The God Spark: Writer Jennifer Anne Moses
in Conversation with Co-Editor Caroline Langston
I just think there's a God spark, and if that God spark is not just a spark but a flame, something's ignited inside you.
— Jennifer Anne Moses
Jennifer Anne Moses is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently The Man Who Loved His Wife, short stories in the Yiddish tradition. She's also a painter whose work was featured on the cover of Vita Poetica’s Summer 2021 issue. She recently sat down with Vita Poetica Co-Editor Caroline Langston to talk about her Jewish background and the true event that informed her short story in our current Winter 2022 issue, “The Tale of the Lustful Rabbi.”
The following transcript has been condensed and edited.
Caroline Langston: How did you come to write “The Tale of the Lustful Rabbi”?
Jennifer Anne Moses: My story was sparked by a true story about a rabbi that hit the newspapers some years ago, and to which I and my family had a personal connection as longtime members of that particular synagogue.
CL: You had an experience with this story? Or some familiarity with it?
JAM: I knew the factual stuff of the story the way everyone did—by reading about it in the newspaper. I had met the rabbi at a distance at public events, but I didn't know him at all. And one day I just sat down and wrote a short story about a lustful rabbi. It just came to me—“The Tale of the Lustful Rabbi.” I have been immersed on and off for decades in the reading of Yiddish literature in translation. Your Yiddish vocabulary is probably as large as mine. I know New York Street Yiddish. Which I didn't grow up with, by the way.
My Jewish background was really beyond bifurcated. My old joke is my parents were mixed marriage: my mother was Christmas Tree-Reform and my father grew up attending a very conservative shul, which in those days was extremely traditional. I think the only thing that made it not what we would today call Orthodox is that men and women sat together. All those lines have shifted and changed in my lifetime. What we now call Orthodox is far more Orthodox than what we used to call Orthodox.
CL: This is certainly true to my own Christian experience. Growing up, my family was Southern Baptist. And when I mention that in the south to somebody who doesn't remember the pre-1979 Southern Baptists—I mean, it was always evangelical, but it was so much more mellow, and it wasn't political. The particular church my family grew up in was very pro-integration.
JAM: You know, with the influence of Haredi Judaism in this country, along with many varieties of Hasidim—when Jews say “I'm religious,” it means—well, it doesn't mean you're me. I go to synagogue and I pray. I consider myself a religious person in that sort of small “r” way—that I believe in God, and I uphold the values of my tradition. But when people within Judaism say that they're religious, they mean they are completely shomer Shabbat, completely keep the Sabbath. To the degree that you don't open the refrigerator, right?
For example, my younger son has become very religious, and it's a good place for him, and he wears a kippah. Looking at him, you wouldn't pick up that he's a religious Jew necessarily. He does wear a kippah, and he does wear tsit-tsit. But otherwise, he kind of looks like a hipster. He's a tall, skinny, good-looking guy. He's open to the world. But he was just home for a couple of days visiting, and I wanted on Saturday, on Shabbos, to walk the dogs together. And he said he can't hold the leash. I had the leash in my hand, and he accompanied me. So I had his company, he could walk with me, but he couldn't hold the leash. And he studied this stuff, and there's a spiritual discipline that keeps all this together that I'm not interested in at all. It's not a discipline that speaks to me. It’s never called out to me in a way that it’s called out to my sons, who have immersed themselves in it and studied deeply.
CL: So both of your sons?
JAM: It manifests in them in different ways. My younger son would call himself religious. And he would say that he didn't come from a religious background, right? Whereas my husband and I felt very good about the fact that we gave our children a vibrant Judaism that meant something to them.
CL: Yeah, that's a very common story, I think. I can relate to the sort of all-over-the place kind of thing, coming from Christmas-and-Easter Southern Baptists, to going through my own evangelical phase, to converting to Orthodoxy. But I've definitely seen where there'll be the phenomenon of the nice Greek doctor and his wife in Washington, or New Jersey, or whatever, who send their kids to church, and then the son wants to go to Mount Athos to be a monk. So I sort of know some of that kind of trajectory.
JAM: I just think there's a God spark, and if that God spark is not just a spark but a flame, something's ignited inside you. Whatever it is. I don’t know… Some people are born and they have to dance—it's a spark.
So the three of my children are very different from one another. And it shifts—religious expression, all those lines shift, and within Judaism, always have.
Some people are born and they have to dance—it's a spark.
CL: Well, I think the dialogue is actually institutionalized in the faith itself. So that by nature, there's no Magisterium. There’s like lots of sources of authority. And then they all talk to each other, is my understanding. Correct me on this—there's no one central authority?
JAM: Oh, no, we've never had a central authority. That's why there's all these jokes about Jews, you know, two Jews, five arguments, right?
My mother's family were southern Jews. They were from Alsace-Lorraine and Germany. So that's as High German as you get. My maternal grandmother was very southern, charming and gracious and elegant. And also had a Christmas tree. But Jewish. She ended up basically running the Federation of New York and was very committed to Judaism in her own way, in a kind of secular way. But Judaism, Jewishness, was also at the center.
I was not raised in any kind of Yiddish American mix. My husband, much more so. My ancestors got off the boat around the time of the Civil War. So we were very, very fancy. And then my father would drop a Yiddish word here and there. Kind of made some of them up himself. It wasn't the culture of our home. My father also had his Jewish cohort who were sort of Washington Jewish intellectuals. So they blended in with that, but the talk wasn't really about—it wasn't a home that had any real God in it, I'll put it that way.
CL: They weren't dedicated to learning. It would have been more kind of philosophical sort of discussion?
