by Sara Levinsky Rigler

One December afternoon, my precious four-year-old niece Jodi* walked into my mother's kitchen and asked, "Bubbie, are you Jewish?"

"Yes, I am," my mother answered proudly.

"So am I," Jodi confided, "but don't tell Santa Claus."

I laughed when my mother told me this story, and I chuckled every time I thought of it --for twenty-two years. Last week, Jodi got married in a Catholic Church, kneeling in front of a huge gilded cross. I stopped laughing.

Apparently, Jodi's perception of Judaism as a liability grew with the years. At age four, being Jewish made her unwelcome to Santa Claus. At age sixteen in a town whose century-old bylaws stipulated, "No Jews or Negroes," Jewish identity was a social non-starter. At age twenty, as a sophomore at Boston University, being Jewish threatened her budding romance with a handsome Catholic senior.

Was there nothing on the asset side to balance Jodi's Jewish ledger?

After all, her Bubbie and Zeydie were committed Jews. Her Zeydie was a life-trustee of his synagogue, an ardent check-writing Zionist, who loved everything Jewish, from Mollie Picon to Bernard Malamud. Her Bubbie spoke Yiddish, made blintzes from scratch, and devoutly attended Friday night services every Shabbat. Was there nothing of nostalgia or Jewish tradition to stay Jodi's knees from kneeling before the cross?

Jews who defect to secularism are not such a 'shanda' disgrace. Why couldn't Jodi and Brian* have celebrated their nuptials in a neutral City Hall, at the Botanical Gardens, or on horseback?

Obviously Brian felt strongly enough about his Catholicism to insist on a church wedding. Was his grandmother's mince pie more delectable than Jodi's Bubbie's knaidlach? Was their Christmas dinner more festive than our Pesach seder? Was his catechism class less boring than her Hebrew school? How did Brian's parents transmit to their son an allegiance to Catholicism which washed away Jodi's loyalty to her Jewish heritage like a wave dissolving a sand castle on the beach?

The problem is not idiosyncratic to my family. According to the American Jewish Identity Survey 2001, out of approximately 5.5 million American adults who are Jewish by religion or of Jewish parentage, nearly 1.4 million say they are members of a non-Jewish religion.

We are not talking here about secularism, about Jews who opt out of synagogue in favor of a baseball game or the movies, but rather in favor of church. Since the majority of American Jews are of Ashkenazic descent, this means that 25% of the descendants of European Jews who resisted Christian pogroms and threats for sixty generations, often at the cost of life, are now voluntary apostates.

American Jews have been occupied for four decades in a desperate attempt to stay the tide of assimilation and intermarriage (not to even speak of their more hideous confrere: conversion). I remember as a teenager in the '60s sitting through sermons where our rabbi pontificated on various solutions to The Problem.

Yet exactly what is the Jewish leadership trying to perpetuate? Jewish genes? Jewish culture? A fondness for kreplach, klezmer and Isaac Bashevis Singer?

No wonder the Catholics are winning. . .They don't try to whip up enthusiasm for the celebration of St. Patrick's Day, or spend millions to make sure that every Catholic child decorates an Easter egg. They are propagating a religion, complete with G-d and soul and afterlife.

We are pushing a culture, complete with Sholem Aleichem and dreidels and Western Wall lithographs. But for a culture, no matter how engaging, no one is ready to sacrifice life -- nor the love of one's life. Against Christianity we have pitted Judaica, not Judaism.

History shows that substitutes for halachic Judaism have a shelf life of four generations or less. Moses Mendelssohn had nine grandchildren; eight of them were baptized as Christians. Theodore Herzl's children were not only not Zionists, they were not Jews. How many of the grandchildren of the great Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz married under a chupah? How many of his great-grandchildren know what a chupah is?

To perpetuate Jewish culture, outside of museums and university courses, at the very least you need Jews. But Jews, as population surveys prove, are disappearing. The first step in the multi-million-dollar enterprise of passing Jewish culture on to the next generation is to ensure that there will be a next generation.

The "cut-flower phenomenon" illustrates the predicament of Jewish culture. Cut flowers are doomed to die in because they are severed from their roots, just as Jewish culture has been severed from its Jewish religious roots. The solution is obvious: reclaim the religious roots of Jewish culture. But roots are not the only thing a plant needs to survive.

When I lived in New England, my favorite hobby was horticulture. I loved the arresting fragrance of gardenias; in early spring, I couldn't resist buying gardenia plants, laden with two or three beautiful white flowers and a dozen buds, usually offered for $3.95 at Woolworths. I would take my plant home, position it in a window with eastern exposure, water it copiously, and wait for the buds to open.

After one glorious, fragrant week, the open flowers would turn yellow and dry up, and the buds, reacting to the dryness in my heated house, would turn brown at their necks. I labored to rescue them, misting the plant with a green plastic spray bottle every time I passed, a dozen times a day. One at a time, the buds would fall off, and I was left with a plant with shiny green leaves. After about six weeks, the leaves started to yellow. I'd run to the local nursery, buy iron granules, and scratch them desperately into the soil in the gardenia's pot.

In three months, the plant would be dead. Every time.

Not to be daunted, I invested in a small greenhouse, where the conditions were optimum for growing gardenias. I also grew hibiscus and jasmine. I assiduously fed my plants with a solution of liquid fertilizer, meticulously regulated the temperature and humidity, and valiantly battled white fly and scale. Despite the major expense of heating the greenhouse through a New England winter, I was proud of my yield: four or five hibiscus flowers a week and a couple dozen sprigs of jasmine in season. (The gardenias didn't bloom, but they didn't die, either.)

Five years into my greenhouse enterprise, I took my first trip to southern California. There, in Laguna Beach, I saw hibiscus hedges eight feet tall, with solid masses of large red and pink flowers, and sprawling banks of white and yellow jasmine. To add to my envy, no one was lavishing care or expense on them. They were flourishing on their own, in their own natural environment.

To really flourish, Jewish culture needs its natural environment: authentic Jewish life.

"Jewish culture" is a greenhouse enterprise. After all the energy and money is spent, it will produce a few prize specimens, like Cynthia Ozick and Andy Statman. But to really flourish, Jewish culture needs its natural environment: authentic Jewish life.

Authentic Jewish life is characterized by the actual observance of Shabbat and Kashrut. Not Shabbat candlesticks as museum pieces, but a generation of Jewish women and girls who light their candles on their kitchen or dining room table to usher in the holy Shabbat. Not klezmer performances to evoke shtetl nostalgia, but Jewish bands playing Jewish music at Jewish weddings where Jewish communities celebrate the beginning of a new generation of a Jewish family.

I wish my niece Jodi had such a wedding.