With regard to my last post, let me just say, we are FAR from being good observant Jews. We just really try to make it work for us and it does play a very very important part of our lives. And we constantly adjust.
Now, the Why....
My parents are French Canadian and were raised Catholics in a very Catholic province in the 1950's, when schools were run by nuns and kids had to learn "Le petit Cathechisme" by heart. So like most people of that generation, they turned away from that. They themselves didn't practice. My mother used to take us to midnight-mass every year for Christmas, but it was totally about the choir. She would find which church was playing a choir she liked and we would get tickets for that mass. I was baptized, did my first communion and confirmation and went to private catholic high school. Yet the only churches that I ever entered were in Europe, on vacation. Even my high-school, though run by priests and nuns, didn't have religion anymore, we had Moral Education.
My father's family didn't live in the city. They all lived in the country, where we now have our country house. It's a small town, where the locals speak French and the populations swells every weekend and holidays. But it is also a town that was very welcoming to Jews, who set up their summer camps there and went skiing in the winter. When I was a kid, there was a kosher butcher on the main street of the village, and the fabric guy on the second floor was also Jewish. I know this, because going there was referred to as "allez chez le juif" (going to the Jew's). But it wasn't pejorative. it was just what they called him. It's weird. Anyhow, I realised years and years later, during my conversion, that the prized soap that my mother used to get stains out of clothes and that she could only buy from that store was not only Kosher, but the cute red or blue dots in the middle of the bar were to indicate if it was the Milkish or Fleishig soap!
So I was pretty familiar with Jews, of all kinds. There were the totally assimilated families, with the fancy cars and big houses around the lake, and the totally orthodox families who would walk by on Saturday on the way to services, wearing all black. It was never a strange sight to me. Actually, I was very curious about them.
Then, I must have been 12 or 13, I read Anne Frank. My life changed immediately. I couldn't understand. I was horrified. I felt a connection that I have never been able to explain. How could it be, that your life would be threatened only because you were Jewish? That made no sense to my young teenage self. So I started reading other things about Judaism. And I longed. I wanted to belong. I wanted to learn more. I wanted to be a part of it somehow.
Luckily for me, I spoke excellent English and I worked as a ski instructor for my uncle's ski school. So, starting when I was 14, I spent every Sunday teaching Jewish kids to ski. They didn't come on Saturdays (apparently, I only had observant students!), but I was one busy girl on Sunday! I loved the kids and they seemed to like me. I ended up babysitting for a lot of those families on Saturday nights. Eventually, once I was old enough to work, I got jobs working for their various families. At 16, I worked as a mother's helper in Ottawa, the first time that I came to learn all about keeping Kosher, attended a Bris, became a Shabbas-Goy, the person who does things on Saturdays that Jews can't do. I also worked in a factory-store owned by another family. They were Sephardi. That's how I learned about the differences between Ashkenazim and Sephardi Jews. I also ended up babysitting a lot for that family and helping the kids do their homework. I was great at the French homework, the Hebrew was another story!
I would accept any invitation these families extended to me. They especially liked hiring me to babysit the kids on nights when they had things going on, like Passover, Rosh Hashana, etc. By the time I got to college, I was very well versed in Judaism. I also spent the year after high school in Austria, near a salt mine where Hitler hid stolen art. I read everything I could about the Holocaust. I tried to go visit the camps, but I couldn't arrange it.
I studied languages in College and the very weird thing was that most of the other students learning German were Jewish. I became very very good friends with 4 or 5 Jewish girls, one of whom was the daughter of Survivors. Every time I got to visit her house and speak to her parents, I felt like I was in the presence of..... I don't know, there are really no words to explain it. It was that same connection I got from reading Anne Frank. I could feel it in my bones, the connection.
I felt that connection one other time. After college, I went to visit one of my friends (Jewish, of course!) who was working in D.C. One afternoon, I went to visit the Holocaust museum. I spent hours watching videos from the Shoa Foundation Project. And then I walked into the room of shoes. If you have been there, you know what I am talking about. There you stand, the walls filled 25, maybe 30 feet high, with shoes taken from their owners. I must have stood there for over 30 minutes. I couldn't move. I felt like I had to make up for it someone, I had to fill one of these pairs of shoes.....
After college, except for my job in the airline, I only worked for Jews. I didn't plan it, it just happened like that. First Mr. C, then Mr. G, who introduced me to Mr. K, and then to his cousin, Mr. N. I was shocked when I took my job at the airline and I found out I no longer had Passover as a holiday! I had never worked passed 2 pm on a Friday! I belonged. I remember once, a Rabbi came to the office to distribute Hanukkah candles and he left me a box. I tried to explain to him I wasn't Jewish and he just laughed and said "Nonsense! you'd be perfect for my nephew Shlomo!" And I used to buy lunch at a little Kosher Deli around the corner from another job I had and for the entire 2 years, I had to repeat to them over and over again that in fact No, they couldn't introduce me to Hymie, or Yaakov, or whomever the newest marrying-age guy was....
So yeah, by the time Hubs and I had that faithful conversation at the bar, and he said he couldn't be serious with anyone who wasn't Jewish, when I said I couldn't either, I meant it. 100%. I hadn't really known before then, didn't know there would be a conversion, didn't know what the details were going to be. But I knew that I was going to live my life as a Jew. I just hope in some way, I can fill one of these shoes one day.
(As an aside, during our fertility treatments, they insisted on testing me for CF, since my husband has it. It turned out, that I am a carrier of CF, although no one in my family as far as we can look, as ever suffered from it. Here is the kicker, there are two main genetic mutations of CF, commonly referred to a French Canadian and Ashkenazy Jew. Take a guess. Which one do you think I carry????)
Sparky asked about Disney... What are your top three "must see" things in Disney for kids? What are your top three "don't bother" things in Disney for kids? Do you think it is insane to take a two year old to Disney?