My first Jewish home

Nice article

My ketuba, decorated with a border of blue and red flowers, sits prominently in the living room. Nearby, a glass shelf displays a silver-and-gold Kiddush cup inscribed with our names: Mikha'ayl ben Moshe v'Sarah and Devorah Sarah bat Avraham Yakov v'Tovah. And even a casual glance around the apartment reveals other Jewish objects: a shofar on a plastic stand, a wood-and-glass tzedakah box, a ceramic challah tray, a collection of traditional and art-nouveau mezuzot, one for each lintel except the bathroom's.

It wasn't always this way. The apartment of my middle age is my first Jewish home, in a manner of speaking. Because when my wife and I married two years ago we deliberately set out to create a space dedicated to Jewish ritual and practice.

But what does it mean, to start one's first Jewish home? What combination of furniture and philosophy sets it apart as Jewish? In this age of informed choices the range of possible answers is quite large. I can only say what it means to me. Everyone dedicated to Jewish observance will make different choices.

My own Jewish interior design has been progressing through stages. For example, my first digs were as vacant of mezuzzot, kippot, or even something as rudimentary as a hanukkya as my refrigerators were furnished with traife. But even these pads empty of ritual items displayed Jewish literature. I considered myself an intellectual and cultural Jew. Back then, that was my definition of a Jewish home.

My collection included Bernard Malamud's short stories, Martin Buber's I and Thou," the Harvard University Press's dry, academic “The History of the Jewish People," and my ever aging, flaking and cracking Hertz Chumash, presented to me in 1970 by the Queens Jewish Center, and Talmud Torah on the occasion of my bar mitzvah. There were also many works on the Shoah by Primo Levi and other authors. At that time the Shoah, and not Sinai, was what I considered the ground zero of the Jewish spiritual experience.

A glance at our bookshelves today would reveal a so-called paradigm shift: tikkunim, tanakhim, siddurim, various dictionaries and other reference works on Judaism. It's an eclectic collection, running from “My People's Prayer Book" through “God is a Verb" to Susanna Heschel's “On Being a Jewish Feminist." Nearby is a stack of teaching tapes for learning to lead prayer services, perform home rituals, and chant torah. And no collection would be complete with a pile of Jewish cookbooks.

Nowadays we've got our Passover dishes, several hanukkyot, about half a dozen challah covers and a few birkonnim (benchers) to hand out. We've got crock pots for preparing and warming food for Shabbat.

And thanks to many weddings and b'nai mitzvot, I even have a kippot drawer as well stuffed as the stash of any longtime Conservative Jew's. I can pass these out as needed during Shabbos dinners and other festivities.

Of course, making a Jewish home is not all about owning fancy ritual stuff. A nonmaterialistic rabbi I admire once told me she used to light Hanukkah candles on a menorah made of tinfoil. Perhaps following her example, our havdalah besomim (spice box) is an old glass jar with holes pierced in the metal cap. I kind of like it that way, because it's like Cinderella's pumpkin-turned-coach. The spirit invested in this ordinary glass-and-steel cast-off gives it an aura of diamonds and silver.

A crucial part of my decision to create a Jewish home is to make sure these objects are used and not just viewed like pieces displayed in a gallery. This means I have to wrestle with a recalcitrant spirit much as Jacob wrestled with his angel.

Neither advance planning, nor spiritual and physical discipline, nor subjugating my will to a higher authority come easily to me. Nevertheless, each day I push myself into the fray.

I may mope, but I will attempt to sit at the table and recite morning prayers, study a little Torah and Hebrew vocabulary each weekday before running to check e-mail, write or do some other work or procrastination. Despite the possible rewards of peace and joy (or perhaps due to a fear of boredom) I still find myself reluctant to plan ahead for Shabbat and other Holy Days, to call a halt to what Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi called commercial time and enter willingly into the haven of Jewish sacred time.

Another difficult part of creating a Jewish home for me means trying to be, well, nicer to people. It means observing mitzvot and even the wise advice of ancient sages in order not to send nasty e-mails to editors, be a smartass on the phone with my parents, or even lose it and yell at my wife.

Now you're probably thinking that you don't need to believe in God, a set of holy mitzvot or even the wise advice of ancient sages in order to act nicer to editors, parents, spouses and others. But sometimes it helps.

As I continue to create my first Jewish home, I've learned that displaying a ketuba and a Kiddush cup in the living room is like putting on a tallis during prayers. A tallis can be just a fringed garment, or it can be the sheltering wings of God's spirit. It all depends upon how you wear it.