8 Days of Queer Judaism, Day 3: A Gentile Speaks.

(This is the third in my series of semi-gay Chanukah posts. Anyone out there with an opinion on queer Jewish culture, or even a queer opinion of Jewish culture, should definitely submit it to me because I would love to post it. And again, let the record show that this was posted before midnight.)

I have a post coming next week about bagel chasers, goyish men who go out of their way to pursue the sons of Abraham, but today I wanted to take a more general track. The temporal proximity of Christmas and Chanukah always leaves me comparing the two holidays, and the cultures behind them, at this time of year. So I asked my gentile (but circumcised) boyfriend to give me his impressions on dating a Jew.

Here's what he had to say:

While never considering myself a bagel chaser by any stretch of the term, I've dated a few Jewish guys. And I'm dating one now. The guys I've gotten to know tend to fall on the more secular side of Judaism, so I haven't been exposed to a lot of the rites and services and what not. I was raised Catholic, and I think there's a connection that can be made between Jews and Catholics, despite the obvious differences. (That whole Christ thing.) Growing up, my boyfriend and I both had limitations and restrictions put on our weekends due to the faiths we were raised under. There were certain foods to be eaten or avoided at certain times of the year. We were exposed to ancient stories of long dead people at very young ages. And we both got laden with guilt, lots of guilt, and were then left to try to sort through it during the coming-of-age and coming-out processes. Heck, we even share a testament. But despite the connection, there's definitely a huge difference between our religious cultures, and its one that I'm kinda jealous of.

I think the easiest way to explain my main thought here is to correct my last statement. There's a huge difference between the Jewish culture and the Catholic non-culture. There is little about my upbringing that I hold dear to me. I don't feel nostalgic when I smell frankincense. I don't crave cheap, watered-down red wine served out of a communal chalice. And I don't miss going to bed early every Saturday night so that I can wake up well rested and ready for mass on Sundays. And when I think back on whatever culture there might have been associated with my Catholic upbringing, I can't think of anything else. The rest of my "culture" seems to be the same as that which nearly every other middle class white kid grew up with, and it's not very exciting either. If world cultures were breads, American middle-class white culture would definitely be Wonder Bread: fragile, flavorless and cheap.

My boyfriend's Jewish culture is so rich. So many traditions passed down through the generations, too many for me to keep track of. He travels home to the Midwest for family celebrations more often than I visit with my family who live only two hours away. I can't begin to describe all of the aspects of his culture that I appreciate so much, mostly because I don't have enough context to understand them all and therefore remember them. And any attempt at description would sound trite. But I know it's substantial, it's rich, it's hearty, something you can sink your teeth into. It's like a good loaf of whole grain rye.

It's really funny to hear this, because when I was growing up my sisters and I always used the term "Christian" as a shorthand for the kind of waspy, Martha Stewart aspects of family life we thought was precluded by the stereotypical messy, neurotic, high involvement Jewish culture.

Thus, when my mom sent us to school with hard-boiled eggs in a wrinkled paper bag, we dreamed of the "Christian" lunch of a ham and cheese sandwich in a tin lunch box. When our sick old mutt began disregarding all rules against indoor bathroom usage, we would talk about the possiblity of someday owning a normal, "Christian" dog, like a border collie, that would fetch our slippers and do tricks instead of trying to impress us with the frequency and fetidity of its bowel movements. We said "Jewish garbage" to refer to the wet piles of plastic bags while laughing about family friends, the Chesterfields, that simply jettisoned one paper grocery bag of detritus at the same time every Sunday. I could go on.

So it surprised me to hear that this "grass-is-always-greener" attitude could go both ways. It probably shouldn't have.