In this paper (a work in progress) prepared for last fall's meeting of
the American Academy of Religion,
Vanessa L. Ochs
investigates the material culture of American Judaism by visiting the
home of a middle class Jewish family in New Jersey. Ochs' visit reveals to us
not only the material culture but the resident's reflection on that culture, and
her anxiety as to how that culture represents her own Judaism. In Ochs' hands,
material culture is far more than just "stuff"--it both reflects and
shapes religious identity in complex ways.
Ochs writes of the pictures scattered through the text, "In each
photograph of different walls or table-surfaces of Susan's home, one sees Jewish
ritual objects and Jewish theme-art "exhibited" along with folk art of
diverse cultures (reflecting Susan's travels and her decorative prreferences.)"
Ochs can be reached at vlo4n@virginia.edu,
and would appreciate feedback, especially insights into why someone with such a
rich religous life as my informant is so doubtful of her "Jewish
authenticity."
An elderly Jewish informant of Barbara Myerhoff tells a story which he
attributes to Martin Buber in order to prove to his community that a ceremony
whose authenticity some doubted was indeed, the real thing. (1978:105): "It
tells here about two men who are worried about the holiness of the Sabbath.
'What is it that makes something holy?' they ask. They decide to make a test to
see what happens when they have Sabbath on a weekday. So they make the Sabbath
in the middle of the week, everything they do right, and it feels the same way
as on Saturday. This is alarming, so they take the problem to the rabbi to
explain. Here is what the rabbi tells them: "If you put on Sabbath clothes
and Sabbath caps it is quite right that you had a feeling of Sabbath holiness.
Because Sabbath clothes and Sabbath caps have the power of drawing the light of
the Sabbath holiness down to earth."
More scholars of religions are now acknowledging what religious or spiritual
people worldwide (including, sometimes, ourselves) have long known, from
observation, lived experience and intuition: that material objects—things
made by people-- are vessels that create, express, embody and reflect
sacredness, or, to use the Jewish term which describes abstract and concrete
movement toward sacredness: Kedushah. Material objects are not just
tangible stand-ins for the stuff of greater weight and value that count more or
mean more in the big academic and cosmic schemes of things—such as ideas
and ideologies held in texts or beliefs held by a people, expressed in
theologies, and dutifully recited articles of faith. Like others whose research
leads them to consider the illumination that is possible when the connections
between religion and material culture are made (including John Cort,
Colleen McDannell,
Leigh Schmidt and Jenna Weissman
Joselit), I am not suggesting that objects are more eloquent, more instructive
or more essential than sacred texts and sacred beliefs in constructing
religiosity, establishing religious identity, or studying religions. Following
the lead of those scholars mentioned above, I am suggesting that objects are
neither less eloquent nor less pivotal either. As John Cort has asked (JAAR
64:3), what would happen if we looked at text-heavy and less text-bound
religions with "material culture as our starting point"? (615) "If
we look first at the objects and base our attempts at understanding on them,
will we emerge from our study with a different view of the tradition?"
(615)
People who live and construct religious, spiritual lives have known that
things are teachers and things are revelatory, knowing it in their very bodies,
as common sense and captured in the verity of aphorisms: "clothes make the
man," "you are what you eat." With "the chicken-or-the-egg?"
circularity, we make things, things make us; things make us, we make things. If
this were not the case about things in Judaism, the central mitzvah
(sacred obligation) of Passover would be reading about or contemplating bondage
in Egypt, which it is not. Were the real matzah (the sacred obligation
one bakes or buys, displays, eats and hides) less important than the abstract
idea of matzah, Jews could read or think matzah, and neither make, use or
consume it. Rather, the experience of bondage, the memory of bondage and the
possibility of new expressions of bondage are made tangibly present in the
matzah, the flat cracker that proclaims in its shape, taste, crumbling fragility
and digestive after-effect: "This is not-bread, this is the not-bread of
affliction." So the matzah matters, and, consequently, so does the box it
comes in, the brand name, the country of provenance (especially if it's Israel),
the competing sale prices at Waldbaum's and the Food Emporium published as
full-page ads in the New York Times, the rabbi whose name certifies,
endorses and seems to extend enduring blessing to the purchased matzah. The
plate the matzah rests on matters, and so does the cover placed on it (crude,
but beloved, for it was made by one's child back in nursery school or costly and
beautiful, designed and embroidered by artisans and representing one's good
taste or economic fortune or the ritual of marking weddings with the gifting of
Judaica). And it matters where on the Passover table the matzah is placed, and
who sits nearest to it, and who is selected to uncover it, point to it, bless
it, divide it for others, and determine who gets it first and who gets what
size. It matters who piles the matzah high with horseradish and haroset, and who
is chosen to hide it, and who to find it, and who to subsidize the reward for
its discoverer. And what an important thing that is, the retrieved hidden
matzoh, for only its discovery permits and creates the conclusion of the
Passover Seder.
In Judaism, and I imagine, most other faith traditions, the spiritual is
material. Without things, in all their thingness, there is no Passover, only
an idea of Passover; and a faint and fuzzy idea it would be, like honor,
loyalty, and remorse; like, perhaps, God, and more surely, monotheism. Things
are the thing that denotes one's belonging, one's participation, possibly one's
convictions. Listen to Jews interrogate each other about the intensity of their
commitment and connection to certain fundamental indicators of conscious,
intentionally lived Jewish life. They do not typically ask, deuteronomically: "Do
you believe in God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might?"
