Hineini: Here I Am
For what it’s worth, anyone who knew my grandpa knew him as a mensch. It’s a Yiddish word with no direct translation into English. The best I can tell you is that it means he was a man of good character, he upheld his Jewish values, he was honest, he was hardworking, he put his family first. He was a mensch.
I was thirteen years old when Grandpa passed away. Jewish tradition dictates that the grieving family must “sit shivah,” open their home to the mourning community when someone dies. It takes ten to make a minyan. On the first day of Grandpa’s shivah, over three hundred people came to mourn with my family.
My mother and I, being the introverted people we are, holed away in my Uncle’s den, away from the crowd. We ate chopped liver and watched the schnorrers fill their pockets and handbags with free food.
“Disgusting,” my mother sneered. Performative tears danced in the corners of her green-gold eyes.
I put my plate down.
*
We are one of those “Pillar of the community” families. Three judges: Grandpa, Uncle, and my father. A few other lawyers to speak of. A librarian Aunt. And a Doctor. My brother Aaron and I had big shoes to fill. Aaron was able to put them on and run swiftly and deftly to the finish line. I, however, stood inert, staring down at this massive pair of shoes no one had even asked me if I wanted to wear. I must have looked like a clown since birth.
*
“I’m just going to wait until Grandma and Grandpa are dead ‘til I come out of the closet,” I informed Aaron one Saturday morning over Teen Nickelodeon and Frozen waffles.
“You’re not gay,” Aaron said.
“How would you know?” I retorted.
“I just know. You’re bi-sek-shoo-ull.”
“Mom says that’s not a real thing,” I reminded him. “She says people are either gay or straight. But nobody can be both.”
“Bullshit,” Aaron said.
We turned our attention back to the TV.
*
“I should be allowed to stay home! I’m sixteen,” I wailed.
“No one wants to be alone on Thanksgiving,” said my father.
“I do,” I protested.
“No, you don’t. Maybe you should try to show a little thanks that you’re spending Thanksgiving with people who love you. Now, get in the car,” my father said.
It wasn’t the first time a man had told me what I wanted, what love looked like. I sulked all the way to Aunt Bethany’s house.
*
My father loves to remind me at every possible opportunity how ashamed Grandma and Grandpa would be had they lived to see me get tattoos. Not only are tattoos against Jewish values, they are against the unspoken code of my family.
The Jewish aversion to tattoos is said to have originated after the Holocaust. Nazis tattooed numbers onto the prisoners’ arms in the concentration camps. On Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” we say an extra Mourner’s Kaddish for the Six Million Jewish people lost in the Holocaust. We solemnly sing “Hatikvah,” and the congregation murmurs homage to those who came before us, who gave us the right to worship proudly, out in the open. We never forget the horrors our ancestors endured. We never forget that it could have been us, our children, our neighbors, our friends. We never forget what comes with our heritage.
*
I never forgot what shaped my childhood. I never forgot that I had a duty, instilled in me by my father, sustained in me by God, to uphold the covenant of the Jewish people.
I never forgot begging my parents to take me out of Hebrew school. I loved learning the language, but the Jewish history we learned was bleak. I never forgot watching the grainy footage of a child’s emaciated body being kicked down a chute by a Nazi boot into a pit to be burned. Rabbi wanted his students to know that we were lucky not to have been born in such awful times. We were privileged to be in a synagogue at all. We were free.
When Rabbi’s wife found me sobbing in the bathroom, she called my father to come get me. I waited alone in the sanctuary, my eyes affixed on the Eternal Flame.
From bondage in Egypt to ghettos and concentration camps, God redeemed us again and again. Why did God let so many slip in and out of life into unmarked, mass graves? What happened in those dark and hellish nights? How could anyone keep the faith, believe in a God who had seemingly abandoned His chosen people? And who was I to plead, to contest?
“It should have been different,” I whispered to God. “It should have gone another way.” Or the question I knew better than to ask, “Why did God let this happen?”
Hineini: Here I am, ready and willing to do whatever You ask of me. Here I am with my whole heart, body, and spirit.
In truth, I was not ready for the Binding of Isaac. I was not ready to be sacrificed, so I made the sacrifices I found necessary. It is said that my soul was there at Sinai, that the choice had already been made for me. I was not ready.
*
One of the Torah scrolls in my synagogue survived the Holocaust. It is as holy as it is fragile. It rests in the ark, reverently taken care of by elderly volunteers.
My father once told me, “Torah study is meant to last a lifetime.” So, I will spend my lifetime searching for answers that may never come. Gone are the days of burning bushes, of God speaking to us directly. But just as the anonymous poet who wrote, “I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. And I believe in love, even when there is no one there. And I believe in God, even when He is silent,” I believe in God too, even when logic suggests I should not.
What I want to say to that battered Torah, or perhaps what I want it to say to me is not, “Never forget.” Of course, we will never forget. We are a people in which the past endures. But my truth is this, “Never again.”
Katherine Orfinger is a writer, artist, and student at Stetson University, where she is pursuing her BA in English, with minors in Creative Writing and Digital Arts. She draws inspiration from her Jewish upbringing as well as her queer identity. Katherine's work has also appeared in Touchstone, Aeolus, Beyond Words (2021, 2022), and other anthologies.