Sweet Like Sugar Read Online Free PDF Page A

said, closing the door behind them. Then it was off to my bedroom with my picture book. Just like old times.
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    I knew, because my mother told me, that the book was a hand-me-down, a gift my grandparents originally gave to my sister when I was just a baby. But as far as I was concerned, the book was mine and always had been.
    The book took me back to a time when I really loved Judaism. It was never about God for me; I’d never been a real believer as a kid, and I’d never had a spiritual crisis that made me change my mind since then. But that lack of belief didn’t matter. I still loved Judaism and the way it was represented in this book. I relished the ancient melodramas, the neatly resolved plots, the simple life lessons. And I adored the drawings, images that blended the freeform style of 1970s cartoons with reverent depictions of historical heroes. As a child, this was what being Jewish meant: stories, characters, history, color.
    My parents added on another layer of meaning—primarily involving food—that also appealed, with their semitraditional, modest observance of holidays and traditions. Latkes for Hanukkah, apples and honey for Rosh Hashanah, challah for the Sabbath. Being Jewish wasn’t just who I was inside, it was something tangible, something I could taste. And it tasted sweet.
    This, of course, was before years of Hebrew school classes and topical Saturday morning sermons at my family’s Conservative synagogue drained away almost everything I liked about being Jewish and buried it under an airless layer of laws and restrictions and suffering. The chosen people’s celebratory rites were grayed by cautionary tales of persecution and woe and impending collective trauma. By the time I was bar mitzvahed, my whole impression of Judaism had changed. I thought not of braided loaves of challah shiny with egg, but of death camp rations of black bread and brown soup. Not of Hanukkah’s miracle of the Maccabees, but of Israel’s War of Independence, the Six-Day War, the invasion of Lebanon. Anti-Semites lurked around every corner, and we would always be pariahs wherever we went. The only things keeping us together were God and our community, both of which made constant demands and neither of which was ever satisfied. Whatever you did, there were rules to govern you; whatever you thought, there was shame to paralyze you. Thou-shalt-not this, thou-shalt-not that. Listen to your mother and pray for the Almighty’s forgiveness.
    But opening my old picture book, I was reminded of a less complicated version of Judaism: Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai, while the children of Israel danced with abandon around the golden calf below. Jacob and his twelve sons—one of them dressed in a vibrant, almost psychedelic coat—tending sheep in the fields. Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac, a knife held firmly in his raised hand. Noah and the animals on a giant wooden ark, a rainbow on the horizon. And that picture of Adam and Eve in Paradise. Under the apple tree. Just as I remembered it.
    The last picture in the book was from a different Bible story that I’d almost forgotten: Queen Esther stood in the middle of an elegant banquet, amid tables laden with golden pastries and green grapes. Her accusing finger pointed at Haman, the man who would kill all the Jews in Persia, cowering before her. Esther’s face betrayed only steely confidence, her long dress a swirl of angry reds and purples.
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    I remembered a Purim from many years before.
    I was seven years old and I was crying.
    We were supposed to show up for Hebrew school in costumes. Ideally, they should have been relevant to the holiday, a sort of masquerade based on the Book of Esther. But kids who attended Congregation Beth Shalom of Rockville, Maryland, weren’t so hung up on biblical authenticity. They were planning to come as Batman or the Little Mermaid or miniature Washington Redskins.
    My mother laid