That's not my mother's minhag
It’s April 2012, I am preparing for my first Passover as a halakha1-observant Jew, and I am frantically scrambling to get everything right. I almost forget to sign up to have our leaven sold to a non-Jew; I purchase special cat food for my cat; I buy a whole smoked trout for the holiday and then become convinced that it isn’t actually kosher for Passover, so I try to eat the whole thing in the two days leading up to the first seder, only to realize it would actually have been fine.2
This wasn’t the vibe in my house growing up. We did switch out the dishes, we didn’t eat chametz (leaven) for a week, and I distinctly remember my mother (an ex-lawyer) drawing up a contract to temporarily sell our leaven to her boss, but we didn’t cover anything in tin foil or buy any special Passover products. The cat ate her regular, year-round food.
In the last few years, and especially during Covid, there’s been a trend in my corner of Jewish social media to encourage people not to make themselves overly anxious about pre-Passover cleaning or shopping. The catchphrase “Dirt isn’t chametz,” for example, is meant to reassure people they aren’t violating any religious prohibitions if they don’t have the bandwidth to dust every surface.
There’s been a bit of a backlash to this, though. Some women have noticed that this language can easily verge on sounding dismissive of practices that are affectively significant to them, on the possibly mainsplainy grounds that those practices aren’t technically correct or necessary. Mimetically learned traditions are important to people, so while maybe it isn’t necessary for you to vacuum under the couch before Passover or buy special kosher-for-Passover labeled orange juice, if that’s the minhag (custom) that has always been done in someone’s family, one shouldn’t tell them that it isn’t necessary for them.
The tension between mimetic Judaism and by-the-book Judaism has been written about, probably most influentially by a guy who was not too thoughtful about the gender dynamics this entailed.3 This guy argued that the replacement of mimetic and perhaps technically “wrong” Judaism with a by-the-book, often stricter Judaism was pervasive in both the Orthodox and Haredi worlds at the end of the 20th century. Unfortunately, I think that this framework exists outside of the Orthodox community as well. Both self-described “halakhic” and self-described “liberal” Jews have accepted the idea that there exists a by-the-book way to do things, and that doing them that way is what it means to live an authentic Jewish life. It’s just that those in the “halakhic” camp have largely gone ahead and figued out how to conform to whatever they think is the book (or, in some cases, make the book conform to them), and those outside it have largely not — often for extremely good reasons, but also often with much handwringing. I’d suggest that this is typically what people mean when they say or think “I’m a bad Jew”: not “I rejected the traditions of my family,” but “There are people out there who do things the ‘right way,’ and I am not one of them, even if I’m living my Jewish life according to my values and/or doing exactly what I grew up doing.”
Back in 2012, I sought the advice of a knowledgeable and respected friend about whether I should stop eating out in non-kosher restaurants — “eating hot dairy out,” as it’s somewhat ridiculously called, because hot, dairy-filled items like lasagna are at the highest risk of becoming accidentally non-kosher.4 I told my friend that I grew up self-identifying as keeping kosher, with separate pots and dishes at home for meat and milk, but we did not keep “hechsher kosher” and we ate vegetarian out wherever we liked. His response was, “Well, that’s your family custom, so maybe that’s what you should continue to do!” At the time, I thought this was a nutty thing to say — obviously, I should go with “the rules” and not my family practice! I did not take his advice. Eventually, though, I did wind back up with my practice of kashrut looking pretty much exactly the way it had as a kid. I felt vaguely bad about it, like I had just chosen the easy route. But why couldn’t I say that this is what it had meant to me as a child to keep kosher, and that to act otherwise genuinely wouldn’t feel authentic to me? What if hot dairy out — or dirt isn’t chametz — is my family custom?
A good friend of mine once told me that whenever she went to the mikvah and the mikvah ladies tried to make her do something annoying or unnecessary, she would say, “That’s not my mother’s minhag.” She was telling the truth, but little did the mikvah ladies know that it was because her mother’s minhag was not to go to the mikvah at all! It’s a funny story, but I also think there’s real depth there. On the one hand, my friend had rejected the Judaism she grew up with by taking on the practice of family purity — possibly the most Orthodox-coded ritual practice there is — which meant that the line about her mother was ironic and just a clever way of getting around annoying stringencies. On the other hand, though, my friend was actually pointing out a real through line between her childhood and her contemporary practice of Judaism: a sense of her own agency in choosing what works for her, rather than basing her choices on someone else’s authority. Her mother exercised that agency by not going to the mikvah, and my friend was also doing so by choosing to go to the mikvah, but on her own terms.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about doing a better job of valuing the Judaism I grew up with — which was amazing and special and helped me love Judaism as an adult — while also making choices that are meaningful to me, without having to either do things exactly as I did as a kid or reject all the things I grew up with as not enough. My mother is staying in our apartment this year so we can have seder with our vaccinated family. She’ll be there alone — she will drive from our place to seder at my in-laws, as will my father and stepmother from their house, and Phil and I will stay with my in-laws from Friday through Monday because our practice is not to travel on Shabbat or the holiday. When I was a kid, my father and I used to drive each year to a family seder in Brooklyn. We had to park around the block for the sake of the neighbors, but my Orthodox family knew we drove (we also left “early” every year, around 1 a.m., when dinner was over), and they invited us every year anyway. That isn’t exactly what’s happening this year, but nonetheless, it’s nice for me to think of kindness, understanding, and some degree of flexibility around different versions of Jewish practice as part of my own family tradition.
I can’t define this word as “Jewish law” because the amount of time I’ve spent reading theory about why this is a bad definition prohibits me from doing so, but for the purposes of this post, that’s what it means.
Thanks to Raffi for recently reminding me of this traumatic moment in my otherwise very positive relationship with smoked fish.
TBH I don’t really want to link to this article because I don’t like this guy, who is now appearing in my second consecutive post, iykyk (so glad “hameivin yavin” has a cool acronym now!!!). If you are really curious, email me.
This has to do with technicalities of kosher laws in which I am definitely not an expert, but basically if a kosher food is cold and dry it’s harder to make it non-kosher, whereas extremely hot melty cheese could get non-kosher pretty easily, just by touching the wrong pan. Also the cheese itself might be non-kosher! 😱
As someone who is often wary of the "not Jewish enough" potholes, I appreciate this article!