The Wailing Wall of Facebook and My First Anti-Semite!

I'm the first to admit that sometimes, especially as a Jew by Choice, I take my Jewish identity a little too seriously. Anyone who knows me through my temple could tell you that: I serve on seven different committees (down from eight last year); I'm a member of the board of trustees, a regular at Shabbat services and at the Torah study table on Saturday mornings. More than even my Jewish identity, however, I'm a huge advocate for Interfaith bridge building. Why? Because this is where I come from, as an interfaith kid. To that end, I teach a session on conversion and interfaith Outreach for every student taking Intro to Judaism through the Union for Reform Judaism in NYC. I even did a stint as a Jewish educator for the Interfaith Community of New York. I'm even a twice-trained Schindler Outreach Fellow for my congregation, which means that I work with people in the process of conversion, and with families where there is never going to be a conversion, to help integrate people into life at our temple.

And life at our temple is pretty sweet. It's a home for a lot of wonderful people I know, both Jewish and not Jewish. That's why we were selected to host a weekend for 15 rabbinic students from the Reform seminary campuses in New York and Cincinnati. I think the students had a great time with us. I think some of them had their worlds turned upside down. And I think that we, as a congregation, were not exactly what they expected.

Imagine a sanctuary where people of many diverse faiths come together in a place we all call home for a great Shabbat celebration on Friday night. Where I read Torah in honor of dozens of families who not only raise intelligent and sensitive Jewish children, but families where the parents themselves are wonderfully connected and involved in their own right. Where temple leaders, both Jewish and Christian, stand on the bimah to share their journeys of faith and open-mindedness. A place where I taught not only is conversion not for everyone, but it's not even remotely a requirement. Because our central prayer, "You shall love the Lord your G-d" begins with the same Hebrew grammar construction as the commandment, "You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." The one thing I hoped the students would take away from this weekend was that loving the stranger brings us closer to G-d - and that loving the stranger is not conditional on them joining the tribe.

It was a wonderful weekend. My highlight was having the opportunity to facilitate a panel with four of our temple community's teenagers, where they answered questions from the students in such an amazingly articulate way that I wanted to get up and cheer. They told truths to the students that I would be too intimidated to admit. That before my conversion, I always referred to myself as half Christian and half Jewish, because it made life easier, and I didn't want to be disconnected from either side of my heritage. And when two of those young women, raised as Jews, admitted to still really liking Christmas, because it is a family holiday and, as one said, "You HAVE to love Christmas!" it was as if I was getting to talk out loud, too.

The weekend, as one might imagine, took a huge amount of work to put together. Housing the students. Making sure they arrived safely. Providing transportation. Arranging all the meals. Getting people to host Shabbat dinners. Making sure various medical issues, dietary restrictions, and pet allergies were taken into account. I had a fabulous, energetic, awesome committee who gave me all the help I needed and more. But let me tell you, by the time it was over - and it was over early due to a huge storm that knocked power out at the temple - I was exhausted.

Maybe that's why I didn't answer as nicely as I could have when a Facebook friend - a former neighbor in my old building in Larchmont - sent me a message this morning, asking (not for the first time) why I keep my Facebook wall private. Now, I do this for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which is that some time ago, someone innocently posted something on my Wall that contained some bad language. This doesn't really bother me, really, but at the time I was working at a company where my Facebook was under scrutiny much of the time. It was a post you wouldn't want impacting your professional life. So I deleted it and made my Wall private from that point on.

This friend, who as I said was a former neighbor, is definitely a little - not really sure how to say it - OK. Crazy. When I lived across the hall from her, she would stalk me after work, when I got home, and spend hours upon hours talking about herself, herself, herself, her life, her love problems, her family problems - more information than you'd really want to know in a lifetime. She seemed to be in conflict with a lot of people - most of her stories were about fights she was having in the various relationships in her life. And honestly, it was 2002, working in downtown NYC, and I was having enough problems of my own.

