The opposite of "chosen"

Confession: I kind of didn’t, like, know about Jewish people until I was nearly thirteen years old. It wasn’t entirely my fault: I grew up in a town that was various shades of White Christian as far as the eye could see, and even though I’d read the diary of Anne Frank and Number the Stars (Holocaust lit-Lite for people under twelve), I was so struck by the horror of it that I didn’t remotely grasp that the people in question were any different in their faith than my nice-but-totally-non-churchgoing family. (We practice a sort of Lazy Unitarianism—celebrating Christmas and Easter, but only as a means to the end of putting sparkly things all over a tree in the living room and consuming mass quantities of alcohol and chocolate.)

In fact, I didn’t really grasp the existence of Jews until 7th grade, when my friend Jana Neudel was suddenly getting mitzvahed, and I realized the full extent of my ignorance.

“There’s just one thing I still don’t really get,” I said to her one day after school. We were taping fuses to model rockets under the supervision of her dad, Mr. Neudel, and I was getting the pre-adolescent version of Judaism 101.
“What?” she said.
“I’m confused about the bats. Are there gonna be, like, bats? At your mitzvah? Don’t you guys worry about rabies and stuff?”
“Um…. no,” Jana said.
“Oy vey,” Mr. Neudel said. Or at least, I think he did.

Obviously, I’m much better-informed now, as a 24 year-old New York City resident, than I was as a 13 year-old in upstate New York. And that was my most recent crash course in making an ignorant ass of myself. At least until last night, when I had a spectacular relapse in front of my Jewish boyfriend.

“So my dad asked if I wanted to invite ‘anyone special’ to Rosh Hashanah this year,” he said to me, as we rode the subway uptown.
“Oh?” I said, kind of perking up. I had been repeatedly freaking out over my fears that Dave’s parents wouldn’t like me because of my non-Jewishness. Being invited to Rosh Hashanah, good sign. “When is it?”
“Oh, well don’t worry,” he said. “I told my dad that it would probably be too weird for you.”
“What?” I said, my voice rising by about three octaves.
“Yeah, so don’t worry, you don’t have to go.” He smiled beatifically at me. I, um, reacted.

“Why would you say that? I want to do family things with you! Do you want your parents to think I hate Jewish people?!” (Realization came here that I was being totally asinine, but I couldn’t stop.) “Oh my God, you’re embarrassed of me, aren’t you! You’re embarrassed of me, and you don’t want me to meet your family, and your parents are going to think I’m an Anti-Semite.”

Dave looked seriously perplexed.
“I just didn’t think you’d want to go,” he said. “Of course you can come, if you want to. Do you want to come?”
“No,” I said, my lower lip pushed out into a three-inch uber-pout, “you don’t want me to.”
“Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do! Come on, of course I do, you should come,” he said.
“Okay, I’m coming to Rosh Hashanah,” I said.
“Good,” he said.

Thirty seconds passed in silence. And then:

“Dave?”
“Yeah?”
“I just realized something.”
“What?”
“I have no idea what Rosh Hashanah is.”

How does that saying go? Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug… and sometimes, you’re a shiksa asshole.