My friend, Aliza Hausman who writes Memoirs of a Jewminicana, sent me the link to this article yesterday, thinking I might find something thought provoking and comforting therein. She was right, I sure did.
This quote in particular really helped me: “No one can ever take your mitzvah away from you. Don’t get me wrong, we should all strive to do as many mitzvahs as possible, but just because you are not yet at the point where you eat kosher food every day doesn’t take away from your mitzvah of lighting candles on Shabbat.”
sooo…. no. It helps to know that even if I am not yet at the point where I can give up certain things, the things I have taken on still matter. We will hang our Christmas stockings this year, just as we observed El Dia De Los Muertos this weekend (sans saints and Virgin). It won’t take away from the other mitzvahs that I am doing and can do with a full heart. It doesn’t lessen my modest skirts, my covered hair, my giving up pork and shellfish. Those things are still good.
After a few truly sleepless nights, I realize that I need to step back and let things level out a little. This all is not meant to spin me up into a bad mental space of self recrimination and guilt and I’m going to attempt to not torture myself any more over the subject of the upcoming holidays. Going to attempt not to overthink everything so much. Well… maybe a little torture? I still want to make Thanksgiving totally kosher. Which means the Cool Whip dilemma still looms on my horizon.
And on the subject of cultural appropriation? I said this last night in an email conversation to a friend, and it struck me as something I wanted to put on the blog.
“I am not used to thinking of any holiday as “religious” really. In my upbringing they were ALL about the food and the presents. No G-d needed. Now I am realizing on a deeper level, for the first time, that holiday means HOLY DAY and they can’t all be mine. Crossing the line between cultural appreciation and appropriation is… tricky. If something is around you all the time, you love it and begin to think of it as yours, or that you are a part of it, when you really aren’t. And when you’re a mongrel like me, it’s even harder, because you don’t think of yourself as anything or you think of yourself as many things, so what is one more you picked up on the way?”
I have picked up a lot of things along my way. It’s been a long way, moving in and out of a lot of places, influenced by a lot of people and cultures. 40 years. It’s okay to take my time about deciding what is really mine and what I want to appreciate from a distance.
“It’s okay to take my time about deciding what is really mine and what I want to appreciate from a distance.”
Yes! What you said there ^!