Jewish Howl
Of all things I’ve shared on this Substack so far, I’d imagine my son’s rebellion probably piques the most curiosity. He gave me his permission to write about him, but only on condition that I plug his business. So, first things first.
Thank G-d, Dovid is doing very well. It turns out that bringing him home from Israel was the right decision. He is working hard, building up his own construction company.
Here are some before-and-after pictures.
And some outdoor shots:
So if you need a contractor in the Rockland/North Jersey area, get in touch with Housman Construction at 718-541-8983.
Okay, the commercial is over. But I am very proud of him. He’s entrepreneurial, honest, and does beautiful work. He works on my house when he has time. It’s his laboratory, his school. He was always more of a kinesthetic learner than his brothers.
When I asked his permission to write about him, I told him how the Substack was inspired by a woman who’d left the Westboro Baptist Church. He’d already heard of her.
“She’s rational,” he said, which is a high compliment coming from him. “I related to her.”
Of course, he did. I felt exactly the same way when I was listening to her. Anyone who has either left their religious upbringing or watched their child do it understands the psychological dynamic in someone else’s life. There are two basic reactions: shut each other out or learn to live with your differences. If you love each other, you’ll choose the latter.
Which is not to say that it doesn’t come with a cost. My son shook my faith. He’d bring home books like Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great, and I couldn’t deny that some of the arguments rang true. He also laid some personal criticism at my feet, which I accept. So while I have not abandoned my faith like he has, I’ve certainly had to readjust. In the wise words of my youngest son, recently married and currently in rabbinical school in Jerusalem: “Your faith is only as strong as the doubt you overcome.”
Because of my family’s religious divergences, I hear the hysteria of the fundamentalist Christians in a fairly specific way. Whether it’s a demand to ban Harry Potter books for enticing kids into witchcraft or the canard that gay and trans people “groom” kids to sexually exploit them, the fear is the same. Parents feel like they’re losing their grip on their kids. “What if they stray from my religion? What if they’re no longer like me?”
The answer is to accept them anyway. We all end up rejecting at least some of the values we were raised with. That’s part of growing up and becoming your own person. My religious sons aren’t carbon copies of my husband and me, either. So don’t demonize some external cause like fantasy books or LGBTQ people. If any of my sons had “come out” as gay, it wouldn’t be because some predator groomed them for it.
I’m not saying the adjustment easy. Not at all. It hurts on all sides. But you can get through it.
And now I want to share some of my more creative writing on this subject. It’s called “Jewish Howl,” a poem modeled after Allen Ginsberg’s.
I saw the pure souls of my son’s generation, good-hearted boys who at age of three wore their hair in long sidecurls and swayed back and forth as they sing-songed the words of the Torah, sweet-natured girls who, even when they were still stick-figured and flat-chested, learned to dress demurely because true beauty gets cheapened when you flaunt your body, watched them turn their backs on the ancient traditions they were raised with to go experiment with drugs illegal and prescription, sex gay and straight, blast punk rock through their pious neighborhoods, shock their families with a new vocabulary of curse words (though the reaction dulls with repetition), delve into the theory of evolution and atheist polemics, citing Biblical quotes showing G-d at His worst, and we, the parents, asked, how can you leave this safe, sacred bubble we’ve built for you, don’t you know how bad it is out there, and they’d answer, all I know is that you’re scared of the outside, so I’ll go judge for myself. But they don’t hop on a plane to India because they’re not looking for meaning like Ginsberg’s Beat Generation of dharma bums, they’ve been oversaturated with meaning, couldn’t make a move without knowing G-d and our forefathers are watching, so they’d sooner take no god at all than some exotic substitute, and instead of getting stuck in ashrams, they organize rave parties in the cities of New York and London, Baltimore and Berlin, even the Holy City of Jerusalem, and especially on Friday nights when their elders are sitting down to their Shabbos meals of home-baked challah and kiddush wine, but sometimes that wine overflows, and the lament for the missing children begins, because no matter what the stereotype, for every parent taking a rigid hard line, there are even more who'd welcome their kids back, looking the other way at the miniskirts that replaced the knee-length dresses, the heads bare of a yarmulka and the sidecurls now shaven, the boys in mascara and the girls in butch pants, and the ubiquitous cell phones in flagrant desecration of the Shabbos, because everyone on both sides of this divide heard about Faigy Meyer from Boro Park, who ended her life by jumping off the Flat Iron Building, whose father begged forgiveness at her graveside, and nobody wants to be that parent, so we learn to accept these heiligeh Yiddishe neshomalach and tolerate the stench of weed in the basement because it’s better than imagining them strung out on heroin in the streets, and perhaps we even learn to see that a potential Messiah is born in every generation, someone specially equipped to take on the problems of the time, so the Messiah of this generation must be hidden like a lamed-vavnik among those rebels because their rebuke of our hypocrisy is like the prophet Jeremiah, and even while they’re frying their brain cells and fucking up their lives, if we can all find a way to heal together, it will be the redemption of our people.