It wasn't a real friendship. Rarely did she ask, or care, what was going on with me. She just thought, because we were near the same age, and single, and living on the same floor in the same building, that I was her best buddy. And this went on for months. I could never really get away from her because she'd listen for the elevator, or my key in the door, and she'd come into the hallway and start in. It was the nightmare neighbor scenario from every bad 70s sitcom. One night, after a really long day, I got home and true to form, she came yammering out into the hallway, yakking away, and I told her that I really needed some down time, and to be on my own. That I just. Couldn't. Listen. Right. Now.

This was apparently a bad thing to do. From that moment, the tantrums started. Yelling. Screaming, Slammed doors. Hostile notes shoved under my door. Emails telling me that I was a bad, horrible, selfish person who deserved to be alone and a workaholic. That I was a bad friend and never listened to her problems. That someone with her problems deserved sympathy and I was an even worse person for victimizing someone with all the life-stress she had. I have to say that as hurtful as her words were, I didn't really care. I was just relieved to finally have some quiet. It wasn't like the loss of a real friend that hurts you in your heart. It was a relief.

Turn the clock forward to 2009, about seven years later, when she finds me on Facebook.

At first all was fine. What is Facebook, anyway, but a way to keep certain people in your life, and others at a distance. I approved her as a friend, figuring what the hell. We didn't live in the same place anymore.

It immediately started. The crazy comments on my posts, the constant stream of narcissistic and silly posts from her in my news feed. One night, she decided to pick a fight with one of my friends in a comment thread. Before my REAL friend got into it with her, I hastily scrawled an email: Back off - not worth it - this one's a nut job.

Which brings me to today's message: why do I keep my Wall private? She wants to post some pictures of the new Don Draper Mattel Doll. Ha! Ha! LOL! LMAO! and whatever other stupid hysterical internet abbreviations you can imagine. Anyway, after this weekend of pure hard work and intense spiritual seeking, I was tired. Really f-ing tired. So I wrote back: I just like to keep my Wall private. It's that simple. Hope you are staying warm and dry.

This was apparently another bad thing to do.

I will now quote from her response:

You can keep your rude comments to myself, my mother is in the fucking hospital and has major surgery scheduled - How fucking DARE you respond to me in that manner - "It's that simple" - How's THIS - You are blatantly and offensively anti-Christian and anti-Catholic in your pro-Jew rhetoric that NOBODY cares about or wants to HEAR on Facebook!! .... Consider yourself blocked.

And one minute later:

Typo: Keep your comments to YOURSELF, not myself.
I was so infuriated, I cannot even TYPE straight. It's THAT simple. Resentful witch.


And so, a supreme irony. I spent this whole weekend teaching Outreach - a culmination of years of hard work, of trying to help people feel more at home at my temple regardless of their faith. A weekend advocating for the non-Jewish journeys of faith in my own home congregation. And being told that I am offensively pro-Jewish and anti-Christian. If it weren't so stupid, I'd laugh. And if I weren't so tired, I probably wouldn't have let it make me cry. But I did.

I think - hell, I know - that I'm exhausted. But the words, "pro-Jew rhetoric" gave me pause. I looked back on my Facebook page, and sure, there are links to stories in the Jewish press, Shabbat greetings, things going on in my temple. But it certainly isn't there to convert anyone, or make any of my Christian, Catholic, or Pagan friends feel weird or excluded. I mean, damn - half the time the people responding to my typical Friday night Shabbat shalom are my friends of other faiths. And much of the time, the stories I post are ones that are critical of stuff going on in the Jewish community.

So what does a person do when she finds out she was connected by Facebook to someone who clearly has a lot of anti-Jewish hostility brewing beneath her surface? I don't know. But I think back to this past Friday night, when I lifted my voice in a duet on the bimah with my first Temple friend, not Jewish like I was when I first arrived at my congregational home. Or of my friend Jill, who spoke about her connection to our community not in spite of - but because of her deep Christian faith. Or of all my Jewish friends from Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist, cultural and secular backgrounds. How different we all are. And how, in the end, it doesn't matter. What this person distinctly does not share with my friends is a sense of humanity. No one whom I trust, no one with whom I actually want to hang out or spend time, online or in person, is as full of conflict and hostility and hate as she is.

