The Matzo Ball

On Christmas Eve, the Estate provided the venue for the Matzo Ball, the annual overnight-camp social-style dance for young single Jews wanting to get shitfaced and laid in Boston. Perhaps I had too many bloody marys at home with Jen before venturing out, but by the time my father dropped us off at the club (couldn't have felt more like a bat-mitzvah--except for the drunk part) all I wanted to do was dance. And it's not just that urge to dance that I always feel when the songs that were popular during my overnight-camp (Pembroke) social days come on, like "Boom Boom Boom" which they did play off of Jock Jams Vol. 2; it's that desire to do nothing but dance, to move, to focus on the physical when the music's loud and any attempt at conversation extends no further than an embarrassing repetition of "what" after the incessant and unnecessary demand,"Hey, what's your name?"

I feel like an idiot saying, "what." I feel like an idiot dancing in a club, but I'd rather be the silent idiot than the one screaming into a stranger's ear that I just love this song and I just love dancing. Perhaps if I had wanted to have sex with a nice Jewish boy stranger, than I would have made the verbal effort or at least danced closer, slower, deeper, whatever, but you can only make the dance-walk away move or disappear to the bathroom so many times at an event designed to get Jews to procreate and make more Jews before you run out of energy and have to let Mr. Future Business-Exec buy you a drink just to show him what an asshole you really are.

I didn't want to get laid. Once I walked into the club, I really wasn't in the mood. And it's not just the emotion-less environment of an atmosphere where there's so much noise, you can't listen to anything, but, this perhaps irrational fear that I'm merely pushed into a too-familiar gene-pool festering with Tay-Sachs. I would never not date someone simply because of the fear that our great-grandfathers studied Talmud together and married their children off to keep business in the family, but ever since I was a six year-old in Hebrew School, various Jewish authorities in my life have repeated over and over that I HAVE to marry a Jew simply because I am a Jew. My parents, on the other hand, could care less whom I fall in love with (within upper-middle class liberal Northeast reasoning, let's be honest) and have never forbade me from following my heart.

My heart, more often than not in my middle- and high-school days, led me to goyim. (I love light eyes and have a weakness for blond hair, as well as WASP mothers that can teach me how to bake things other than kugel.) And after endless Holocaust education (and a lesser amount of pre-WWII antisemitism education), I understood--by middle school--the historical, cultural, and religious reasonings for marrying a Jew, but that illogical rationale of Jew over Love instilled in me by those authorities has now manifested itself in a feeling of boredom and an almost complete lack of desire when placed in Jewish mating environments, like the Matzo Ball.

I know that I will probably have nice Jewish babies with a nice Jewish boy because of a common social understanding and shared experiences whether or not we marry or divorce, thereby making every rabbi and Hebrew school director I have ever known very happy, not to mention my grandparents who just love when my brother brings home shiksha girlfriends; but knowing that, and knowing that I don't want to make small talk and don't want to just get laid and don't want to make Jew babies just yet, I see no harm in just dancing. And in the immortal words of Jennifer Lynn Reiss: "The world just needs more dance!"