Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan Read Online Free

Carla. “I can’t help but feel that a bat
mitzvah should be kosher. We’re expressing our Jewish identity to our friends and family.”
    â€œBut we don’t keep kosher,” argued Mark. “And Stephanie’s right—the stuff tastes awful.”
    â€œSome kosher food can be very good. Remember my mom’s?” Mark had courted Carla in the days when the Kaplan family kept kosher, and he had raved about his mother-in-law’s cooking then, as he did now. Though Jessie had let the custom lapse when her own father died fifteen years ago, Carla had remained sentimentally attached to the memory of those earlier times. The image of her grandfather presiding over the Sabbath meal that her grandmother—and later her mother—had scrupulously prepared for the occasion was one of the most compelling images of her childhood. “Having a kosher bat mitzvah is a symbolic gesture,” she explained now. “It shows respect for our heritage.”
    The spirit, if not the subject, of this debate was a familiar one in the Goodman household. Carla was “more Jewish,” as the saying goes, and Mark was “less.” It was not that Mark had been raised in a lax religious household. On the contrary, he had grown up in a Conservative Jewish home and weathered years of religious training, trudging back and forth to Hebrew school, through snow and sleet, to be drilled in the prayers by aged rabbis with phlegmy voices. But though this intensive training had produced the expected piety in many of his peers, it had had the obverse effect on him.
    There were two aspects of his religion (one could say of religion in general) that went against Mark’s grain. First, were the supposed charms of repetition. Religion was predicated on repetition—on rites and rituals performed over and over again. But Mark had no patience for repetition. It bored him.
    Second was the alleged superiority of one God over many. The idea had never impressed him in the way his teachers obviously felt it should. He could still remember being told what differentiated
Judaism from those benighted, earlier religions: “We believe in one God,” the teacher had said in a hushed tone while the other five-year-olds opened their eyes wide in reverence. But Mark had not grasped the advantage of this singularity. It seemed to him that there were definite benefits to having more than one God; indeed, the more the better, given how much there was to do.
    Yet despite the practical and philosophical problems he had with his religion, Mark was not wholly alienated or disenfranchised from it. He identified himself as a Jew, was proud of his heritage, and, after his marriage to Carla, had agreed to join an area synagogue, though only under the stipulation that it be a Reform temple where the services were shorter and the relationship to the deity more metaphorical.
    Carla, by contrast, was of a totally different view. She had strong feelings of affiliation and affection for the religion of her ancestors. Her mind was more emotional and impressionistic than her husband’s, and she found the prayers and rituals to be enormously compelling and consoling. Judaism, as she saw it, was a vast, complex tapestry from which one might follow any thread to arrive at a profound truth.
    She had tried unsuccessfully to convince Mark to join a Conservative synagogue, closer in spirit to the Orthodox one in which she had been raised. In making her case for this traditional affiliation, she relied on all sorts of arguments, and had even put forward the example of the area’s notorious Reform rabbi, incarcerated for life for the contract-killing of his wife some years before. The case, when it first made its explosive appearance in the press, had been a source of morbid fascination and impassioned debate for the Jewish community of Cherry Hill. Many had voiced skepticism: “Okay, maybe he had a few women on the side—not