Jewish in Bangkok
By Anna Moss
To get from Wilmington to Bangkok, it was a grueling red-eye flight over a handful of oceans, always with a stopover in some country or other where Jews were not particularly welcome. But in Thailand, Jews were more than welcome—that is, they would be, if anyone had ever met a Jew to welcome.
We may be a minority in America, but in Thailand, we are a microminority, a term I just made up. While there are tons of Jewish and Israeli backpackers passing through, very, very few residents of Thailand are Jewish. This wasn’t something I thought about at all when I made the decision to move to Bangkok to teach in 2016, but it ended up coloring my two years in the country—and in the most vivid of ways. The teeny-tininess of the Jewish community made it warm and welcoming, and many of my best memories, and most of my best friends, came from the tiny Jewish expat community.
What follows are some moments that stand out in my memory. Please join me on this trip down memory lane. Or, as they might (but really, they don’t) say in Thailand, Soi Memory…
High Holidays
I straddled the motorbike as it zoomed down Sukhumvit Road, my mototaxi driver expertly weaving between the gridlocked cars. The traffic-trapped cars belched out smoke and God knows what else, but we were free—full speed ahead, and diagonal, and sideways. My first few times on a mototaxi, I had gripped onto the bike—and the sympathetic driver—for dear life. But today, I watched the world blur by—a flash of the pineapple seller, a blue glimpse of the ever-present Pepsi brand shade umbrellas—and smiled up into the morning sunshine. “I’m riding on the back of a motorbike through downtown Bangkok on the way to Yom Kippur services,” I thought. “Does it get much better than that?”
I hobbled from the bustling street into the chic downtown hotel on my bad ankle and sat on the couch to catch my breath. I watched the fountain in the middle of the lobby, bubbling grandiosely. Bangkok is full of water features like that: beautiful fountains, forbidden pools and ponds—the oppressive heat always made me wonder whether I would get yelled at if I just jumped in. If only I was one of the giant monitor lizards, then I could slither into any pond I wanted.
Energy regained, I took the elevator up a few floors, as the email directions had stated. When I got off the elevator, the irreverent older guy—what was his name, Art? I begin to forget—greeted me by name.
“Nice to see you here,” I said.
With a wry grin, he laughed, “They got me to stand here all day and take tickets, but they can’t get me to set foot inside the service!”
Art was like that, always a rebel. He never did anything he didn’t believe in 100% in his life. He had been in Thailand for nearly 50 years because he had dodged the draft for the Vietnam War. Uncle Sam called him up to go off to Vietnam, but Art took the initiative to beat him to the punch, only he ended up just a few miles too far East. Did he know that he would be an exile for his whole life? Did he know he would never again set foot in the United States? He doesn’t seem to mind, at any rate. He’s always got a wry smile, and he wears his iconoclastic ideals well as a key and active member of the Thailand Progressive Jewish Community—on his own terms.
As I walked to my seat, I nodded and smiled at everyone I knew, which was nearly everyone. The rabbi stood at the front, leading everyone in a reflection. She had been flown in from Israel for the high holidays, which was the main reason we had a ticket price. Since the ten Days of Awe come between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it didn’t make sense for her to fly all the way back to Israel and then all the way back to Thailand again, so we all paid for her to stay over at a hotel and do some tourist stuff.
I’m normally pretty salty about paying for a ticket to attend a religious service, but in this case it made sense; the rabbi was really amazing. It turns out that she was one of the OG women rabbis who wrote the progressive prayerbook! She taught us new songs and explained the history of how she got these 1970s-era feminist prayers into the book.
After services, we all broke the fast at the Greek restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel. Convenient!
Shabbat Potlucks
I could smell the robust aroma of my husband’s Famous Vegan Chili Stew the moment I stepped out of the elevator. The smell always hit me all at once: the lentils, the fresh herbs from the old guy who sold potatoes and a few fresh, green things at a folding table outside the 7–11. As I turned the corner and approached our apartment door, I wondered if anyone had beaten me to it. I’m usually late to my own parties, and Shabbat potlucks are no different.
The Shabbat potluck crew could always be counted on to get together if you didn’t have anything to do on a Friday.
We were:
· Me, a mid-20s, nihilistic test prep tutor, punk rocker, and train aficionado.
