilers, you should come back to this after July 11.
When I was growing up, my family kept kosher the way lots of Jewish people I knew kept kosher: we ate milk and meat products together and used the same plates for Passover that we did every other week of the year, but we didn’t eat pork, not even in the one Chinese restaurant in town.
I was 13 when I tasted pork for the first time. I had accompanied Mom on a visit to see her friend Marylou, an Italian woman with a well-stocked larder. The grownups were visiting and I was being entertained by Marylou’s daughter, whom I didn’t know well. When she decided it was time for a snack, I followed her into the kitchen and watched as she pulled something from the refrigerator.
“Want some?” she offered, holding out what appeared to be an undernourished stick of salami, but which was very red, as if it had just suffered a terrible embarrassment.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Pepperoni,” she replied.
“I’d better ask my mother,” I said.
I was sure Mom would say no. Had these been normal times, she might well have. But these were not normal times. A few weeks earlier, on Erev Purim, my father disappeared. The last time I saw him was when he dropped me off at junior high in the morning. The next day his car was found parked by a lake where we’d never been, about a half hour north of our house. Police divers had been dragging the lake and search parties had been combing the woods but there was no sign of him. We didn’t know whether he’d been kidnapped, murdered, or had killed himself. None of those scenarios would have seemed plausible a few weeks earlier. They still didn’t. There was no reason I could fathom that anyone would have wanted to kill my harmless, funny, loving dad, the rabbi of the only Reform temple in Utica, New York. Nor was there any reason I could fathom that he would have been killed or would have killed himself. Mom had no explanation, either. When my sister and I tried to engage her by offering up variations on “what do you think happened,” she swatted away our questions with pithy aphorisms, among them “hope for the best and expect the worst and either way you won’t be disappointed.”
I tried, but it was hard to hope for the best given that weeks had gone by with no word from or about Dad. At least we knew how to behave in the event of the worst. He had told us: “When I die, I want you to cry for an hour and then get back to The Business of Living.”
I can’t recall when or how often he said this, only that I assumed he was doing so not because he expected to die any time soon (he was not sick and hadn’t been in my lifetime) but because as a rabbi he frequently counseled the bereaved and had seen too many congregants whose grief had rendered them incapable of The Business of Living. I’d always thought it was useful advice, until now, when I wasn’t sure if he was dead and didn’t want to think he was but understood that it was the most likely scenario. It wasn’t a comforting thought, but then again, not much had been comforting lately. Maybe that’s why, when I asked Mom if it was okay if I tried the pepperoni that Marylu’s daughter had offered, she didn’t hesitate to say yes.
It was delicious: salty and oily and way better than the salami that my uncle sold at the kosher butcher shop he ran with his wife, Mom’s oldest sister. I was hooked immediately.
By the time Dad’s body surfaced in the lake two weeks after Passover, Mom was buying pepperoni for me regularly. She couldn’t bring my father back, nor could she provide a satisfactory explanation for why he had disappeared in the first place, but ensuring that I had a steady supply of trayfe—that she could do.
The coroner ruled Dad’s death an accident. Mom concurred. My sister and I didn’t understand. “Why did he go to that lake in the first place?” we asked over and over, as if the frequency of our questions would increase the likelihood that the answer would change. Which it did, but the new responses were no more satisfying than the old ones:
He liked to go for walks, to clear his head. You know that.
He probably slipped and fell into the water.
Why does it matter? It’s not going to bring him back.
You had thirteen good years with him. You should be grateful for that.
Why are you looking at the cup half empty? Look at the cup half full.
Amy and I knew better than to push Mom for an informative, useful answer. During the first few days after Dad went missing, when people showed up at our front door with questions she didn’t want to answer, she’d sent them away. She turned one of our neighbors away for crying.
By the time I was fourteen, I’d given up hope of ever receiving a straight answer about what had happened. As is the case with most short-sighted adolescents, I assumed this meant I would never know.
On the positive side, Mom kept buying pepperoni. She wasn’t consciously trying to fill the Dad void in my life with pork, but I couldn’t help associating my fall from kosher grace with his disappearance and death. Whenever I ate pepperoni and, eventually, bacon and salami, I felt as if I were betraying him.
