My First Purim Carnival! (and Jake’s too)

It is, perhaps, the most remarkable change that motherhood has wrought:  I looked forward to the Purim Carnival for weeks before it was upon us.

This is remarkable because — although this was my first Purim Carnival — it was certainly not my first opportunity to attend one.

Purim — for those who have not had and/or rejected the opportunities to participate that I have — is a Jewish celebration of spring.  I’m not sure exactly what the story behind it is, although I’ve picked up at Jake’s school that it has something to do with heroes.  My impression is that, as Christmas is designed to perk up those cold winter months, Purim is a chance to celebrate the onset of the warm ones.  Mostly by getting dressed up in hero costumes and having carnivals in synagogue parking lots.

My only previous brush with a Purim celebration occurred my sophomore year in high school.  My friend Brenda and I scored some cool 60’s dresses my mother had buried in a closet (since disappeared, to my periodic chagrin) and headed out to a party for the teenagers of a congregation to which Brenda may or may not have belonged.  I certainly didn’t, and I know for a fact that she is the only one of the two of us who would have heard about and expressed interest in a party at a synagogue, even one at which boys might be met.  While nominally Jewish myself, my entire exposure to what this meant consisted of:  1) attending a number of Bat Mitzvah’s at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Tarzana during eighth grade; 2) having my parents tell me a whole lot how important it is to marry Jewish (that one plainly never sunk in); and 3) during the fall of my sophomore year of high school informing my mother that I would be taking Yom Kippur off from school to attend services with my friends and having her respond, “Take the day off if you want, but don’t waste your time in services!”

So, as little as I recall of that spring’s Purim party, I can say with assurance that Brenda set the whole thing up.  And that it was enough to push me over the edge and away from any synagogue-sponsored activity for, well, ever, since this last carnival was sponsored by the local Jewish Community Center (not a synagogue), where Jake attends preschool.  Because it’s the best program in town, not because I felt the need to enroll my child in Jewish daycare.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The reason that spring of ‘82 Purim party so turned me off to the joys of Purim remains rooted in memory, even if all the other details of the evening have faded.  Brenda and I arrived just in time for a stand-up routine by some kid consisting entirely of racist jokes.  I was so horrified that, to this day, I have steadfastedly ignored Purim.  Plus, I generally don’t have any idea when it is, being only nominally Jewish and all.

And yet, a few weeks ago, when the announcements went up at Jake’s school, I was thrilled.  Not only because I knew without a doubt that there would be no racist fourteen-year-old comedians at the JCC’s Purim Carnival. But because I truly was looking forward to taking Jake to the celebration.

How Life — and Motherhood — Shapes Us When We’re Not Paying Attention

Speaking honestly, my sense of Jewish identity — never strong — has become less and less important to me over the years.  Was it the earnest Hillel students in college who drove me away?  The belonging I didn’t want to belong to going to law school in New York?  The moment one of my own law students rather condescendingly thanked me for canceling class on Yom Kippur, saying, “You’re the only non-Jewish professor I’ve had cancel!”? Her face went a shade whiter when I told her that her assessment was off, though I’d like to think I would have canceled anyhow, since I obviously wasn’t going to services myself or anything.

It says a lot about the world I’ve grown up in that I never felt a need to hold onto my Jewish identity, nor did I feel a loss in not nurturing it.  I felt, in fact, that bringing it to the fore would only subject me to pre-judgments and expectations, just as any sort of label can.  Sometime between law school and yoga teaching I even stopped declaring myself a feminist because I realized everyone seems to think they know what that means and no one really does.  Identity, I came to conclude as I cut through the layers of it in my yoga practice, comes from within, not from labels.

Until, that is, I had a chance to get Jake into the daycare program at the JCC.  Suddenly, for the first time ever on a form asking for my religious affiliation, I became “Jewish.”

Not that that moment was a turning point of any sort.

Indeed, during Jake’s first year at the JCC I was pretty well neutral on the whole religious component of his schooling, probably because “religious component” is a bit of an overstatement when you’re talking about kids under the age of two.  Playing with plastic matzoh during Passover hardly qualifies as preparing my child for his Bar Mitzvah, after all.

Over the past few months, however, I’ve found myself rather thrilled to see how much Jewish culture is integrated into the program for the older kids.  Jake love-love-loves Shabbat on Fridays, when they sing songs in Hebrew and learn the prayers for lighting the candles.  While I found it pretty adorable that he used to call it “Sha-bop,” I found myself equally pleased last month when he corrected my erroneous pronunciation.  He brought probably the biggest bag of change in school to another holiday celebration — even though I can’t even remember the holiday or what the point of all that change was.  Something to do with planting trees, which seemed like a pretty good reason to clear out the parking meter stash in my car.  Nearly every day when I pick him up, he grabs the plastic challah that sits on a shelf next to his cubby and raises it over his head, chanting, “Up, up, up, challah!”  I have no idea what it means, but I feel quite certain it is part of a Jewish tradition he knows far better than I.

“I’m so happy,” I now find myself saying to Mike.  “Jake is learning about his Jewish heritage and I don’t have to teach it to him!”

So why was I the one itching for the Purim Carnival?  Why did I insist on walking to it even as Jake fell asleep in the stroller — and wandering through for long enough to awaken him to the cacophony of costume contest award announcements; kids yelling as they swooped down the big, inflatable slide; and me and Mike engaged in loud attempts at conversation with other parents we knew?

