Monday, November 17, 2014

Explaining My Jewish Family to My Christian Parents

By Yael Armstrong for Raising Kvell

When I was in middle school, I was lying on the couch one day reading a book when my dad walked through the living room. He asked if I’d done my study guide for a test I had the next day. I told him, “No,” as I continued reading and he asked if that was a smart idea. I said, half paying attention, that I would be fine. I failed the test.

When he asked about it later and I begrudgingly told him that the teacher surely had it out for me, he said, almost to himself, “I wonder if you’d have failed if you studied.”

That was how my parents parented. They let us go too far, offered us help back, and when we refused, were always there to subtly drive the lesson home.

My parents, my sister, and most of my family are Christian in the same way that my husband’s family is Jewish. They are committed, it is a part of their everyday life; in short, they’re Orthodox.

When I converted they didn’t say a word. The first few years of my being Jewish were a weird time in my life and in the life of my family. I was trying to find my footing in a new faith and I think my family was waiting for my Jewish phase to end. I didn’t tell my parents I was dating, knowing that they wouldn’t understand the world that I was now living in (a very Orthodox one at the time) and so, I brought my fiancĂ© home to meet my parents a week before we were going to be married.

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