They will not ask, decalogically, "Do you remember that God rested on the
Sabbath day by keeping it holy?" Rather, they inquire about the materiality
of lived-out beliefs and habits of conviction: "On the Sabbath, do you
drive your car? Carry keys? In your house, do you separate your meat and milk
dishes in different cabinets and have 2 sinks? Do you cover your head, wear a
wig, put on tefillin, hang a mezuzah on your door, sleep in separate beds, eat
cold food out, light menorahs, spin dreidls…"
And where are most of these things that point toward and create Jewish life
and identity found, but in the home, in Bachelard's words, "our corner of
the world…our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the world"?
(4) Within Jewish homes, things, people, and even times of day and seasons of
the year and of life interact in a fluid process, through which things make the
home Jewish, by which things are animated by Jewish life, and absorbed by it in
specifically Jewish ways. This is well-expressed in Sylvia Rothchild's (Reading
Ruth, 146) autobiographical account of the holiday, Shavuot, which she
refers to in the Yiddish, "Shveeis":
On Shveeis, the three small rooms our family of five called home became
a magical place, a stage, a bower redolent with the smell of fresh green leaves,
roses and peonies. My pleasure was not only in the transformation we brought
about but, even more, in the seasonal discovery that it was possible to alter
what was familiar and prosaic, that escape could come not only in daydreams but
through physically changing things.
Anthropologist Leedom Lefferts, who studies the spiritual lives of Thai
textiles, has suggested this provocative question be considered (personal
communication, 1997): if things have social lives just as persons do, could we
consider that they have religious/spiritual lives as well? To this I would add
another question: Could we consider the possibility that things in a Jewish home
have Jewish identities, solid, erratic or angst-filled like the Jewish
identities of people? For just as memory recovers lost, stolen and rejected
worlds and ways of being left behind, do not objects—those present, those
retrieved and even those dimly recalled, do the same?
In my research looking at Jewish-American material culture in homes from an
anthropological perspective, I have been attending to how my human informants,
the creators and keepers of Jewish homes, (more often women than men, but not
always) reflect upon how things make their homes Jewish, and how things found in
the home facilitate Jewish living and create, maintain and transmit Jewish
identities. Three years into this project, I have been struck over and again: if
informants do not come from Orthodox homes, and if they are not rabbis, they
routinely express anxiety that I may have come to the wrong place and am wasting
my time. Despite an impressive inventory we have just taken together in their
home of over a thousand Jewish things, they are bound to claim that their Jewish
home is still not "Jewish enough" or "really Jewish." They
will acknowledge that while their home can be read as "Jewish space,"
by outsiders—Jewish or not-- it is may not be "sufficiently Jewish"
to transmit Judaism successfully to the next generation. (Visible transmission
to the next generation is the fashionable contemporary benchmark in many Jewish
communities for one's success as a Jewish parent: raising children who stay
within the fold and marry within the fold because they have come from what is
called, "A good Jewish home.") One informant claimed that the presence
of Jewish objects in her home that do not always get used in the "right"
ways and at the proper times, or are used with too little confidence and too
little understanding, serve for her as concrete, continual and condemning
evidence that her Judaism is marginal and inauthentic. Other informants
suggested that if I wanted to see a "real" good Jewish home, I should
look elsewhere. While I have not taken their advice and gone elsewhere, I have
been trying to grapple with the questions their resistance to seeing the
Jewishness of their most Jewish homes raises. Why are my informants so anxious
about what does and does not count as authentic Judaism? Why are they
overwhelmed by the pervasive feeling that they cannot create an aura of Jewish
authenticity in their environments?
In my research, I have identified three sometimes-useful categories of
things as we look at what things make a Jewish home Jewish and how they do there
making. First, I intend to take you on a brief tour of one home that "makes
Jewishness" by its objects—even when the home-keeper claims that the
home is insufficiently Jewish--and then to outline those categories which have
helped me to organize, and thus better see how things make a home Jewish.
Meet my informant, Susan, who is a past president of a Conservative
synagogue in suburban New Jersey, the mother of three daughters who have
celebrated bat mitzvahs, and an adult celebrant, herself, of a bat mitzvah.
Professionally, she is a quilter; she is married to a doctor. Beyond some formal
Hebrew school education she received as a child, Susan's recent adult bat
mitzvah preparation has increased her Jewish skills and her confidence: she
reads Hebrew, she has studied Jewish history, beliefs and practices for two
intensive years, she can chant Hebrew prayers as well as chant the ancient tunes
for the readings from Torah and Prophets. She is a leader in her community
Jewish federation, chairing important fund-raising and educational campaigns,
and she is a member of the Jewish women's organization, Hadassah. She has
participated in a women's rosh hodesh group that studies books and
issues in women and Judaism and is a Lion of Judah, a woman honored for her
large annual financial contributions to the Jewish community.
She meets me at her front door, and as we stand underneath her mezuzah, a
cloisonné object d'art she has brought back from one of many "missions"
to Israel, she explains that she is always taken aback when friends or
acquaintances tell her that she is the most Jewish person they know, and
they turn to her for information: can you serve rice on Passover, on which side
of the door do you hang a mezuzah, and what is Shavuot (beyond blintzes),
anyway? She laughs, saying: "I fear for Judaism if I am the most Jewish
person anyone knows."