So what I'm trying to focus on is how I am really bound to all of my friends by something even better than sharing a faith in common: by the fact that we're all human and decent and trying to make a good life for ourselves and the people we care about. And that we all try to be good people. And maybe that's the lesson of Outreach for me this weekend.

I did respond to the horrible emails I received, and I was honest. I said that I was deeply hurt and sad by what she said about my faith, and that her emails brought me to tears. I also said that I hoped her mother would recover and that she herself would find the strength and grace and wisdom to care for her.

And my final hope for her is, in the illustrious words of my people: a meshugenem zol men oysshraybn un dikh araynshraybn.

Prologue


Save yourself, the plotlines and narratives and trajectories of the bestsellers crowding my night table earnestly urge in sweet, seductive whispers from their pastel-colored covers. And now, I am a typical reader: a casualty of intention and expectation, a woman shaking off a bad fall. Maybe I’m like someone you know: someone who believed she held all the answers until the day a bouquet of questions was delivered to her hospital room. And now I’m guilty of reading every one of these damn memoirs of reclaimed self-esteem, trying to figure out what just happened and what I'm supposed to do next. I’ve become a sucker for self-improvement, a postulant of positive messaging.

For someone living out her own cautionary tale, someone who started out on a pedestal of righteous good intentions and wound up crying herself sick and half-dead in a restroom off the New Jersey Turnpike, these books more than fit the bill, with their messages of salvation through cookbooks and ashrams and poems composed in serene Italian gardens. And like most parables, all of these stories come with a similar, simplistic message. Save yourself. Find yourself. Reclaim your soul from darkness and despair. Shine your light and proclaim your Truth from the hilltops, from the mountaintops, from your desktops and your laptops.

With time now to catch up on my reading, friends bring books by on a regular basis. I can’t help but notice that the covers of these stories I’ve been reading lately resemble nothing so much as board books– those chunky volumes meant to capture the attention of pre-verbal infants. By contrast, the young adult books lent to me by my young cousins and nieces are a coven of black covers adorned with gothic typefaces and distorted images of blossoms and flames and waterfalls in intense shades of orange and vermillion and ocean blue. The message of this phenomenon is that the next generation is valiantly protecting the world from supernatural forces. Women like me are merely trying to appease the demons they have created for themselves.

Like me, my favorite heroines start out in early pages weeping in places just as undignified as the Grover Cleveland Service Area – in a subway car, on the bathroom floor, just prior to the second act of Tosca, during the dessert course of an elaborate dinner party complete with wine pairings. A picaresque journey ensues, and by the time one reaches the acknowledgements and the book group guide at the end, my vicarious self has shed her dead-end job / fears about marriage / fears about motherhood / fears about Life Itself. Invariably, she has either jetted off to Asia to procure ancient wisdom, courageously cooked her own weight in artisanal butter, or bravely sets and raises her chin as she accepts the weight of a newborn or two nestled into her blessed, benevolent arms.

I, like so many other women my age, reach for one dog-eared volume or an interchangeable other in that final quiet hour of the day before sleep. We read along and imagine ourselves returning our table trays to the upright position, anticipating the descent into the foreign city that will lead us to our true selves. We picture ourselves at the stove, the wooden spoon at ease in our fingertips and the nutty aroma of browned butter and sautéed leeks filling the air as we embrace our destinies of home and hearth.

In the hour that transitions us from doing to dreaming, we try to reconcile our true potential with our deep fatigue; the equations of work and love and memory and independence relentlessly resolving and unresolving themselves with imperfect symmetry. We attune our ears to that distant melody, the song of self-salvation.

But until now, I have never been particularly interested in saving myself. I wanted to save the world.

Ever since I was a little girl, I was taught that it was my responsibility to leave the world a better place than I had found it. My mother was a schoolteacher, my father a detective. In our house, fighting injustices – of crime, of poverty, of ignorance – was as normal as pouring the first cup of coffee in the morning. It was all I ever knew. I never for even one moment imagined that going out into the world, armed only with a talent for words and intentions of doing good, would do me no good whatsoever.

