I wish my family was like this. My mom was raised in a very religious Jewish family and left the orthodoxy when she met my dad, a totally non-religious (but still Jewish) kid from Brooklyn who never had a bar mitzvah and couldn't even read Hebrew...goyisher shmuck that he is.

My parents met in the middle and raised my brother and I in a conservative Jewish household. We went to synagogue for major holidays, attended Sunday School and learned about Jewish history. My mother was the president of our synagogue, my father was the treasurer, and our Jewish community was very important to them, even on a secular level. This didn't sit well with my mom's brother/my uncle, who married a woman who insists on keeping our two families as distant as possible.

Today, I'm 26 years old and can count on my hands the number of times I've even met my aunt and their five children - my first fucking cousins - and it's only been at major events like certain bar/bat mitzvahs (certain ones; she and the kids didn't attend mine even though we moved the whole affair to a Sunday and cancelled the after party specifically so they could drive to attend), and at my grandfather's funeral.

When my father asked my uncle to be the best man at my parents' wedding, he refused because my aunt didn't want him to stand on the altar with them. Yes, my uncle turned down the opportunity to be the best man at his baby sister's wedding because his wife thought God would object to my father's lack of a Jewish education and religious upbringing. Instead of taking the same path as your family, they chose fear instead and pushed us all away.

It's sad because my first experiences with religion (my brother's as well) were with our family, and were overwhelmingly negative because of how they treated us. If they had been more accepting, I don't think I would have developed such an aversion to religion, especially to Judaism. My aunt and uncle raised their kids to be just as exclusionary as they were, so I'll keep the interaction between us minimal when I have kids of my own because I don't want their attitudes to be influenced in the same way.