“Don’t do that! Bad luck! Shhh!” I tapped out in a frenzy.

“Can’t help it!” he responded.

A clammy wave of fear and irritation washed through me. “But what about the Angel of Death?” I typed, before promptly erasing it. The Angel of Death? In stark black-and-white pixels, on a screen powered by electricity and chemicals and human ingenuity, it looked crazy. I shoved the phone into my bag and slid my gloves back on.

I used to live firmly in the observable world. When it came to my physical wellbeing, I trusted the power of medical technology to establish cause and effect. Twisted ankle? A quick X-ray shows whether anything is broken. Sore throat? A culture determines whether or not it’s strep, and antibiotics cure it. Tests identifying a cluster of pre-cancerous cells? There’s surgery to scrape them away, and close monitoring to trigger a repeat if they return. Things are, or they are not, and that’s that.

Pregnancy, I assumed, would work the same way. After all, it was a litmus test that confirmed it in the first place: two pink dashes on a plastic stick, easy as handing over $12 at the drugstore. A few weeks later, we heard a heartbeat, transmitted via sonogram, and a few weeks after that got our first visual confirmation via ultrasound that the bump in my belly housed an actual baby, who has two arms and two legs, 10 fingers and 10 toes, two little ears and a tiny button nose.

Then came the genetic tests, which I was startled to discover offer results in the form of percentages, rather than certainties. Our numbers were good, but if we wanted guarantees, we were told, we needed to do an amniocentesis—a test whose chances of hurting the baby were higher than the outside possibility that something was actually wrong. In other words, it was riskier to pursue a definite answer than to trust the statistics—a choice that, for us, was no choice at all. But that little seed of uncertainty took root in my mind and has been steadily watered by a cascade of “wait and sees” on everything from how big the baby will be to how labor will go. Now, with less than a month before delivery, it’s blossomed into the idea that the baby is like Schrödinger’s poor cat: simultaneously perfect and afflicted, not one or the other but both, until he emerges from the black box of my belly into the world, where we can see him for ourselves. Knowing a little bit turns out to be as good, or bad, as not knowing anything at all.

The fact that we live with the uncertainty for nine whole months—and that the evidence of the mystery is always right in front of me—is why, I’ve discovered, pregnancy is a particularly ripe condition for spawning superstition. “Whenever you have a situation where there’s a lot at stake, and you’ve done everything you possibly can to make sure there’s a happy outcome but there’s still a lot of uncertainty, it’s a perfect circumstance for superstitions to emerge,” Stuart Vyse, a professor at Connecticut College who specializes in the psychology of irrational beliefs, told me. “Establishing some kind of ritual or lucky thing you do makes you feel better, because it gives you the illusion of control.”

And Jews have spent centuries accumulating a vast catalog of practices surrounding pregnancy and childbirth: a trove of off-the-shelf totems to fit any anxiety that, for someone as determinedly secular as I am, has the added appeal of coming wrapped in echt Jewish authenticity. “You can trace the magic to the Babylonians, the ancient Greeks, you can see the common denominators,” said Michele Klein, an expert in Jewish birth folklore and customs. “But the Jews have a written heritage and have channeled it and processed it and turned it into a way to maintain Jewish identity, separate from other peoples.” So, expectant Jewish parents can rely on charms like the hamsah to ward off the evil eye or tie red strings around their wrists for good luck—or resort to time-honored tricks like not saying a baby’s name aloud before it is formally bestowed at the bris, eight days after birth, to avoid attracting notice from vindictive spirits.

Which is why, despite there being nothing in the Talmud about my omnipresent Angel of Death, it felt like a distinctly Jewish thing to fear. Along with the evil eye—ayin hara—it’s a concept that has become woven into the warp of Jewish observance, so much so that it can be thought of as “superhalachic.” (Another is the habit of wishing a pregnant woman “b’sha’ah tovah”—“in good time”—rather than a standard mazel tov.) “The overwhelming majority of these things are not legally or textually based,” said Rabbi Dr. Edward Reichman, who teaches Jewish medical ethics at Yeshiva University. Superstitious habits like not revealing a baby’s intended name before the bris, or not outfitting a nursery until a baby is born, dovetail with other legally sanctioned practices, like not planning a funeral until a person has died. “There is a belief that you don’t want to prophesize or look to the future in ways that are inappropriate,” Reichman told me. “There’s nothing in halacha about not calling a mohel before a baby’s born, but you don’t want to anticipate God’s work—so you wait.”

