To further get you into the holiday spirit, the guys behind God & Co. put together an advice-rap. Enjoy.

Rosh Hashana Rap from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Nearly 30 years ago, Cohen left France to enroll in L.A.’s American Film Institute. Born in Tunisia, he had lived in Paris from the age of 6, and he’d grown up working for his father’s kosher restaurant Les Ailes—everything from serving as a busboy and waiter to later bartending and managing. Now run by Cohen’s brother (their father died in 2000), Les Ailes is famous for its grilled meats, couscous, and a convivial atmosphere that attracts North African Jewish emigres. (Its location next door to the famed Folies Bergère never hurt, either.)

While Hollywood ostensibly fueled Cohen’s departure, the opportunity to place serious distance between himself and the family business was no small fringe benefit.

“I left France, I left the Jews,” the 54-year-old Cohen now says. “I left cooking Tunisian cuisine, I left everything I knew.” But the pull of his culinary roots proved surprisingly resilient. Nearly two summers ago, he opened up a café, Got Kosher? Provisions, featuring, he is the first to admit, food very much like his father served. At a time when delis are reinventing themselves and winning the spotlight for their efforts, Cohen and Got Kosher? remind us that there are other, equally delectable, Jewish gustatory traditions.

But let’s back up. When Cohen first moved to California, he found that breaking into the movie industry was harder than he had hoped. His one film was a documentary for French television called The Jews of Djerba, about a tiny island off the coast of Tunisia where Cohen’s maternal family has roots. After several years in Hollywood without steady work, and finding himself in a relationship that would ultimately produce a daughter, now 19, Cohen decided it was “time to get serious. I needed to make a living,” he says. “I thought, ‘What do I know how to do?’ Thank God, I knew food, I knew managing restaurants, I knew how to cook.”

Through the years, Cohen has held a smattering of culinary jobs—most of which were far from the kosher realm—from helping to train Disney employees in French language and cuisine in preparation for EuroDisney’s launch to managing Nancy Silverton’s popular, upscale La Brea Bakery. Gradually he found himself returning to the observances he grew up with and eventually took on work within the kosher food industry too. “Little by little,” Cohen says, “kosher was calling me back.”

About five years ago, he established the antecedant to his café—a wholesale business selling prepacked kosher sandwiches. In July, 2008, he opened the cafe. Got Kosher?, with its sign reading, “haute glatt to go,” sits on a busy stretch of Pico Boulevard in the heart of L.A.’s traditional Jewish neighborhood, a tiny take-out shop with just one table inside and a couple more on the sidewalk. But with an expansive menu including Tunisian dishes from his childhood, Got Kosher? has quickly gained attention.

The Los Angeles Times, not in the habit of featuring tiny glatt cafes, included Got Kosher? in a 2009 roundup of the city’s standout international sandwiches, calling Cohen’s merguez “splendid” and reporting that his smoked andouille “travels deep into uncharted flavor territory.”

His food lives up to its reputation. The warm merguez sandwich has a terrific kick to it, with peppery sausage redolent of fennel and accompanied by onions, parsley, and homemade harissa, resting in a challah roll. The traditional Tunisian sandwich is a revelation, somewhat like a nicoise salad but its own salty-sweet creation, a hodgepodge of tuna, egg, potato, olives, capers, and peppers. Cohen, who tends toward modesty, can’t resist waxing poetic when he talks about it. ”It’s a gestalt of tastes,” he says, his face breaking into a big smile, adding that the potato is “an island of rest in an ocean of spiciness.”

Kosher food doesn’t exactly have the best reputation, I say to Cohen, fantasizing about a world in which his Tunisian sandwich replaces the chicken and fish options on the bar and bat mitzvah circuit. Cohen sighs. He speaks of the relative scarcity of food that Jews found in Eastern Europe versus the bounty available in places like Spain and Northern Africa. “Ashkenazic cuisine reflects that,” Cohen says. “I’m not putting it down; there are some gems, and when it’s well done, it’s incredible, but they don’t have the same palate, the same range of spices as are available in Sephardic cuisine.”

