School Prayer

In the 1940s, when I was a kid, it was legal to pray in school.  At big events, like convocations or sixth grade graduations, we would bow our heads and peek out at our teachers, bent under the weight of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  I kept my head half down, not to look conspicuous, and squinted, looking out of the corners of my eyes.

Normal assemblies, we just put our hands on our hearts and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.  God wasn't in that then.  But every day, assembly or no, we read the Bible.  We sat in our seats, our backs straight, elbows resting on the desk, hands folded, and did not speak.  I believed that you weren't supposed to swallow when the Bible was being read.  Nothing that might promise even a potential noise was allowed.  I 'm sure I thought if you spoke while they read the Bible, God Himself would send down a lightning bolt.  Now, I wonder how I explained to myself that I was still alive.

Picture a dim, chalk smelling room, like all the rooms in those schools where the hallways added their odor of metal and water.  Sun or rain, the outside was always obscured by windowpanes decorated with stenciled cutouts of turkeys, hearts, tulips or bunny rabbits.  Once a week, the blue haired principal read in assembly.  I listened intently, but was confounded.  She looked like an avenging angel.  She read about tinkling bells and crashing cymbals, broken bowls, cisterns, and seeing through a glass darkly.  I still don't know when we see face to face.  I must admit I got one thing out of it though.  Even if I never understood the words - now, and maybe even then - I appreciated the cadence.  I never got that much out of the thought for the day.

Anyway, it was getting to be spring.  It was warming up and turning green and getting harder to sit inside.  Soon the highlight of the year would be upon us.  In a week it would be Passover.

Who could endure the waiting for Passover: the excitement of absolutely everybody getting together all at once; of the table that took up the whole first floor of the house; the cousins; the food; the four questions; the dresses?  Later, of course, we learned the complexities: the perennial arguments about arrangements; the old grudges, dusted off in early spring, to bring, in time, to the big event; the drinkers; the fighters; and the seating chart.  Then, we only noticed how bright the lights shone, the solid presence of our navy-clad, rectangular Baba reciting prayers at the head of the table, with a yamulka that did not, to us, seem incongruous, and nobody really listening.  It was fine.  It was just the way it was supposed to be.

My cousin Paul, the teenager in the family said "bizz,....... bizz, bizz," shutting his lips together, and shot his finger around to sting us.  He recognized us!  Maybe he loved us!  Heaven!

Our younger male cousins chased around the crowded table, snatching at each others' skullcaps, being threatened by irritated adults.  My grandmother was the only member of the family who was the least bit observant.  This was evidenced by the fact that she led, or rather stood over, the Seder.  Four of her daughters, and several of her grown grandchildren had living and present husbands, but she was at the head of the table.  Perhaps if her only son had lived, he would have been allowed the honor, but certainly her sons-in-law were neither up to - nor worthy of it.  But it was still fine.  Afterwards, the sisters recited funny verses they had made up to mark the year's progress in the family, and sang Passover songs in high, nasal voices.

It was without doubt the high point of the year.  Better than Channukah - at Channukah there were not so many people!  And the best part began even before the Seder did, and extended the glorious day like a wedding.

Many of my mother's family found jobs, after their arrival in this country, in the garment industry.  My mother, being next to the youngest, went to Normal School and became a teacher, but her older sisters worked in the needle trade.  One sister married a cutter, who was to become one of the leaders of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union; a star.  Another became the first seamstress for famous dress designer, Ceil Chapman.  Her husband was dead; her children were grown up.  Relieved of immediate family responsibility, it was her annual duty to supply her granddaughter and her two nieces with Passover dresses.  She collected pieces of haute couture fabric, had boxes of scraps of organdy appliqués, eyelet and lace.  Every year, on the eve of Passover, my cousin, my sister and I took afternoon baths and went for a nap, knowing that when we awoke, hanging on the door knobs of the closets, would be - the dress: three dresses exactly the same, and we would be, like three Cinderellas, transformed.

But Passover, on this day in the dusty schoolroom, was still three days away, only a shadow in the mind, and we had said the Pledge and were sitting with our hands folded, waiting in silence.  Like the words, the choice of Biblical passage was, to us, a complete mystery.  We had no opinions; we were innocent lambs.

We were mostly well-behaved Jewish children.  The Catholic children in the neighborhood went to parochial school three blocks away, and God help us if we were walking by when they got out.  It wasn't difficult to avoid that route, though we had some difficulty understanding why they disliked us so much.  The few Christian children in our school were our friends, only at odd moments asking us hard questions like why the Jews killed Jesus.  I felt sorry that they thought we had, but as far as I was concerned, we hadn't.  I assured them of this, and there were only a few fleeting moments of awkwardness.

Our teachers were, of course, elderly women.  We believed that all teachers were old whether they were young or middle-aged.  Most were maidens of various kinds, and only a few were Jewish.  My third grade teacher was not one of those.  She had blond hair, and what I now know was an Irish name, and was one of the few we thought was not old.  That is to say, we liked her.  She started to read from the Sermon on the Mount.