· Blair, the always-optimistic serial entrepreneur in her late 20s. After leaving Bangkok, she spent the next few years traveling around Asia; she is now settled in Belgrade, Serbia with her own boutique relocation business. (See: www.blairinbelgrade.com).
· Simon, the charming, 40-something hotel website somethingorother, who was always up for a potluck when he wasn’t visiting his husband in Singapore. Simon and his husband were finally able to move to Taiwan together a couple of years ago; Thailand only began to legally recognize gay marriage years later.
· Alec, a much spicier, bit older, and equally nihilistic test prep tutor. Even though he and his husband lived way out in the suburbs, Alec always made an effort to come to potlucks, which I appreciated given the distance.
· Bev, the Matriarch. Bev had been in Bangkok since the ’70s, and she told us about how she remembered when they first put telephone lines into her neighborhood.
Bev didn’t always come to potlucks, but when she hosted, it felt like being back home, having a real Shabbat dinner at my parents’ friends’ house. Her apartment had real furniture, cabinets displaying all kinds of art, even a tablecloth. It was funny because no matter what any of us transients did, no matter how nice the fancy new apartment buildings were—and Bangkok is chock full of fancy new apartment buildings, which is an issue in itself—we just couldn’t make them feel like home, because it wasn’t really home for us. So, I always liked going around Bev’s, even though I only went once or twice.
“What is ‘Jewish’?”
I was out for lunch with a coworker, and I fumbled for words.
“It’s sort of like Christians but . . . without . . . Jesus?” I paused. This was probably not clarifying anything.
“Jews believe in one god, but, like, I don’t really believe—well, I’m sort of agnostic—but um . . . We don’t celebrate Christmas. Well, I sort of do, as much as people here. You know, I love going to see all the Christmas decorations at the mall, the big sales, the gigantic polar bear outside CentralWorld . . .”
Thailand is 93% Buddhist and is a religious monarchy. The king is a religious leader and is believed to be divinely descended, and if you disagree with that, don’t say it out loud or you’ll end up in jail. Thailand might be the chilliest religious autocracy around, but it still is one.
That said, as long as you act with respect to the king, you can practice whatever religion you want. Thailand is 5% Muslim and 1% Christian, and there are so few Jews that I’m pretty sure I had Shabbat dinner with the entire Jewish population at some point.
What is interesting is that Israelis are pretty common, and you’ll even see signs written in Hebrew in the most touristy areas. Lots of young Israelis backpack around Thailand as a gap year, so most people are familiar with Israelis and know that they are usually Jewish. This leads to the rather funny situation where many people in Bangkok think that, if you are Jewish, then you must be from Israel. I had some confusing discussions where I tried to explain to people that I was Jewish but from America, which was sort of like telling someone you are French but really from Germany, and we all left the conversation bemused. In America, many people make the opposite mistake, assuming that everyone who lives in Israel is Jewish, so it was funny to see the opposite assumption, that anyone who is Jewish must live in Israel.
“So,” I floundered, still trying to explain what it means to be Jewish, without referencing Judeo-Christian background knowledge I would normally take for granted. “We have one God, and it’s sort of the same one as the Christians, but a little different . . . I still like to go and see the Christmas lights, but like, without Jesus? Since Jews don’t celebrate Christmas,” I continued, surely giving the clearest explanation of all time, in a city where literally every devout Buddhist celebrates Christmas by taking selfies with a giant glowing polar bear in a Santa hat at the mall.
“Ah, this coffee is really good, isn’t it?” she said, mercifully changing the subject.
It makes me laugh now, and, looking back, I think it’s a funny story. But I wonder if that near-insurmountable linguistic and cultural divide didn’t reveal something deep and important, something about why synagogues are emptying, something about why more and more, we aren’t raising Jewish children who raise Jewish children. At its very core, what does it mean to be Jewish? How can I reconcile Judaism as a religion with Judaism as an ethnic heritage without dressing up my confusion in highfalutin words like “reconcile” and “ethnic heritage?”
And so, I will leave you with this question: If you were somewhere far away and a colleague asked you what “Jewish” means–and what it means to you–what would you tell them?
About the Author:
ANNA MOSS is a native Wilmingtonian who now runs Mind the Test: Brain-Based Tutoring out of South Jersey. When not teaching, Anna can be found reading about sociolinguistics, baking interesting desserts (her toddler loves her orange-rosemary banana bread!), and traveling with her husband, toddler, and dog.
