Jewish Mama Sings the Tfellin Blues

Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I think about starting a second blog called Jewish Mama. It would chronicle my efforts to raise Jewish children as a single Jewish parent in a small city with a small Jewish community. I envision writing about the time my son laughed out loud the first time he heard the creation story at Hebrew school. He turned to the Hebrew school teacher and asked in his little five year old voice, “Haven’t you heard about science and evolution?” My Jewish Mama blog would also include an entry about the time the rabbi explained to my sons that our Torah was from a congregation in Europe that no longer exists because of the Holocaust. I cringe each time the H word is said aloud in my sons' hearing and wonder how I’ll explain something I’m still grappling with myself.

I could also write a few posts on my anxiety about teaching my boys about yet another holiday detailing Jewish oppression. Yet mostly I’ve discovered the things I struggle with, my kids take in stride. Violence in the Torah? They love it. A story where Jews are trying to be killed again? To them, Jews are Superheroes.

 

I really don't have time to start another whole blog, so today instead of a blog about books or reading, "Jewish Mama" will be guest blogging. So here’s my current Jewish anxiety. And no surprise, it’s all about gender.

Last night I tried on my brother’s tfellin. These are small ritual objects, phylacteries in English, that have a scroll in them containing one of the central prayers in Judaism, the shema. The prayer proclaims God’s oneness, and then goes on to say that you should teach this to your children and mark it on your doorposts, and keep it close to your head and your heart. The tfellin are two small boxes that attach with long black leather straps. One goes around your head, with the box on your forehead. The other one attaches to your upper arm, close to your heart, and then you wrap the strap around your arm and hand forming the letters Shin, Dalet and Yod, one of God’s names.

I tried on my brother’s tfellin because I wanted to teach the kids at Hebrew school about them since we’re learning the shema. My brother has tfellin because we were both part of a Hebrew school program called Tallis and Tfellin when we were twelve. Students and parents met for prayers and the boys got a tallis (a prayer shawl) and tfellin when they became bar mitzvahed. The girls didn’t. And I didn’t care about this. In fact, I never thought about it until I was faced with wrapping my brother’s tfellin around my arm, alone on a Thursday night, praying my (non-Jewish) husband didn’t come home early since it would be a lot to explain.

I suppose there’s a lot of things I could feel badly about being a Jewish woman, but mostly I’ve been spared the exclusion Judaism can impinge on women. I grew up in a synagogue with mixed seating. Other women (including my mother) fought for women to lead prayers in my childhood shul. I had a bat mitzvah where I said the same prayers as the boys. Yet wearing tfellin felt different. I felt like an invader, like I was doing something reserved for men. And then, as I struggled with the leather straps, I felt badly, like I had purposely been excluded from a covenant with God.

If you google images of tfellin, you come up with some interesting pictures. On popchassid.com there are pictures of Santa wearing tfellin, and Batman, and a rabbi in a flooded street after Hurricane Sandy teaching a young man how to wrap tfellin. There's a beautiful picture of a group of Holocaust survivors in their 80’s, all men, wearing tfellin in a synagogue. Behind them, their wives peer through a tiny window looking on. They're the only women in the blog post photographs, and guess what, they aren’t wearing tfellin.

My husband didn’t come home to find me wrapped in leather with little boxes attached to my head and arm. He found me flat on our bed, deep in thought. He (unhelpfully) tried to remind me of all the other ways orthodox Judaism excludes women, but that’s never been my experience. If there’s something I don’t like in Judaism, I change it. If I find a prayer or word exclusionary or offensive, I leave it out. If there’s a ritual I think is outdated, then I dump it. I tell my friends I practice “Make-Your-Own-Judaism.”        

I’m trying to flip my tfellin experience around, to get over the feeling of exclusion and to make myself part of the Jewish story. For example, none of my Hebrew school students will have ever seen or heard of tfellin. Next Saturday morning I will be the first person, a woman, to show them how to wear them. That’s got to count for something. And then, if you search online for pictures of women wearing tfellin, there’s a raft of pictures, many of them of women praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Best of all, there’s a picture of Rosie the Riveteer wearing tfellin. Something about the look in her eye tells me she’s part of the story, that she won’t be excluded.

My Reading Obsession

 

I have a secret reading obsession:  I’m reading about the British Raj. I’m a little embarrassed to admit my fascination with British colonialism, but rest assured, I’m highly suspect of the white men who assumed they were inherently better at running a country than its native people. Still, I’m hooked on the details of the British in around India. I want to learn about the 19th century, and travel writing and Kipling, and the history of the East Indian Company. I want to know about the Mutiny of 1857. (Did you know this wasn’t spurred on by nationalism, but by a rumor that Hindu sepoys were given cow grease for their rifles?) I’m fascinated by life at stations in places like Barrackpore in Bengal, and of the train rides to summer in Shimla. I want to know about the servants and the clubs and what was eaten, and what one packed for a life in India, and how one found a spouse. I can’t help keeping a list of words of the era that fascinate me: ayah, bungalow, cantonment, maidan, mahout, punkahs, purdah, sahib, sepoy, subaltern, zennana. (I also can’t help my urge to alphabetize these words.) 

 

My fascination with the Raj mainly centers on women’s lives. I want to know what those Victorian ladies did all day when they weren’t at the club, and how they ran their households, what they read, and what they packed for life in India. One of my favourite books on the topic is Margaret MacMillan’s Women of the Raj. I’m also a fan of Elizabeth Buettner’s Imperial Families and Anne de Courcy's The Fishing Fleet: Husband Hunting in the Raj.  

 

Currently I’m reading Enid Saunders Candlin’s  A Travelllor’s Tale. Although not set in the Victorian era, Candlin provides a wealth of information on India. Candlin found herself on the sub-continent after the fall of Hong Kong during World War Two. Her husband was a weapon’s inspector first near Calcutta and then later near Bombay. Part of the book is devoted to some of the exotic trips they took to Sikkhim and Darjeeling and the caves of Abernath. Even more interesting to me are the details of her domestic servants and their various houses and settings, against the backdrop of the war. I’ve been taking detailed notes on the houses she lived in as well as the numerous rail journeys she took. The trains don’t sound that different from when I visited in 1998.

 

Next on my reading list, I’m continuing my interest in the Victorian period with a few books on travelling. What’s on my book shelf?  Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Travellers by Dea Birkett and Victorian Scientific Travellers by Peter Raby.