It was a realization of a gap in kosher offerings that kick-started Cohen’s business. About 10 years ago, his partner in life and business, Evelyn Baran, realized that sausages were all the gustatory rage.“Why don’t you make kosher sausages?’” she asked him. He got to work and began tinkering in his garage, seeking counsel from his family butcher back in France, wrestling with the issue of casing—a Gordian knot of sorts, since non-kosher sausage uses a pork casing. In France, kosher and halal sausage is made from lamb intestines, but Cohen couldn’t find anyone in the States to supply these to him. When Cohen tried to import them from France, it took a month just to receive a sample, and then it was held up at customs; never mind the issue of rabbinical certification. “It was a problem,” he says. He ultimately turned to beef collagen for the casing. You can buy the result of his effort, Neshama Sausages, at Whole Foods and Fairway today.

But for all of Cohen’s focus on meat (Sundays he offers barbecue), it’s a Jewish staple, baked with a twist, that draws many customers. Inspired by the pretzel roll at La Brea Bakery, Cohen introduced a pretzel challah last year and saw sales skyrocket. He had to add a nightshift of bakers to meet the demand. Bathed in a baking soda solution, the dough is lighter than more traditional challahs and turns a beautiful dark color with a light pretzel flavor after being baked. Cohen now offers several varieties of challah, including one with chocolate chunks and another with green olives.

Yet as proud as he is of his other creations, Cohen constantly returns to Tunisian cuisine. “I left everything I knew, and now where am I?” he says. “I am here, cooking kosher Tunisian food, selling sandwiches, just like my father.” And then, as if he still can’t quite believe it himself, he adds, “I’m the perfect personification of the grass is always greener. I wanted something else, and then I realized, here I am standing, with grass, here under my feet.”

The legendary chef-owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, a longtime friend, was in town to work with me on a fundraiser for Martha’s Table and DC Central Kitchen, two organizations that feed the less fortunate in Washington, D.C., where I live. It seemed only natural to invite Alice and the other visiting chefs to my home for a Shabbat dinner—a meal I’ve prepared my whole adult life. It’s an invaluable opportunity to open my home for people to enjoy hearty food, good conversation, and a connection to Judaism. It’s also a chance to include non-Jewish friends in the experience, so filled with the universal themes of shared sustenance and faith, and it’s a moment to unplug from our otherwise wired existence and, for a few hours at least, to appreciate the occasions where time does not seem to matter.

The real question was what to serve Alice, the queen of American cooking. Keep it simple has always been my motto. I did that when I hosted a small dinner for Julia Child’s 90th birthday, and it was a big success. So, I decided to do the same this time.

You should realize that the charity event consisted of a series of 14 dinners for 20 people each, all to be held the following Sunday. My house was the event’s headquarters, and I had a garage bursting with produce, gifts, and wine, and a kitchen and family room dotted with volunteers glued to their laptops and cell phones, while an endless flow of people filed in and out of the house. Simple, amid all that, made a lot of sense.

But beyond keeping it simple, I also knew that Alice would want a seasonal and sustainable meal. I went to our local New Morning Farms truck early in the week and gathered greens and beets and hearty winter produce. On Thursday I assembled some of the young volunteers, and we made succulent roasted beets and squash for one salad and lathered kale with olive oil for another, prepping blood oranges and yellow grapefruit that would be added at the last minute. I asked a pastry-chef friend if he would bake some cookies, and he happily obliged.

But what would be the main course? I only had to think for an instant: Mousakhan, my favorite chicken recipe, of course. It’s a delectable Palestinian dish—chicken, topped with slowly cooked sautéed onions, golden-brown pine nuts, and a mixture of cloves, allspice, and sumac (the tart desert herb found throughout the Middle East), all of which is placed on a large pita and baked in the oven. I’d learned of it many years ago, in Israel, when I was a foreign press attaché for the late Teddy Kollek, then mayor of Jerusalem. I confess that I was more interested, even then, in peering into pots than into politics.

