Sweet Like Sugar (31 page)

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Authors: Wayne Hoffman

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #General, #Jewish Men, #Male Friendship, #Rabbis, #Jewish, #Religion, #Jewish Gay Men, #Judaism

BOOK: Sweet Like Sugar
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“Take it,” he repeated. “We must start somewhere. Hillel speaks to your heart? So start with
Pirkei Avot
. Come visit me again. Teach me what you have learned. And I will teach you what I have learned.”
“I don't know . . .”
“ ‘Do not say: When I have time I will study. Because you may never have the time,' ” he said. “Also Hillel. Also
Pirkei Avot
.”
Irene came up behind my chair and put her hand on my shoulder. And the rabbi looked at us and smiled.
I conceded: “Well, I guess I can't argue with Hillel.”
CHAPTER 12
“S
o, he
is
trying to convert you.”
My mother didn't much like the idea of the rabbi “teaching” me about Judaism; she didn't know exactly what we'd be discussing, but she was sure that his Judaism wasn't the same as hers and the rabbi was surely filling my head with Orthodox propaganda.
I tried to reassure her by telling her that I wasn't any more likely to start attending Shabbat services at his synagogue than I was to go to Congregation Beth Shalom. Or the gay synagogue. Or any synagogue.
“He's not going to change how I think,” I said, sitting across from her at my parents' kitchen table over Friday night dinner.
“You're not going to start praying every morning, are you?” she asked, as if that was the most absurd thing she could think of.
“I'm an atheist, Mom,” I said. “Who am I going to pray to?”
She threw up her hands. “An atheist!” she spat, as if she had now realized that there was one thing even more absurd than praying every morning: not praying at all.
Sitting next to her, my father was less dramatic, but no less confused. “If you're an atheist, why are you studying with that rabbi?”
“Isn't being Jewish about more than God?” I asked.
“Like what?” he asked.
“Community, family, tradition, culture, history,” I said. “Codes of ethics. Social justice . . . should I go on?”
“No, I get the point,” my father said. “But what brought all this on?”
I told him about the rabbi's speech, about how I shouldn't let someone take my Judaism away from me—and how I felt like I'd let that happen for so many years because I felt alienated at every turn. Other Jews had told me that I didn't matter because I wasn't observant enough, or Zionist enough, or committed enough to “continuity”—which was really just a code word for heterosexuality. Meanwhile, non-Jews saw me as too Zionist, or too invested in religion, or simply too culturally foreign to ever really blend in. Both sides would have been happier if I'd simply stopped calling myself a Jew. But I wasn't going to let them win. I was going to take back my Jewishness. On my own terms.
“I'm embracing my Judaism,” I said to my parents. “I thought you guys would be happy.”
They looked at each other.
“If you want to embrace your Judaism, you could just come with us to services,” my mother said. “I don't understand what the rabbi has to do with it.”
“No,” I said. “I guess you don't.”
I tried to change the subject by telling them about Michelle's engagement. It worked; they were both back on familiar ground.
My mother's first question: “Is he Jewish?”
I didn't know the answer to any of her subsequent questions: Will Michelle take his name or hyphenate? Have they set a date? Where will they live? Are they planning to have children?
She wasn't too annoyed that I didn't have all the answers. The first question was the only one that really mattered.
“I remember the first time you brought her home for dinner,” my mother said. “You were both freshmen. You two made such a cute couple. I had this fantasy somewhere in the back of my head that someday she'd be marrying
you
.”
In fact, when I'd come out to them at the beginning of my sophomore year, my mother's second reaction—after first believing I was playing a prank on her—was confusion: She was convinced that Michelle and I were an item, despite my insistence to the contrary. (“Michelle's not my girlfriend, Mom, I'm
gay,
” I reiterated. She asked, without realizing how funny it sounded, “But does Michelle know?”)
Sitting across the table from her now, I was amazed to realize that her fantasy of having Michelle for a daughter-in-law still flickered somewhere in her brain, despite how much she'd grown to accept me as her gay son. “Yeah, that wouldn't really have worked out,” I said.
She shot me one of her don't-be-a-smarty-pants looks. “Well, God forgive me for fantasizing about my son falling in love and settling down,” she said.
“That might happen,” I said, “just not with Michelle.”
My father's ears perked up. “Seeing someone?” he asked.
They never asked for too many details, but they did keep track of who I was dating.
“For a couple of weeks,” I said. “His name is Jamie.”
My father asked, “What does he do?”
“He's a flight attendant,” I said. I imagined his disappointment; I'm sure he'd have preferred something like doctor or lawyer or civil servant.
“That's okay,” was all he said.
I looked at my mother, who was conspicuously silent.
“And yes, he's Jewish,” I said. This was true. Or half-true. Or true enough for me, anyway. I figured that'd satisfy her.
Instead, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “I didn't say a thing.”
Despite my parents' misgivings, I developed a new routine with the rabbi. Once a week, I'd visit after work to discuss Judaism.
We started with
Pirkei Avot,
with more Hillel: “He who does not increase his knowledge, decreases it.” The rabbi intended this as a motivational slogan, something to prod my further studies. I rose to his challenge.
Occasionally, we'd touch on a related subject that would send the rabbi to his bookshelves to find another book, something else to discuss. Sometimes it was a story I remembered from my childhood book of Bible stories, other times a verse from the Talmud or rabbinical commentary that he deemed relevant.
Once in a while, I'd come to him with a seemingly random question about a holiday tradition or a custom that I didn't understand. Why is it a woman's responsibility to light Shabbat candles? What does cheesecake have to do with Shavuot? Why is fish considered pareve? These were usually questions that Jamie had asked me that I couldn't answer on my own; I'd pose them again to the rabbi as if they were my own questions and he'd answer them. Then I'd report his remarks back to Jamie, as if the rabbi were the Oracle of Glenbrook.
These were elementary discussions, I knew—things the rabbi had probably talked about sixty or seventy years ago. But he never talked down to me or treated my questions as too obvious to warrant a response. He was a good teacher; his years as a yeshiva instructor in Brooklyn proved useful. Usually, I left these sessions with a new book from his shelves, something to pore over for a few days before our next meeting.
The rabbi, too, asked me questions. About being gay.
“I am afraid I do not even know what to ask,” he said tentatively, at one of our first meetings. “About your . . . life.”
I remembered a story from the Passover Haggadah about four sons: a wise son, a simple son, a contrary son, and a son who does not even know how to ask a question. “As for the son who does not even know how to ask a question,” I said to the rabbi, quoting from my family's Haggadah, “you must begin for him.” He nodded at the reference; I began for him, telling him about how I realized I was gay.
Eventually, he came up with his own questions: How was I so sure that I was
that way?
Did I ever
try
to change? Why did I feel the need to
talk
about it, to label myself? His questions were always general, and while he avoided using the word “abomination,” he still couldn't bring himself to use the word “gay.” My answers were similarly broad and I never spoke specifically about sex. But we understood each other.
The rabbi's questions about being gay were surely as elementary as my questions about being Jewish; I'd answered them all years before. But like him, I never spoke down to him or treated his questions as too obvious to warrant a response. It was the questions that mattered. I knew I'd never change his mind. But I tried to help him understand—to “get over it,” as Irene might say.
Irene was delighted that I was visiting again, even if it wasn't every day. “He always looks forward to seeing you,” she told me one day in my office. “He talks about it all week.”
“That's because I always bring honey cake,” I joked.
“Well, that doesn't hurt, either,” she joked back. “The way to that man's heart is through his sweet tooth.”
Mrs. Goldfarb admitted to being a bit surprised at the turn my visits to the rabbi had taken. “It's like you've come back to Hebrew school after all these years,” she said with some disbelief when I saw her at the sandwich shop one day at lunch.
“He who does not increase his knowledge, decreases it,” I told her. “That's Hillel.”
She was somewhat stunned, but quickly came up with a retort: “I suppose your teachers must have planted those seeds of curiosity many years ago.”
I didn't tell her that the rabbi was more patient than she'd been when I was her second-grade student. I just said, “A good teacher, you never forget,” and left it at that. Let her think what she wants.
 
