its usefulness should also be pointed out. With an
eruv
in place, traditional Jews stroll through the streets on the Sabbath with a commanding ease, as if moving from room to room. Women carry their babies and push strollers; men carry their books and prayer shawls; guests carry wine to their hosts. At a more abstract level, an
eruv
delineates the contours of a Jewish space, which adds value beyond the value added when real-estate prices soar within the footprint of the
eruv
. If you read
Eruvin
, the tractate that deals with the laws of the
eruv
, you will discover that the rabbis belonged to, and wrote about, highly mixed societies. In their neighborhoods, Jews and non-Jews lived next to and on top of one another. Different kinds of Jews—rabbinic, non-rabbinic, Torah-reading, non-Torah-reading—also mingled. With the
eruv
, the rabbis uncovered a way to pry unity out of diversity. One set of
eruv
laws requires beneficiaries of an
eruv
to make a collective donation of bread, and imposes penalties on neighbors who are too stingy or forgetful to do so. As it was with collecting manna, so it is with building the
eruv:
You have to learn the lesson of cooperation. Another set of laws ponders the mystery of how to involve the non-Jewish neighbor in the peculiar act of making an
eruv
. The discussion concludes with the opinion that youprobably can’t, and that you should probably retreat to a mostly Jewish neighborhood. The
eruv
, in other words, is a segregator and identity-enhancer and nation-builder. Its quasi-fictional walls were the stage upon which the Jews imagined their way into the idea of community.
8.
S OMETIME IN THE MID-1970S , my mother, certain that our Puerto Rican sojourn had weakened, if not destroyed, her children’s sense of Jewishness, began looking for a Jewish summer camp to send me to. She wound up choosing the same summer camp that she had gone to in the 1940s, an archetypal scattering of cabins, rec halls, and playing fields in rural New Hampshire. This was the institution in which my mother, a public-school student, had acquired her religious Zionism. I did not appear likely to follow her example. I was a girl growing up in the honky-tonk part of an American colony, used to spending my spare time sneaking into hotels to swim in warm, clear, forbidden pools. And suddenly I was forced to take swimming lessons in an ice-cold dark-brown body of water that the instructors called a lake, though it was clearly no more than a pond. My friends at home were the transient children of businessmen briefly stationed on the island, some American, some European. We had mastered the tone of world-weariness meant to let people know that we were well traveled, if a bit neglected. My fellow campers, on the other hand, were earnest students at Jewish day schools from the decorous middle-class suburbs of Boston. I had to play games I’d never heard of, like tetherball, and pretend to know something about the TV shows that were constantly alluded to, even though Puerto Rican television, at least then, broadcast only a handful of American programs, all a year or so late and dubbed into Spanish.
I could fake acquaintance with American pop culture, but I couldn’t fake being Jewish. My after-school Hebrew school left me with hardly any knowledge of the language, whereas my peers could read the Bible in the original. Nor did I know what to do when wegathered to pray first thing in the morning. I was particularly confused by one move, a series of steps ending in some bows that were required at the beginning and end of the standing silent prayer called the Amidah. I usually tried to imitate the person praying in front of me, which made everyone behind me snicker.
The camp had been founded in the 1940s, along with dozens of others like it and scores of Jewish schools, in response to rising anti-Semitism in Europe as well as in America. Once America entered World War II, echoes of the Nazi attack on Jews began to be
eruv
in place, traditional Jews stroll through the streets on the Sabbath with a commanding ease, as if moving from room to room. Women carry their babies and push strollers; men carry their books and prayer shawls; guests carry wine to their hosts. At a more abstract level, an
eruv
delineates the contours of a Jewish space, which adds value beyond the value added when real-estate prices soar within the footprint of the
eruv
. If you read
Eruvin
, the tractate that deals with the laws of the
eruv
, you will discover that the rabbis belonged to, and wrote about, highly mixed societies. In their neighborhoods, Jews and non-Jews lived next to and on top of one another. Different kinds of Jews—rabbinic, non-rabbinic, Torah-reading, non-Torah-reading—also mingled. With the
eruv
, the rabbis uncovered a way to pry unity out of diversity. One set of
eruv
laws requires beneficiaries of an
eruv
to make a collective donation of bread, and imposes penalties on neighbors who are too stingy or forgetful to do so. As it was with collecting manna, so it is with building the
eruv:
You have to learn the lesson of cooperation. Another set of laws ponders the mystery of how to involve the non-Jewish neighbor in the peculiar act of making an
eruv
. The discussion concludes with the opinion that youprobably can’t, and that you should probably retreat to a mostly Jewish neighborhood. The
eruv
, in other words, is a segregator and identity-enhancer and nation-builder. Its quasi-fictional walls were the stage upon which the Jews imagined their way into the idea of community.
8.
S OMETIME IN THE MID-1970S , my mother, certain that our Puerto Rican sojourn had weakened, if not destroyed, her children’s sense of Jewishness, began looking for a Jewish summer camp to send me to. She wound up choosing the same summer camp that she had gone to in the 1940s, an archetypal scattering of cabins, rec halls, and playing fields in rural New Hampshire. This was the institution in which my mother, a public-school student, had acquired her religious Zionism. I did not appear likely to follow her example. I was a girl growing up in the honky-tonk part of an American colony, used to spending my spare time sneaking into hotels to swim in warm, clear, forbidden pools. And suddenly I was forced to take swimming lessons in an ice-cold dark-brown body of water that the instructors called a lake, though it was clearly no more than a pond. My friends at home were the transient children of businessmen briefly stationed on the island, some American, some European. We had mastered the tone of world-weariness meant to let people know that we were well traveled, if a bit neglected. My fellow campers, on the other hand, were earnest students at Jewish day schools from the decorous middle-class suburbs of Boston. I had to play games I’d never heard of, like tetherball, and pretend to know something about the TV shows that were constantly alluded to, even though Puerto Rican television, at least then, broadcast only a handful of American programs, all a year or so late and dubbed into Spanish.
I could fake acquaintance with American pop culture, but I couldn’t fake being Jewish. My after-school Hebrew school left me with hardly any knowledge of the language, whereas my peers could read the Bible in the original. Nor did I know what to do when wegathered to pray first thing in the morning. I was particularly confused by one move, a series of steps ending in some bows that were required at the beginning and end of the standing silent prayer called the Amidah. I usually tried to imitate the person praying in front of me, which made everyone behind me snicker.
The camp had been founded in the 1940s, along with dozens of others like it and scores of Jewish schools, in response to rising anti-Semitism in Europe as well as in America. Once America entered World War II, echoes of the Nazi attack on Jews began to be
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