Firstly, I think that brushing away the "holy water" was unnecessary. Unless one puts meaning behind an item or object, the item or object is just the said item or object--at least in cases where the object is not inherently signified or set apart as something. Secondly, when Malina wrote about how her "dad stood slouching in a back corner pew", I was reminded of my own Crypto-Jewish granddad falling asleep in the back of the church that he had his family attend (about which I was told by my aunt Mary--who was, although we are Ashkenazi, named for both of her then-living grandmothers [Mary Trudnak Czarnecki (z"l), the granddaughter of Mária Nagyová Trudnyaková; and Marysia "Mary" Rusnak Gaydos, a Levite and a granddaughter of Mária Nováková Rusznáková]. She distinctly remembers that Pop-Pop would fall asleep in the back of the church while Grandma would Dad and Aunt Mary with her in the church service.).
Thirdly, I relate to Malina's point about how "this is not how I envisioned my first trip to the country where my maternal grandmother... and her entire family fled during pogroms". As someone who just discovered that I'm Jewish and a bat-Anusim a while back, I myself am trying to recover of much of my Jewishness as possible (I was honestly raised to believe that my dad was fully Slavic [Polish, Lithuanian, and Czechoslovakian--I had no idea that he was an Ashkenazi Jew and Matrilineal Levite.]). Granted that I personally believe that one is still Jewish when he or she believes in Jesus (as I myself do), but I agree that a Jew is (to say the very least and maybe understating at least a little bit) remiss to have a Vaticanist ("Catholic", "universal") wedding. I also had to convince my sister and her to-be husband to incorporate some Messianic Jewish traditions into their to-be home (Granted that their officiant will be a Messianic Jewish pastor, but the wedding will still be traditionally Protestant and not Messianic Jewish--and as much as I love my to-be-in-law brother, I was hoping that my sister would find a fellow Jewish believer to marry.).
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