When I lived in Israel in the early 1970s, I ate mousakhan whenever I could, although I only found a recipe for it a few years later when I was in a small seminar on ethnicity at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where I was studying for a master’s degree in public administration. Adnan Abu-Odeh, then Jordan’s minister of information, was a fellow student in the class, and I approached him with trepidation to ask for the recipe—after all, he was a government official and I a young woman. “Invite me to your home and I’ll show you how to make it,” he instantly responded. I promptly did. Not only did we make this celebrated dish from Adnan’s native Nablus, but we began a lifelong friendship. I knew that Alice would love this recipe as well as the story behind it—a great example of the power of food.

While the aroma from the baking chicken filled my kitchen on Friday afternoon, some of the volunteers helped make a Moroccan challah, a new recipe from Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, my forthcoming book. Together we mixed the yeast, anise, water, eggs, vegetable oil, and flour. Letting the dough rise only a few minutes, we punched it down, molded it into two long cylinders that we twisted together and then formed into a circle and baked.

When the guests arrived, about 30 of them, everything was ready. We gathered while I recited the Sabbath prayer over lighting the candles. Then my husband, Allan, blessed the wine, which in this august setting of the food world really meant something. As I translated the prayers from Hebrew, I explained that in ancient times wine symbolized all drinks extracted from fruits that grow on vines and trees.

Then it was time for the blessing over the bread. At that moment, everyone in the room was connected, either placing their hand on one of the two challahs (signifying the double portion of manna in the desert) or placing their hand on someone who was touching a challah. As I explained the 10 transformations wheat undergoes to make a beautifully browned challah, Alice listened intently. I described the steps we often take for granted: planting seeds, growing wheat, threshing, removing the chaff, grinding the wheat into flour, mixing flour with water and yeast, letting it rise, forming it into a braided loaf, letting it rise again, and then baking it off.

I often recite these 10 steps that I learned many years ago as a scholar-in-residence at Congregation Etz Chaim in Chicago, and every time I find it is a powerful gesture. It was even more so on this particular night, surrounded by so many people dedicated to food and charity.

Gathered around the table, we sensed that bread is everything for civilization. In Egypt bread is called aish, which comes from aisha, meaning “life.” The Hebrew word for bread, lechem, at least to the English ear, is akin to chaim, meaning life.

“I am so touched by the challah ceremony,” Alice said to me, as we all shared the Israeli and Arab food, a dinner full of symbolism. “It is so beautiful to see this ancient tradition kept alive, with the simple, historic staple of bread as the focus.” After tasting the chicken, she added, “It is amazing. I could eat this kind of food every day.”

MOUSAKHAN

Adapted from Joan Nathan’s The Foods of Israel Today (Knopf), 2001

½ cup extra virgin olive oil
5 large onions (about 10 cups), coarsely chopped
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
4 chicken breast halves
4 chicken legs with thighs
1 cup pine nuts
4 tablespoons ground sumac
1 teaspoon ground allspice
½ teaspoon ground cloves
8 small pita breads, 4 large pita breads cut in half, or 1 oversized pita

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

2. Heat 1/4 cup of the oil in a large skillet over a low flame. Add the onions and sauté for 20 minutes or until golden, stirring occasionally. After 5 minutes, sprinkle on salt to taste.

3. Season the chicken pieces with salt and pepper, rubbing well into the skin.

4. Transfer the onions to a 9- by 12-inch baking dish and place the chicken on top.

5. Bake, uncovered, for 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to 375 degrees and bake for 15 minutes more.

6. Drizzle a tablespoon or so of the remaining olive oil into a frying pan. Heat the oil, then add the pine nuts. Fry over a very low heat, stirring occasionally, until the pine nuts are browned.

7. Put the sumac, allspice, cloves, and pine nuts in a small bowl and mix.

8. Remove the chicken from the oven and sprinkle on the sumac-pine nut mixture. Drizzle the remaining olive oil over the top and return the dish to the oven. Continue baking for 20-25 more minutes, or until the chicken is cooked. Remove the chicken from the oven.

9. Preheat the broiler. Transfer each chicken piece to a round of pita bread, or place all the chicken pieces over the oversized pita. Sprinkle the onions, with a small amount of the cooking liquid, on top and around the chicken. Place on the middle shelf of the oven and broil for 5 minutes, watching closely to prevent burning.

