The Snake Hisses

I want to tell you a story right now, based on real world events. 

This is going back like 30 years ago. Okay, I hope that doesn't make me seem really old, but it is what it is. 

Anyway, as I've said before, though maybe not here, many of my friends and teachers and classmates growing up were Jewish.

This is way before I became aware of the Jewish Question. 

Back then I was taught to believe that the Jews were an oppressed people. But I remember speaking to my High School homeroom teacher one day, a Brooklyn Jew with a PhD in Physics, and we got into a disagreement about oppressed people, because I was on a feminist kick at the time, and, anyway, I remember pointing out to him, that it's weird that Jews are so oppressed and yet they are so successful. 

He smiled and nodded in agreement.

He wasn't going to debate me after that. I was now one of them, or so I thought. 

Anyway, he was a religiously observant Jew, who attended Synagogue on a regular basis. At the time I was really into books, I still am, but back then it was new to me, and so I was all Gung Ho about it. I was interested in linguistics, ancient languages, anthropology, and archeology. My teacher, my homeroom teacher, Mr. Ph.D. in Physics, University of Berkeley 1960 something, told me one day that he had access to a large amount of Jewish Torahs that they were trying to dispose of in a graceful manner. 

I said I'd love to have one. He said something like that as a teacher in a public school that he could not give me this book because it is religious and they were not allowed to promote any sort of religious literature. Well, I convinced him to give it to me. It was really cool, it was in English, Greek, and Hebrew. It had all those languages. 

Anyway, he said that it was a Sacred Text and that he was a caretaker of it, and that he was entrusting it to me to borrow it and to take good care of it as a gesture of goodwill. 

Okay, fast forward a couple year's later. I have a garage sale. I sell some books, the Jewish Torah is one of them. Somehow my teacher comes to the garage sale, takes the book without paying for it, gives me a dirty look, as if expressing that I've betrayed him. I remember apologizing, but it was to no avail. Looking back on it now I can honestly say that at the time I had simply forgotten the agreement, or didn't think he meant it. Had it happened now I would have kept the book. I never would have tried to sell it.

Yeah, this teacher, the Jew from Brooklyn, who graduated from UC Berkeley with a PHD in Physics, eventually ended up becoming a transgender woman.  

Well, isn't that special?