“Shoe-ish”

My father’s mother’s home was a house divided: two microwaves, two refrigerators, two sets of dishware. Our meals were governed by mysterious rules. We eschewed shellfish and pork; shrimp were the “cockroaches of the sea”; milk and meat could never mix. After brisket, we had to wait a tortuous two hours before eating brownies. The joke in our family was that my grandfather snuck cheeseburgers in the garage.

I understood, in a vague way, that this division had something to do with being Jewish. That because we were Jews, we followed certain rituals: We blessed food before eating it, lit candles on Shabbat, and played with dreidels on Christmas instead of decorating a tree. But in the end, I didn’t understand what being Jewish really meant. Like Chinatown, the whole thing felt somewhat strange and inaccessible.

My grandmother seemed to understand. And because I loved her, I wanted to understand, too. She passed away when I was 15, and I began to wonder: What was it about this religion that held such powerful allure for her?

To me, my grandmother’s devotion to the mysterious laws of kashrut made her more spiritual, more pure; she seemed to live on a different plane. Only later did I learn the truth: That to many, kashrut is pretty damn arbitrary. No one knows whether these laws are God’s way of keeping us clean, or teaching us compassion toward animals, or something else entirely. As my agnostic father likes to point out, his mother’s entire kitchen schema comes down to one line in the Bible: “You shall not boil a calf in its mother’s milk.”

Recently, I asked Helen Kim, a Korean-American sociologist who studies Jewish-Asian heritage with her Jewish husband, what drew her to Judaism. Her answer? “There aren’t as many touch points for a collective Asian-American memory as there are for Jews—especially given that Asia is so large and that there are so many distinct waves of immigration,” Kim said. “But Judaism comes with a text.”

In the end, kashrut might not reflect the values I saw in it. But what it represents is something far more crucial: the Jewish collective memory. Unlike many other communities, Judaism comes with an instruction manual, a set of rules that teaches you how to be a Jew. The Torah tells you everything you need to know: when to fast and when to feast, what to wear and whom to marry. That’s an appealing idea: Follow these rules, and a deeper sense of Jewishness will follow.

My grandmother didn’t mind the seeming arbitrariness of kashrut. To her, these rules had a deep, profound meaning. They allowed her to tap into Jewish collective memory, the story Jews tell themselves about who they are. She was following the instruction manual.

There isn’t an instruction manual for how to have two cultures. In some ways, that sucks: It makes it easier for people to criticize you, squeeze you into boxes, or try to poke holes in your identity. But in another way, it’s profoundly freeing. Without a text, it’s up to you how to connect to your heritage. You get to choose which stories resonate, which elements to hold onto. When you start your own family, you get to decide which stories to impart to your loved ones.