That last one has a lot to do with it:  I felt like I belonged to something.

Not necessarily the JCC, although there is more than a growing inkling of that.  But a part of Jake’s school, and the other kids and parents in it.  After a year of struggling to “use” the Mommy connection as a way of making friends in a new town, there was no struggle.  Instead, there are friends in yoga class who happen to have kids at Jake’s school as well.  And the truly cheerful greeting of the lawyer who drafted our will as we bumped into each other picking our kids up the other day.  And the moment a few weeks ago in Old Navy when Jake nonchalantly walked by a little boy we had encountered earlier in the mall playground and identified him by name:  “Did he know that just from the playground?” Alban’s impressed mother asked me.  Equally impressed, I raised my hands in a gesture of I-can’t-take-credit-for-my-child’s-brilliance.  “Unless he goes to school at the JCC,” I said.  Turns out I can’t take credit for my child’s brilliance because that was exactly how he knew Alban.

In short, Saturday’s trip to the Carnival was about a lovely walk on a lovely day, socializing with friendly people, watching my two-year-old earnestly throw baseballs nowhere near the target, and feeling like I was part of a really good community.

“I love that we can go to something like that and run into people we know,” I said to Mike on our walk home.

“And I love that we don’t know everyone,” he added, pointing out that Asheville seems to be just the right size for us.

The right size, the right community.  A community, it turns out, that is, in large measure, not only partly Jewish, but determindedly, importantly so.  A place I want to be a part of my child’s life.

Why Letting Go of Identity Has Strengthened Mine

One of the precepts of yoga with which I’ve long struggled is the idea that you need to let go of the trappings of “who you are.”

An asana practice, for example, is one long preparation for savasana, or corpse pose, in which one finally and completely surrenders — body and mind.  While I’m far from an expert at it — never having mastered the art of the quiet mind — a key part of savasana is not only letting go of thoughts about your day and what you need to get done, but thoughts about you as a separate entity, a being distinct and insulated from other beings.

I get the part about being connected to everyone else, about us all sharing the same energy.  I think that’s beautiful and important and if only more people would understand it a reason to end so much of the hatred in this world.  But somewhere between sharing energy with others and dissolving the ego that separates me from them, I lose my way.

Maybe it comes from being part of a culture in which we look — look at ourselves in mirrors, work at projecting an image there, often wander in spirit behind ourselves trying to assess what others see.  Or maybe it comes from far too many years of schooling, of trying to find new ways of seeing things, hyperarticulating the simple being out of events.

Whatever the reason, I find it hard to contemplate completely surrendering the parts of me that do, I feel, make me different.  For goodness sakes, I write personal essays — plainly I want to stand out in some way as a unique individual.

It was for this reason, I think, that I shied away from identifying myself with Jewish culture.  If I did, I feared, people would pigeonhole me, expect me to act and think in certain ways.  Better, I concluded, just to be me, with a frisson of Jewishness as garnish.

Now, however — as I watch my child develop his own identity and realize how much of it will come from my input and from other sources over which I have no control — I realize that yoga isn’t about losing any identity.  It’s about not fooling ourselves into thinking we can completely and solely shape what that identity is.

If, for example, we are learning to surrender to the energy around us, to move with it even as we make choices for ourselves, aren’t we shaping an individual identity?  We are, after all, making our choices, even the choice to follow this philosophy.

So, too, I now see, dissolving the ego isn’t about dumbing down our individuality, blending in, becoming a nonentity.  It’s about not trying to control what that identity is.  It’s about letting our choices, the world in which we live, the turns our lives take have their influence.  It’s about choosing whether to embrace that influence and let that embrace open us up to the possibilities of life — and become the sort of person who is open to such possibilities — or to reject the idea that anything other than what we choose to let in has an influence — and to become the sort of person who is limited by her own limitations.

It is, in other words, at this moment for me, about letting my Jewish background be a part of me as much as it is a part of Jake.  Period.  Nothing more and nothing less.  A Buddhist-leaning, yoga-respecting girl from a Jewish background who’s never been Bat Mitzvah-ed, knows maybe half of the standard Jewish prayer, is happily married to a former altar boy, and loves every bit of her background that shares space in her beautiful boy with the background his father brought to the genetic and cultural table as well.

Inviting It All in in Trikonasana (Triangle Pose)

It could be that I am offering trikonasana (triangle pose) here merely because I love it.  To me, practicing trikonasana is liberating — I feel open, beautiful, balanced, extensive.  But it is that very feeling that leads me to believe that trikonasana is the ideal pose to turn to when one wishes to experience the sense of opening to what is within us as well as what is without.

In other words, I invite you to practice this trikonasana by first finding ways to expand and then going inside as well and seeing how the energy infuses you.  This may take a while, so use props if you need them — a block under your lower hand is a great idea so you don’t have to reach all the way to the floor or put all your weight on your front leg.   Take as long as you need (trying to spend roughly equal time on both sides) to both feel the pose and experience it.

And here, in this beautiful pose, with your heart open, your weight balanced between your back and front legs, your body and spirit in the present, your upper arm reaching outward into the world, find a kernel of your identity by integrating into it all the beauty that comes your way.

Trikonasana Instructions

Tagged as: Jewish identity, Purim, yoga and motherhood