By Amy Kurzweil

These are the sounds of Sunday School: an off-key guitar spitting songs against the stained glass windows. The whispers of boys in vans and kippahs. This is what Sunday School tastes like: grape juice. Challah toasted with honey. This is what the synagogue smells like: a vacuumed rug. This is how I feel: like I don’t belong. Eleven am Sunday brings me here against my will. I am 12 years old and I have better things to do than shift awkwardly in a pew while pondering why the lady with the guitar is always so happy. The room is dark, the windows full of jewels. Stand up, sit down. The red cushioned pews make a whooshing sound when you land. The boys giggle. I mouth words in Hebrew. I don’t know what they mean. Words in my mouth like skittles, full of sweet, innutritious familiarity.

Secretly, of course, I love it. The whole thing, especially the pretending not to love it part, especially the feeling out of place part. I love the songs. I love the crazy lady with the guitar. I love the lamps dangling like angels from the ceiling. I love the doors that hide the Torah, painted with some fantastic abstraction of color and swirl. I love the food, pieces of sweet bread rationed out, savored like chocolate truffles, and cups of juice so tiny they make you thirstier. This is a world unlike my own. Food is scarce and treasured. People smile for no reason. Songs uplifts without meaning. Most of all, God. God! Who is this God and why doesn’t he live above my house too? He must love all those tiny pieces of Challah with honey. He must love music and color and shiny happy people.

Sunday School is an alternate universe where the 10-12 year olds of my largely Jewish town go to learn how to be Jewish Adults. We do not know the truth: This ritual is an excuse for our parents to outdo each other with big fancy parties when we turn 13. I go compliantly every week. I am always late (my parents’ fault – our house, unlike Sunday School, does not run on time, nor does it include morning smiles or songs) The day includes a half-hour service in the chapel and an hour-long class. Here, the jewels of Jewish wisdom are fitted for our ears. We learn about the Torah and our holidays and our great ancestors of the past (yay). We learn about  Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (boo). We learn traditions and food and stories and games and charity.

We sing songs and color and bake and smile. It is one of those places where you know you are being treated much younger than you deserve, like summer camp, or the pediatrician’s office, but you tolerate it. As a kid, you can see there is, perhaps, something inappropriate about this kind of world view, and yet, it is all you really know.

It is here, among honey and music, among the fellow jeans-and-Skechers-wearing sons and daughters of the commandments, where I first learn about Zionism.  Zion. I think I’d heard the word once in a Bob Marley song. Little did I know Zionism was INVENTED by a Jew. His name was Theodor Herzl and he was born in 1860. Cut out a picture of him, color him, put him on the wall. Zionism is a tangible religion. It yields results; the state of Israel was founded in 1948. Cut out the state of Israel, color it, put it on the wall. Many people helped establish and care for this wonderful place. Cut out a picture of Chaim Weizmann,
David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, color them, put them on the wall. However, the Zionist path is paved with hardship. 1948. 1956. 1967. 1973. 1982. And yet we prevail. My name is Amy and I am a Zionist. Color
it, put it on the wall.

I will not remember the face of a single Sunday School teacher I ever have. I will remember every crevice, every eyebrow out of place, every intonation and awkward kitchen smell of my grade school teachers since kindergarten, but I will not recall a face or even a gender of a single Sunday School teacher from these few years. This is who I will remember: Ben Goldberg. Oh how I love Ben Goldberg. He is skinny and white with orange freckles and matted brown hair smashed against his forehead like thick acrylic paint. He always wears the widest leg cargo pants out of everyone, with silver chains that hang  mysteriously from the pockets at his knees, and too-small striped colored shirts. He is the prototypical, alpha, Jewish, 12-year-old Male. Always raises his hand first. Friends with everyone. Wideeyed. Smiling. Always doling out purple pieces of Bubble-Tape from one of his many pockets. Plus, he stutters, spewing words and spit with the kind of delightful enthusiasm that only boys of 12 can expound.

One day we are discussing Anti- Semitism and Unidentified Teacher asks us if we’ve ever experienced prejudice because of our cultural and religious affiliation. I rack my brain. I love to talk in class, but this one has me stumped. I always think racism, or anti-Semitism, like World Wars and black and white TVs, is a thing of the past. Ben raises his hand, my heart pounds and the skin below my fingernails feels warm. We are seated on the floor and Ben rises to his knees. He stutters through his story, loudly chewing his purple gum and rocking his hips back and forth to absorb some of that explosive boyish energy. This is the story: one time Ben was called a Kike. I have never heard this word before and I am rapt in attention as the teacher has Ben explain what this word means. Ben tells us and then elaborates on how he stood up for himself, telling the offender not to use offensive language. Oh Ben, my heart. How dramatic! How righteous to be slandered and given the chance to show such strength and moral standing. What a hero, what a knight. In my charmed middle-class town, the worst name I’ve ever been called is a Robot. I secretly romanticize the strife of a persecuted people. Perhaps it is my legacy. My confused sense of guilt. My 12-year-old brain cells born from bruised and exiled women now buzzing in the shadow of a hatred I’ve never really known. My family’s history is like a phantom limb, a third arm, the one that’s always raised, asking a question.

The teacher tells us about Israel’s “problem.” The problem, as I understand it, is Anti-Semitism. It is beautiful Ben being called a Kike. In regular school we learn about these assassinations: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr. JFK. Now I learn about the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. It has been three years since he was shot and Israeli dreams of peace fell to the ground like snow. Show a picture of Yitzhak Rabin, reaching over the body of President Clinton to shake hands with Yasser Arafat, cut it out, put it on the wall. This tragedy joins the  other benchmarks in my mind. There is a quiet air that settles over a classroom when you speak of important assassinated people. Children learn at a young age not to ask questions about the dead.

But there it is, my third arm, raising again. My phantom limb knows death, knows about the darker things that come from silences. Knows about hatred as more than words and history. Knows about historical cycles that build slowly like musical crescendos. There are always questions. And we, our tiny legs tucked under single desks filled with colored crayons, will learn to ask the right ones one day.

I raise my hand. Who killed him, I ask. The teacher does not answer right away. Who? I ask again. This is what I will remember most: we are surprised that Rabin is killed by a Zionist. Already my mind is forming blockades, easy smiling compartments, black and white, good and bad. The teacher does not want to disturb the clean desk drawers of my young mind. I don’t understand. Why did he do it? I will not remember the answer. But don’t all Israelis want the same thing? Aren’t we on the same side, the right side? The questions
loop in my mind like blank typewriter tape. Forming words into punctuated sentences until there is nothing but the loud hum of misunderstanding. If I could remember, I would see in my teacher’s eyes the reflection of cracked stained glass windows. The tumbling compartments of my mind, sticky with honey and breadcrumbs.

Years later I will go. I will climb the steps, one foot at a time, to the spot where Rabin was shot. I will go to his memorial monument. A pile of black rocks lit with orange lights. An Israeli soldier with sad eyes will whisper in my ear that Rabin’s peace was false, a show, a sham, a detriment, of course the man was shot. He will mumble something more in Hebrew, the drawers of his brain sealed shut, the whole desk wobbling. And mine: unhinged. I will stand and read: Here, at this spot, on Saturday, November 4. 1995,  Israel’s Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered. In capital letters, scratched in marble plaques: PEACE. In black spray paint on stone: PEACE. On paper, in murals, around necks. PEACE. Cut it out, color it, put it on the wall.