The 'Shame' of Hand-Me-Downs

A colleague of mine sat down across from me at lunch the other day with something weighing on her mind. She is an engineer whose heavily accented (but perfect) Hebrew identifies her as having immigrated to Israel from the Former Soviet Union.

I don't know this woman well, but after several years of working together on projects I've made certain assumptions about her based on the way she dresses and the casual remarks she makes about local politics. I assume that in Russia she was called a Jew and that the word was not meant as a compliment by those who used it. Here she seemed pleased to have left the Jewish label behind in favor of the more theologically vague title; 'Israeli'.

As we ate our lunch and made small talk about a project we were working on, I could tell she had something else on her mind, but it was equally clear she didn't know quite how to broach the subject. Finally, as we were finishing up our dessert she just blurted it out:

"David, I brought something from home but I'm not sure what to do with it", she began. "I was hoping you could help me".

With that, she reached into her large purse and pulled out a couple of tattered books and placed them carefully on the table between us. I picked them up and was surprised to find myself holding two battered Chumashim, (bound copies of the Torah - the first five books of the Jewish Bible).

The books were in terrible shape… marked throughout with multi-colored highlighters and had pencil scribbling in the margins. The covers were missing altogether, and several names written and crossed out on the title pages indicated that each of the books had seen more than one owner.

She explained that her youngest had recently finished high school and that she had decided to go through the family storage room, giving away or throwing out all of the old books and school supplies. However something told her that these two tattered books were supposed to be treated differently. She had brought them to me – a coworker with a kippah (yarmulke) - in hopes that I would take them from her and do the right thing.

We religious Jews are an arrogant lot when it comes to making assumptions about our coreligionists. It may be that our secular counterparts are equally arrogant, but I can only comment from my own experience… and arrogance.

I'm a bit ashamed to admit that when she explained why she'd brought me the Chumashim my first reaction was rather uncharitable.

In the case of this particular coworker, her occasional political comments and her somewhat revealing outfits had led me to the conclusion that she is one of the many Jews from the FSU who have little use for Judaism. Nearly a century of communist indoctrination and oppression had done its work well, and many of those who came to Israel from the FSU seem more than happy to leave behind the often-derogatory label of Jew.

Outwardly I smiled, but privately I chided her for not knowing the proper way to deal with holy books. I also looked askance at the fact that she apparently didn't want a Chumash - the source of all things Jewish - to remain under her roof after her last child no longer needed it for school.

But then, as often happens, I got a chance to taste the bitterness of my own uncharitable thoughts.

She picked up one of the Chumashim and caressed it reverently in her hand and explained that starting in elementary school, her older kids had used these two books as they'd made their way though the Israeli school system. As the books had been passed down from one child to the next younger siblings, the pages had accumulated copious notes and colored references… and the bindings had long since shed their covers to reveal dog-eared pages from countless trips back and forth to school. But in her experience, a book that had given up all its knowledge was supposed to look like this.

She told me that there was a third Chumash at home on the family bookshelves… in far better condition than these. It had been used by her youngest daughter, the one who had just graduated. Since the baby of the family had somehow managed to avoid the 'shame' of having to use a hand-me-down Chumash, that third copy was still in pretty good shape. So, during her cleaning spree, my coworker had made a practical decision to keep that third copy of the Five Books of Moses in the family.

By now I was blushing with embarrassment, sure that she had somehow read my mind.

First I had rushed to judge her for not knowing how to dispose of a holy book, and then I'd assumed she couldn't wait to rid her home of any vestiges of Judaism.

But in a single moment the enormity of what I'd ignored came crashing down on me like a pile of books. Here was a woman whose family had somehow managed to remain Jewish under generations of oppressive Communist rule. She and her husband - uneducated in Jewish things though they may have been - had decided to come to Israel and had given their children the opportunity to grow up as (and among) Jews.

Sitting before me on the table was ample evidence that her children had digested the Jewish content (however abridged) of their secular Israeli education. And though ignorant of the precise procedure for doing so, this Jewish woman knew instinctively that one didn't simply toss the Torah into the trash bin alongside broken-spined algebra books and crumpled history notes.

As I gathered up the pair of well-read Chumashim from the lunch table, I assured my colleague that it would be my pleasure to take care of them for her. I explained that far too many people didn't understand that such things required special handling and that she had done a very important thing by treating the books with such respect.

As I walked out of the cafeteria with these 'hand-me-down' Chumashim, I felt very small at having initially judged this woman so harshly.

There is really no shame in having hand-me-down holy books, or in someone not knowing precisely what to do with them when they are no longer serviceable. After all, ours is a hand-me-down religion that has survived throughout many lean generations where perhaps only one family in a village owned (or could read) a Chumash. During much of Jewish history the idea of each child in a family owning their own copy would have been preposterous!

I thought about my own home filled with Jewish books, most of them (sadly) in excellent condition. My older children, who received their religious books from me barely used, or brand new from the Judaica store, have already far-surpassed my meager religious learning.

Our youngest will likely never know what a hand-me-down Chumash looks like and, like his older siblings, will almost certainly complete his education with his small collection of religious volumes in relatively good shape. But that isn't necessarily something to be proud of… and certainly no cause for arrogance. It is simply a function of our relative affluence.

But there are different kinds of affluence.

I realize now that for all the fatherly things I could want for my children, I would do well to wish that the holy books I buy for them, as well as those I hand down from my own collection, will one day be as well used and tattered as the two hand-me-down Chumashim my coworker place into my hands.