Continue reading: Psychological incentives

Hear our voice, Hashem our God, pity and be compassionate to us, and deliver us, Oh Father in Heaven, from our mothers here on Earth. Bring us back to you, Oh Lord, if only to get us the hell away from them, for we are in agony and depressed and neurotic and sexually dysfunctional. We have turned away from You, we have become guilty, we have robbed, we have slandered, but Jesus, let the punishment fit the crime, and no crime could fit the punishment of mothers such as ours, Oh God. Hear our cries, Oh Lord, He who did deliver us with a mighty hand from the from the land of Egypt but clearly saved the 11th plague for us, He who took us from the land of bondage to the land flowing with guilt and shunning, a land of superegos and shame and Hitler and pogroms and arthritis and Alzheimer’s, and for which the only solace is alcohol and violent pornography. For you are our Lord, the All-Knowing, the All-Understanding, but Who, let’s face it, Oh Lord, never had a mother Himself, so doesn’t really know, does He? May He who split the Red Sea and delivered his children from suffering do so once again, speedily in our days, or just let the sea collapse on us and get the damn thing over with.

(For sons, the fast begins at sundown the evening before Mother’s Day, and continues until loss of consciousness results in blessed, merciful death.)

For Daughters

Hashem, Hashem, God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abundant in kindness and truth—what the fuck? If the pain of childbirth is our punishment for Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden, Oh Merciful God, what sin did we commit to receive the punishment of such a mother? Did Eve grab a second apple on the way out? Did she bake an apple fucking pie, Oh Lord? For our misery is great, and apparently that is the only thing about us that is: Our clothing is not great, our hair is not great, neither are the way we raise our children or the men we choose to marry. Oh Lord who gave Abraham unto Sarah, hear the voices of our mothers who would cry out and say: a shepherd? No daughter of mine is marrying a shepherd. Our brothers can do no wrong, Oh Lord, and we can do no right. May I find favor in your eyes as I never shall in hers.

(After the blessing, visit the mother you swore you wouldn’t, try to convince yourself she means well, tell your partner/husband/children to just ignore her, and spend the rest of the day wondering if she’s right and you have gotten fat.)

For Mothers

Blessed art thou, Oh Lord our God, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I should have such children myself, maybe if I give mine a dime they’ll phone me once a year, the merciful Lord, the One who forgives us for the sins we have committed, and we must have committed some doozies, after all, to deserve children like these: the son with hair like a girl, the daughter who’s out all night—who knows what she’s up to—children who blame us for all their problems and cause us to grow old before our time, children who marry whores and Philistines, who give birth to bastards and finish what Hitler started—you think you’re hurting me by dating a shvartza, you’re not hurting me—forgive us this day, oh Lord our God, for whatever laws we must have broken, they must have been some big ones; we must have must built a Golden Calf, a whole herd of Golden Calves, who knows, it’s always our fault, Oh Lord Our God, for why else would You keep from us those sons who become doctors and those daughters who marry them, like the Goldberg boy, he’s a surgeon now, or that Rubenstein girl, she married a brain surgeon kinehora, why else would You curse us with sons who never call before Shabbos, and daughters who wear jeans with their gotkes hanging out, is this why we paid for yeshiva, Oh Lord? May it be your will, Oh Lord our God, who doesn’t know Himself what it’s like to be a Mother—it must be nice to be a Father—forgive us, Oh Lord, for it’s our fault, of course it is, You go create another world, do whatever you want, don’t think about us; may it be Your will, Oh Lord, to bring us the Messiah and deliver us to Jerusalem speedily in our days, it should kill you to lift Your feet while we vacuum beneath You, Oh Lord, You have it very hard and let us say Amen. Of course we’ll say Amen.

(Take three steps backward, dab tears from eyes with tissue already soaked with sadness, wave dismissively to the right, wave dismissively to the left, wave dismissively to the center, sigh heavily, and walk out, a hand pressed against your aching lower back.)

For Psychiatrists

If He had given us a job that’s primarily sitting

and not given us a never-ending source of income,

it would have been enough.

If He had given us a never-ending source of income

and not permitted us to charge an hour for 45-minutes of work,

it would have been enough.

If He had permitted us to charge an hour for 45-minutes of work

and not permitted us in that hour to earn more than a high-end prostitute,

it would have been enough.

If He had permitted us in that hour to earn more than a high-end prostitute

and not given us the duplex on the Upper East Side,

it would have been enough.

If He had given us the duplex

but not given us the license to prescribe drugs,

it would have been enough.

