Transcript
I’m Zeldman, I work on Team 51.
_APPLAUSE_
Yes! We make wonderful WordPress websites for interesting, deserving people and organizations, and *this* is my Crash Course in Judaism. Enjoy.
My mother and father are ethnically Jewish, my father was an atheist, and my mother was Canadian, so we celebrated Christmas.
_LAUGHTER_
We celebrated Christmas ’til I was six, and right before my sixth Christmas, my Nana came to visit. And she looked at the tree, and she looked at all the stuff, and she said, “These boys won’t know they’re Jewish.” So my parents were shamed and changed to Hanukah.
_LAUGHTER_
Now, Hanukah’s cool. Christmas is cool. We won’t get into saying which one’s cooler. We know.
_LAUGHTER_
But either one’s fine for a kid if you just keep going with it. Dropping Christmas at age six, I think that was the start of my Goth years, right there.
_LAUGHTER_
I felt so disappointed, so alienated. And, you know, before I turned six, like, I would go into Kindergarten and my friend would say, “Santa Claus brought me a rocket launcher and a grenade launcher and a Tommy gun and a machine gun and a Japanese Prisoner-of-War camp, what did Santa bring you?”
And I would say “Santa Claus brought me socks and a book.”
Because we weren’t materialists.
And then after age six, they would say, “Santa brought me a neutron bomb and an atomic bomb, and the Great Garloo, a monster that you can control by remote control, and a flame-shooting monster and a set of daggers, what did Santa bring you?”
And I would say, “We’re Jewish.”
_LAUGHTER_
The “fuck you” was implied.
_LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE_
And so … I didn’t get beat up as a Jew until I moved to Pittsburgh, but that was later, and I’m not going to get to that part of the story. But when I was living in New York areas and Connecticut, there were enough Jews that people were sort of laid-back about their hatred of Jews, and they would just be okay with it. They would even be okay with my saying “We’re Jewish,” and there was no retribution from that.
Anyway, I asked my Dad, “What’s God?” and he said:
“Okay, so before science, people thought there were a lot of gods, because they needed a supernatural explanation for everything.
“So if there was a fire, the fire god was angry.
“And if there was a flood, the water god was angry.
“If there was a snowstorm, the snow god was angry.
“And the Jews improved that by saying there’s only ONE God, and he’s *VERY* angry
_LAUGHTER_
“But there isn’t one.”
And then I said, “If there’s no God and we don’t go to Temple, why are we Jews?”
And my Dad said, “Hitler would’ve killed us.”
And that was my satisfaction with that.
Anyway, when I was twelve-and-a-half, my parents came to me, after no Jewish stuff for a long time, and they said, “Jeffrey, would you like to be Bar Mitzvahed?”
And I said, “What’s that?”
And they said, “You make a speech and then you get money.”
_LAUGHTER_
So I said “yes,” and, really, I’ve been doing it ever since. Thank you, Judaism!
