What gym workouts, book clubs, and ancient traditions have in common
It's all about the reps
If you want to build muscle, you don’t just lift a heavy weight once. I hate to tell you, but you’re gonna have to lift it like 3 sets of 10 or whatever (honestly, not being able to focus long enough to count to 10 has been a major impediment to my strength training). And then, you can’t just do that every once and awhile. You’re gonna have to do that two or three times a week. Until you die.
On the list of my many complaints in life is that you have to STAY in shape after you GET in shape. That seems entirely unreasonable, like taking away someone’s degrees if they don’t end up working in the field they studied (please no one give my alma maters any ideas).
Well, guess what, if you want to build stronger bonds with other people, you’re gonna have to do more reps for that, too. The good news is that unlike weightlifting, you can strengthen your relationships while drinking margaritas and eating tacos.
Or you can workout with other people, then you can have strong muscles AND strong friendships. And THEN you can also go drink margs and eat tacos. During my “serious runner (in my own mind)” phase, I did some pretty great bonding with friends over hours and hours running through the streets of Washington. I wish I could still run like that, because I rarely see any of those ladies any more, and also I can’t eat as many tacos now.
I’m not a fitness expert per se, but I think the conventional wisdom it’s better to do heavier weights, fewer reps. Or is it lighter weights, more reps. I have no idea, actually, I think it might even be disputed.
But when it comes to human connection, in my mind, there’s no question.
Fewer people, more reps.
Several years ago, I started a book club. I wanted to read more instead of scrolling on my phone, as enjoyable and fruitful as that is. So I put out a bat call to a bunch of ladies in the neighborhood. My idea was to make it “easy” on everyone—I would host every time, we’d just have wine and a few snacks, NBD, and we wouldn't ritually shame anyone for not finishing the book or kick people out for missing a meeting.
It went OK for awhile. People came and went. We added people (even a man) and dropped others upon their request, no hard feelings or obligation. This was the Tinder of book clubs, low commitment, low expectation. I thought that’s what busy 21st-century people wanted, what they could manage.
Then one evening a couple of years ago—memories of COVID shutdowns still fresh, with beautiful weather in the offing—I asked if the club wanted to do a potluck dinner. I offered to grill some stuff if others could bring sides. They came enthusiastically, with their (presumably illiterate, just kidding) partners. We had an absolutely spectacular time, eating and drinking together as the summer dusk faded into stars. We talked about the book but briefly.
The consensus after the fact was that we had to do it again. So, long story short, our book club still reads books—well, some of us do—but we are essentially a supper club. Hosting duties rotate. Partners and friends are always welcome. And we now have a good-sized group of devoted regulars. Some are friends I’ve known for many years; others are friends that others in the group have added. All of them are a cherished presence in my life, and our monthly gatherings are a ritual to which I always look forward.
I’ve actually started or been in a few such regular gatherings over the years—a bridge club, a brunch club, another supper club; I go to NYC (almost) every year with the same group of ladies; I joined with a group of friends to sponsor Tetiana and Serhii—and I find them far superior to the occasional dinner or large parties in building and sustaining friendships.
In general, my overall social circle is probably smaller at the moment than it’s been at other times. Post-pandemic, I spend more time with fewer people. And I’m convinced it’s a big reason why I feel more connected and bolstered than ever. More and more, I feel a strong sense of home. Maybe it’s just age. It’s definitely that, but I think it’s more than that.
My experience with the book/supper club is that there are other people out there looking for a regular “gang,” too, and they actually don’t mind the higher level of commitment that I assumed at the beginning would ward them off.
I always thought this was the reason the show Friends was so popular (I’ve since watched some re-runs, and I honestly don't think it was the writing). We all love the idea of having a group of friends who are fixtures, with whom we don’t sweat a dirty house or an ask for help or a higher obligation.
I’m not sure how realistic that particular show is, whether that kind of friend group is attainable or feasible for adults over a certain age in our society, but I do think that opting into regular, small gatherings offers the possibility.