JAM: It wasn't even that. Most of the people who came to our house, particularly around him, less so my mother, but around him—were very glamorous people, either through their careers, ambitions, through their lineage. Sometimes their intellectual ambitions and intellectual attainments, that would have been more of the Jewish side of the street. But none of it really had to do with Judaism or being Jewish or walking a Jewish path. It was just the mix. It wasn't a bad mix.
CL: It sounds like a wonderful way to grow up, actually. But it's interesting that you've both kept some of that and also departed from it in some significant ways.
JAM: I'm a weird mix of experiences. It wasn’t until college I finally met regular Jews. Jews who talk like Jews—they use their hands. And then I moved to New York, and then and on and on. And we lived all those years in Baton Rouge, Louisiana—not exactly known for its Judaic culture either. But we had this amazingly wonderful tight-knit Jewish community there. So Judaism became much more important and more central in our lives in a creative, kind of organic way that had much more to do with connection of the heart and the community. And then we moved here to New Jersey where there are plenty of Jews. My twins, who are now 28, they were starting 10th grade. Schools cluster Jewish holidays, because if you have a fifth or a fourth of the kids out, and a fourth or fifth of the teachers—like, not worth it. My kids were just shocked. They moved from Baton Rouge the same time that they were experiencing this place where there were, for them, so many Jews. And their peers were experiencing new kids who had really good manners. So it was a funny mix.
The thing is, I had every reason in the world, when I went to college to say, fuck Judaism, fuck being Jewish. I don't give a shit about any of this—excuse my language. Because to the extent that I had some Judaism in my life, it felt very punitive. I didn’t know what Judaism was, but I wanted it.
I wanted it partly as a bridge to my father. Because that was the one place that he seemed to have something important, and I didn’t. It's my birthright that had been denied to me in a bizarre way—in part because I was a girl, in part because we lived where we lived, and in part because my father's Judaism seemed apart from how we lived as a family, where my mother's lack of Jewish education along with her big and playful personality swept me more into her orbit than into his, because my father would have said Judaism is the most important thing. But it had been denied to me, and I just wanted it. I just started studying, and lo and behold, we raised our children in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and two of my sons are Orthodox. And, here's an interesting little side dip—I speak modern Hebrew.
CL: ‘Cause you were an adult Bat Mitzvah.
JAM: I was an adult Bat Mitzvah. And that would not have happened had I not moved to Baton Rouge. I loved our Rabbi there. It took that list of special circumstances of being in this small southern community with a rabbi I loved loved loved, who I could joke around with. I could say, “I just think this is all complete crap, Rabbi,” and he was like, “Yeah, well.” He was my friend.
But the initial and very stupid reason I started studying for my Bat Mitzvah was that I thought I'd get an article out of it. That's the truth. I thought, “I'll get a book out of this.” I needed something to write. That was the first spark. I mean, talk about insane. And then of course, it became something completely different.
Jennifer Anne Moses’s most recent book features her painting of her grandfather’s hat factory in Baltimore, MD.
My great-great-grandparents are the founders of the family on my father's side. They came from Manchester, England, to the Port of Baltimore around 1860—penniless, the usual story—and became in their own lifetimes fabulously wealthy. There were portraits that had been painted of these people. And they hung in the hat factory—my great-great-grandfather was a hat manufacturer. These austere paintings hung, staring at me, and I always felt like my great-great-grandparents, whoever these people are, hate my guts because I'm a bad Jew. I’m a girl and not a boy. I’m a disappointment. And they're hanging here. And I'm scared of them as a little child. And then my grandfather died. And then my grandmother died. And there were two main claimants among my generation of cousins to those portraits. I was one, my eldest male cousin was the other, and my father got in there and got them for me. And I think the reason was—I was Jewish. It's that simple. I was raising Jewish children in a Jewish home, albeit in Baton Rouge. So I have these people, and I talked to them. You know, I'm like, “What do you think?” And they're like, “Yeah, good job, Jennifer, you raised Jewish kids.” The times change, and our expression of Judaism changes. And within any timeframe, you’d find a different level of observance anyway.
But back to the story I wrote. The rabbi in the story is an addict, right? And so, what is addiction? Addiction is fueling yourself with something illicit or outside yourself in order to get a high in the brain, if it's from a drug or alcohol, which chemically changes things, or you chemically change your brain with experiences. Workaholics, rageaholics, MAGA people, they're getting a huge high. So this rabbi in the story is a tragic figure. He's an addict. And addicts are hungry ghosts. There's an astonishingly, miraculously brilliant book called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, which I read about a year ago, written by Gabor Maté, a psychiatrist who works with addicts. Very famous doctor, writer, philosopher, humanitarian Jewish refugee. He was a child during the Second World War. Now he works with addicts in Vancouver. And his understanding of addiction—as this unbelievable, awful, unbearable soul sickness—is spot on. He points out along the way that we punish people who put heroin in their veins, right? They're only hurting themselves. This is crazy. We’re punishing sick people for being sick. And this book is just a miracle of empathy. I mean, as a person of faith—you know, I don't know if the author himself would frame his own life as being a person of faith, but he's channeling God.
CL: So many people do and don't even know it.
JAM: So whatever his deal is, I don't know. But the rabbi in my short story is a hungry ghost. And he's cloaking his hungry emptiness in the false robes of piety, and more than that, of learning—because he does know his stuff. He's a Talmud scholar, he's a Torah Talmud scholar, as all Orthodox rabbis are. But for him, it's an empty shell, because he has this awful emptiness at his core that he can't fill. And that's the story, really.