Yield: 8 servings

But all that good-for-you-ness doesn’t come cheap. A monthly delivery of a weekly challah costs $36, while $88 gets you three challahs a week for the month. Business is building, slowly, Bronk said. “I’m doing most of the advertising by word of mouth and some flyering,” she said by phone, acknowledging that she’d also advertised on Craigslist. So far three committed buyers have signed up for her services; they’ve all declined to order the vegan or spelt versions. “I’m a little bit surprised that I’ve only gotten orders for the traditional challah so far,” she said, adding that friends whose advice she solicited before beginning the challah-service found alternative types of challah appealing. “Maybe the people in my area have more conventional eating taste.”

When I went away to college, I tried going to Hillel High Holiday services, but I really hated it…>>

Here, food as metaphor deals with bread, literally and figuratively the staff of life, and salt, a real and philosophical purifier. Bread and salt represent the practical and the spiritual and, together, are part of a common Sabbath meal ritual of pouring salt on a piece of challah after saying the Motzi but before it is eaten, following the admonition of Leviticus 2:13: “Never shall you suspend the salt covenant with your God. With all your offerings you shall offer salt.” That, more or less, will be the scope of this monthly column: food as it affects and touches various aspects of our lives. Our choices and preferences can reflect our aspirations or prejudices; changing attitudes and styles redesign the meals we read about and then hunger for.

On the practical side I will bring news of delicious things to eat, where to find them or, occasionally, how to prepare them. Some columns will relate to time-honored Jewish traditions concerning food and the changing world of kashrut.

On the philosophical side, there will be descriptions and explanations of food and how it figures into lifecycle celebrations primarily in cultures where wheat or rice are the sustaining grains, from the blessings over challah and matzo to the Christian Eucharist to the wedding cake that evolved as a sweet form of bread or oat cake that was to be broken over the heads of the bride and groom in 17th and 18th century Britain. In some Slavic countries a round, flattish loaf is topped with various toys indicating professions to be placed within reach of a toddler. The first toy he or she picks up is considered a forecast of the profession that will provide money for bread in the future.

Salt figures similarly in life and lore. In Japan handfuls are strewn across the mat as a sanctifier before every sumo wrestling match. Knock a salt cellar over at the table and you will have an argument with a loved one or even worse luck unless you toss some over your shoulder to ward off the evil spirits you have angered. Salt in the wound? Bad as far as pain goes, good as far as killing bacteria. For that is the property–the ability to kill living things, by dehydrating them–that makes salt an effective preservative and explains why nothing lives in the Dead Sea and why animal foods are koshered with a salting down. In ancient Rome, salt was so precious that workers were paid with it, or with coins entitling them to a ration of it, thereby giving us our word salary although hardly anyone would accept it as payment today, unless perhaps it was an exotic black, orange, pink, or green coarse sea salt for which tastings are held in cutting-edge restaurants and, by the way, how do such salts really differ in flavor?

For gourmands, salt is essential to flavor, and no less a respected chef than André Soltner, former chef-owner of the late-lamented Lutèce, once advised that salt must be in every single dish one prepares, even sweet confections and cakes. I forgot to ask him about coffee and tea.

What would we do without it? Or, as expressed in the New Testament, Luke 14:34, “But if the salt shall lose its savour wherewith should it be seasoned?” And do without it we apparently are expected to as control-freak chefs banish salt from the table, implying they know our palates better than we do. Perhaps they are unaware of the sensory science related to salt and how no two of us experience levels of it alike, something that will be a future subject here.

Though bread and salt undoubtedly will remain staples of Jewish cuisine, that cuisine is also changing rapidly. Centuries-old and honored observances such as kosher laws are being updated and modernized in many interesting ways. How and why such things occur–sadly or happily–and what they lead to is another subject for exploration.

Thirty years ago I would never have believed that kosher dairy restaurants would virtually disappear from New York and other large cities to be replaced by Israeli-Sephardic “dairy” restaurants. These serve light and enticing falafel and hummus, pita and baba gannouj, pizza and tabbouleh, instead of heavy and enticing cheese blintzes with sour cream, scorching hot mushroom–barley or cabbage soup, eggs scrambled with lox and onions, and baskets bursting with cascades of breads and rolls, fragrant with onions and veneered with sesame or poppy seeds. A younger generation intent on keeping kosher but looking for more spicy, diverting, healthful, and fashionable dishes are flocking to Indian vegetarian restaurants in urban areas. They are de facto kosher for their Hindu customers who do not eat fish, meat, fowl, eggs, or cheeses set with rennin, the acidic enzyme in rennet that begins coagulation of milk and is produced in a cow’s stomach.

