2. To be blind?

3.  To be dying?

4. To be a man?

5. To be a woman

What's it like to be a Nanny?

1) A superintendent in a building? Do you ever get a break? Don’t you feel like you need to get out of your ‘office’ (the building you manage)?

2) A nanny, especially the ones whose families are still back home? How do you take care of other people’s children’s?

3) In bed all the time? My aunt is and I can’t imagine where her inspiration comes from.

4) A Bus driver for the city? It seems like an easy enough job but the stories we hear about passengers harassing them, and young kids being violent, kind of put a different spin on the job.  I used to think they were all the jovial ‘ha how are you this morning’ type – but those are hard to find.

5) You? What would I find if I or anyone got into your mind completely? Is it pleasant in there or can it be a tad or very rough? To be me? It’s nice but frenetic and you’d get a sense of being dishevelled.

Your character – your way – also appears differently through my judgment than yours. I have the advantage of objectively scrutinizing your outward behaviour, sometimes mixed in with an understanding of your insides, giving me a type of insight unavailable to you.

This, too, is the case with a community, in our case the Toronto Jewish community. Its members define it of course, but it is also characterized by its non-Jewish neighbours, business associates, sociologists and documentarians.

And then there are the mail carriers. How do the carriers whose routes fall within the Jewish corridor see us? After all, are they not privy to intimate details of our lives, such as the origin of our investment statements, our subscriptions and postcards from our children in camp? Surely these frequent messengers have a distinct awareness of our people.

Well, recently I had a beer with one such individual at the Lazy Lizard Pub. John has been delivering mail for 24 years, 20 years in the Lawrence Avenue and Bathurst Street area, a Jewish crossroads with a large haredi population.

John’s an intriguing character. His friend tells me he is a member of Mensa, a society for people whose IQ is in the top two per cent of the population. His right shoulder kind of droops, a condition he says in an occupational hazard stemming from years of delivering hoards of High Holy Day greetings, Chanukah cards, The CJN and heavy parcels wrapped in thick brownish-grey paper with postage from Israel. John’s experience tells him they are likely “holy books.”

The wind-blown postman, a son of a doctor, expresses deep admiration for the Jewish people on his old route. He says they are “very kind folk” (with the occasional curmudgeon on Caribou Road and Stormount Avenue) with sincere interest in his welfare.

He sips his suds and tells me a story – one with an Isaac Bashevis Singer flavour – of a “charming” old devout woman whom he delivered mail to for two decades. Staring skyward, John reminisces about her and says she was “as lovely as could be… gracious and generous.”

He said she would always give him gifts when the holiday season came around, once tipping him $100 and once giving him an “exquisite” serving tray she purchased for him while visiting Jerusalem. I imagined a rainy Monday morning when she invited him in for a cup of coffee.

John’s eyes teared as he told me he mourned deeply after her passing. I was intrigued by his heartfelt nature and the significant human interaction that occurs while we’re not looking. I wondered what the aged woman’s bank teller felt (individuals often compassionately connected to their geriatric customers) when she heard she died.

John liked the younger people on his route too, especially the children, curious about his job and the world outside of their own. His beer mug remained in his hand, but still on the table as he recounted an ordinary morning, when a 10-year-old boy “with strings hanging out” asked him, “John, why does the whole world want to kill the Jews?” John replied sadly that he didn’t know.

According to this veteran mail carrier, the Jewish people at Bathurst Street and Lawrence Avenue receive a relatively large amount of mail. John says the people are mostly amiable, inquisitive and giving.

Our Jewish community. Who are we? The answer, at least in part, lies in the minds of the cleaning lady, the grocer, the hairstylist, and no doubt – the mailman.

Questions: Are you the rebellious child in your family? Why do you think you were different than all your siblings? Why did you move away from your parents teaching? Did you suffer being the rebellious child? Any advice to those rebellion today?

________________________________________________________________________

I think there are two main things that my parents want for each of us, and that is that we should be good people and happy. Of course there are all the other things like that we should be comfortable, healthy, successful, etc., but the feeling I get is that when it comes down to the basics, they hope for us to be good people and to feel good.

Around three years ago, after many years of religious struggles, I decided that I needed to move away from the religious path my parents had given me. It was a torturous, difficult, depressing decision. During the years leading up to my decision, I really struggled with the dissonance I was experiencing between the actions I was doing at the time (aka, living a Torah-observant life) and my feelings towards those actions. I did not feel connected to the lifestyle and always questioning why I was doing everything I was doing. Looking back, I think it is that amount of time that it took me to make my decision. The decision to live differently than my parents.