Until I was eight years old, my family spent the month of July on Cape Cod, where we ate lobster, shrimp, clams, and scallops. We went to Cape Cod because it was close to Boston, where Dad had grown up, and New Bedford, where his mother and a favorite uncle lived. His mother’s father had been a much-respected Orthodox rabbi in the former whaling town. The family that never bothered to drive five hours to our house in Utica during the year happily made the relatively short trip over the Sagamore bridge to the Cape to see us every summer.
The first time I tried stuffed shrimp was when Dad’s uncle, son of the Orthodox rabbi, treated us to dinner at the fancy seafood restaurant overlooking the harbor down the road from our rented cottage. Uncle Barney ordered salmon. The rest of us, Aunt Rose included, ate shellfish.
My sister recalls our parents telling us that pork wasn’t kosher. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I learned that shellfish was no more kosher than pork. I was shocked, but more than that, I was embarrassed at how ignorant I was, how ignorant my father had let me be.
Were we kosher or were we not? How could you claim to be kosher while still eating food that wasn’t kosher?
“Why did we eat shellfish and not pork products?” I asked my mother.
“Your father felt that what came out of your mouth was more important than what went into it,” she said. It was a pithy quote which, I later discovered, came straight from the mouth of Jesus himself. But it did not provide the understanding I was looking for, so I did some research.
The most plausible explanation I found was a theory that pork products are more offensive to Jews than shellfish, because in eastern Europe, anti-Semites sometimes left pigs on the doorsteps of Jewish homes. Presumably this was because shellfish was too expensive to leave on doorsteps and pigs were more widely available.
As with my futile attempts to learn why Dad had disappeared into the lake all those years ago, I was hopeful that the more frequently I questioned Mom about our kosher practice, the more likely I was to get a satisfactory answer. Hope springs eternal. Also, questions about pork were less likely to get Mom’s hackles up than questions about Dad’s death.
I floated the pork-is-more-anti-Semitic theory past her. “Did we eat shellfish because it didn’t have the same negative connotations as pork?” I asked.
Once again she quoted Dad (Jesus).
On other occasions when I asked for an explanation, she criticized “gastronomical Jews, like Aunt Roz,” my father’s only sister, the family bogeyman, who kept kosher but didn’t go to temple on Friday nights (which we did) and shopped on Shabbos (which we did not).
Dad had been dead for nine years when I stumbled upon boxes of letters we had received while he was missing and after he had been found. Mom said she’d been saving them for me and my sister but she’d forgotten to tell us about them. I spent an afternoon poring over them. There were hundreds, all but two of which were glowing tributes. Those two, written by people I’d never heard of, intimated that Dad had been depressed and killed himself. They made me furious. I dismissed them, immediately, as outrageous.
I’d long since embraced Mom’s version of Dad’s death, that he had gone for a walk because he liked going for walks, and that he’d slipped into the lake and drowned. It was a comforting story. It did not open the door to guilt, shame, responsibility or self-examination, and the pain that inevitably followed.
A few months after I found those letters, I had an encounter with Aunt Roz who, unprompted, blurted out that she had accepted years earlier that Dad had killed himself. I was so shocked that I ended our conversation, though I waited until I got to my car to cry. Rather than entertain the possibility that my aunt might be right, I concluded that she was more cruel than I had imagined.
Two years later, my sister informed me that she, too, believed that Dad had killed himself. I was as angry with her as I had been at Aunt Roz and the letter writers, but it wasn’t so easy to dismiss her. Unlike the letter writers, I knew her. Unlike Aunt Roz, she wasn’t the bogeyman. Also, I was twenty-four, and though I preferred to believe that Dad had not left us deliberately, it was time for me to at least explore the possibility.
Seven more years passed before I was able to fully free myself from the sludge of denial into which I’d begun to sink the day Dad disappeared. It took three years of therapy combined with long conversations with Mom, my sister, my Dad’s closest rabbi friend, and Aunt Roz, who had sloughed off her bogeyman costume and revealed herself to be a devoted, loving relative.