Recognizing this growing market, many of those Indian restaurateurs now go the extra mile by employing a mashgiach and having separate hand sinks in the dining room to be used before saying blessings over the food. But how a novice navigates one of those menus will be the subject of a future column as will a few of the kosher Indian vegetarian restaurants around the country.

In a way, Jews might well have been the unwitting pioneers in what is currently celebrated as fusion cooking. Now, perhaps, a new worldwide Jewish cuisine is being born that, like the old Ashkenazic and Sephardic cookery, borrows from other cultures, fusing to modern tastes while still honoring their beliefs. But as butter and schmaltz give way to olive oil, no-fat sour cream stands in for the luscious high fat original, and croutons replace gribbenes, we are left with one important question: if heartburn becomes extinct, who will buy Nexium?

Imagine the scene: It’s a sunny November morning, and about 40 people are gathered in the living room of a classic six in Park Slope, Brooklyn. At center stage we have our infant, lying unsuspectingly on a pillow in the lap of his maternal grandfather. The mohel leans down, Mogen clamp in hand, and the room falls silent. The father looks understandably tense. The mother is starting to weep.

I look over at Danielle expecting to see her caught up in the drama, maybe even tearing up a bit herself. She isn’t even watching! I tap her on the shoulder and she turns toward me, horrified. “This is barbaric,” she mutters.

The baby begins wailing, the mohel makes kiddush, and the crowd starts singing “Siman Tov U’mazel Tov.” For the past eight days, I had been talking up the tribal feast that would follow the tribal rite—the bagels and lox, the whitefish salad, the pickled herring. In a cruel gesture that I can hardly fail to notice, Danielle passes over the array of smoked fish and settles on the coffee cake instead.

My history with Danielle began long before we ever met. In the mid-eighties, I attended Deerfield Academy, a prep school in western Massachusetts where her father was a dean and her mother a teacher—my sophomore English teacher, in fact. Back then it was all boys, 550 of them. Danielle and her sister rarely, if ever, showed their faces on campus, but it was known that the Mattoons had daughters. They were rumored to be blond. And attractive.

In the late nineties, we were both working at the same magazine, me as a writer, Danielle as an editor. I saw something auspicious in the coincidence; she did not. Over the years, Danielle had received more than her share of advances from Deerfield boys, who she invariably suspected were acting out some latent crush on her mother. But after a few late-night edits and countless reassurances that I was different, I succeeded where many of my fellow alumni had failed.

Dating a non-Jew should not, at least in theory, have been an issue for me. When I was an infant, my parents left New York for Palm Springs, land of rich retirees, manicured country clubs, and streets named after aging celebrities—Bob Hope Drive, Frank Sinatra Way. The local Reform temple, which was around the corner from Liberace’s house, didn’t provide much of a counterpoint; the rabbi collected antique cars.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression; my parents were proud of their religious heritage. They gave generously to Jewish charities and took the family to Israel, and the ashtray on my mother’s night table sat on a stack of Holocaust histories, which she devoured like romance novels. But unlike my maternal grandparents, who kept a strictly kosher home, my parents had drifted away from observance.

As an adult, I continued along the same path with one small detour: in my mid-twenties, I worked at the Forward. I took the job because it was an exciting newspaper, and because I was desperate to stop covering business. As it turned out, working at the Forward made it easier for me to ignore my own religious identity. Any unexpressed desire to express my Jewishness was satisfied by going to work every day.

From the first time I brought Danielle home, my parents set about making her feel comfortable. On Rosh Hashanah, one of the three days a year that my family spends in synagogue, my mom told Danielle that she looked tired and that, if she didn’t feel up to it, she should stay home. At lunch that afternoon, my mom, always on the lookout for the smallest disqualifier, barely seemed to notice when Danielle passed along the bowl of gefilte fish without spearing a piece. My mother seemed to like my shiksa girlfriend; I should have been thrilled. Somehow, I wasn’t.