Believe me, I never, ever, wanted to leave Yiddishkeit. (By the way, not that anyone who knows me today would say that I did! I’m so Jewish, people often assume I’m totally “religious.”) I wanted more than anything to “connect” to the traditions and way-of-life my parents had given me and during those years of my early twenties, I did whatever I could think of in order to try to “fix” this terrible problem. Why? Because, I wanted to fit into the community I knew. I wanted to live a meaningful life and believed (still believe) that living a Torah lifestyle is conducive to meaning. I wanted to believe in God. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I didn’t want to have to change. I didn’t want to have to go “out, into the big, wide world” and have to try to find a different path that would give me meaning.

It was terrifying and I just wanted to stay home.

But by the time I turned 26 I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was painful and I was depressed. If Torah and Judaism are truth, it didn’t really make sense to me that I’d have to “leave” it, but it seemed like I had no choice. Because the overwhelming dissonance that I was experiencing was eating me alive, I was not able to fill my hopefully wonderful potential in this world.

In order to get away religiously, I chose to go away geographically. I knew that I needed to figure out how I should live in order to start feeling better, and it was obvious that it would be terribly difficult, if not close to impossible, trying to do that from home. I decided to go somewhere totally new and chose Vancouver, B.C., as my destination. I knew no one here and did not know if I would last more than a few days, let alone months or years here.

Vancouver has served me very well. I wanted a place with a small Jewish community and found that here. I made a conscious decision not to let people have expectations of me and so from the start, I was very honest about where I was religiously. It hasn’t always been easy but I have tried my best to keep to that decision. Thank God I have associated myself with very special people who have given me the space and support I need to find my own religious way.

After being here a couple of months, and seeing that I really was not keeping Shabbat anymore, I spoke to my mother one day and told her about this. She just asked me a few questions about it and that was it. She never said a negative word to me, never made me feel guilty, and always made sure I knew I was loved. Yes, a blessing indeed.

Now, two-and-a-half years since my arrival in Vancouver, I am in a much healthier place. When I first got here, I could not daven (pray). When I’d go to shul Friday night, I’d sit at the back and wait for it to be over. Now, I can open a prayer book without cringing.

I am still a very skeptical person, but at the same time, deeply religious. I question God’s existence, but at the same time live according to many beautiful rules that are built on the assumption that holiness and greatness runs through our souls and our lives. I hope to one day fully keep Shabbat again, but am not sure if I’ll ever really want it enough to give up some of the things I’ve really come to enjoy on Shabbat. And if I do, I still might very well wear jeans to the Shabbos table! This has become a luxury for me.

I want my children to have a full, meaningful, truly Jewish education. I want them to know at least as much as I know. I think that is the fair thing to do for a Jewish child. I believe that this is the only way to really give children a choice regarding their lifestyles. I also want my children to grow up in a very similar home to my parents’. They deserve the blessings that I had and have.

As for how my parents have dealt with what I’m sure is a difficult situation with me becoming not fully Torah observant, it says in the Talmud, “Derech Eretz Kadma LaTorah.” How we treat our fellow human beings comes before the rest of the Torah. In Faranak Margolese’s book, “Off the Derech,” which discusses people who stop being Orthodox, she mentions a few times the importance of remembering this in your interactions with your children. It is way more important to look after their emotional health than that they should be keeping Shabbat or kosher. In the case of a parent-child relationship, the emotional health comes from them feeling 100% that they matter to you more than a halacha (a Jewish law). That you love them, care about them, etc.

Some parents might fear they are giving up on truth if they act in this way. It is important to realize that if the child feels the emotional health, there is more of a chance they will return/keep the Torah in the way the parent thinks is best. If, on the other hand, the parent pushes halacha down the child’s throat, the messages the child gets are that your love for them is dependant on something and that will not be conducive to keeping the Torah or, of course, having a positive relationship with you.

I am sure that my choice is disappointing to my parents, even if it was never explicitly said. Of course I assume they wish I were frum, even if they never told me that. But I know more than anything that they love me very, very much and that, still, the main two things they want for me is to be happy and a good person. I also know that they are a blessing more than I even realize because not every parent reacts in this way to their child going “off the derech.”

As for how I dealt with it, I am quite proud of myself in that regard. I have always tried to remain respectful of my parents and, though not everyone agreed with this decision, I also knew for myself that I could not have a real relationship with them if I kept such a big secret from them. So I told them the truth. I also see that moving away has been helpful. I just still hope that I will be able to move back and still maintain the good relationship I have with my parents. It’s an on-going journey.

Check out Deena’s new blog, a place for discussion of Jewish topics: http://blogmidrash.wordpress.com.