Gradually I learned that Dad had worked himself into a depression over fears that the temple was going to fold (an unfounded fear: nearly forty-four years later we had Mom’s funeral in the same building). I learned there was history of mental illness in his family, and that at his father’s funeral the officiating rabbi singled him out during the service and, from the pulpit, castigated him for becoming a Reform rabbi. I learned that his mother and sister blamed my mother for not keeping a kosher home, even though it had been his wish as much as hers—that he firmly believed that what we ate was not a measure of the kind of Jews we were.
But I still didn’t understand why we embraced shellfish and not pork. Eventually I gave up and stopped asking. I’d never know, which meant I would feel guilty every time I ate it, which is why I almost never ate it and why I felt a stab of self-loathing whenever I allowed it in my house.
I was in my mid-forties when, unprompted, Mom finally solved the mystery. By then I was living halfway across the continent with my non-Jewish husband and our two children. I was telling Mom about an upcoming meal at my in-laws’. My mother-in-law had contemplated serving ham, which she had never done in the years I’d been part of the family.
“I could never eat it,” I said. “It’s just so pink and icky looking.”
“Dad never liked the taste of ham,” Mom said.
The comment wasn’t intended to be profound. She was sharing a memory, albeit one that was new to me. In the brief moment it took to process what she’d said, I knew she’d given me the answer for which I’d been searching. “That’s why we never ate pork? Because Dad didn’t like the taste of ham?”
“Yes,” she said, as if she hadn’t given me a different answer every other time I’d asked.
There was a part of me that didn’t quite trust Dad-didn’t-like-the-taste-of-ham as the reason for my family’s lopsided kosher practice. If that was the case, why hadn’t Mom told me so the first time I’d asked?
There existed the distinct possibility that she had pulled this explanation out of the air, that if I were to ask again the following week or a year later, she’d be back to paraphrasing Jesus. But it didn’t matter. This was the answer I was buying because this was the answer that resonated with me. What I had thought was our kosher practice was all about taste buds. And while it contradicted traditional Jewish law, it didn’t contradict the Jesus quote, nor did it contradict the spirit of Reform Judaism.
I spoke slowly, so Mom could not mistake the intent of my question. “You mean, if Dad had liked the taste of ham, we’d have eaten pork products?”
“Yes,” she said.
I’d like to report that this new information immediately erased all of the guilty confusion I had ever felt about eating pepperoni and bacon and salami, but it did not. However, there was one positive change. When people asked if I was turning down pork for religious reasons, I felt I could answer honestly: “No.” Then I’d add the punchline: “It’s because I’m neurotic.”
It inevitably got the laugh I’d been hoping for, but the laugh didn’t mitigate the discomfort I still felt about the role that pepperoni, bacon, and salami played in my life.
My husband, who is not Jewish, never complained about having to go to his parents’ house or a restaurant to get his bacon fix. Neither did my son. My daughter, Elizabeth, wasn’t so happy about it, but when she was old enough to cook, I told her if she wanted to eat bacon at home, she could buy it and cook it herself. She rarely did.
Let’s face it: bacon is messy, not to mention a fire hazard. Beef fry, fake bacon (think of it as fake-un), a Hebrew National product marketed in my youth to kosher Jews who didn’t know what they were missing, was much less splattery, probably because it didn’t have nearly the amount of fat as the real stuff. Mom used to buy it all the time. It kept company in the fridge with the pepperoni. Its culinary successor, the more widely available turkey bacon, is equally less messy and less dangerous to cook, but my daughter has dismissed it as a poor substitute for its piggy cousin. She is right.
Elizabeth loves bacon. It is near and dear to her stomach and to her heart though not, thank heaven, in an artery-clogging way. When she became a Bat Mitzvah in 2009, she chose the date of her ceremony specifically so she could read Parshat Shimini, which details the laws of kashrut. She researched the laws’ logic and traditions. She quoted nineteenth-century Italian scholar Samuel David Luzzatto, who wrote that “every Jew must be set apart in laws and ways of life from other nations as to not imitate their behavior” and “the laws we observe make us remember at every moment the God who commanded them.”
Luzzatto’s words helped her to understand that kashrut is designed in large part to remind us “of the one-of-a-kind values, traditions, and obligations of our religion, that it will always keep us special,” that it has been a part of Judaism for thousands of years and will likely continue to be so.