If He had only given us Mothers

and not Fathers, too,

it would have been enough!

(Immediately following prayers, cancel all appointments and spend the day getting shitfaced.)

In the book of Samuel, Hannah weeps and prays for a son, becoming so overwrought that the temple priest thinks she’s drunk.

Laugh or cry. Like the matriarchs before them, artist and teacher Phoebe Potts, 39, and blogger Keiko Zoll, 28, have each done their share of both along their journeys toward motherhood. And as these two women navigate the confusing, terrifying, and emotionally charged landscape of infertility—Potts in a book, Zoll in a website and video—they’re sharing their stories in innovative ways, bucking recent research that suggests infertility is a “closet issue,” something women are afraid or ashamed to divulge.

Good Eggs, Potts’ graphic memoir about love, marriage, career, Judaism, and in-vitro fertilization, hits bookshelves just after the High Holidays. Later in the month, Zoll will accept a “Best Viral Video” award from Resolve: The National Infertility Association for her video, “What IF: A Portrait of Infertility.”

The two women struggle with a problem that affects one in eight American couples, or 7.3 million people, according to an estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though statistics don’t offer comparative rates of infertility among different populations, the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” can especially sting when a Jewish couple fails to conceive.

After three artificial insemination cycles, four goes at in-vitro fertilization, five miscarriages, and four years of procedures, drugs, acupuncture, and yoga, Potts is without a definitive diagnosis of what’s kept her from staying pregnant. Zoll, newly married to her high-school sweetheart but diagnosed with premature ovarian failure, never even got to try to conceive.

But infertility stories, long and complex as they are, don’t end so much as unfold. Potts and her husband, Jeff, are now deep into the adoption process, awaiting news of a match with an Ethiopian baby, and Zoll and her husband, Larry, are weighing the possibilities of adoption or IVF with a donor egg. As their journeys took shape, both women discovered solace in the creative process.

For Potts, drawing became a way to forge a record of her experiences so she could “create when I wasn’t creating,” she said in an interview from her home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. “Virginia Woolf talks about how art is making your own world, and you can do as you like in it. I could make something out of my own body, my hands. That was profound for me.”

Good Eggs is at times hilarious, at times poignant, and always successful at conveying the many layers of coping with infertility, from how to handle friends’ pregnancies and what to share with families to how to manage depression and maintain a healthy marriage. The team of professionals any infertility patient encounters becomes a memorable cast of characters in Potts’ hands, including a big-headed and cyclopic phlebotomist, an egg that sings Sinatra, a financial adviser who cackles like a mad raven, and a crowbar-wielding nurse.

Don’t mistake Potts’ humor for false cheer, though. “I will never, ever be accused of putting a happy face on something that’s not happy,” she said. After years of living with depression—which she also chronicles in Good Eggs—Potts has become adept at finding the absurd even in dark moments. “It’s how I’m used to communicating. It’s sort of a safety net too, so I don’t completely descend into sorrow.”

Another safety net is her Judaism, which was just budding when she entered the infertility maelstrom. Potts grew up, she said, “ethnically Jewish, loosely Reform.” She turned more to Judaism during her engagement when Jeff, raised with no religion, suggested they take an Introduction to Judaism for Interfaith Couples class. “My connection to Judaism was really fostered by finding love,” she said, recalling their “great, funky Jewish wedding.” Potts subsequently flirted with rabbinical ordination and now works part-time as a Hebrew school teacher, work she also covers in Good Eggs. These days the couple observes some Shabbat rituals—they light candles on Friday evening and don’t use the phone or computer during the Sabbath.

Her faith was not shaken by her infertility struggle. “I tend to blame myself more than I would Hashem or the godlessness of the world,” she said. “If anything, I’d be like, ‘Oh, I eat too many M&Ms,’ or, ‘I’ve got this wonky uterus.’ ”

Zoll’s instinct when she received her diagnosis—at work, via a blunt email from her doctor—was to make plans to attend Shabbat services that Saturday. Zoll describes herself as a “half-Japanese Jew-by-choice”—raised a Christmas-and-Easter Protestant but curious about different religions, she converted to Judaism in 2007, just before her wedding to a Jewish man. But her solid faith suddenly buckled that Shabbat when she randomly flipped to the back of the siddur and landed on a treatise about how “not being able to bear children is the greatest punishment that God can ever hand down,” she recalled, with incredulous anger in her voice.

Her journey to a better relationship with God involved launching her blog, “Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed,” and coming back to Judaism as a source of comfort, not failure.

