to say that I truly dealt with it until 1997: the moment I was looking at my newborn son at his bris (circumcision). This necessitates a rewind to 1993, when I had a blind date with a wonderful Skokie native named David Shapiro and married him eight months later. I had never felt such an instantaneous certainty about knowing someone without knowing them, of looking forward to talking to someone for the rest of my life. He had a Midwestern genuineness, a keen sense of humor, a fascination with history, and a devotion to family. Our family parallels felt like no coincidence: we both had parents with strong, uncomplicated marriages; I’m an identical twin, and Dave has identical twin sisters. Dave is three years younger than his twin sisters, and Robin and I are three years older than my brother, David. We had an instant shorthand and ease together.
On a sunny October morning, Dave proposed to me at the Lincoln Center fountain, pouring champagne from a bottle into two flutes, playing our favorite song on a portable CD player: “I Could Write a Book,” by Rodgers and Hart.
David wanted a small wedding, so we culled the guest list to the bare minimum (not easy—I have regrets), picked a pre-high-season date with lower airfare to St. Lucia, and asked my Yale classmate Mychal Springer, by then an ordained rabbi, to come marry us. We exchanged vows on a mountain so windy, I thought I might blow off. Mom had requested a wedding canopy, and the island resort seemed to enjoy creating its first “hooper,” as the St. Lucians referred to it—the huppah (canopy for weddings). It was important to me to be under one; all my ancestors had been, and I wanted to relive the Fiddler on the Roof wedding scene, having watched every Broadway iteration since 1969, memorized the movie, and played Chava (the rejected daughter) in a college production.
When our first child, Benjamin, arrived in all of his robust nine pounds, twelve ounces, something powerful reared its head as I watched his swaddled self, capped in a miniature yarmulke, held aloft by the mohel who performed the “surgery,” Phil Sherman. (Phil is famously theatrical but he gets the job done fast, with an improvised pacifier of sweet wine for the infant, minimal baby-wailing, and plenty of shtick). I’ll never forget the questions that echoed in my head as Ben was being blessed: “Do you really understand why you’re doing this? Does this mark the start of your Jewish family, or are you just checking the box?”
The bris conveyed a decision I’d never made. We scheduled the ceremony because that’s what Jews do: host a bris on the eighth day of a boy’s birth, invite friends and family to come witness, bless, and then eat. I cried that morning because I was hormonal, true, but also because Ben was the newest tiny Jew, joining a tenacious people that many were determined to eliminate. And I cried at my deficits: how little I knew, and how late I’d have to learn it if I chose to start now.
This was the moment that led me to write my first book, Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish, an anthology of face-to-face interviews with Jewish celebrities about whether they cared about Judaism. Sure enough, these public figures had wrestled with similar vacillation—discarding what was inherited; feeling part of a tribe or indifferent to it; owning or abandoning tradition; mastering rituals or never learning them; navigating the patchiness of observance, the shame in stereotypes, the riddle of Israel.
No fewer than sixty-two people agreed to talk to me for the book, including both Jewish Supreme Court justices at the time, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer; actor Dustin Hoffman; director Steven Spielberg; opera legend Beverly Sills; comedian Gene Wilder; writer and director Nora Ephron; Star Trek’s Jewish duo, Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner; Olympic medalist Mark Spitz; and three of my former bosses at 60 Minutes: Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, and Executive Producer Don Hewitt.
In the midst of what proved to be intense, intimate conversations, I realized that I hadn’t answered the questions I was posing: How much does being Jewish matter to you? Do you care what religion your children are? Do you feel a personal weight because of our hard history? Are you pro– or anti–gefilte fish?
Then I was jarred by my interview with Leon Wieseltier, the wild-haired, erudite writer, who grew up Orthodox and is fluent in Jewish scholarship. I sought him out because I know he’s unapologetically opinionated and I didn’t want my hand held. But as we sat on chairs opposite each other in his spare office, the bluntness of his message was still bracing. He was entirely unsympathetic to the idea that I, and many of my interviewees, might be unmoved by, and uncommitted to, Judaism:
“The problem is that most American Jews make their decisions about their Jewish identity knowing nothing or next to nothing about the tradition that they are accepting or rejecting. We have no right to allow our passivity to destroy this tradition that miraculously has made it across two thousand years of hardship right into our laps. I think we have no right to do that. Like it or not, we are stewards of something precious.”
I left this interview feeling both depleted and energized. I picked up Wieseltier’s book Kaddish and underlined a line I’ve kept with me: “Do not overthrow the customs that have made it all the way to you.” The proverbial lightbulb went off.
I began weekly Torah learning with a young rabbi, Jennifer Krause, who had taught my parents’ study group and who hails from Tucson. It soon became a highlight of my week as I began to understand how random Bible stories connected, how family dysfunction was timeless, how right and wrong was clarified in our ancestors’ mistakes. Torah references suddenly popped up everywhere: novels, political speeches, movie scripts, poems.
Ultimately Jennifer nudged me to cross the Rubicon—to become a bat mitzvah at the tender age of forty. I fought her at first, because it felt like much ado about not much, and I didn’t want to celebrate myself for such a belated milestone. A bat or bar mitzvah (literally: “daughter [bat] or son [bar] of commandment”), typically marked at age twelve or thirteen, is the turning point of a Jew’s life—as other religions have their rites of passage—so I was hesitant, twenty-eight years late, to ask friends and family to save the date, to rent out a defunct synagogue since I still didn’t belong to one, to reserve a restaurant space for lunch. Jen told me to stop angst-ing; this wasn’t about a party, but a promise. I was signing up for Judaism, and that was worth a catered meal.
I gave in and soon found myself on the subway memorizing my parsha (Torah section) with earphones every day, pressing stop and rewind to make sure I knew the chant. As the date neared, I became single-minded, going over the prayers and feeling pulled toward the ceremony in some inexorable way.
I slept in my childhood bedroom the night before the service because my Chicago in-laws had kindly flown in and were bunking in our apartment on various sofa beds and mattresses. I suspected that I’d need a little separation and quiet to concentrate. Mom left a gift on my old Laura Ashley comforter: a silver Kiddush cup (for wine blessings on Shabbat and holidays) with my name engraved and the date of my bat mitzvah. “Better late,” she wrote in her card. “I’m so proud you chose this.”
Jen was right: my Big Fat Belated Bat Mitzvah was unforgettable. Maybe it was watching Ben and Molly come up on “stage” to recite by heart the blessings for the candles and challah (braided bread), or seeing them witness their mom officially join the Jewish people. Maybe it was that when I chanted Torah, the handwritten Hebrew letters were no longer swimming on the parchment, but recognizable. Maybe I was overwhelmed by reciting the same text that has been read and read and read by Jew after Jew after Jew for more than three thousand years—even when people had to do so in secret. Maybe it was watching my mother crying in the front row.
My Torah portion in Leviticus included the concept of Karet—being cut off from one’s people. I realized that I was choosing not to be.
After the bat mitzvah, I became somewhat insatiable, downloading books and journals, listening to recorded sermons of rabbis I admired, reading the Jewish press. I convened a monthly Torah study group over wine in my living room with friends, led by the cheeky, affable Rabbi Burt Visotzky from the Jewish Theological Seminary, an expert on Midrash (Torah commentary). Burt suggested that we begin at the beginning, so we chose the book of Genesis and didn’t stop till we’d completed it five years later.