Jesus, Goats, and Hanukkah Candles

I live in a nunnery, and Jesus and I have grown to be friends. I’ll correct myself. We make good roommates. 

Last summer, a Latin program brought me to Rome for several weeks of language classes and far more churchgoing than any Jewish teenager would normally anticipate. Though I signed up anticipating days filled with Ovid and Cicero, I instead found myself spending nearly every day in some sort of church, chapel, basilica, or shrine. A handful of mostly non-Jewish students from the program and I ended up housed in the guest rooms of Casa Santa Brigida, a convent a few blocks from Piazza Navona.

We share the shoebox-sized space well, Jesus and I. I get the bed, shower, sink, and bedside table. Atop that table, my summer rings, the silver and plastic ones my good camp friend, Lucy, had gotten me on our temple’s Israel trip, are tucked between the pages of Jane Eyre and make tiny triangles of brownish shadow where the chapters should line up. Those rings are my tiny reminders of home—the most visibly Jewish things I packed. Jesus gets the wall. The fabric behind his print—which, though worlds apart from the Mona Lisa in nearly every respect, shares the uncanny illusion that a painted gaze follows me wherever I stand—puckers where the string pulls tight.

We have another roommate. Across from Jesus hangs a metallic cross with Mary’s face at its center. I swear I spotted that same one at a gift shop yesterday, next to the Colosseum magnets and Pope-faced bottle openers. But a cross is a cross, I presume. 

Isaac, another student in the program and my frequent companion through Rome’s churches, knocks on my shoebox door. To my knowledge, he’s the only other Jew in this program. And in this building. 

“Want me to take yours too?” Isaac asks. 

I stare at him blankly. “My what?”

“The cross. And Jesus. Wow, that stare’s intense.”

Though I had stopped wearing my rings after receiving a few too many stares during our trip to the Vatican, Isaac seems to think we are the same.

“It’s okay. I don’t want the nuns to yell at me,” I explain, stepping back to widen the space between us. Really, I just couldn’t care less. 

Isaac steps forward. His Yiddish-speaking grandmother had clearly never told him what mine always said: Es iz nit mayn tsig un nit mayn khanike-likhtl.” Yiddish—though she would have called it Jewish—for “it's not my goat and not my Hanukkah candle.” Essentially, my Jesus print is none of his business. 

I’ve learned quite a bit this past week. Yes, about Latin, but we already knew that sort of learning would be happening. I’ve learned that going to Latin Camp means reading more recent Latin—recent meaning Saint John, not Vergil. I’ve learned that “unus militum lancea latus eius aperuit, et continuo exivit sanguis, et aqua.” Who would’ve thought that there would be “sanguis, et aqua,” “blood and water,” in the man? I liked hearing about Jesus’s supposed anatomy. Isaac didn't. He doesn't like to do a lot of things that I like. 

On Saturdays, he doesn’t like to use his phone. Or walk the Colosseum. Or fly on airplanes. He doesn’t like sitting next to our professor who prays with rosary beads on bus rides, and he doesn’t like staying at a nunnery. Do I have to mention that he hates it when Mona Lisa Jesus stares him down? But we make good roommates, Mona Lisa Jesus and I, and though the nuns aren’t much for kosher cooking, they are hosts I’d prefer not to offend. 

“Are you sure?” Isaac asks. “I mean, don’t you think it's kind of weird, if you’re Jewish and all, to sleep with those things?”

Those things, though the property of the nuns of Casa Santa Brigida, are my goats and my Hanukkah candles. I keep them in my shoebox with my rings and my packet of the Gospel of Saint John. 

“Es iz nit mayn tsig un nit mayn khanike-likhtl,” I say. I immediately curl my stomach toward my spine as if to envelop back through my belly button the humiliating words that just slipped from my mouth. But I give no explanation. I don’t want to translate my Jewish for him. 

Isaac raises an eyebrow. But he walks away with only his staring goat and gift-shop candles and leaves mine hanging precisely where the nuns left them.