Dinner Time
It’s four in the afternoon. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten today. I can’t eat. I’m atoning for my sins. Fasting for Yum Kippur.
Everywhere I turn there’s food. Everywhere I turn there’s someone eating. Someone going to eat. Telling me what they ate.
I’m hungry. I want to break the fast. But, I’m a bad Jew. My father was Jewish. My mother is Jewish. And yet, I never had a Bar Mitzvah. I don’t speak Hebrew. I’ve never been to Israel. I don’t own a yamika.
The only thing that separates me from being Christian and being Jewish is that I know that I’m Jewish. And the guilt that six million Jews were killed in the holocaust, that my grandparents fled persecution, that Israel may be wiped off the map at any time wears on me.
That’s why, once a year, I atone for my greatest sin. I atone for not being Jewish.
