On Flying While Jewish

What my toddler taught me

This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.

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Photo by Sacha Verheij on Unsplash

As the TSA staffer checks our toddler’s soy milk for explosives, I ask her if, amid the partial government shutdown, she’s working without pay. She nods, and suggests that next time, we wipe down the condensation on the five bottles we’ve packed for our three-hour flight.

“Thank you so much for being here,” I offer.

“Thank you for noticing,” she responds.

“Be well,” I say.

I wonder if she’ll remember us at the end of her shift—if she’ll recall our cooler overflowing with toddler snacks or my purple Indiana Hoosiers T-shirt. I wonder if she will have clocked that we are not just a kind family, but a Jewish one—or if my “Midwest mama” disguise has worked.

While I bear the ever-popular and uncultured ‘80s name “Jennifer,” my husband and son have conspicuously Jewish-sounding names (Matan and Ori), and we speak a mix of Hebrew and English. Apart from my undying love of chicken fingers and tuna casserole, everything about me, about us, is Jewish. I am a rabbi.

But these days, when I travel—unless I’m boarding a plane to Tel Aviv—I try to limit myself to English. I leave the necklace engraved with my son’s Hebrew name at home. I dress, and act, in ways I learned growing up in the Midwest—striking up random conversations about Indiana University’s rise to NCAA football championship glory, for example.

Although we fly regularly, my anxiety is often exacerbated by air travel. I mentally profile the other passengers, then feel guilty about it. I worry that if something horrible were to happen on board, my conspicuous Jewishness would bring me to the foreground of harm. In knuckle-gripping turbulence, I text loved ones, and wonder if God really wanted humans to get so close to the sun. But bringing Ori to visit his loving bubbe and zayde as often as possible is a core value. So we fly.

Today’s trip is not to see family, but to Palm Beach—a brief reprieve from the New England winter. After a rough six months—which included the devastating loss of my mother-in-law—we really, really need the sun. Curious George plays silently on the seatback screen, and we have enough bottles and cheddar bunnies to make it to the moon. As the plane begins to jostle in the air, I grip the armrests and text a pilot friend. He gently reassures me, as always: “You’re not going to die today, friend.” My son doesn’t notice the turbulence. Just as his abba and I are beginning to sweat, we hear a tiny voice.

“BIM BAM, BIM BIM BIM BAM!”

My husband and I burst out laughing.

Ori attends nursery school at my synagogue. He loves Shabbat: the candles, the challah, the Shabbat Dinosaur. But above all, he loves this song, Bim Bam, thumping his little fists one on top of the other to the beat.

On October 7, as his Israeli abba sat paralyzed by the unfolding horror, Ori was in utero, after a four-year fertility journey. He arrived five months later into our topsy-turvy world, right before Purim– a festival of merriment and joy. We dressed him as a taco and gave matanot l’evyonim, gifts for the poor, on his behalf: to Boston’s Yad Chessed and to World Central Kitchen, so that babies around the world could receive nourishment and care.

I love seeing my son run comfortably through Jewish spaces, climbing the bimah while our rabbi and community chuckle. I love that he yells “Abba!” across rooms, on playgrounds, at airports. I love that he knows the Shema and I love that he is learning the four questions. I love that our bedtime ritual ends by wishing lilah tov to the house.

Yet I fear the day when someone asks him with malice, “Are you Israeli or Jewish?” I’m relieved he doesn’t have to grow up as a minority, like I did. That he is unlikely to discover, as I once did, that an evangelical classmate is gathering a prayer circle to save his soul. But I don’t want him to forget that the world is diverse, full of beautiful and holy beings worthy of respect and love—even when their way of life differs from ours.

The plane lands safely. In the arrivals hall, Ori waves at two women and yells, “Hi Bubbe!”; he associates airports with my parents. It’s Palm Beach, and a terminal full of bubbes smile back. Buckled into his stroller, he hugs his favorite stuffy, Kelev, a Squishmallow dog with floppy ears, who wears a conspicuous yarmulke with a big Jewish star.

Ori delights in surprising people, and he loves to play peek-a-boo. But he does not yet know how to hide himself from the world. I had dressed Ori as a Midwesterner, in a red and gray 2T hooded sweatshirt emblazoned with Indiana across the chest, but at 30,000 feet, he sang his heart out as a Jew. Just like we taught him.

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Jen Gubitz is a Boston-based writer and rabbi at Temple Shalom of Newton and the founder of Modern Jewish Couples. A graduate of Indiana University and Hebrew Union College in New York, she is the co-host of the OMfG Podcast: Jewish Wisdom for Unprecedented Times. Her writing appears Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Romper, and Lilith Magazine.

Instagram: @ogubitzrules and @modernjewishcouples

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This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.

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