She narrates her Jewishness in this way: "We're not
religious-religious, but we always light shabbos candles and have
challah, even if we're going out after. Daisy, our golden retriever, comes and
sits like a perfect dog as soon as she hears the challah coming out of its
plastic bag. And after the blessing, she gets some. We bless her just like we
bless the girls. Daisy knows when it's Friday night."
Despite Susan's protest that she, herself, is not sufficiently Jewish by her
own standards (while her dog may indeed be a Jew in good standing of the
Pavlovian denomination), she takes me on a detailed tour of the profoundly,
explicitly Jewish home that she has made and that makes her, and suggests to me,
in her discussion of things in her Jewish home and reflection upon them, that
there must be blind spots in her Jewish identity: ways in which she can
articulate, but not altogether acknowledge the Jewishness of her home, ways that
keep her from claiming it.
Walking through the door, Susan says, "I notice the relationship
between who people are and how they arrange their homes. So when I go into
Jewish homes, I am acutely aware of decorating. Parts of my own home really
reflect who I am, and parts of it, I just live with. To me, a Jewish home is
books. They don't have to be Jewish books. If I don't see books, I don't think
it's a real Jewish home. I am ordering more bookcases for my living room."
If Susan measured the Jewishness of her own house by books alone, she would
score well: in her library, she will soon show me prayer books for everyday,
Sabbath and holidays, Hebrew dictionaries, books on Jewish literacy, Jewish
histories, coffee-table art and photograph books of Jews and of Israel, and a
respectable collection of texts that have emerged out of Jewish feminism and
Jewish renewal.
But without looking further, she taps her chest, showing me a ring on a gold
chain, what she calls her "most significant piece of jewelry,"
emphasizing the "Jew" in "jewelry". She explains that her
father used to sing in the synagogue chorus in Mount Airy, and for his service,
received a ring with the Hebrew letter "shin" on it; either the "shin"
stood for the word "Sh'ma" (listen) or it was just his initial. He
wore it always on his third finger. Hospitalized before his death, he called
Susan to his bed. "Go to my jewelry box and get my ring." Susan got it
and gave it to him. After her father died, the ring was given to her, and, she
explains, assuming I will know what it means, she wears it always.
Inside
the house, there is what Susan calls "Jewish stuff" everywhere. "I
love tzedaka (charity) boxes. And I have at least three of everything so
I can give them to my 3 kids so they will know they came from me and my home. If
you have spare coins, you put them in any box, because many boxes are lying
around. (Indeed, there are standard JNF boxes, but also boxes shaped like her
synagogue, like her house, and like a chicken). When a box is full, I confer
with the family, and we decide where to give the money; it could be to something
Jewish, or something like juvenile diabetes. And photos are very Jewish things:
it's important to have photos of family around the house because family is
Jewish and that's us, that's who we are, and family's important to me." ("I
say to 'me', she adds, because it means so much to me to arrange parts of the
house.")
In her house, mixed among valuable objets d'art and fanciful folk paintings,
sculptures and ceramics made by the Jews of Russia, Ethiopia and America, are
sentimental drawings and paintings from Prague and Israel. The imagery is
familiar: Russian grandmothers in kerchiefs, milkmen like Tevya in villages like
Anatevka, lions of Judah, doves of peace, stars of David. The others traveling
on Susan's mission to Prague, she says, "couldn't scoop the paintings up
fast enough." Other artwork comes from the gallery of Jerusalem's King
David Hotel. "It looks like Jerusalem and I love images of houses and
neighborhoods, and I hung it next to my pictures of Cape Cod, which I also love."
Fine Jewish folk art paintings also come from the hotel gallery, and Susan
explains, "I know it's getting extravagant, but I like leaving money there
(in Israel, that is.)" Susan pauses to assess what my inventory may have
already revealed: "Does this make a Jewish home? Not in itself, as anyone
could hang up this stuff. But would they? It's the gestalt."
When
we reach the dining room, Susan narrates the story of her father's Seders in his
dining room. As Bachelard writes, "…the house is not experienced from
day to day only, on the thread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own
story." Through dreams, through memories, "the various dwelling places
in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days." (5) "After
my father died," Susan said, "we had the Seder at my brother's house.
We couldn't have done it there in my father's lifetime; my brother was not
observant enough. But damn it, we said, we were going to have a meaningful
Seder, even without our father." Susan questions the legitimacy of the
Seders after her father's death: "It's not really authentic. It's what we
as a family can do. We got our own copying machine. This year, for two days
before Passover, I copied from other hagaddas I have collected, and cut and
pasted. I was nuts. I took out the tear-jerker passages that were in the
hagaddah I put together the seder the year right after my father died, because I
decided, this year, I wanted to move forward. My father's sister came. We had
more than 50 people. Everyone came. I got a lady to help. The hagaddah I made
isn't ritually right, but it's OK for us. I pass out my big collection of
hagaddas for people to look at and put out my 3 Seder plates and everyone has
their own kiddush cup." Susan shows me an 11 page stapled, Xeroxed document
called "The Rosenblum-Adler Family Hagaddah." On the cover border is a
clip-art multigenerational family in a circle dance; at the center is a jolly
family toasting cups of Passover wine: captions extending from their mouths
read: "L'Chaim! Yummy! Welcome! Passover Rocks" (referring, I presume,
to the matzah balls.) As Susan had explained, it is a stitched together
document, but the introduction appears to be hers. It reads: "just as we
sometimes deviate from the exact route on a printed map when we travel, we can
make adjustments and deviations in this seder (order) too. But the basic
signposts are here for us." In the "Rosenblum-Adler Family Hagaddah,"
the entire second half of the seder, that which follows the festive meal, is
omitted, just as it is omitted in practice in many American-Jewish homes.
