by Chuck and Tricia Brauner I grew up in a secular Jewish household. We never belonged to a congregation. We never went to synagogue. I never attended High Holy Days services. I think the first time I was ever in a synagogue was for a friend’s bar mitzvah. Our observance of Jewish rituals was confined to the following:
Nevertheless, we were intensely Jewish. My parents spoke Yiddish and sent me to Yiddish classes for a few years (unfortunately, they didn’t succeed in teaching me the language). I attended a Sholem Aleichem Folk Shul, a secular substitute for religious school, where I learned about Judaism and Jewish history and where we discussed such questions as how we could call ourselves Jews if we didn’t practice the religion. In lieu of a bar mitzvah, my class put on a play about Jews in America. Just about all my friends were Jewish, of the same sort as myself. Even my high school, the Bronx High School of Science, was about 90% Jewish at the time. Although we did not keep kosher, my home was also Jewish in the culinary sense. My grandmother, who lived with us, baked challah every Friday. My diet included plentiful quantities of chopped liver, noodle kugel, potato kugel, chicken soup, ruglach, gefilte fish, etc., etc. Soul food for Ashkenazim, in other words. This description of a secular Jew—unaffiliated, nonpracticing—still describes my brother. The difference between us, I am sure, stems from whom we married. He married a woman who was born Jewish. I married Tricia. I grew up in a Protestant household with a strong Puritan background. On my mother’s side were both Pilgrims and circuit-riding Methodist preachers, on my father’s side, Episcopalians; my parents joined a Congregational church after they married. We were Sabbath observant: on Sundays we did not play cards or go to the movies. We had a special midday meal after attending church services. My parents sang in the church choir, and I joined them when I was in high school. In college I began to attend an Episcopal church, and I declared my major to be religious studies, which morphed into music history my senior year. Tricia and I met in graduate school. We were married in 1969 in the Episcopal chapel at Yale, the marriage officiated by the Episcopal chaplain. We wrote our own service, basing it on the Episcopalian wedding service but expunging any reference to Christian doctrine or to Jesus. We improvised something of a chuppah and got them to cover the cross (we couldn’t do anything about the stained glass windows, however). All this at least in part to make my relatives as comfortable as possible although it was also to make me as comfortable as possible. I had scoffed when one of our friends, also a secular Jew, insisted that his fiancee convert before he would marry her, so I couldn’t very well insist on such a thing when my turn came. In graduate school I continued to attend an Episcopal church whose ritual was “high” (bells and incense) and traditional. Then Chuck and I began dating, and in our last year of grad school we married. Since our field was music history, the music for the ceremony was of primary importance for us, and we avoided the standards in favor of opera: “No stars again shall hurt you” from Purcell’s “The Tempest,” love duets from Monteverdi’s “Coronation of Poppea,” the prayer to Isis and Osiris to protect the new couple in Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” the march from Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger”—nothing religious. And for a reading, W. B. Yeats’s “A Faery Song,” a benediction over a bridal couple. The chaplain said he could always find an historical precedent for modifying the service, so we avoided all specifically Christian references. After our marriage, Tricia continued to attend church regularly. We had two children, David in 1971 and Sarah in 1976, and after we moved to Oak Park in 1975, the children attended religious school at Grace Episcopal Church (which is beautiful inside). David sang in the choir and Sarah was Mary in a Christmas pageant. We celebrated Christmas, had a Christmas tree, and exchanged presents. We also celebrated Chanukah and took to lighting candles on Shabbat to keep alive in our children and ourselves that our household was half Jewish. The children were never baptized. But it is hard to counter belief and regular practice with unbelief and little practice so the orientation definitely leaned toward the Christian half. Then when David was about eleven, he said that he would like to take communion. I told David he would have to be baptized first and that this would cause his Brauner grandparents great grief, since even though they themselves were not religious, as Jews they had strong feelings against a religion that had persecuted Jews. We had a lengthy discussion about religion, which ended with David saying if religion made people so unhappy, he wanted nothing to do with any of it. I countered that before he gave up all religion, he needed to know more about the Judaism he would be rejecting. Friends in my church who were youth leaders recommended Oak Park Temple since they had had very good experiences with Rabbi Gerson and an interfaith youth program. I learned from the Rabbi that Jewish-Gentile couples were common at OPT and their children welcomed in religious school; we joined the Temple in time for David to start seventh grade Sunday school classes with Cantor Richard Cohn. At that time, b’nai mitzvah celebrations were optional at OPT, and David opted out. However, I was taking Hebrew classes, having been raised with a strong background in “Old Testament,” both at home and in college (where I had studied Greek, the language of the New Testament). Chuck and I were both attending Rabbi Gerson’s Torah study group, and we made a commitment to attend all family Shabbat services with our children. I found myself participating more in the life of the congregation and feeling more and more Jewish. One day while riding the el I became aware of this as a sort of assimilation, realizing that I was thinking “we Jews …”. It may have been around this time that Sarah said, “One person in our family isn’t Jewish; I think it’s Dad.” In the mid-1980s Cantor Cohn asked me to tutor the b’nai mitzvah students in the texts of their Torah and Haftarah portions, after which he would teach them the chant. This was something I very much wanted to do but I felt that if I were the parent of such students I would want them to be taught by a Jew. I began meeting privately with the Rabbi. One of the most meaningful things he said in those conversations was that all Jewish souls stood at Sinai, although not all of those souls were born into Jewish families. I struggled with the implications of this step: my mother was still living, and it would be difficult for her to accept my conversion, which I knew she would see as a rejection of salvation. Then Rabbi Gerson, in a sermon that was perhaps during the High Holy Days, seemed to challenge me directly to make a decision, and on July 6, 1986, I “entered into the covenant of Israel as a righteous proselyte,” in the presence of a Bet Din composed of Rabbi Gerson and Kitty and Dan Hall. My immersion was in Lac Labelle, Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, when the Gersons, Halls, and we were picking up our daughters from OSRUI. I took as my Hebrew name Hannah Miriam for my grandmother Annie and my mother Miriam, to show that I was not giving up my past in my acceptance of Judaism. After the ceremony Rabbi Gerson asked the children if they had any questions, and Sarah, ten years old, asked, “Does this mean I am Jewish?” “Yes,” said the Rabbi. “You have two Jewish parents, so you are Jewish.” My mother, with the support of her pastor at Pilgrim Congregational Church, came to accept my conversion. I carry my tallit in a needlepoint case she made for it, and on holidays we use a challah cover she embroidered. As someone who tends to worry about negative consequences, I had mixed feelings about Tricia’s conversion. After all, the woman I loved and married was a Christian, and I didn’t want a different wife. Still, although I loved a Christian, I did not love Christianity, and I did like the idea that our family would be unified, our children would be Jewish, even though it meant I would become a member of a synagogue, something I could not have imagined previously. And in fact I am happy to have done so. I have learned a great deal more about Judaism than I had known before, much of it from Tricia, and our connection to the Temple and its community has considerably enriched my life. (Although, if truth be told, I do not much care for the Reform service and rarely attend.) Sarah did celebrate becoming bat mitzvah, both our children were “confirmed,” as the graduation from religious school was then called, and I was called to the Torah as a bat Torah, with all of my b’nai mitzvah students sharing an aliyah. It was then that I understood clearly that when one has finished chanting from the Torah that first time, there is a rush of feeling: “Now let’s party!” In 2009 Chuck and I were honored by the Temple as members for 25 years. And, though we are not as active as we were, we’re still here, with our grandson Jacob now in religious school—a third-generation member of Oak Park Temple.
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