“It was about re-contextualizing my faith, and instead of seeing my diagnosis as some sort of causal relationship or punishment thing, to look at it as my net to keep me from falling farther,” said Zoll, who, like Potts, lives on the north shore of Boston, in the town of Salem.

Zoll’s popular video—20,000 views since it went live in April—is a window into the thoughts that follow an infertile woman during a typical day. Her eye catches a pregnancy test in the bathroom drawer (“What if I never see two lines?”). A favorite pink nightie hangs in the closet (“What if infertility has robbed me of my sexiness?”). The computer screen flashes (“What if I have to read another pregnancy announcement or see another ultrasound photo on Facebook today?”). A mom with baby carriage passes her in the park (“What if I never let go of the resentment and jealousy of the women who got to do this naturally?”). And the most raw and basic question of all, “What if I lose myself along the way?”

For Zoll, the video was an entrée into the world of infertility advocacy and consciousness-raising. Despite a full-time job as a residence-hall coordinator at Tufts University, she now devotes at least three hours each day to her advocacy work, which is as much about affecting political change, including getting more insurance coverage for fertility treatments, as it is about redefining terms like “mother,” “woman,” and “family.” It’s also about helping women put words—or images—to a struggle that can feel ineffable and overwhelming.

She wants, as perhaps Potts does too, to help women feel more comfortable sharing their stories, countering recent studies that reveal infertility as a “closet” issue that keeps many women feeling depressed and isolated. A January 2010 national survey by the pharmaceutical company Schering-Plough showed that only half of infertile couples had told their mothers about their struggles, 44 percent had told female friends, and 16 percent had told no one other than their spouse.

“The most crucial issue in infertility advocacy is the lack of people who are willing to speak publically about it,” said Zoll. “Infertility is one of those diagnoses that literally rocks you so deeply to the core that you’re literally left with almost no words when you’re first diagnosed.”

Holly Lebowitz Rossi is a freelance writer in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Mothers are reveling in their self-declared outlaw status, bragging about their kids being unwashed, un-toilet-trained, potty-mouthed, or prone to Barbie-hoarding. MacBook-tapping moms detail their own tendencies to plunk their kids in front of the TV (ooh!), have a cocktail (oy!) and give their kids non-organic, preservative-laden, character-branded junk food (veyizmir!)

Though it’s trendy to say you suck at motherhood, I doubt most of the women declaring this actually believe it. Their boasting is really about being cool. They may drive a Veggie-Booty-strewn mini-van, but their hearts are on Harleys. The problem is that by embracing “bad mommydom,” we opt out of redefining what it means to be a good mother. Most confessional writers aren’t taking up the gauntlet of redefining the norm. Instead, they identify as Other, which lets them off the hook; they lose out on the chance to say imperfect mothering is good—it’s normal, healthy, flexible.

Is it so “bad” to put yourself first once in a while, to admit that parenting can be maddening and boring, to acknowledge that our culture has elevated motherhood to an impossible ideal without actually providing social services that allow us to get anywhere near that ideal? Being a “good mom” does not mean being utterly self-negating while telling yourself it’s all for the children. It is just as narcissistic to talk about how awesomely bad you are as it is to boast about how perfect you are. (And yes, as a parenting columnist, I am aware that I am the bottle calling the sippy-cup BPA-free, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.)

All of us live and write in a culture of panicked hovering and competitiveness. (I don’t think fathers are immune, but mothers are still most often the ones blogging about the minutiae of babydom, playdates, and extracurricular activity pickups.) And now we’re witnessing backlash not just from the mommy bloggers but from the mainstream media. Parenting magazines, women’s rags, reality TV, and The Today Show have all picked up on the term “helicopter parent” and are suddenly mocking moms who can’t back off. The New York Times’s designated chronicler of the ovaried over-educated, Lisa Belkin (the writer who created a faux revolution with her disingenuous “Opt Out Revolution” article), recently wrote an entirely anecdotal piece saying that the age of alpha parenting may be coming to an end, and that micromanaging one’s offspring is falling out of favor.

Announcing that helicopter parenting is over is like saying that something is the new black. Guess what? Black ain’t going anywhere.

What is new is the notion of fake casualness. Now we’re supposed to be relaxed and real, but this unstudied-ness is, in fact, carefully studied. “Authenticity” is the operative buzzword. One trend in weddings is for low-key-seeming family-style fetes that actually cost as much as a more formal event. Clothing trends are bohemian and punk-influenced rather than overtly luxe, but they still come at price points that would make a real hippie have a seizure. Fashion mags talk about how much men love women who eat, and urge women to have dessert, but we’re still supposed to be a size two.

