Last week I went to Kiddush at synagogue. Kiddush is a buffet-style lunch where after prayers congregants eat foods like herring, cholent, and crackers. They mingle and connect over small talk and business.
This past Shabbat, I stood with a new acquaintance on the perimeter of the Kiddush surveying a scene of men, women, and children loading their plates with food. My new friend looks at the crowd and says, I’m just so embarrassed that these are my people. Where is the dignity? Look at them elbowing each other out of the way to get some stale crackers. Have they not eaten in days? There is no way other communities behave this way.
I heard an identical statement from another close friend. She is deeply involved in the Jewish community and this behavior viscerally bothered her. I admit I have also been agitated by seeing this in my community.
As I looked at the crowd, I did see people grabbing food with their hands, pilling their plates with seconds, and pursuing the food with the vigor of a man in a natural disaster.
My eyes settled on an older man with food in the corner of his mouth grabbing a piece of cake. The man’s name was Jacob. I know Jacob because I sat with him once. He told me about his mother who was taken to the Nazi camp, Mauthausen as a teenager. There, she was worked to the bone and starved for years. She fought for morsels of hard bread and watery soup. She lost over 50% of her body weight. Her mother and father died in the camp, and her sister was murdered marching in the snow.
Jacobs’s mother was plagued with anxiety and kept her food cabinets locked. As a young boy, when he didn’t finish the food on his plate, his mother would stick a crooked finger in his face and scream at him in Yiddish. He grew up in a constant state of tension and fear.
When I looked around that room at Kiddush, I saw other people. I saw my wife whose grandfather hid in a hole under a barn in Poland for more than a year during the Nazi occupation and lay starving in that hole most of the time. He emerged permanently disfigured and perpetually traumatized. There is no doubt that trauma impacted my wife’s mother.
I thought about my own grandmother who grew up in a wealthy family in Stuttgart, Germany, left her family to die, and escaped to pre-state Israel. While she was one of the lucky ones to survive, she rationed food for years and lived in constant fear.
As I stood at that Kiddush and looked around, I suddenly realized something.
I realized that it is about time we exercised some self-compassion. While I understand we have high standards for our fellow Jews to be both respectful, respectable, and uphold the highest ethics. We must also understand the real trauma that the community has endured. So many of us have been raised by parents that were raised by deeply traumatized mothers and fathers. They drank trauma in their baby bottle. This has impacted us all.
We need to cut ourselves some slack.
Do our people misbehave? Can we be pushy or feel that our survival depends on us getting ahead? Do we have a host of other challenges in our community?
Of course. We should address them all and strive to do better.
But, let’s address them in a way that is compassionate and gives proper deference to the real generational trauma our community has experienced.
Shabbat Shalom to all.
So many things in my life have simply streamed by without me thinking about them. As a child growing up in the 50's, 60's, and early 70's, I was ordered to Temple every Friday night and Saturday morning. Kiddush, which in Buffalo in those days was more like a brief snack, was, unless something special was going on, gefilte fish balls, herring, kichel (little egg based small biscuits - some with sugar and some without) and something to drink - wine, and schnapps (for the older men). I rarely considered the behavior of others as I was consumed with getting my arm in there to grab some food. I think, perhaps, people these days are a wee bit too judgmental. We should give ourselves a break. As long as there is no violence, let's leave other people alone to do what they do and not spend endless hours thinking about every little thing. People are who they are. Let's appreciate them for that. Some people are naturally more aggressive than others. I remember some of the people at those tables not being aggressive. They were also survivors.
Well said. I struggle with stress related binge eating. As a child, I was constantly berated for not eating enough by a grandmother and aunt. Though my grandmother and aunt and other family never faced evil and starvation like described here, my grandmother's generation did experience plenty of times when there wasn't enough food and lived for weeks on corn meal and tomato sauce. So, reading this reminded me to have more compassion about what was done to me as a child about food. Thank you, this helped me. Shabbat shalom.