Work kept coming at a steady but reasonable pace through the winter. More ads for Paradise. More online work, thanks to referrals from my website launch the previous fall. I even picked up a bit of work for the bookstore, when Mrs. Goldfarb asked me to design the store's advertisements for the
Jewish Week
. (“Keep it clean, Benjamin,” she told me, “no boys with their shirts off.”)
In my spare time, I worked on a little project I was doing for free: designing invitations for Michelle and Dan's wedding. Here, too, I kept it clean.
Through it all, Jamie and I continued to grow closer. His work required him to leave town every few days—San Francisco, Lima, Detroit, Panama City—but he always came back to me.
We spent New Year's Eve at a great party at a disco downtown, on a double date with Phil and Sammy—still seeing each other, and still unwilling to visit the suburbs—with one of the hottest DJs from New York spinning. We left at a quarter after midnight so we could go home and be alone instead.
We spent a whole weekend in February doing door-to-door canvassing for Obama—my T-shirt said “Change” while his said “Hope”—and celebrated with champagne when he swept the primaries in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington.
We did Valentine's Day like a couple of giddy goofballs, exchanging heart-shaped balloons and heart-shaped candies and matching boxer shorts covered with hearts. I was hooked.
One day in the middle of March, Jamie came to my office to meet me for lunch.
“When's Purim?” he asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“The bookstore has a big window display,” he said. “Just seemed so funny when everyone else's windows are full of shamrocks and leprechauns for Saint Patrick's Day.”
“Welcome to Glenbrook.”
“Right,” he said. “So what's Purim again? Isn't that the holiday with the noisemakers and the big cookies?”
I knew there was more to it than that, but I also knew that I'd probably have described it the same way. “Hamantashen,” I said. “The cookies are called hamantashen.”
“Did your mom make them when you were a kid?”
I laughed. “My mother didn't bake much. She was more of an Entenmann's mom.”
“Better than mine,” Jamie said. “She used to bake these awful little Swedish cookies. Dry as dust, and they tasted like almonds and sand.”
“Poor thing,” I offered. “Sounds like child abuse. Or at least neglect.”
“Want to make hamantashen tonight?” he asked.
“I've never done it,” I said.
“Me, either,” he said. “So we'll figure it out together. How hard can it be?”
Truth be told, it was pretty hard. Our first batch unfolded in the oven, leaving prune filling spilling out across the cookie sheet. The next batch burned on the bottom, and the one after that burned on the top after we'd moved the baking rack up too high. By the time we got a dozen decent hamantashen, our hands were blistered from the rolling pin and my kitchen floor was covered in flour.

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