Who Knew?

by Ruth Lampert copyright September 2008

I'm Jewish, all right. I have a Jewish heart, a Jewish sense of humor, Jewish taste buds, and Jewish guilt. But I was raised in a tradition of "secular Judaism" in which these traits flourished in a climate devoid of formal Jewish education or religious practice. The only thing I knew about "kosher" was the connotation in the saying "that doesn't sound kosher to me," and a vague image of bearded, skull- capped men who didn't eat pork.

My father -- a kind and deeply moral man -- was philosophically opposed to organized religion. He probably would not have approved of the summer camp I went to the year after he died, when I was 10.

We called it "Camp Chi," pronounced "shy," although today I wonder if it wasn’t the Hebrew word “Chai,” meaning “life.” Be that as it may, the director’s name was definitely “Mother Seiman." As I think about it now that sounds more Catholic than Jewish, but Mother Seiman she was. I paid very little attention to her until the evening of My Sin.

Camp life was O.K. -- I liked the songs, and can still sing all the words to "I'm a hayseed, I'm full of seaweed..." and "Do your ears hang low, do they wobble to and fro" and "Be kind to your web-footed friends, for a duck may be somebody's mother" -- but in a lot of ways it was dumb.

For example, cabins rotated the task of setting tables for the evening meal. On my Eve of Transgression I hurried to the dining room hoping no one would notice that I was a little late (I had probably been lying on my cot day-dreaming, as usual) and the other girls were hard at it, pushing and shoving as they grabbed utensils from a large wooden box which, if I thought about it at all, I probably assumed had formerly served some other storage or packaging use, since printed on the side in big bold letters was the word "MILK." Probably the little individual milk cartons had been delivered in it, I may have thought.

My dopey cabin-mates were all crowded around it in a frenzy of gathering spoons and knives and forks, and I wondered, in my sensible way, why some of them didn't just avoid the crush by taking utensils from the nearby box labeled "MEAT"- - probably brisket had been delivered in that one. I took what I needed from it, finished my share of the tables in short order, and slipped back to my cabin, my cot, and my interrupted day-dream.

Halfway through dinner -- which I didn't think much of, mostly just cheese-filled blintzes -- the door flew open and Mother Seiman stormed in from the staff dining room. Face blazing with fury, voice strident with rage, she bellowed something about having "just learned of this blasphemy... someone with a twisted sense of humor...I expect a confession by morning or everyone in the offending cabin will be punished...bla bla bla."

What the heck was she yammering on about, I wondered? Oh well, grownups were strange, and besides, I wasn't feeling too well. My throat was sore, and my head ached.

The next morning I was in the infirmary. I stayed there until Mother (mine, not Seiman) picked me up and drove me home where Doc Kraut said I had a strep throat and was I a lucky young lady that a new wonder drug called "sulpha" was available for just such cases.

So much for Camp Chi and Mother Seiman and her inexplicable temper tantrum. Growing up I became exposed to more traditional Jews and learned, among other things, about dietary laws, including the injunction against mixing milk and meat at the same meal.

Those boxes. MEAT. MILK. The tantrum became all too explicable.
I never have kept kosher. I do scrupulously observe a personal dietary law, which mandates eating lox, bagels, and cream cheese every Sunday morning at a deli.

I espouse the spirit of Reform Judaism described by the late humanistic Rabbi Leslie Freund, whose father was an orthodox Rabbi. Leslie recalled the day he realized he really didn't believe the words he was chanting, but, he said, “I still loved the music."

That metaphor continues to inform my spiritual life. So it is that on the coming Yom Kippur I will sit, as I do every year, with fellow Jews and examine my conscience. Have I been complacent? arrogant? unkind? self-righteous? etc. etc.

I know that getting strep throat was not punishment for my childhood sin of ignorance at Camp Chi, and no God I can imagine would expect me to ask forgiveness. Still, I offer up a little apology to Mother Seiman, and if a Higher Power hears me, hey...
Couldn't hurt.