Somehow I thought she might read from Exodus, about all of us leaving Egypt.  But she didn't.  I have gone back and located the passage.  It precedes The Lord's Prayer: Chapter 6, verses1 through 8.  Verse 5 says '...thou shalt not be as the Jews (sic) are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men... But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and... pray to thy Father which is in secret;..."

I have to confess that the passage does not say Jews.  It says "hypocrites" (My father always said he hated hypocrites).  Perhaps in 1948, it said Jews: probably not.  But I, of course, knew only one people who prayed in the synagogue, and Jews it became for the rest of my life.  For years I wondered what we had done that made us so unlovable.  We did love each other.  We would still have the Seder and I would still wear the dress.  But how could it be as pretty, if we were so ugly?  I wonder, if I had been struck by lightning, would it have felt different?

 
Elaboration:
We lived in the old days, the neighborhood days, when the drug store/soda fountain and the grocery were around the corner.  Ice cream cones were a nickel.  Both the drug store and the grocery were small businesses owned and run by the owner and resident of the house that stood above the respective stores.  The druggist and the grocer were Jewish, as was practically everyone else, it seemed, in the neighborhood of young (I say that now) middle class professionals.  Despite this majority, we always, soon after  we met a new playmate, approach them closely and whisper loudly “Are you Jewish?”  That question being settled in the affirmative, we somehow felt more secure, as if we were all safe in the same yard, with a gate to protect us from something we never identified.  

My parents were both immigrants but so naturalized that one wouldn’t have noticed.
My mother’s mother was observant and she and her sisters took their cue from her whatever their belief or spiritual preference.  They were neither observant nor religious, but they hid the bacon when my Baba came over.   My father had emigrated in his teens, having survived the famine and the Russian revolution.  He thought he hated hypocrites, thought religion was more or less hypocritical and maybe the opiate of the masses.  But he was Jewish – He wasn’t anything but Jewish.  He would say later when discussing Israel – when your skin hurts, you hurt. (He died before we would have come to battle over Israel).  He lived through a famine and he loved ham.  He ordered a ham sandwich when invited to lunch at a deli with my mother and the principal of the Hebrew school she taught in.

They were also for that time politically correct.  All the people I knew seemed liberal, and no one said anything bad about any other racial or religious group.  We knew no epithets.  Since both my parents worked, we had a maid who took care of us and though I loved her more than I loved my mother, there was a subtle aura that I now know to be somewhat like what might have existed in a  Southern household relative to the nanny.  They were paternal. Black must have been part of it even if they themselves didn’t realize it.  Much later, when my mother, my aunt were at Hazel’s funeral, they covered their mouths and said they were surprised at how many white people there were at the event.  My mother loved Hazel, but without malice gave her get well cards with pickaninnies eating watermelon on them.

So we were never told to be afraid of or look down on anyone.  We weren’t told we had enemies.  We knew better than to be around the Catholic School when it let out, but we had no idea why they were mean and called us names.  I guess we got it though.  It was in our DNA.  It was the 40’s, shortly after the fall of Germany after all.  I had no relatives killed in the holocaust, but it still hung in the air and we took it when we breathed.

So when I heard the hypocrite, synagogue (Jew) line from a teacher I adored in a setting where I was trying my best to be perfect, it felt like lightning.  I had relaxed into being comfortable and thinking I belonged.  Now I knew I was an outsider and would be an outsider forever.  It changed my young life.  It was always there, along with are you Jewish even if I didn’t even believe anything Jewish in particular.  The corollary is that I certainly didn’t nor would ever think of believing anything Christian.

After the fact, I thought the Jesus thing was personal: missionary teachers trying to get a toehold, get even with the fact that we were all Jews.  I could not understand why they didn’t just read about the Exodus from Egypt.  Not only did I think that Jesus hated us, the teacher and the principal did too  ― and probably everyone else that wasn’t Jewish. It was on the agenda.  

Though this lived in my head, I ended up ecumenical and consorted with Jews and non-Jews alike as I grew up.  I always chose a non-Jewish boy for a crush. It didn’t limit my society – just who was family. 
I realize now that the Sermon on the Mount was chosen as the passage because the teacher who read it was Catholic.  What could be more appropriate: Easter was fast approaching.  This is a Christian country!  How could it be wrong?  She wasn’t trying to convert us; she didn’t know any better.  She might not have done it if she had known what it would do to me.  I was, in fact, her  pet. 

And I think now to those few Catholics, and Armenians, and Protestants in our classes. Of Nickolas Tantaras when he asked me if the Jews killed Jesus.  The pain of his confusion.  How vulnerable he must have felt in the sea of Jews who were his school friends.  How much of an outsider.

We are all outsiders.  This is the only way we can invite each other in.

(I don’t really know what the above “this” is. I wrote this a long time ago.  Maybe “this” is telling our stories.)

PS.

I recently spoke with a dear old friend with whom I went to school. He has come to find great value in Jesus’ teaching and he knows the New Testament. He explained that the passages that so influenced me are meant to say that prayer is not limited to a public, observed setting; nor that prayer should be undertaken to prove the righteousness of the person praying. Prayer is a private communication between the orant and his/her god and any other reason for praying is hypocritical.

But that was then. Next Life