The Lilith Blog

This past Sunday Temple Emanuel celebrated Purim with a Megillah reading, followed by a performance by the KlezMormons. The KlezMormons are an ensemble from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and their performance Sunday was the first time they played to a Jewish audience.

My husband, John O’Connell, is the city editor of the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello, Idaho. He covered the Purim event, and wrote about it as well as I could!

The headline “Crossing Cultures” is significant for a few reasons. From a Jewish perspective, we are constantly crossing cultures in Southeastern Idaho, or perhaps more specifically, the local cultures are constantly crossing with us. Look at how interesting we are, look at how close to Jesus we are. Look at us celebrate our holidays. That’s how it feels to me sometimes. I’m sure every synagogue has some element of the curiosity-seeker-with-mysterious-agenda, but growing up at Temple Emanuel in Chicago, I sure never noticed it.

Pocatello is a largely transient area. People come and go from the university, the semiconductor plant, the hospital, the Idaho National Laboratory. There have always been Jews in Pocatello, but wild west Judaism hasn’t changed much since the days of the ‘Frisco Kid. So, Temple Emanuel in Pocatello’s membership ebbs and flows—and right now it ebbs. With our only child congregant barely 3 months old (and who looked so cute in her pea pod costume), we are happy to open the doors to the community during our festive holidays—especially the child-oriented ones. Our Purim festivities included dancing, fabulous music, as many hamentaschen cookies one could eat, and a satisfying full-house. And since many of the attendees aren’t the drinking type, that left more of my husband’s homebrew “Haman’s Hangover” and a large jar of Slivovitz for the rest of us.

Several years ago, John did extensive research for a piece exploring the alleged regional Mormon “divide” and followed missionaries around, hung out in high school cafeterias, and partied with the “Excommunicated Mormon Drinking Team” at the annual beer festival in Idaho Falls. While the multi-part series was fascinating, informative, and very well balanced, the paper ultimately decided not to run it—go figure. If nothing else, that decision does reflect a cautious and mysterious religious dynamic in this region that isn’t present in many other parts of the country.

My relationship with John, a recovering Catholic, has been a cultural experience in and of itself. While I never knew it before marrying a properly raised Catholic boy, there is much truth to the statement that Jews invented guilt but Catholics perfected it. While more inclined to run Atheist or Pantheist than I, it was he who pushed for a Jewish wedding, and he who curses at Pharaoh the loudest at our Temple seder. We are both more inclined to find Adonai on a ski run or in a garden bed than in front of a podium, and I’m sure our Jewish-Catholic cultural dynamics will play out throughout the length of our relationship. Perhaps someday he’ll see that having a loud family screaming match followed by a visit to a Chinese food buffet really is the best way to resolve family issues. Until then, John loves my culinary experiments with matzo balls, latkes, and hamentaschen, and while he laughs at the suggestion, I’m happy to sit with him through midnight mass any time he wants.

–Nancy Goodman

I have a long-lost camp alum on Facebook who lives in Tel Aviv and keeps taunting us about how he’s at the beach enjoying the sunshine. But, I love snow. And now that we’ve miraculously got a few precious inches of snow here in the Snake River valley, it’s possible ski season can be revived and the aquifers will fill so we can water things and play on boats this summer. We will happily accept any snow shipped in from the Mid-Atlantic.

I was 17 when I went on my Israel tour, too young to fully appreciate the natural and historic landscape where it’s fun-in-the-sun all year long. I was psyched about the trips to the Shuq, and the nights on Ben Yehudah street. I do remember wading through rivers and ancient aqueducts, but it’s only been in the last decade or so that I’ve really developed a sense of and appreciation for “place.”

I’ve often compared my local and regional summer landscape to that of Israel—hot and dry, with crags, mountains, rivers, and lots and lots of nothingness. Deserts, come to find out, are different from each other—and here the vast, desolate open spaces are comprised of sagebrush, Juniper trees, and basalt rock. And new-moon nights on the Arco Desert reveal stars as bright as I saw them so many years ago somewhere in the Negev.

I am even inspired to make my home landscape similar to that of Israel, and am actively seeking information about the Kalanit flower (Anemone coronaria), a protected flower in Israel. While I know picking this flower is illegal, I wonder if there are seeds/rhizomes/bulbs/dry-roots available anywhere. I would appreciate any information so I can start Kalanit flowers indoors and plant it as an annual!