In other words, the standards women are held to are as high as ever. Now we’re not supposed to be self-negatingly child-centered, but our kids still have to come out brilliant, accomplished, and adorable. No wonder it’s easier to throw up your hands and call yourself “bad” than engage in debate about the impossibility of perfect goodness.

I’m not blaming the mommy bloggers for society’s unachievable standards. But blogging about how edgy you are for refusing to buy your daughter princess-themed merch (or the converse, blogging about how edgy you are for agreeing to buy your kid princess-themed merch) is small stakes. Ayelet Waldman often pushes my buttons, but she’s one of the few parenting writers who comes by her badness honestly. She’s written about loving one of her kids more than the others, about loving her husband more than any of her children, about hoping that her son would be gay but not that her daughter would be a lesbian, and about her battle with mental illness so severe that her seven-year-old told her, “I am afraid you’re going to kill yourself.” That’s far too much authenticity for some folks. It makes “OMG, I’m so bad, I haven’t washed Coco’s hair in three days” pale in comparison.

Certainly nobody’s perfect, and most of us aren’t truly bad. It might be nice to put some of the energy we pour into our personal performance art toward working to improve the lives of moms who truly are considered bad by the wider world—moms who can’t feed their kids, moms in abusive relationships or with substance abuse problems, moms who really are overwhelmed. Claiming to be a badass by typing while your kid watches Blues Clues doesn’t really help anybody.

Problem was, she had no idea how. For her, as a kid in Manhattan (and the Bronx), Jewishness was to my mother as water is to whitefish. It was just there, all around. You breathed it. It was what you did, how—and where—you lived. But it was not about observance of ritual or halacha; that, for her father and his free-thinking intellectual friends, belonged back in the Old World. Instead, for my mother and her sister, being Jewish meant rallies, fist-pounding politics, landsmanschaft meetings, Yiddish theater, Zionist songs, noodle kugel, chopped liver. When she became aware that some of her friends were having bat mitzvahs, she asked her father why they didn’t belong to a synagogue. His answer: “Synagogues belonged in Europe, where Jews had nothing else. In America, Jews don’t need synagogues. They have everything else.”

While Lexington, Massachusetts is certainly America—it’s the birthplace of American liberty, after all—it bears little resemblance to New York in the 1940s. It didn’t (and doesn’t) offer the kind of “everything else” my grandfather was talking about. There were Jews there, sure. Lefty politics? Some of that too. But it was unlikely that my mother, no matter how good her kugel, would have been able to find or create for me a Jewish atmosphere there like that of her childhood. (Let’s just say that there isn’t actually a store in Lexington called Minuteman Bagel, but there might as well be.) She was going to have to turn instead to religious ritual and education—and not just for me.

After much soul-searching, and with much trepidation—specifically, the fear that someone would spot her and shout “Trayf!”—my mother decided to join Lexington’s Reform synagogue and enroll me in the religious school. A few weeks before the consecration ceremony for the new children, the rabbi met with the families to welcome us and describe what would happen in the service. We’d stand before the ark, he said, and we’d all recite the Shema.

Mom raced home to phone a Jewish friend. “Sally?” she asked, ‘What’s a Shema?”

I still have a very clear, comforting memory of sitting at the piano with my mother and learning to chant the three simple lines of the Shema, Judaism’s essential affirmation of faith. I had no idea she had just learned them herself.

And now I am a mother who wants to give her daughter memories like that one. (Not to mention a mother who wants to have an apartment big enough for a piano.) I know what a Shema is; if I didn’t, I have a husband who could pretty much break it down for me. That said, I don’t want to cede Bess’ Jewish upbringing to David just because he does Jewish upbringing for a living—though I’ll be happy to give him the floor the first time Bess asks, “Who’s God?” I don’t want him to be the default bearer of our household Jewish standard. I want to start new family traditions, help Bess find meaning in who we are already. But that’s also where I get intimidated. This past Passover, we enjoyed second seder with dear friends and their kids in Boston. When the mom rallied the troops to count the omer—which we never got around to in my house growing up—my first thought was, “What’s an omer?” (Counting the omer is a daily blessing for marking the days between Passover and Shavuot, the holiday commemorating the giving of the Torah. For some reason I can never remember that.)

