Our fortieth anniversary celebrated a marriage that had survived 429 tubes of toothpaste squeezed from the wrong end, three children and three sets of braces, five dogs and four homes, 2,583 arguments and just that many reconciliations, one bout of prostate cancer, one near conversion to Judaism, one near divorce, a few months of perfect hate, and forty years of love. We celebrated our forty years of marriage with a three-week trip to South America.
According to Mordecai Kaplan’s teachings, which have long resonated with me and so many others, to be Jewish in America is to live simultaneously in two rich civilizations, the Jewish and the American civilizations, both full of promise and character-shaping values. To be Jewish in America is to draw deeply from both of these civilizations in order to contribute meaningfully to both of them. As deeply as Kaplan believed this, living it out was often challenging in his day. Increasingly, it is challenging in our day as well.