Indeed, this haggadah, which Susan calls "very liquid, with a slight
feminist bent" does deviate: it ends with the eating of matzah, horseradish
and haroset, and a toast to freedom with a second cup of wine. The rest of the
seder which follows the festive meal is omitted. Evaluating her creation,
defending and critiquing it in one breath, Susan says, "There's too much
cognitive dissonance between what my rabbi and the hagaddah say you should do on
Passover and what my family can actually do. You have to make traditions that
can stick. At the same time, you have to be true about things."
In
a corner of the dining room hangs a brass Sabbath light, an exceedingly curious
piece of Judaica in an American home. "People see it and say, 'How come you
have an eternal light in your dining room?' But that's not what it is. It's a
shabbos light from Kenny's family. His family was not observant for the last
generations, but they were very Jewish, from Baden-Baden, and this was their
family heirloom. The family said to me, 'You might appreciate this,' and I was
thrilled to have it."
Inadvertently, Susan demonstrates the transformational capacity of things in
a Jewish home as they become Jewish, or are designated to be so, by performing a
Jewish function, for a first time, and then forever after: "I have this
thing," says Susan. " I turn things into Jewish ritual objects if I
want to. In Prague, (a place which she identifies as having deep Jewish meanings
for her) they have beautiful glasswork, so I wanted to bring something home, so
I turned this chalice into a kiddush cup." Chalices found in Paris, Prague,
Boston and Cape Cod also met similar fates: brought home, they were dedicated—or
they dedicated themselves-- to sacred Jewish service, and now live together on a
tray, a monastery of now-kiddush cups. Like kiddush cups, are dreidls: "I
keep my dreidl collection out all year. They range from the sublime—silver,
ceramic and cloisonné—to the ridiculous—plastic. I get them as
gifts. I also turn things into dreidls. A top, a Christmas ornament: I make them
dreidls. I like that." In Susan's hands, and in her home, homeless Jewish
objects become ba'aleitshuvah, masters of return, rescued like Russian or Ethiopian Jews, and
then subjected to being domesticated as American Jews.
I
inventory the kitchen: piles of Sh'ma magazine, Moment, Tikkun, Hadassah, and
Bon Appetit, dog-eared on pages for latkes and flourless Passover tortes. More
prints of an old synagogue in Prague, images of Jewish people floating, a cross
between Kabbalah and Chagall. No great art here: Susan says none cost more than
$25, but all speak to her. "The image is Jewish, having them reminds me
where I was, gives me a good luck charm: I like the mystical piece of it."
On a kitchen shelf, I inventory Jewish sounds: piles of CD's of singer Paul Zim,
classic cantorial pieces, Barbara Streisand and Klezmer bands. On one wall is a
framed needle point of the word SHALOM made 25 years ago, a framed photographs
of Susan as chair of the UJA Women's division, bubbe and zayde dolls, over a
dozen Jewish cookbooks, a refrigerator magnetted with bar and bat mitzvah
invitations and photographs of a nephew's recent bar mitzvah, a synagogue
calendar and directory and more tzedaka boxes. On a shelf are Jewish videos
(Shalom Sesame, an animated haggadah, the Rugrats celebrating Passover) three
challah trays, a tray of six sets of Shabbos candles, and a tray of silver
kiddush cups that stays out always: some were gifts, some inheritances from
parents' collection, others the booty of rescue missions: "I buy kiddush
cups at antique shops. I take them away. I rescue them. I don't want anyone who
doesn't know what they are to have them."
Having the scanned the surfaces of the kitchen, I request that we look
behind closed doors: the refrigerator door, the cabinet doors, the food pantry.
Susan grows tense for the first and only time, and wants to assure me that here,
in the "Really Jewish" Olympics, in the kitchen event, she is about to
lose not only her standing but her very position as a contestant: "I do not
keep Kosher," she admits, apologetically, as if I might be disappointed,
offended, or bound to judge her poorly. Then, she adds, as if she might qualify
under shifted rules, "But we do have A LOT of food." Still, in the
refrigerator, I find a half-used Kosher-for-Passover bottle of horseradish, a
jar of Manishevitz borscht, a bottle of Kedem Kosher Concord grape wine.
Susan explains that she gets very traditional around holiday times; "I
am at my best on Jewish holidays. I make better chicken soup than my mother. I
love shopping for the holidays. I love telling the vegetable man that I'll need
horseradish or soup greens." She boasts that she makes special trips to the
fancier bakery to buy Sabbath challahs, and jumps at the chance to find challahs
that are "more tasty, more authentic." This translates to making New
Year Honey cakes, Purim Hamentashen, all the Passover ceremonial foods and nut
and sponge cakes.
