A new series of as yet indeterminable length.

So. It's been a few months since I've written. In public. Since I've self-published.

I have been writing. Not all pieces I'd want you all to see. At least not with my name attached to them.

But I thought it was time to share something.

So. A couple months back I assigned my juniors a personal essay with the following prompt: What does it mean to you to be a young, American Jew today?

One particularly cheeky student suggested that were I to write such an essay it would be quite short (since I have occasionally vocalized my disinterest in and lack of conscious affiliation with Judaism). I laughed. Then I thought about it. And I decided to try to write the essay as well.

It came out in fits and starts, bits and pieces, phrases and scenes. As per the usual. I usually write in chunks. And I didn't finish by the due date. But I read to them what I had (after some of them shared theirs). And now I offer it to you. In fits and starts. A series.

So. Without further ado. Section 1.
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Growing up, religion played no part in my friendships. As a kid, I’m sure I couldn’t have told you which of my friends were Jewish and which were Christian and which were anything else. I guess it never seemed important to them, so it was never important to me. My family belonged to a temple for about six months, I think, when I was about five. And then not. I never went to services, not on holidays, not on any days. As far as I know, none of my friends went to temple or church either – though I realize they must have, if many eventually had bar and bat mitzvahs. Actually, the first time I remember going to services at a synagogue it was for a classmate’s bar mitzvah in seventh grade. Now that I think about it, I never went to a confirmation – until high school, when I went to my girlfriend’s brother’s confirmation. It felt just like a bar mitzvah, but without the extravagant party.

But anyway. I never paid attention to my friends’ religions. And it seemed like they didn’t either. Even when I got older, and I could tell you who was Jewish, for example, I couldn’t tell you at all who was Reform or Conservative or Orthodox. And I’m just as far from knowing who amongst my friends is Presbyterian or Episcopalian or Unitarian or Catholic. In high school I had an acquaintance named Mohammed. Only recently, when I ran into him at another friend’s house while he was discussing the similarities between Islam and Unitarianism, did I consciously put together that he was Muslim.

Mohammed was in Political Science with me sophomore year of high school. He sat next to the door. There was no seating chart; that’s just where he sat. The teacher used him as an example all the time. The death penalty. Abortion. Torture. Whenever we discussed something bad happening to somebody, Mohammed was the somebody our teacher used to make the example personal. He would say something like, “Imagine that we just killed Mohammed by lethal injection,” and for physical emphasis he would send Mohammed out into the hall and make us look in silence at Mohammed’s empty seat. To pound home that we were killing someone. That capital punishment wasn’t just theory. People died. People were lost. We killed Mohammed quite a few times that semester. Now, with my, and the world’s, current sensibilities, Mohammed seems like a bad choice. But he wasn’t a Muslim then. He was Mohammed. He just sat closest to the door. And maybe that’s the point.