Seen in isolation, she said, kashrut didn’t make sense, but from a faith-and-belief perspective, a perspective that contradicts logic, she better understood why God had made the laws.
She summed up her d’var Torah by announcing that she had no intention of keeping kosher. As a Reform Jew, she said, she had the freedom to make an informed choice, and now that she was informed, she chose not to follow a law that did not resonate (her words) with her. My father would have been proud.
I was envious. It has taken me much longer to come to peace with my kosher practice. Elizabeth deserves some of the credit. “You eat shellfish and it’s not kosher,” she would remind me when I dithered. “Your dad ate it, too. So why won’t you eat pork?”
“Because I’m neurotic” was no longer an acceptable excuse—not that it ever was to her.
“Because I don’t like the taste” was a lie: although I have no interest in pork chops or ham, I can’t deny the appeal of bacon, pepperoni, and salami.
For a long time I believed the answer was, “Because it means I’m not a good Jew,” but as a rabbi pointed out to me when I was lamenting my self-described failures of observance, “There are many ways to be Jewish.” At the time I thought she was placating me. Perhaps she was. Regardless, I wasn’t ready to stop punishing myself, to let go of the idea that enjoying something I didn’t eat when my father was alive made me a bad Jew and a bad daughter.
The seeds for my about-face were planted thirteen years after Dad died, when Mom and Aunt Roz put aside their grievances. Guided by Aunt Roz’s daughter, they eventually built a relationship so close that even my maternal aunts adopted Aunt Roz as one of their own. The woman who had once judged my mother for failing to keep kosher had clearly gotten that out of her system. When I got to know her as an adult, I was surprised to discover that Aunt Roz was more concerned about my salt intake than my adherence to Jewish dietary laws.
As it turned out, Aunt Roz was more concerned about my salt intake than my adherence to Jewish dietary laws.
The other turning point in my decision to stop loathing myself for eating the occasional slice of pepperoni pizza or strip of well-cooked bacon occurred a few years ago, when I started reworking my memoir about understanding Dad’s death and my inability to face the truth about it. A few months into the project, my mother died. Two weeks later, my then 20-year-old son tried to kill himself. During the three months that he spent in a psychiatric hospital, I resolved to stop judging myself the way Mom and Aunt Roz had judged each other, and the way Dad felt judged by his entire family.
Dad’s Jewish practice was very different from that of the Jews who raised him, but that didn’t make it bad. Mine is different now from what it was when I was a child and a young adult. It works for me and my family. Perhaps it will be different 20 years from now, but the core of my belief hasn’t changed and I doubt it will: to me, a good Jew is one who takes to heart the words of the Sh’ma, treats others with dignity and respect, and understands and practices the mitzvot of tikkun olam, gemilut hasadim, and bikor cholim.
I do not have to keep kosher to be reminded of God’s presence in my life; I’m aware of it always, when I lie down at night, when I wake up in the morning, when I lead a group of kids in song at my synagogue, when I walk along the river near my home at sunset, when I see my son and daughter heading off to the mountains for a weekend of hiking and canoeing with friends.
The freedom to be “a good Jew” in a way that feels right to me is what Mom was trying to tell me when she quoted Dad (Jesus) all those years ago: what comes out of my mouth is more important than what goes in. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to understand. But, to quote another of her pithy sayings, better late than never.
Debby when Danny and I grew up my Grandmother bought Kosher meat but we ate from the same dishes then you know when we knew you and your sister my Mother had 2 sets of dishes one Milk one meat and bought Kosher meat ! We ate out though when I married at 46 and when it’s in Albany I never kept Kosher and because my husband to wasn’t Jewish and No kids who cared about that ! I love bacon but can’t have it or the other lovey things because of the salt I love pickles and olives but No ! Nothing I grew up with either boy I remember my grandmother boiling Beef tongue which I now don’t want to know about
אמן ואמן
This was beautiful. Kosher when I was a kid meant meat dishes, milk dishes, Passover dishes and a trayfe set for when we ordered in….My mom was even shomer Shabbat when my parents were first married. But things changed over time. My house is far from kosher but as homage to my grandmother there is no pork in the house. Your dad was right, to be a Jew isn’t what goes in your stomach.
P.s. turkey bacon in the air fryer isn’t as messy….