As Danielle and I got more serious, something strange started happening. I can trace the first sign of it back to a warm afternoon in Brooklyn. I had just done a lap around Prospect Park and was walking home when a couple of cheerful Hasidic teenagers accosted me. “You Jewish?” they asked. I had been approached by young Lubavitchers at least a dozen times before and had never given them more thought than I would a Hare Krishna slapping a tambourine. This time, I stopped and answered yes.

Before I knew it, I was wrapping my sweaty arm in tefillin for the first time since my bar mitzvah. A few weeks later, I found myself driving around looking for challahs on a Friday afternoon. The next day, standing in line at the butcher shop, I spotted the thick-cut pork chops, my favorite quick-and-dirty weeknight dinner, and opted for lamb instead.

These are, admittedly, modest life adjustments. but to Danielle, I professed to be diving in headlong. And so there I was, spending a Saturday in front of my computer only to come home and extol the salutary effects of honoring God’s command to preserve a day for rest.

A psychoanalyst would have told me that I was overcompensating for my feelings of guilt about falling in love with a woman whose father was named Skip. After a lifetime of feeling perfectly comfortable surrounded by gentiles, I suddenly felt like an embattled minority. I fed my growing paranoia on the Web sites of various Jewish organizations for the latest studies on the “continuity crisis.” There seemed to be no way around it: I was a traitor to my people, and nothing drove the point home quite so powerfully as Christmas at the Mattoons’.

Danielle’s parents had always been warm toward me. I was in many ways a more familiar breed to them than the non-Jews whom Danielle had bought home before, which is another way of saying that I drank beer and played team sports. There were no signs that the Mattoons were at all uncomfortable with my being Jewish.

And yet, when we set out for rural Connecticut for my first Christmas, I felt as though I were heading into enemy territory. Danielle and I were both silent as we drove over the Triborough Bridge and north through the Bronx listening to Coldplay. No doubt Danielle was thinking about her Christmases past. I was thinking nostalgically about those afternoons spent eating Chinese and going to the movies.

Two hours later we were pulling up the long driveway to their white-shingled house. It was a postcard picture of Christmas, complete with candles in the windows and a green wreath on the door. Danielle’s parents and sister came out to greet us. I smiled weakly.

We made our way inside and my eyes quickly found the tree. The Christmas tree. With presents for me, no less. And as if my betrayal weren’t already manifestly clear, dangling from one of the branches was an ornament with my name on it.

A little later in the day, after ham was consumed, I stopped Danielle in front of the tree. “Don’t they know I’m Jewish?” I sputtered, stabbing my finger at the offending object.

“Oh, relax,” she told me. “It’s a snowman, not a crucifix.”

“But it’s a Christmas ornament,” I tried vainly to explain.

If I could have ended the relationship there, I would have. But it was too late. I was already in love. What’s more, Danielle was perfectly suited to me. I’m not talking about the blond hair and willowy figure. She was an expert at dealing with my neuroses and she seemed constitutionally incapable of nagging.

And so I launched my conversion campaign.

I would like to say now that I introduced the idea subtly, imperceptibly, in the spirit of, say, Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid. In truth, my approach was more Great Santini. Knowing that Danielle had developed an interest in Jewish day schools—as she put it, they seemed “so anti-touchy-feely”—I informed her that they were off-limits to children born of non-Jewish mothers. Then, wrapping up a phone conversation one afternoon, I wondered aloud if she was aware that if we were married and she didn’t convert, we couldn’t be buried in the same cemetery.

Not surprisingly, Danielle wasn’t ready to plunge into the mikvah, but she was willing to register for a six-month Introduction to Judaism class. It was a start.

Leading us into an office cluttered with Judaica, the rabbi sat us down for a casual, pro forma interview. “So, Danielle,” the rabbi asked, “how would you describe your Jewish identity?”

Danielle looked at him blankly. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” the rabbi said, “how would you describe your relationship to Judaism?”

Danielle pointed at me. “Him. He’s my relationship to Judaism.”

