sincerely misguided

sincerely misguided
© Melina Magdalena (2010)

for grandparents

Yesterday was another important day in the life of our family. We held a thanksgiving service at home in the afternoon, and our son had a dedication in the morning, at my partner’s church. We get some pleasant compliments when we throw parties – and in doing so, we are building a community of friends and family here in Adelaide that feels strong and positive. It is great to offer hospitality and share our events with people we love and respect.

It occurs to me that we ask a lot, of the people around us, by being who we are and by living the way that we live. In making our expectations explicit through our actions and commitments, we merely reflect back the similarly unspoken majority mainstream, which is rarely brought into focus or questioned as to the correctness, validity or tastefulness of its presence. By choosing to live quietly and openly as a same-sex, mixed-faith couple with a child, there are an awful lot of aspects to our identities which cause anxiety and disquiet in people who position themselves squarely in the mainstream, and for whom coming into contact with us is far removed from what they perceive as normality.

However, we are not only interested in engaging the so-called mainstream. Naturally, most of our friends and family members do not identify as mainstream. But in preparing for our thanksgiving afternoon tea, we were acutely aware that in choosing to invite our neighbours to the celebration we hoped to build on the tenuous threads of connection that we have tentatively been establishing whilst living here, as well as sharing with them, our joy in the new life in our family. We live in an area that is rich in cultural and socioeconomic diversity. Building on the threads of common connection and shared humanity is the only way to find any hope of cohesion.

In the ceremony which we conducted to bless our baby and welcome him into the family, we omitted, for example, a Kiddush or blessing over wine which is a traditional and indeed central part of nearly every Jewish ritual. We could have used grape juice, but chose instead to incorporate a blessing over water, something with which our Muslim neighbours could also identify. We’ve all been experiencing a similar relief at the breaking of a long drought in our state.

Food is always an issue with us, as my partner is vegetarian and I am coeliac. This time we chose to have a vegetarian afternoon tea, not only because it is easy for us, and out of deference to the many vegetarians in our circle. We also chose not to have meat out of deference to our Muslim neighbours, for whom food that may not be halal, is problematic.

It irks me that they did not come and that indeed they did not even respond to our invitation. It’s ok – we’re a long way from giving up on this! But I’ve been thinking about it today, and realised that my own Jewish tradition, like Islam, has long demanded that its adherents separate and keep themselves apart from the general community, instead gathering in tightly insular, self-sustaining groups. In the light of certain interesting questions that were asked of us yesterday, and issues that have been raised because of yesterday, I have been tracing back what happened to make me the way I am, and to break me out of the mould of needing to keep myself apart.

I could not do the work that I do, which is teaching English to newcomers to Australia, without being open to the complexities of cultural and religious diversity. I am continually confronted in the classroom, by manifestations of diversity and incipient conflicts that arise from this. Ethics and conflict resolution are not directly part of our curricula, but maybe they need to be.

I was surprised week or two ago, whilst planning an end-of-term event with one of my classes, when a student challenged the easy statement I made, that if we were to have a BBQ of course the meat would need to be halal. “I’m not Muslim,” she said, “I’m Christian. So why do I have to have halal meat?” Good point, particularly since she comes from a war-torn region where religious conflict tore apart her family and community with the direct result that she is orphaned in Australia as guardian of two younger siblings, and worries incessantly for the safety of the other four who remain, inexplicably, marooned in their home country.

I didn’t have an adequate answer for her, but it’s something I would dearly love to take up in the classroom, after our holidays.

A Jewish friend commented last night that it must have hurt, to have my son dedicated in a church. She also asked, as though it were given, whether he had had a bris (ritual circumcision). My sister referred in passing, the other day, to the fact that our son won’t be raised as a Jew. I was struck by my strong internal reaction to all of these comments. I found these questions harder to deal with, than the question of a young boy in church yesterday, who asked me whether I was my son’s Dad.

Clearly, I am not completely reconciled to our situation, but I take comfort from the fact that our family is in a process of continuous transformation and conscious evolution. We are not set rigidly within a mould that would impose upon us certain conditions that we might not be able to live up to. With such freedom comes a great deal of responsibility. I feel that it I am responsible not only to my family and myself, but to exploring and explaining our situation to others, in the hope that they might also find understanding and acceptance of us. It’s not something I can take for granted, and it’s not something I feel comfortable in imposing upon those who would impose their ways upon us.

There have certainly been times in my life when I have felt threatened by Christianity, and when I could not have felt comfortable with having any kind of formal or semi-formal associations with a church, or church-members. Happily, I now dwell in a certainty that we share far more than I was once able to acknowledge. This does not feel threatening, most of the time. I still insist on certain latitudes of choice and distance, and as I said in the previous paragraph, my situation is in process of continual transformation. I am getting comfortable with who I am, and how I came to be.

I can state with flippancy that it would take far more than my son’s severed foreskin to convince others that he is Jewish, or to usher in the messianic age. But the issue of ritual circumcision is difficult and mystical, not very different from issues that confound me when I think about some of the difficult and mystical things that Christians do and believe. Indeed, the peculiar things central to all religions that seem strange to outsiders.

I cannot be flippant about my son’s religious identity. I did not birth him. Therefore the Jewish tradition that a child follows its mother’s Jewish identity cannot apply in our situation. Does this mean therefore that he is Christian, like his birth-mother? Christians do not have the same tradition – whether they are of the view that a baby can be baptised, or whether a person must choose to be baptised into a Christian church. Nevertheless, this is truly a dilemma for both of his mothers. We create ourselves as a family that is both Jewish and Christian.

We intend not to impose a singular identity on our children. Some might say such ambiguity in itself is cruel, but it is our conscious intention to not demand that our children choose one over the other. If we as parents can live (un)comfortably with our multiple identities, than so can they, we hope.

My understanding of life is directly related to the fact that I am a third generation person consciously committed to interfaith and intercultural understanding. My mother’s mother appears to have made a deliberate choice to intermarry and to raise her children in a new country and a liberal faith tradition that embraces diversity. Her husband of choice came from a family that brazenly defied the national xenophobic law and culture which destroyed most of her family. Her 6 children, as I am fond of reporting, adhere with their respective spouses to 6 different religious traditions!

My father’s father married a woman who had been raised within a small, insular German-speaking community. He and his wife (my paternal grandmother) raised their four children to recognise and respect diversity, something which each of them has passed onto their children, in a myriad of manifestations.

My mother and father have, in their lives, directly engaged in interfaith and intercultural activities that have spun a vast web of connections that sparks off every continent of this planet. This has been part of their personal and professional lives, and is a source of great pride and inspiration to me. They are quiet achievers, but their achievements have a depth of integrity which I draw on, in my own personal and professional life. It’s not for nothing, that we migrated to Australia; that they adopted children into our family as well as birthing them; or that we earnestly and sincerely bounced from one religion to another.

To turn back to my partner and me – at least we cannot be accused of lazily adhering to empty tradition for its own sake. Our situation demands that we grapple on a daily basis with what is at the hearts of our belief systems and values. Some might well accuse us of being misguided, but no one can accuse us of insincerity.