She explains her house-rules for partial kashrut: "We don't
have pork products, but we do have shellfish," expressing, as I hear it, a
not-so-idiosyncratic distinction between signs that are more and less potent
indicators of boundaries in Jewish life. When we get to the freezer, there are
packets of meats from the Kosher butcher. I am surprised by the presence of
kosher meat in a not-kosher home, and because I can not understand why she goes
to the added trouble of securing and paying more for Kosher meat, I ask if she
finds Kosher meat fresher or tastier. It actually has noting to do with the
meat, she explains. She has Kosher meat delivered by a Kosher butcher once a
month because she likes the idea of the Kosher butcher delivery man coming to
her home, as it reminds her of such deliveries growing up in her childhood home.
The deliveryman brings more than a box of meat. Says Susan, "When the
kosher meat delivery man comes, I feel a sense of Jewish community. Arriving,
he'll tell her that he's late because he just came from the Mandelbaums, and
they ordered double, because the children and grandchildren were coming in from
Israel for all of Passover; departing, he'll tell her that he is not going to
the Shapiros because Mrs. Shapiro is in a nursing home, and Mr. Shapiro is
staying with his daughter in Montclair. Leaving for the next home, Susan knows
the deliveryman will part with the salient news of her household, and will
deliver it, along with his goods, to the next house.
Idiosyncratic kashrut extends to Passover. In Susan's basement, stored next
to a basket of haggadot, Israeli ceramic candlesticks and a seltzer bottle from
her youth, is a box marked "Passover dishes." Why would she keep
separate dishes for Passover when she does not keep separate milk and meat
dishes for the year-round? Susan explains how she makes sense of this seeming
curiosity: "I know this isn't quite right, but it works for us. Growing up,
I remember unpacking the Passover dishes from a box as we got ready for the
holiday. So I keep the tradition. I couldn't use paper plates either, because
it's very important to set a beautiful Passover table."
And then there are clothes. As we go up to her bedroom, Susan points to the
colorful vest and nice jeans she is wearing: Jokingly, she says she is "farpitzt"—dressed
to the nines to perform a weekly mitzvah, taking a woman out for lunch to divert
her from an arduous course of chemotherapy. Other clothes and objects are also
mitzvah-connected: hanging in Susan's bedroom closet is her Lion of Judah pin, a
premium given to women who make outstanding annual financial donations to UJA.
Susan explains that when she wears her Lion of Judah in on a certain suit for a
UJA event or luncheon, it gets to stay on that suit, offering it attention and
dignity, until the next event and the next suit are selected. Susan says she is
uncomfortable with the message a woman wearing her Lion of Judah pin can
broadcast: "Oh look who she thinks she is that she has so much money."
It has a good side, she admits, as it shows the extent of one's commitment. In
her jewelry box, she counts 16 different Jewish Stars, some from childhood, and
one pincushion of Torah fund pins representing donations to the JTS, and another
of Hadassah pins.
Susan's
bedroom is a landscape of shrines: Photographs of relatives who are ill. Says
Susan; "I have this thing about talismans. My Aunt is sick, so I have
photos of her everywhere." Frames birth announcements for her three
children and her own wedding announcement, all very important Jewish objects,
she says. And on her dresser, a random assortment of kippot from bar and bat
mitzvahs and the Bukharian embroidered pillbox kippa she wears when it is her
turn to do "bima-duty", sitting on the altar next to the Rabbi as a
representative of the Board of Directors.
On her bathroom mirror is a sticker the rabbi have out to the congregation
on Rosh Hashanah some years back: it says, "I am created in the Image of
God."
As I have said above, I have found that three categories of objects help me
to understand and experience what I am seeing, and help me to reflect upon what
I have already understood and experienced. I trust such categories can be useful
as methods of making meaningful groupings for other religious scholars who start
from home and start from material culture.
First, certain standard markers serve as unambiguous "signs" or "indications"
that Jewish home has been intentionally constructed, and is being continually
constructed by the objects themselves, and by a range of interactions people
have with these objects. Call this first category of objects: articulate,
revelatory, self-evident and unambiguous. One could call objects in this
category signs which say "a Jew lives here", props
which say, "I am needed in Jewish life," or catalysts which
say, "my very presence creates Jewish ways of being and doing." Often
they are all three: signs, props and catalysts.
Such things in this category facilitate, instigate or suggest Jewish ways of
being, create and enforce Jewish identities, and serve as reminders that the
home one is in is Jewish. One informant has described such objects as the
boundary-keepers she sets up in order to distinguish and protect the Jewish
identity of her home from the largely non-Jewish world in which her family
lives. One could just as easily say that it is not this informant who is setting
up the objects to create boundaries, but the objects themselves that create a
boundaried world in which my informant lives. In Jewish-American homes, the most
familiar and visible objects in this category might include a mezuzah, Chanukah
decorations, Sabbath candle sticks that are displayed and used, a kiddush wine
cup (often silver), a prayer book, a bible and other ancient sacred Jewish
texts, a Jewish calendar (distributed by a synagogue, Kosher butcher or Jewish
funeral parlor), a drawer of yarmulkes harvested from various celebrations, a
Chanukah menorah, artwork depicting Jerusalem, displays of New Years, Chanukah
and Passover greeting cards that change with the season, sentimental or
nostalgic artistic images of serene shtetl mothers in scarves lighting Sabbath
candles or bearded old rabbis worshipping and studying in destroyed European
villages, tzedakah coin boxes designated for some Jewish cause or charity,
Kosher wines, loaves of challah, the boxes of matzah, and just about anything
with Hebrew letters written on it: from an illuminated Ketubah (wedding
contract) to Hebrew letters in primary colors magneted onto a refrigerator to a
red and white can of Israeli Coca-Cola, brought back as a souvenir from an El Al
flight to Israel.