This is a long way of saying that I am going to have to do some reading. Just because I am a rabbi’s wife does not mean I’m a ringer. We know that when less observant liberal Jews like my mother marry or start a family, they often feel the urge to become more observant—to join a Jewish community, to create a Jewish home, and, often, to give their children more in the way of Judaism than they themselves had growing up. Basically, we’re all looking for ideas and answers—to our childrens’ questions and our own. As I am beginning to discover, there’s an ever-growing library that can help.

The books I’ve collected so far seem to fall into two rough categories: first, those on how to be a Jewish parent; and second, those on how to parent Jewishly—or, how Judaism can help you parent. (Arguably, there’s also a third category of books by sleep experts, but that’s only because the guru status of the biggest-deal expert is such that I hear him called “Reb Ferber.”) The current big-deal book in category number two is psychologist Wendy Mogel’s The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children—but we’ll get to that in a later column. Self-reliant only when in her ExerSaucer (referred to by fellow parents as “Overstimulation Station” or “Neglect-atron 2000,” depending), Bess is indeed old enough to sense routine, to respond to music, to be mesmerized by candlelight. So we’re on the Rituals 101-level books number one such as parenting columnist and web doyenne Meredith L. Jacobs’s new The Modern Jewish Mom’s Guide to Shabbat, which David and I just consulted because somehow we keep forgetting when in the rundown on Friday evenings you bless your children (right after lighting the candles). Its approach, like that of Anita The Red Tent Diamant‘s 2000 classic How to Be a Jewish Parent: A Practical Handbook for Family Life, is comprehensive and concrete: here are the blessings; here (traditionally) is when, how, and why you say them; here’s the deal with keeping kosher; here’s how to install a mezuzah on your doorframe; here’s the recipe for Grandma Hilda’s Carrot Ring. Both books invite and assert the flexibility that is key to liberal Jewish practice—it’s still Shabbat if you light candles after sundown, and even if you don’t make brisket—but without crossing the line from lenient to meaningless (“Here’s the recipe for Grandma Hilda’s Pork”).

More and more Jews, it seems, are looking for this kind of gentle, practical, substantive guidance. Traffic to Jacobs’s website, ModernJewishMom, has increased by 300% over the past two years. Diamant’s other venerable guide, Living a Jewish Life: Jewish Traditions, Customs, and Values for Today’s Families, is not only still in print after 15 years, but was just updated and revised. When I asked Jacobs what she thinks accounts for the success, new and renewed, of works like hers and Diamant’s, she said, “Whether it’s a response to September 11 and the kind of world we are now raising our children in, and/or a response to materialism, I think parents are turning to the traditions of our faith to give our children a sense of peace and a sense of self.”

True. But (gasp!) it’s not just about our children. Bequeathing them Jewish traditions can give us a sense of peace, too—as long as we’re able to be comfortable with our own Judaism. Just comfortable! Not experts. “Starting to make Jewish choices as an adult can feel very awkward, even for people who were born Jewish,” Diamant writes in Living a Jewish Life. “There is a sense that you ought to know Hebrew, and when Passover begins, and what the Talmud is. Being uncomfortable in a synagogue or at the prospect of lighting candles might seem to confirm the suspicion that you will never ‘get it,’ that you will never fit in.” True: everyone feels like they’re the one who doesn’t know as much as the person next to them—the one who doesn’t know the melody, who doesn’t know why everyone covers their eyes during that prayer. Thing is, the person singing along perfectly is also wondering how that guy over there knew just when to bow. I’m just learning, we think—they’re the real Jews. Like me: at my husband’s or home shul, I’ve totally got my Jewish game on. But when we have Shabbat lunch with a bunch of rabbis and their even frummier friends, I go into a very “What’s a Shema?” place. How do they keep track of where we are in the post-meal blessing? Do they actually feel joyful because it’s Shabbat, not just because they have the day off? I am always sure that every else’s experience is deeper than my own. Which, if I’m just sitting there feeling inadequate, it definitely is.

Which itself is why it’s a mistake to confuse being less prepared with being less adequate, less experienced with being less Jewish. As my mother ultimately learned, it’s just as Jewish to inquire as it is to know. (Their temple, by the way, has become the center of my parents’ social and spiritual lives. Good call, Mom.) The trick is to get over ourselves—to read how-to books, ask questions, or just observe, and quit worrying about looking stupid. If we’re doing this for our kids, we should learn like them, too. Sitting on the piano bench before my consecration, I don’t remember being afraid that I’d forget the words to the Shema. I just remember that my mother taught them to me.