Saying grace

A helpful internet friend shared a lovely little story worth a minute of your time.

I was and am Jewish, and at thirteen, I had never in my life done the whole “saying Grace” thing before, though I was at least aware that the practice existed

I have a different funny story about this culture gap.

In my freshman year in college I dropped in to a few Christian dorm lounge Bible studies, which lead to my sweetheart finding Jesus, which led to several instructive months of hanging around Evangelicals. Among other things, it made me feel very Jewish — the God I did not believe in turned out to be a very different figure than the one they did believe in.

Their style of saying grace was pretty improvisational: “Would anyone like to say grace?” Then someone would volunteer, with lots of “lift up my sister Colinda who has a midterm tomorrow” et cetera. I never offered. But one day we wer sitting down to pizza or something and nobody was feeling like doing it, so someone turned to me and asked if I would like to. I imagine that they expected one of the friendly demurrals I had gotten good at. But instead I felt a bit inspired.

“Can I do it in Hebrew?”

I had not yet absorbed how the unnerving philo-semitism of Evangelicals works, so I was not prepared for how enthusiastic they were about this idea.

I could not resist a little theatrical wave of my hands over our repast as I exhausted a good 20% of my entire Hebrew vocabulary saying “בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה׳ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם הַמּוֹצִיא לֶחֶם מִן הָאָרֶץ” adding a hearty “אָמֵן” and pronouncing it “ah-mayn” instead of their “ah-men”. I wryly added, “For those of you who do not speak Hebrew, that means, ‘Blessed art thou, O Lord, our god, king of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth’.”

They were very impressed. I had (mis)understood their enthusiasm for me proposing it — exposure to the cool practices of other cultures and all that — but the aftermath was too much. What the heck?

Then it hit me maybe a week later. They must have assumed that I just made that up on the spot, that I could have gone on like that for hours if I felt like it!