On Easter this year, I lamented on social media the dread that punctuates Christian holidays these days for all the showy, sanctimonious posts by people I consider morally repugnant human beings. This time, it was the absolute meltdown over Easter and Trans Day of Visibility falling on the same day, as if Biden had invented the latter just to personally insult Jesus—who would be insulted—that pushed me over the edge.
A (non-local) Jewish friend replied that I was welcome at his Passover table anytime I was in the vicinity. I said that I would adore coming to Passover, actually.
Not long after that, I got a text from Ben, who lives just a few miles away, inviting us to his family’s Seder.
I was deeply moved. Ben is someone I don’t know well, but whom I greatly admire.
He then texted an Aramaic phrase and its translation:
“All who are hungry, let them come and eat. All who are in need, let them come celebrate Passover with us.”
I never speak for Kevin, but I was in need, hungry for food from a different table altogether. Too much of the food served from the familiar tables of my life seems tainted and toxic.
So we went. 1
I didn’t really know what to expect. I knew the Last Supper in the Gospels was some kind of Passover meal, but the main details included in that account—Jesus predicting his death and resurrection and giving Judas the side-eye —would obviously not be replicated at a modern Seder (although, being that they are family gatherings, side-eyes are probably not unheard of).
Also, our book club had recently finished The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, which is about the intertwined Jewish and Black communities in a small town in Pennsylvania in the 1920s and 30s, so I had gotten a good review of Jewish cuisine. Our Jewish friend Jon, who is also in the book club, made us brisket for that meeting, but warned us off gefilte fish.
Gefilte fish, by the way, is actually delicious, all due respect to Jon. That was just one of the things I learned at Ben’s house. Everything was delicious, in fact (well, I cheated and did not eat an entire piece of the “bitter herb”/horseradish). I could have eaten a gallon of the matzo ball soup. Sublime.
I also learned that, unlike Christian celebratory dinners—in which everyone inhales as much food as they can in like 30 minutes then passes out on sofas—a Seder is a whole program. There are books (did I spectacularly fail the test of how to open and read a Hebrew book? I did, thank you for asking) and somewhat opaque readings, in various languages, featuring dueling rabbinic teachings (I tried to imagine Southern Baptists tolerating, much less voluntarily presenting, multiple viewpoints on literally anything, but I’m just not that creative) and singing (burning question: whatever do tone-deaf Jews do? Or rather what is done with them) and rituals of various kinds (my favorite was the downing of four cups of wine).
Ben and his family did their best to explain it all to us, but I can't pretend to now be an expert on Passover from just one Seder. And that’s kind of the point. Every member of that family—three generations sitting around the table—had learned and understood Passover, as well as many other Jewish traditions, through hard work and study and repetition, year after year. And every generation of Jews for hundreds of years, thousands for pieces of it, had followed the same order, the same rituals, the same readings as we had that night (and American Jews actually have two Seders each Passover). Year after year, century after century, generation after generation.
I asked Ben how Jewish families compel their children to take it all on, to do the work, even to enjoy it (Ben’s young adult son was probably the most enthusiastic of any in explaining everything to us). I mean, Jews don’t even believe in hell, so that’s out as a parental tool. The fear of hell was basically the entire engine of my life until at least my late 20s.
We haven’t raised our kids to fear hell, and you’d think sitting through an hour service once a week—with donuts, no less!—was something only slightly more pleasant than having a boil lanced. Incidentally, boils were one of the plagues visited on Pharoah by God to compel him to free the Israelites. But I already knew that.
“For me, growing up, it was the knowledge of everything our people had been through and suffered. You have this guilt of letting them down if you don’t keep it all going,” Ben explained.
I don’t doubt the guilt, but I can imagine the meaning, too. Of joining such an enduring, persevering, expansive procession of people that reaches as far back into the past as pretty much any culture still in tact. A community that has somehow remained tight-knit over vast spaces and epochs and varieties. Because it has formed through and around these rituals, these tangible actions, these traditions. These are things that can be passed along, repeated, replicated.
“Judaism is a religion of practice, not belief,” Ben said.