Things that are signs, props and catalysts enter one's home in a variety of
ways: as purchases, souvenirs, gifts (from relatives, friends and the Jewish
community), inheritances, hand-me-downs. Sometimes they are quietly "borrowed"
from synagogues, in a kind of surreptitious lifetime loan. Sometimes they are
acquired once in a lifetime—like a pair of silver candle sticks; sometimes
they are re-acquired annually and consumed or used up—like Chanukah candles
or a Jewish calendar; and sometimes they are acquired annually, and after they
have surpassed their initial intended use, they are saved and transformed. I am
thinking of etrogs turned into pomanders and lulavs and pieces of Afikoman hung
over doors to increase one's blessing. Frequently, things in this category have
important stories that are attached to them or that are readily and even
customarily evoked by seeing them or using them. When the story is so central,
sometimes the objects is not used as it is intended to be and, instead, remains
on constant or periodic display, as an aide-memoire to recapture the story. One
kind of story, the story of acquisition, is frequently elicited by these
objects: in the telling, one learns who was the giver of the object, and why
they gave it, when they gave it (particularly if it was a special occasion, like
a birth, bar or bat mitzvah or wedding), what the giving meant initially and
what it means now as a connection between giver and recipient. Barbara Myerhoff
(Number our Days, 206-207) would include what she calls symbolic jewelry: she
describes the elderly Jewish elders wearing "expensive gifts from their
children—golden medallions bearing grandchildren's names; 'Tree of Life'
necklaces studded with real pearls; Stars of David; and the golden letter 'Chai'
Hebrew for life and luck. All were announcements of connections, remembrance and
esteem."
As Kopytoff has demonstrated, (64-91) objects, like people have a life span,
a biography that can be narrated about their lives and a network of
relationship. Just as stories of human birth matter, (the story of when you were
born) the birth story of an object, or it's entrance into one's home matter.
Another story that Jewish objects also evoke is the miracle story of rescue
or survival against high odds; the object that first comes to mind is a broken
silver Sabbath breadknife that one family hid under floorboards during the
Holocaust and later retrieved, the sole tangible surviving sign of their Jewish
material life.
Some objects in this first category are considered to have higher level of
holiness, kedusha, than others because of some aspect intrinsic to its
structure or composition. The mezuzah, for example, contains parchment with
verses of scripture written on it; the holiness is raised to an even higher
power because these verses contain the written name of God. The holiness
quotient of the mezuzah would be reduced if there were a mistake or defect in
the writing or a tear in the parchment. Holiness would also be reduced if it
were installed on the wrong side of the doorway and if it were placed too high
or too low.
While the base-level holiness quotient of a mezuzah could remain the same
from home to home, non-intrinsic and personal or sentimental aspects of an
object also increase its holiness (one could also substitute the word "preciousness.")
For instance, one woman takes out her deceased father's yarmulke and prayer book
each Friday night and places them next to the Sabbath candlesticks she lights.
As it happens, she neither wears the yarmulke nor reads from that fraying prayer
book, but because they evoke and represent her father's presence, and remind her
of how the Sabbath entered his home, they are, for this woman, objects of higher
sanctity, more potent or powerful than other yarmulkes and prayer books she
owns, even if they are not used in conventional ways. Thus, while objects within
this category often have codified rules and customary or traditional
expectations that are connected to them, idiosyncratic usage—or
personalization-- can prevail with no dishonor usually intended and with
increased value added. For comparison, I note the Pentecostal
prayer handkerchiefs, which were thought to procure healing, studied by
R. Marie Griffith. (Griffith,
1997) The handkerchief was considered to be a "sacramental object of
divine prayer" which one sweated and prayed over; "…these objects
themselves were thought to be saturated with a kind of power through these signs
of intensive prayer." When speaking of objects in this category, my
informants acknowledge there is often a distinction between what these objects "really
mean" (which they may say is unclear to them, but a rabbi would know) and
what these objects actually did mean to them once, do mean to them now, and will
potentially mean when and if they are inherited. McDannell enforces these
distinctions in Material Christianity (17)
when she states that while meanings may be "articulated by a controlling
institutional body with a long history of custom and tradition," these may
not be able to help us "understand the personal meanings that people find
in their daily use of religious objects," which may mirror neither the "intentions
of the clerical elite not express the idiosyncratic whims of the masses."
In this respect, a mezuzah one purchased in Jerusalem while on one's
twenty-fifth anniversary will have a different valence than a mezuzah found in a
synagogue gift-shop—it might be seen has having greater protective power
and potency precisely because it is a contains and activates both "powerful
personal memories" and "collective memory," a distinction
McDannell makes.