A long pause followed. “Well,” the rabbi finally said, straining to sound optimistic, “I guess that’s something.”

“Jew school,” as Danielle soon took to calling it, consisted of mostly interfaith couples, engaged or soon-to-be-engaged, navigating their paths to marriage. Among our classmates was Ira, a Polish-born cyclist whose mother was a Holocaust survivor, and Kathleen, who came from a big Irish Catholic family. They had ended their relationship several times over religious issues. Ira’s mother refused to speak to Kathleen.

Each class was two hours long, with a break for a (kosher) snack in the middle. During the first hour, one of the students would present an analysis of a passage from the Torah. During the second half, the rabbi—happily, not the one who had interviewed us—would discuss a Jewish ritual.

The first couple of months were rocky. The Torah was far more violent than I remembered, and I suspected that Danielle, who averts her eyes during action movies, was not having an easy time stomaching the wholesale destruction of entire biblical villages. I had also underestimated how much of the Torah is devoted to God ennobling the struggles of his chosen people, which also didn’t exactly strike a chord with her.

As the class progressed, Ira emerged as our most feverishly committed student, bringing in articles on the return of anti-Semitism in America and reporting on the latest synagogue he and Kathleen had auditioned. For a while, I cheered him on. Over time, though, as I watched Ira nudge his shy fiancée to volunteer for the weekly Torah commentary, my allegiances began to shift. Self-recrimination quickly followed. With my passive-aggressive references to cemeteries and Jewish day schools, was I any better?

Near the end of the course, I decided it was time to fashion a compromise. We would have a Jewish wedding and bring up our children Jewish, but the conversion question would remain open.

We raised our chuppah on a July evening on the greensward of Hotchkiss, where Danielle’s parents now work. I studied the skies nervously all day, fearing we’d have to put the backup plan—the school’s “nondenominational” chapel—into effect. But the rain held off, and during the reception, while watching Skip bounce gamely on a chair hoisted high above the dance floor, I made my peace with my future.

A few weeks after we returned from our honeymoon, Danielle came home from work one Friday evening with candles and a couple of challahs. She announced that she wanted to try to make Shabbat dinners as often as possible. I was stunned, but over the next couple of days it slowly came into focus for me. During those six months of Jew school, as I worried obsessively about how Danielle was taking to the Torah, she was starting to find her own route into Judaism.

A little over a year later, Danielle was pregnant and Christmas was again upon us. Under the tree was a gift for her from her sister, a book about raising Jewish children called The Blessings of a Skinned Knee. The stereotypical Jewish mother is overprotective, indulgent, prone to living vicariously through the achievements of her children. But this book argued that, at bottom, raising a Jewish child is in fact about ensuring that there will be someone around to honor God and try to make the world a better place after his or her parents are gone. Danielle was soon quoting from it.

Any fantasies I had about my wife suddenly deciding to zealously abide by the letter of Jewish law—and believe me, I had them—were soon banished when she announced that a friend was throwing her a baby shower. (Jewish custom prohibits acknowledging the impending arrival of a child.) Once again, a compromise was reached. She would have the shower, but gifts would be discouraged, and she wouldn’t open any until after the baby was born.

I picked Danielle up after the shower. She tottered toward the car carrying two heavy shopping bags. This was not a good sign. Driving home, I asked, warily, how it had gone.

“I had to open some presents,” she blurted.

“How many?” I asked, as if the number mattered.

“All of them.”

Danielle tried to justify herself—”It felt rude not to,” she said—and apologized repeatedly, but I wasn’t interested in her explanations. I dropped her off at our house and sat stewing in my car for an hour, half-listening to the Mets game on the radio. When I went inside, she was asleep.

We both woke up early the next morning and didn’t speak until Danielle was about to leave for work. She apologized again, wiping tears off her face as she did. By then, I had already forgiven her.

A little more than a month later, Frederick Gustave—Gimpel Ya’acov, after my maternal grandfather—was born. On the morning of Gus’s eighth day, he found himself lying atop a pillow on a table in our crowded living room, shrieking. The mohel stood above him admiring his handiwork. “Now he looks like a nice Jewish boy,” he said. With that, our friends and families started singing.