Every Monday and Thursday that I attend this class I feel like I expand my understanding of the Jewish experience.  And sometimes I can relate to a Jewish experience, make a connection to an unexplained event that has happened in my home.  When this happens I get pretty pumped.  So when we had to read about cuisine, costume, and music I was able to make some connections.  Connections that are from dinners at home with my dad and a connection to costume that I have seen before because my best friend is Jewish.

The connection that I have been looking for since the beginning of class is the connection to foods I am familiar with.  About four years ago my mother began making kugel.  She wanted to make my father a “Jewish” meal for one of the holidays, so she researched a Jewish dish that would be appropriate via the internet.  When her results from the internet search were null she asked my grandmother for a recipe or something simplistic.  My grandmother just told her go with a kugel.   Ever since then she has made a kugel at least once every two weeks.  The kugel she cooks is very sweet.  She makes it with raisins and noodles, as for the rest of the recipe, I am clueless.  But in any sense, it is one of my favorite dinners because I feel like I am getting desert as a dinner.  Christy was saying that she tried a kugel and her thoughts were that it was sweet tasting too.  This made me feel comfortable with the fact that it might be an actual Jewish food.  The feeling was reinforced after looking through the cook books that Professor Staub brought to class.  There were a few different recipes for kugel, I cannot say that those kugels would be sweet or not based on my lack of knowledge of my mother’s recipe.  It challenges the question that was posed about what is Jewish about _____? In this case the kugel seemed to be a food of choice for other people who identify themselves as Jewish, thus making it a Jewish food.  Not just because a Jewish person cooked it does it make it Jewish but because it can be familiar to those who identify themselves as Jewish.  Does kugel have an original source that we can track back to the bible? I’m not sure in this sense of the answer to the question, but a connection from home to the class occurred.

When we saw the tallit katan with tzitzit that Professor Staub brought in I made a connection to my friend.  During his bar mitzvah I vaguely remember (this was a while ago) him wearing this when he was reading his Torah portion and throughout the ceremony.  I never asked him what he had thought about it or what it meant to him.  When we talked about the tzitzit in class I remembered being a thirteen year old kid sitting at Zach’s bar mitzvah.  So seven years later I am able to fill in the pieces of the puzzle that was my wandering mind.  As for the tefillin that we also saw in class, I had never seen or heard of it before, but watching the youtube of someone putting it on and listening to my classmates talk about it, there seemed to be many different opinions.

In this class, a large portion of our discussion surrounding cultural boundaries is in relation to how Jews created boundaries between themselves and other cultures. We have spent some time talking about the differences between movements in Judaism and among individuals, but we have not really referred to these differences as boundaries. I wonder if this language is rarely used to discuss interactions among Jews, because it is uncomfortable to recognize that Jews are actively working to separate themselves from each other, as well as other populations. Borrowing, rejecting, and dividing are concepts that are most certainly not exclusive to Jews’ relations with non-Jews. It would be nearly impossible to acknowledge all of the ways in which this happens within Judaism. Because of this, I would like to explore how I have begun to recognize my own borrowing and rejecting processes within Judaism and how these processes have shaped my own cultural boundaries.

I recently attended a very untraditional Rosh Hashanah(Jewish New Year) service in a neighborhood park. I do not think of myself as particularly traditional, Jewish or otherwise, but I think that in experiencing something so untraditional, I was made much more aware of my traditional tendencies. Some of the Jewish cultural boundaries we discussed in class relate to food, costume, music, and religious practices. Costume is an example of a boundary I used to separate myself from fellow Jews in the park on Rosh Hashanah. Because we were in a park, many people there wore jeans and other casual attire. As appealing as wearing jeans sounded to me, I could not bring myself to wear them. Something felt funny to me about dressing so casually for one of the most important days on the Jewish calendar. I chose to wear a skirt. This boundary is not only a visible boundary to others, but also a personal time boundary. I believe that part of my inability to dress casually came out of the desire to create an internal boundary between my everyday life and the time of the High Holy Days. This can arguably be done through means besides clothing, but perhaps my use of clothing reflects my borrowing of more traditional ideas. My clothing that day created more than one boundary. I arrived in a jacket covering my shoulders that I later removed after spending some time in the sun. Uncovering my shoulders would always be seen as unacceptable in an Orthodox setting, and it would have been equally inappropriate during a High Holy Day service in my Conservative synagogue.  By rejecting this notion of modesty I made a second boundary. This time it was not between a more liberal Jewish population and me, but rather a more conservative one.

This specific costume choice is only one small example of boundary making in my own life and lives of other Jews. Of course, my experience is not representative of all Jews, it is not meant to be generalized. However, I feel that my borrowing, rejecting, and boundary creating is particularly reflective of my experience as a Conservative Jew.  I find the desire or need to create boundaries to be very interesting. This Jewish desire for separation starts on a large scale with separation from other cultures, continues into divisions in the form of movements in Judaism, and still proves necessary in the lives of individuals. Sometimes we experience and internalize boundaries without even realizing, but it is especially fascinating to step back and examine their existence and influence in our lives.