I've been back in New York for my last college spring break (!), which means that immediately my life becomes full of interfaith activities. Is this just me? Seriously, it's almost crazy how much goes on...
I flew home late Friday night, and by 9:30 a.m. on Saturday I was in a chapel with my mother for a mass honoring my grandmother who died back in December. It was a simple, Catholic service. A lot of other families were there also honoring their loved ones who had recently died, but I did not find the experience extraordinarily meaningful, I am not quite sure why, there was certainly nothing wrong with it. I did have the opportunity to see where my grandmother's ashes are interred, though, which was comforting.
Then on Tuesday I headed into Manhattan for the day. When I stepped off the train, I immediately saw hundreds of loaves of challah in Penn Station. Finally, a place that knows about Judaism! I paid a nice visit to the Center for Spiritual Life at NYU, a fabulous new initiative working towards fostering stronger connections between faiths. (Their website, for which I designed the overall look last summer during my internship with them, is www.nyuspirituallife.org.) I had a nice chat with my supervisor from last summer, and it was nice to see the work we'd put into decorating the office space still shows.
I also met with four friends throughout the day, and talked about religion with every single one of them. I love it, but somewhere along the line it seems like I became the go-to for discussing religion. Throughout my visit we discussed topics from G-d to the universe to karma to halakhah [strict Jewish law] to antisemitism to interfaith marriage to atheism, and everything in between.
Dinner was particularly great, because I was eating with a good friend of mine, who happens to adhere to halakhah. Which meant we were eating kosher. Which meant we were in a restaurant sans meat, since part of kosher rules is having a separation of dairy and meat, and this particular restaurant had chosen dairy. When he had texted me the name of the restaurant and I'd looked up the menu online, it looked super cute: an Italian restaurant, fancy food and wine, down some stairs below street level, on the Upper West Side not too far from Lincoln Center. Somewhere along the line I forgot that it would seem any different from a normal restaurant...until I walked in and saw a room full of yarmulkes. So it was an Italian place, full of religious Jews, served by a mostly-Hispanic waitstaff, with a British greeter at the door. I love New York. And by chance my outfit was modest enough that I think I fit into the atmosphere...
A few days later, back on Long Island, I went into one of our favorite local bakeries to snag a hamantaschen [a triangular-shaped cookie, usually filled with some type of fruit filling, traditionally eaten on the holiday of Purim]. I walked in, said, "Do you have hamantaschen?" and instead of the blank stare I'd received when asking the same question down in Williamsburg, Virginia, I received the answer, "Oh, yeah, the bakery owner is Jewish." The woman working in the bakery both a) knew immediately what I was looking for, and b) knew that it is a Jewish food. Score!
Hamantaschen, with apricot filling, like the one I ate yesterday.
Tonight we're planning to head over to Shabbat services at our home synagogue, where I grew up, where I was blessed as a baby, bat mitzvahed, confirmed, everything. Except for the fact that tonight is the monthly family service (a lot of young children will be there, I generally prefer normal services), it should be nice to be back. Unless this layer of snow prevents us from heading out, of course.
Then tomorrow we're going to a baby christening. This break is actually so interfaith it almost seems fake. But yes, my cousin's baby son Owen will be christened, which should be cute because he's tiny and I haven't seen him yet. My Dad and his brother (the Jewish side) both married Catholic women, hence the real mixture of Judaism and Catholicism in our family. And yet, it all works.
Now go out and love one another.
<3,
Allyson
Just as a note: If you want to receive an e-mail alert when I've posted on the blog, you can stick your e-mail address in that box up a ways on the left side of this page, right under the blog title.
No comments:
Post a Comment