Besides my attempts to create a xeric landscape of Biblical proportions, one of the many things I enjoy about my Idaho desert experience is being a lay-archaeologist. While no Western Wall or Mount Olive, The city of Pocatello has it’s own unique background and mythology. For example, there has been a common legend that tunnels leading to opium dens snaked underneath Old Town. This story was mostly debunked when renovation of Main Street revealed massive underground boulders stretched beneath the road’s surface, delaying finished construction so long that many Old Town businesses nearly went under.

Another colorful bit of Pocatello history is the presence of the Civilian Conservation Corps during the (first) Depression era. Evidence of the CCC and other New Deal projects are laced through such places as Yellowstone National Park, the Oregon coast, and the hillsides surrounding Pocatello, Idaho. Now-faint ridges dug into the hills by the CCC were cut to help slow water run-off into the Portneuf River, which before the city stretch was encased in cement and chain-link fencing, had the tendency to flood.

My home property abuts such ridged hillsides, and I find evidence of the CCC and friends everywhere. A garden rototiller dug up (my best guess) government-issue tin cans, and a metal detector revealed a metal box-top stamped with the image of a Chinese palace. Further back is a small set of concrete steps and masoned rock walls, overgrown with sagebrush and tall grasses.

Mother Earth absorbs all of us and our history sooner or later, and while I may never climb Masada again, I am happy to explore what lies beneath the rocks in my backyard. I am as spiritually attached to this place as I am anywhere; and when I catch the alpen glow off Scout Mountain, it is a sacred feeling indeed.

–Nancy Goodman

Soon after my move to Pocatello, Idaho from Chicago, Illinois, a “fallen Mormon” boyfriend who knew more about Judaism than I did inspired me to visit the nearest Barnes and Noble to stock up on Jewish reference materials. In the past, my sister Sara had been my Jewish reference material being a Jewish educator, but it was time to build up my own library.

Barely a few years out of graduate school at the time, my religious library consisted mainly of many feminist spirituality books and guides. Books like “Living Wicca,” and “The Once and Future Goddess” fueled my graduate school-era pagan phase, many tenets of which I still embrace (as well as I embrace any organized religious structure) today.

Other than that, I had my Gates of Prayer and the Book of Mormon, a copy of which, as a pious and ethical person, I stole from a hotel room in Salt Lake City. For residents of the Gate City area, the nearest Barnes and Noble is 50 miles away in Idaho Falls—a stretch of I-15 that in winter, is often covered in fun-for-the-entire-family black ice. Aside from the Book of Mormon replacing the King James Bible in hotel rooms across the Mormon Corridor, the Barnes and Noble in Idaho Falls reveals another subtle difference in this part of the country. In many of the urban big-box booksellers, the Judaica book section can span an entire row, and the books on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS–Mormons) are mixed into the smaller world religion categories. Here, the opposite is true—and alongside the many shelves of LDS books, I was happy to find my essential “The Jewish Book of Why,” and a book that strongly resonated with me called “Generation J,” by Lisa Schiffman.

Schiffman defines Generation J as third-generation American Jews—Jews whose grandparents were born elsewhere and immigrated to the US. She describes this generation of Jews as often lost, rejecting Jewish rituals for similar ones in other cultures, or abandoning religion altogether. One paragraph has always struck me in particular:

“We were a generation of Jews who grew up with television, with Barbie, with rhinoplasty as a way of life. Assimilation wasn’t something we strove for; it was the condition into which we were born…When we used the word schlepp, it sounded American. Being Jewish was an activity: Today I’ll be Jewish. Tomorrow I’ll play Tennis. In secret, we sometimes wondered if being Jewish was even necessary. We could resist that part of ourselves, couldn’t we? To us, anything was possible.”

Schiffman charts her course as a Jewish wayfinder through intermarriage, through keeping kosher, through conversations with JUBU’s, (Jewish Buddhists) through participating in Mikvah. As a Jewish wayfinder myself, I followed her course in some respects, taking some time to explore my own Jewishness. I kept kosher for a while much to the amusement of my local friends, who liked to bait me with bacon and cheese-wrapped freshly hunted moose-kabobs and such. How many Jewish laws does that one meal break? After a short time, I began dating a Jewish man living in Montana, and I considered that my replacement Jewish activity. Then I married a non-Jew who insisted on a Jewish wedding, and I got married under a chuppah after all.

I feel “Generation J” gave me permission to explore my own unique sense of Jewish identity, and it has been as invaluable a resource as any book on Judaica I have read. “Call us a bunch of searchers, call us post-Holocaust Jews, call us Generation J,” Schiffman says. Ain’t that the truth—at least for me.

–Nancy Goodman