Now I know differently. Like my sisters in literature, I, too, have done my time on the bathroom floor; I know the feel of white tiles cold against my cheeks. Like them, I believed the old biblical saw: those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. Something in me could never believe in a world so unjust, or a God so cruel, that those who sow in tears could actually reap a harvest that only brings forth more tears.

But I am not one of those heroines. And this is not one of those stories.

Dispatches from the Permanent Vacation

This whole being unemployed thing is just plain weird. I realize that I'm only one of millions of people who are out of work right now, as I can see for myself judging from the volume of people taking up tables at Borders right now, at 3:00 in the afternoon on a Tuesday. When I wrote my book here, back in the spring of 2005, I could show up at 9 in the morning and be the only person here. Now it's downright crowded. Sometimes I can't even get a table with an outlet. But I did today, which is a good thing, because even though I am not making any real second-novel progress since Sunday, I can at least waste time on Facebook and AOL and the NYS Department of Labor website.

So, hineni: here I am. Jittery, uninspired, anxious, under-exercised, pretty much broke, full of dread, and just as busy as I was when I had a job. I'm always at temple on Monday nights for meetings, on Friday nights for Shabbat services, on Saturday mornings for Torah study. On Wednesday nights, I'm in my Year 2 class for the Melton adult Jewish learning program, which, thank G-d, gave me a scholarship to continue my studies. I'm more grateful than anyone can ever know, because seriously, this is the highlight of my week at the moment. I'm trying to stay busy, call on friends, make plans. But what I'm most aware of is how quiet my life has become. Most days I go hours without talking to anyone. It's not like I have no one to talk to, but most of my communication is by email these days. When the phone rings (with apologies to anyone who has called me recently) I can't bear to pick it up. Lately I just don't have the energy to tell people the lie that I'm doing fine. I'm scared and I'm worried from the second I wake up in the morning until the sleeping pill kicks in.

(There happens to be a really cute guy one table over at Borders, which is not a bad thing. But talk to him? Yeah right. Hi, I'm a garden-variety 39 year old writer wannabe with no job. And he's probably unemployed too. Fabulous. Oh, and he just left. Probably because I exude unhappiness and stress like a subway car at rush hour.)

Most of my friends, rightfully, tell me over and over again that my last job, nice as it was, wasn't really what I need to be doing with my life. That it was just a nice little marketing job with no real potential and lots of annoyances. And they are right: it certainly did not feed my soul or fulfill my ambitions in any way. But it was a safe haven, somewhere to go, where I had a routine. Where I knew what the day would generally bring, where I could predict what a client would or wouldn't like, where I knew the guy in the deli and he knew how I took my coffee, and where I had a method to getting through the day. And sure, some days were a lot worse than others, but that's with any job. It wasn't a bad job. I've had bad jobs. I know the difference.

And now that Im trying to write about what it was like to have a bad job, I find myself lost for words, unable to get anything down on paper except a whole lot of throat clearing and basically meaningless delays. I don't seem to be able to access the emotional heart or language of the story. And I don't know why. It's not like I don't have time. It's not like I don't have access to good, cheap hazelnut latte every day between 3 and 5 (Borders coffee happy hour! Maybe that's why it's so damn crowded?) I sit down to write and, well, nothing happens.

Last time this happened to me, where I suddenly found myself without a job, I was able to both complete a book and find a new job within ten weeks. It doesn't look like that's going to happen this time. There are just so many good people out of work. And very, very little to apply for.

And of course this is complicated by the fact that I'm not sure if I really want to go back to work as a marketing director. If only there were some way to translate this writing thing into, well, writing for a living. I'm not without total hope. I mean, I do have a book coming out next summer.

But calling myself a writer, right now, feels more like a fancy way of saying that I'm a 39 year old jobless person who has had to move back home because it's just not possible to get by on $405 a week in Larchmont, NY. And without the ability to focus on a new book, I can't really call myself a writer anyway. After the past few days of nothing but beating myself up about the poor quality of the six pages I've managed to accomplish, I can totally understand why Fitzgerald and Hemingway drank. Maybe I should start.