About seven years ago, two Orthodox Jewish men carted off the contents of my kitchen. I watched as they took boxes filled with items that for them were tainted, but for me carried precious family memories: the dinner plates my recently deceased husband had lugged back from a store in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna; the ceramic cake pan purchased in a small Alsatian village that I used to bake my children’s birthday cakes; the delicate hand-painted tea mugs for which I’d bargained after we toured the Forbidden City in Beijing.
Within a few hours, the men brought the items, now damp and smelling of chlorine, back from the mikvah. I bristled when I heard that one of the irreplaceable Roman plates had broken. The flatware looked tarnished. I washed the rest and put it away in my newly configured kosher kitchen, which I needed a roadmap to navigate. Now I’d be doing all the cooking on a tightrope, in service of a belief I didn’t even hold. Then my youngest child affixed his blue eyes upon mine.
“I really appreciate this, Mom,” Daniel said.
I had done it for him. At age 14, Daniel had become a religious Jew, or baal teshuva, a phrase that in the beginning stuck in my throat. In the early days, when he was a teenager, it was easier to focus on the small changes. He was keeping kosher, and the prospect of his refusing to eat my meatloaf or mushroom tart was painful. But making my kitchen kosher felt important during a time when I needed to keep my family together. Taking a stand for the right to cook how I wanted didn’t seem a battle worth fighting. So I did it all: the cleansing of my cabinets and refrigerators of any item not marked kosher, the purchase of a Shabbat hot plate, the cessation of cooking Friday at sundown, the running of my dishwasher on empty between the meat and milk cycles.
THANKS SO MUCH,, IT MEANS THE WORLD TO US IN THESE DIFFICULT TIMES
