“Someday,” my boyfriend David said to me dreamily, “we’ll have Shabbat dinners at our house.”  “Yeah right,” I guffawed. “I guess you’ll have to marry someone else. I don’t do Shabbat.”  Sure, I was Jewish. I went to Jewish camp. And High Holiday services. But I was not an every-week-kind-of-Jew, and had no intention of becoming one. Ironically, my father was a cantor at a Reform synagogue in New York City.  But he was a professional baritone who happened to be the cantor, not a classically trained chazzan. Raised by socialist Russian parents who spoke Yiddish, he got the message—Cultural Judaism: Important. Ritual Judaism: Not so much. My mother, the daughter of assimilated German Jews, was fine with that. David, on the other hand, grew up the son of a German refugee whose family arrived in the United...

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