Placement of objects in this first category matters. Sometimes Jewish law or
custom dictates the placement: the mezuzah goes on the right side of the door
post, the menorah goes near a window, the Sabbath challah goes on the table, and
holiday cards go on the refrigerator, mantle piece or piano. Other times, a
public-private distinction governs placement: a "shalom" plaque on
one's front door is meant for general consumption and illumination, whereas a
father's tefillin bag or Bat Mitzvah Jewelry may be kept in a drawer as a
private keepsake. There is also a distinction between objects that are used and
objects that are displayed in conscious ways so as to create a shrine-like
presence communicating commitment and belief.
This first category embraces a subset: I am referring to objects whose very
absence or prohibition from use at specific times points loudly,
articulately and evidently to the Jewishness of the space. Absent (or typically
absent) are specifically "other" objects such as Christmas trees,
wreaths, colored lights, and wicker baskets of painted eggs and chocolate
bunnies, bacon and its smell. Prohibited, and hence placed out of sight or
otherwise rendered out-of-commission in particular times and places are, in some
Jewish homes, cars, money and fire on Sabbath; bread and flour on Passover,
mirrors and leather shoes in the mourner's house.
In a second category are objects that are not in and of themselves
considered as explicitly or uniquely Jewish signifying objects that create the
Jewishness of a home and point to it (for oneself and for others who enter the
space). Nonetheless, they also function, in many Jewish homes, to embody, create
and express kedushha by their actual presence, and also by their hidden
presence that one is consciously or subliminally aware of, and also by the whole
range of interactions such objects suggest, provoke or are subject to. They
participate in the fulfillment of mitzvot, or, as Max Kaddushin would say,
Jewish value concepts. While the definition of this category might seem curious,
the objects themselves that constitute it are not: consider books, some which
are by Jews or are about Judaism—but also all books in abundance, filling
shelves, piled on floors, spilling off of tables, scattered in children's rooms.
Consider foods, some which are readily recognized as traditional Jewish foods of
every day or holidays: bagels, chicken soup, the Chanukah latkes, the Purim
hamentaschen, gefilte fish and horseradish-- but also all food in abundance, a
pantry and refrigerator sufficiently overstocked to serve one who "cooks
for an army" or one who urges those who dine to consume more: "Eat,
eat. You eat like a bird." And consider shrine-like displays of
photographs, of children, of parents, of extended families assembled at what
Jews call "affairs", of ancestors: L'dor va'dor, these things
point: from one generation to another, family matters, love matters, keeping
connections matter, increasing and multiplying matter.
In a third category, I place a whole range of material objects that could be
found in any home, but whose meanings and functions shift within the context of
a Jewish home. A dish is a dish: but in a Jewish home where kashrut, the
dietary laws, is observed, the dishes of a certain color or pattern placed in a
particular and separate cabinet become and remain milchig (milk) dishes, and the
dishes in the other cabinet become and remain fleishig (meat.) The telephone is
a telephone, but when it's being used by a Jew who is checking in on a sick
friend who lives far away, it is a klei kodesh, a holy vessel used in
the practice of bikkur cholim, the commandment to connect to the sick.
All the equipment one uses in house cleaning--cleansing powder, mop, Windex,
Pinesol, vacuum cleaner-- is just cleaning equipment. But in the Jewish home
where Sabbath is observed by cleaning one's home before hand, we have again,
klei kodesh, holy vessels that create and point to the Sabbath,
tangibly, experientially and sensuously. In each case, we have objects that are
endowed with meaning, memory and sacred purposes—they are not changed, but
they have the potential to become charged, so to speak. Quoting Robert
Armstrong, McDannell (18) writes that "in all cultures certain things exist
which, though they may appear to be ordinary objects, yet are treated in ways
quite different from the ways in which objects are usually treated."
McDannell suggests that it is people who "activate or enliven" such
objects, but we might consider that it is also possible the objects "activate
or enliven" persons. At the very least, ending with John Cort, as I began,
when we ask his question, "If we look first at the objects, and base our
attempts at understanding them, will we emerge from our study with a different
view of the tradition?" (615) The answer seems to be more self-evidently, "yes."
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated from the French
by Maria Jolas. New York: Orion Press, 1964. Cort, John. "Art,
Religion and Material Culture: Some Reflections on Method," Journal of
the American Academy of Religion 64:3 (1996). Griffith, R. Marie. "Prayer Handkerchiefs" in
The Material History of American
Religion Project News,Spring 1997. Kopytoff, Igor. "The
cultural biography of things: commodification as process," in Arjun
Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1986, pp. 64-91. McDannell, Colleen.
Material Christianity. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995. Meyerhoff, Barbara G. Number our Days. New
York: Dutton, 1978. Rothchild, Sylvia. "Growing Up and Older with Ruth"
in Judith A. Kates and Gail T. Reimer, eds, Reading Ruth: Contemporary
Jewish Women Reclaim a Sacred Story. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994.
Vanessa L. Ochs is in the the Department of Religious Studies of the
University of Virginia and author of Words On Fire: One Woman's Journey into
the Sacred (San Diego: Haarcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990).