This resonated with me. I the way I was raised, in American evangelical Christianity, this would be cited as a criticism of Judaism, or any other religion based on deed or ritual. We were proud to be “free” of all that. Jesus had come so that we didn’t have to do anything but believe.
As if belief were so easy.
Our communities of faith were more like linked individuals with “personal relationships” with an invisible, untouchable deity. Our practices were about retreating into your own heart to convince yourself more and more that it was all real. That you really did believe. Without a doubt.
But what if you don’t believe? What if you try your best, what if you want to, but you just don’t? You can’t make yourself believe, any more than you can force yourself to fall in love with a particular person.
And even if you do, the evangelical life is in many ways disconnected from tradition even as it insists on conformity. Other than the Bible, there’s very little awareness of history. Even the Bible is studied as if in a historical vacuum, cherry-picked and interpreted for the now. No, the American evangelical church is about constant reinvention, always searching for the flashy and new. Another praise song with a cool beat or an emotion-plucking chorus. Another way to conjure up belief.
There’s very little that stands apart from belief as a basis for belonging. There’s little that you can do, that you can act out, that you can grab hold of or pass down or connect to in any kind of concrete way. Even communion in almost all evangelical churches is contingent on proper belief. If you don’t believe, you don't eat.
When it comes down to it, there are very few reps.
There’s just you and Jesus. And he may not be dead, but he’s not exactly alive in the way we are, bound by flesh and blood, time and space, love and loss.
“All you need is Jesus,” I was told as a kid.
At almost 50, I can finally say out loud that I don’t know WTF that means, if anything at all.
Jesus or God or Love or The Force, or whatever it is that propels us, wants us to need each other, generously and authentically. It wants us to form book clubs and communities and traditions and to invite people into our homes and lives and hearts without agenda or manipulation or pretense and to hold it all close even as we extend it out with both hands. It may even want us to exercise, although a truly benevolent deity would have rendered that unnecessary.
Because then we will belong to each other. And then we will get stronger. We will get better. And we will go forward in the faith that more of us will walk on this earth toward a future that is an improvement on the past. Maybe not immediately or foreseeably, but eventually. Toward something that is beyond what we can imagine.
I believe that.
Thank you, Ben, for strengthening my faith.
What about you? What “reps” do you do with people? What meaning do you find in that?
Sidenote: As I think I’ve said before, an invitation from person of a religion that does not actively seek converts has an entirely different vibe from one that does. Because you know there’s no agenda, you conclude that the person simply wants to be your friend and to share part of themselves with you. It makes you want to be their friend and to learn about what they think and believe. Huh.
Passover to me is all about connection to the past. The ancient story, yes, but also: my aunt Cissie's brisket recipe, which we only make once a year even though it's so simple and so good; my mother's chicken soup, which my wife now makes; my mother's way of making charoset--by hand, in a wooden bowl with a hand chopper; the hagaddah I stitched together from all the sources my parents liked, with certain key phrases that I remember from all of my childhood seders.
That's the thing: every time you do it brings back all the other times you've done it: with your parents, with your college friends; in the set of a play with your theater company, as a parent yourself. It's a time machine
No small task to weave those three topics together so beautifully. This week has been tough for those of us who sat through hours of con law fighting sleep. Turns out I didn’t actually need to stay awake since so much is no longer relevant. Anyway. Here’s something I came upon a few years ago re my peeps. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/jewish-practices-and-customs/. We are a pretty diverse group. And while we don’t believe in hell, guilt is a pretty strong component of Jewish life, and in the hands of strong Jewish women, not to be underestimated as a motivator.
Growing up, my Seder was at my aunt’s house, mother’s side. There might have been a Haggadah there, but not likely. But there was a Sedar plate and all the traditional foods, and we gorged Thanksgiving level. Great non religious time had by all. When I attended my husband’s family Seders, led by his maternal grandfather (most amazing man who fled from Poland and ended up in a Siberian work camp), the meal was pretty much secondary to reading the Haggadah in Hebrew and lots of atonal singing. I miss David terribly, but don’t miss those Sedars. JVL should link to this essay. Just saying.