Swimming Across the Hudson by Joshua Henkin

revelation worried me even more. I was living with someone who wasn’t Jewish. I had nothing to fall back on.
    â€œLet’s say someone’s mother is Jewish,” Jenny said, “which makes that person’s mother’s mother also Jewish. How far does it go back, anyway?”
    â€œTo Abraham.”
    â€œYou think every Jew is descended from Abraham?”
    I was inclined to say yes. But that sounded about as reliable as claiming that the world was five thousand years old.
    â€œFine,” she said, “then you’re not Jewish. It makes things easier for both of us.”
    â€œIf only it were so simple.”
    It bothered Jenny the way my parents behaved, always kind and polite when they saw her, but also always distant. Even my mother, who, under other circumstances, would have loved Jenny (they had a lot in common, I thought), could be curiously remote around her. My mother herself wasn’t religious; she’d simply compromised for my father’s sake. I was surprised that it was important to her that I marry a Jew. But it was important to her. She quietly allied herself with my father, who thought my relationship with Jenny would someday end, who still phoned me with the names of single Jewish girls, with the silent breathless weight of his hoping.
    I thought of turning to a rabbi. But I didn’t know any rabbis. Before I’d gotten my birth mother’s letter, the only times I went to synagogue were when I returned to New York. The day her letter came, however, I chatted with the rabbi after services in Berkeley. He struck me as a decent man. When I called him now, he agreed to meet with me.
    Rabbi Stone’s office was in the back of the synagogue. The air smelled familiar, the sweet fermented scent of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where my father grew up and where our teachers took us to see matzo made by hand and the sabbath wine bottled.
    Rabbi Stone told me a little about himself. He had grown up in New York City, in an assimilated Jewish home on Central Park West. He’d gone to the Trinity School, where the students attended chapel every morning despite the fact that many of them were Jewish.His parents had had a Christmas tree, although they’d called it a bush and decorated its branches with Stars of David. Jesus was Jewish, his parents had said. They liked to remind him of that.
    When he got to Princeton, Rabbi Stone found God. He studied at a yeshiva in Israel and came back to the United States to prepare for the rabbinate.
    He was more or less my age. Several times since I’d met him, I’d seen him on the streets of Berkeley carrying a knapsack on his shoulder, not looking like my idea of an Orthodox rabbi. He had no beard. His head was always covered, but sometimes he didn’t wear a yarmulke—instead sporting a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap with the peak turned slightly to the side. I’d watched him from afar at Berkeley Bowl, strolling through the produce aisles with his infant son in a front pack.
    He asked me now about my religious education. I’d told him that I’d gone to Jewish day school. He wanted to know if I’d studied Talmud and if my Hebrew was fluent.
    I’d learned Talmud, I said. I could still speak Hebrew and make my way through the prayer service. The day I’d met him, I’d been surprised by how familiar the liturgy sounded. My grade-school teacher, Rabbi Appelfeld, had described Jewish learning as a car without brakes: either you were going forward or you were going backward. But there I’d been in synagogue that morning, and all the tunes came back to me.
    â€œYou wanted to talk about adoption,” Rabbi Stone said.
    I nodded. “But first I need you to promise not to judge me.”
    â€œWhy would I judge you?”
    â€œBecause you’re an Orthodox rabbi. You think a Jew’s supposed to live a particular way, and by those standards I don’t do very