Page 399 - WhyAsInY

Portrait of a (first) MarriaGe
played in our relationship, a role the importance of which increased through time.
When Phyllis and I were planning on marrying, she expressed her desire that we keep a kosher home. I had eaten “kosher-style” in my home and camps, and I had no issue with that. I actually got a kick out of obtaining two sets of dishes and two sets of silverware. Little did I know that some day there would also be a full set of glass Seder dishes as well—plus formal meat and formal dairy sets.
The distinction between being kosher at home and maintaining the tradition outside of the home was an important one to me. As you might recall, I liked shellfish and other non-kosher foods, but I was willing to compromise on being kosher at home if my rights outside the apartment were not compromised. This was okay, but there was one critical ques- tion: was pizza an acceptable food to be brought into the kosher home?
Here I am grateful to Michael and for Phyllis’s deference to his quasi-rabbinical expertise. For the life of me, I could not see how a food that was made in an oven that had undoubtedly been the home to all manner of traif drippings (pepperoni!) could possibly pass muster. But who was I to doubt the judgment of Michael on this question? He blessed take-home pizza, and that was good enough for Phyllis. He was, after all, the Judaic scholar whose research had unearthed the fact that in the Netherlands it was kosher for Jews to eat dairy when only two hours had elapsed after the ingestion of meat. This permitted him, and therefore Phyllis and me, to have ice cream after a meal of London broil, without having to wait the six hours that was customary for all observant Jews who did not live in Holland. I had no idea that the Yaverbaums or the Rebells (originally Novagrebelskis, then Rebelskis) were Dutch.
Within the year after we moved to Scarsdale and set up for our new life, and years before Danny would be eligible for Hebrew School, Phyl- lis proposed that we join a synagogue. One could have seen this idea as a mature one, one intended to separate us somewhat from her parents’ city and country synagogues. But it wasn’t, really, as we would continue to spend our incredibly lengthy days and evenings in Lake Mahopac on the High Holidays. Nevertheless, I agreed.
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