I now cry at school performances (always have)

I’m not made for school performances. I’m not made to watch a bunch of nine-year-olds go on stage wearing white t-shirts and start dancing and singing songs about their homeland, nature, environment, and dry fruit.

I’m not made to watch them dress up as trees and tell us how they provide a home for all the little creatures and shade and air to humans.

I’m not made to watch a lone bi-spectacled nine-year-old take a microphone at the end of all this, and reading from a piece of paper, ask all the grown-ups to please stand up for the singing of Hatikva, the national anthem.

This was the Tu BiShvat ceremony at my daughter’s school. Tu BiShvat (also called “The New Year of the Trees”) is one of those minor Jewish holidays that can easily go by unnoticed unless you’re a parent to a fourth-grader and are informed you have to be at your kid’s school on a Friday morning.

My child didn’t even have any major role in the performance but it didn’t matter: I cried from the second the first fourth-grader set foot on stage and until the last notes of Hatikva.

It was beautiful, touching and so painful.

I hated it.

I hated that it had to be so sad.

I hated that these little kids had to say “We hope all our soldiers will be safe and we hope our hostages will come back soon!”

I hated that the words of the song Artzeinu ha-ktantonet (“Our tiny homeland”) are infused with so much pain now. Maya sang it at home for a week before the performance, practicing, and when I started singing along with her, she made big round eyes: “How do you know this song???”

“Because I went to school too once,” I said. I didn’t tell her that back then, at the end of the 90s, it was a different song. It was just a regular song, not even a very good one. Lyrics + melody = song. Everything was different back then.

Dear language-speaking friends, I’ll be honest with you. I feel a little bit lost after last week’s post. I sat down to write today’s post about 47 times and it never came out right. Until last week I knew, more or less, what this newsletter was about. I felt like I had a plan. I like having a plan.

Without a plan, one can start feeling all sorts of feels and it can get a little uncomfortable.

I started this newsletter, 16 months ago, because I wanted to find a way back to some sort of normal even if this normal was completely out of the ordinary.

I started it also because I wanted to resist the urge to curl up on my cultural identity and shut out the world.

But maybe sometimes one needs to curl up on one’s own cultural identity, and now I have an irresistible urge to do just that, after resisting it for an entire year. I don’t know if this is temporary and will go away, or if it is here to stay or what.

I have been thinking about belonging. And how — apart from attacks from hostile armed groups on your people — nothing strengthens your sense of identity and belonging like school performances.

I remember going to Maya’s first school performance in Israel (the year when we came back here, she was in preschool) and watching these four-year-olds dressed as Maccabees (the Hanukkah heroes) and thinking how magical it was that now we live in a country where Hanukkah is a state holiday and where you didn’t have to go and look for some after-school Jewish club for her to experience this.)

If you’ve never felt that warm feeling of belonging, I envy you because that means you’ve never experienced the opposite: un-belonging.

I know I’ll never take it for granted because I grew up as “the other” in Russia, and didn’t have a chance to experience this until I was a teenager (and didn’t appreciate it even then until I left again and came back.)

But it’s a strange thing, cultural identity, and you never really know what’s going to nurture it.

Back in England, Yannai (who is almost 16 now) went to a primary school that belonged to a Methodist church. They had RE (religious education) lessons, a daily assembly in the church, and a nativity play every Christmas.

Parents had the right to pull their kids out of these activities but we chose not to. Not because we necessarily wanted him to be exposed to all the religious content, but because these activities were where the school community spirit was formed and we wanted him to be part of it.

Sure it was a little quaint to be surrounded by all that, especially after living for many years in the secular and inherently multi-cultural Toronto, but there was also something cozy about it.

And no, I didn’t mind people saying “Merry Christmas” on the streets instead of the more inclusive and more accepted in Canada “Happy Holiday!” It was sweet and sincere and did not offend me in the slightest. On the contrary, I appreciated that people were holding on to their traditions and were not forcing themselves into a narrow definition of “inclusiveness.”

I liked the Toronto way too. But it was right for that place and that environment. Every culture has its own way and, as long as it is sincere and not forced, that’s how it should be.

By the way, my child didn’t forget who he was just because he was in a Christian school. On the contrary, somehow that environment made him think more about his identity.

He was about six or seven and we kept having conversations like this:

“Who are we? Are we Jewish?” he’d ask me.

“Yes, we are.”

“Who is right, Jews or Christians?”

“There is no right or wrong, that’s just a matter of belief and traditions.”

“In the Church assembly today I didn’t say ‘amen’, because I didn’t agree when they mentioned Jesus. But who is right?”

Clearly, he wasn’t satisfied with “There is no right or wrong here” because one day at school instead of annotating a prayer, he scribbled “Jews are right” in his religious education class workbook.

In December of that year, he begged me to make sufganiyot (Hannukkah donuts) and bring them to the school’s Christmas fair, and in April, at his request, I went to his class and told kids all about Passover.

(Fast forward four years, and during our first Passover in Israel, he stormed out of the Seder table because he was now against anything even remotely religious.)

But I think, religion or not, it seems that humans like and need to organize themselves into cultural (and linguistic) groups probably because it makes us feel safer in this world. And maybe it is only when we securely belong to our cultures that we can truly appreciate what other cultures and peoples bring to the world.

Yannai’s first Seder, circa 2009. Probably the first and only time he agreed to hold a piece of matzah and didn’t try to run away before the Seder was over.

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