Copyright 1999, Vanessa L. Ochs vlo4n@virginia.edu
Department of Religious Studies University of Virginia Cocke Hall
Charlottesville, VA 22906
Inside
the house, there is what Susan calls "Jewish stuff" everywhere. "I
love tzedaka (charity) boxes. And I have at least three of everything so
I can give them to my 3 kids so they will know they came from me and my home. If
you have spare coins, you put them in any box, because many boxes are lying
around. (Indeed, there are standard JNF boxes, but also boxes shaped like her
synagogue, like her house, and like a chicken). When a box is full, I confer
with the family, and we decide where to give the money; it could be to something
Jewish, or something like juvenile diabetes. And photos are very Jewish things:
it's important to have photos of family around the house because family is
Jewish and that's us, that's who we are, and family's important to me." ("I
say to 'me', she adds, because it means so much to me to arrange parts of the
house.")
When
we reach the dining room, Susan narrates the story of her father's Seders in his
dining room. As Bachelard writes, "…the house is not experienced from
day to day only, on the thread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own
story." Through dreams, through memories, "the various dwelling places
in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days." (5) "After
my father died," Susan said, "we had the Seder at my brother's house.
We couldn't have done it there in my father's lifetime; my brother was not
observant enough. But damn it, we said, we were going to have a meaningful
Seder, even without our father." Susan questions the legitimacy of the
Seders after her father's death: "It's not really authentic. It's what we
as a family can do. We got our own copying machine. This year, for two days
before Passover, I copied from other hagaddas I have collected, and cut and
pasted. I was nuts. I took out the tear-jerker passages that were in the
hagaddah I put together the seder the year right after my father died, because I
decided, this year, I wanted to move forward. My father's sister came. We had
more than 50 people. Everyone came. I got a lady to help. The hagaddah I made
isn't ritually right, but it's OK for us. I pass out my big collection of
hagaddas for people to look at and put out my 3 Seder plates and everyone has
their own kiddush cup." Susan shows me an 11 page stapled, Xeroxed document
called "The Rosenblum-Adler Family Hagaddah." On the cover border is a
clip-art multigenerational family in a circle dance; at the center is a jolly
family toasting cups of Passover wine: captions extending from their mouths
read: "L'Chaim! Yummy! Welcome! Passover Rocks" (referring, I presume,
to the matzah balls.) As Susan had explained, it is a stitched together
document, but the introduction appears to be hers. It reads: "just as we
sometimes deviate from the exact route on a printed map when we travel, we can
make adjustments and deviations in this seder (order) too. But the basic
signposts are here for us." In the "Rosenblum-Adler Family Hagaddah,"
the entire second half of the seder, that which follows the festive meal, is
omitted, just as it is omitted in practice in many American-Jewish homes.
Indeed, this haggadah, which Susan calls "very liquid, with a slight
feminist bent" does deviate: it ends with the eating of matzah, horseradish
and haroset, and a toast to freedom with a second cup of wine. The rest of the
seder which follows the festive meal is omitted. Evaluating her creation,
defending and critiquing it in one breath, Susan says, "There's too much
cognitive dissonance between what my rabbi and the hagaddah say you should do on
Passover and what my family can actually do. You have to make traditions that
can stick. At the same time, you have to be true about things."
In
a corner of the dining room hangs a brass Sabbath light, an exceedingly curious
piece of Judaica in an American home. "People see it and say, 'How come you
have an eternal light in your dining room?' But that's not what it is. It's a
shabbos light from Kenny's family. His family was not observant for the last
generations, but they were very Jewish, from Baden-Baden, and this was their
family heirloom. The family said to me, 'You might appreciate this,' and I was
thrilled to have it."
I
inventory the kitchen: piles of Sh'ma magazine, Moment, Tikkun, Hadassah, and
Bon Appetit, dog-eared on pages for latkes and flourless Passover tortes. More
prints of an old synagogue in Prague, images of Jewish people floating, a cross
between Kabbalah and Chagall. No great art here: Susan says none cost more than
$25, but all speak to her. "The image is Jewish, having them reminds me
where I was, gives me a good luck charm: I like the mystical piece of it."
On a kitchen shelf, I inventory Jewish sounds: piles of CD's of singer Paul Zim,
classic cantorial pieces, Barbara Streisand and Klezmer bands. On one wall is a
framed needle point of the word SHALOM made 25 years ago, a framed photographs
of Susan as chair of the UJA Women's division, bubbe and zayde dolls, over a
dozen Jewish cookbooks, a refrigerator magnetted with bar and bat mitzvah
invitations and photographs of a nephew's recent bar mitzvah, a synagogue
calendar and directory and more tzedaka boxes. On a shelf are Jewish videos
(Shalom Sesame, an animated haggadah, the Rugrats celebrating Passover) three
challah trays, a tray of six sets of Shabbos candles, and a tray of silver
kiddush cups that stays out always: some were gifts, some inheritances from
parents' collection, others the booty of rescue missions: "I buy kiddush
cups at antique shops. I take them away. I rescue them. I don't want anyone who
doesn't know what they are to have them."
Susan's
bedroom is a landscape of shrines: Photographs of relatives who are ill. Says
Susan; "I have this thing about talismans. My Aunt is sick, so I have
photos of her everywhere." Frames birth announcements for her three
children and her own wedding announcement, all very important Jewish objects,
she says. And on her dresser, a random assortment of kippot from bar and bat
mitzvahs and the Bukharian embroidered pillbox kippa she wears when it is her
turn to do "bima-duty", sitting on the altar next to the Rabbi as a
representative of the Board of Directors.