Why a Jew?
Part One (Want to skip to Part Two?)
When friends and family find out I am a student/follower/observer/convert of Judaism, the first reaction I often get is, “Wha...what? Why?” Wow, what a loaded question. In truth, this little shpiel will only answer the most shallow and infinitesimal part of that question. So, my objective isn’t to detail all the painful experiences I’ve had growing up in Southern Baptist Bible Land. Nor is it to offer a defense of Judaism as somehow superior to other religions. My intent here is to simply answer the ‘why’ from a personal perspective. Many people new to Judaism speak of finding their way ‘home.’ I suppose, in a real sense, that resonates with me, but the experience didn’t happen overnight. In truth, I’ve been wrestling with Judaism for nearly thirteen years.
I’ve been proclaiming myself an atheist, or at least agnostic, for over twenty years (which would explain the surprise of the aforementioned friends and family). I won’t bore the reader with inglorious details of my bad experiences in church revival tents, but I will say this: I’ve had enough Holier-Than-Thou righteous bastards point a finger at me and say I’m gonna burn, baby, burn to last me a lifetime. The bible of my youth was a pain inflicting, misogynist, patriarchal and oppressive beast and I had no intentions of being easy prey. I reasoned that if God really were this omnipotent, omniscient white male up in the sky issuing self-aggrandizing judgment from above, then He and I had no business with each other. According to His followers, I was (am) an abomination. Lovely.
So I rejected God as I knew Him to be, in a fashion I thought total and complete. It wasn’t until I met a rabbi at age 19 did I realize that I had not rejected God, but merely someone else’s conceptualization of what ‘God’ embodied. Of course, I had explored Buddhism and other Eastern or nontraditional (i.e. nonwestern) philosophies regarding religion and spirituality, but I always stopped short of recognizing a divine presence. I viewed man as a fatally flawed character, intellectually advanced to the point of self-torture, forever doomed to contemplate mortality within the constructs of his own cerebral prison. God, I reasoned, existed as a malfunction somewhere between the cerebellum and the prefrontal cortex, and most of the world was insane.
Yet underneath my cold withdrawal, an awful truth lurked. I was a terrible atheist. While I made great headway in convincing others of God’s (whatever S/He/it may be) profound nonexistence, I never managed to convince myself. Pacing my room until the early morning hours, I argued extensively with God about why S/He didn’t exist, not recognizing the cruel irony in doing so. God, for whatever reason, never found my arguments particularly compelling, and so the impassioned dialogue continued. Gradually, I began to acknowledge that I would make a better agnostic than atheist, but I continued to outwardly scorn organized religion with great enthusiasm. To this day, I remain deeply suspicious of it.
At age 19, 7 years after my conversion to atheism, I attended Texas Wesleyan University where I was required to take a course on the Old Testament. Our professor was a methodist minister, which was pretty damned liberal considering I grew up in Southern Baptist country. Due to an illness, he took a week off from the course, and he invited his friend, a rabbi, to fill in for him. I don’t remember his name, and barely remember his appearance, but I will never forget his voice. Over the course of two class periods, that rabbi effectively altered the path of my own spiritual journey in profound fashion. For the first time in my life, someone told me I could argue with God-- with great passion-- and still have a relationship. That the religious texts I had been indoctrinated to accept as the sole word of God might, in fact, be the word of God, or might be the word of man, but either way it is our duty to interpret it and decipher the meanings, discuss how they may or may not be relevant in contemporary life. In fact, he said, the very word "Israel” translated as “God wrestler.” He baldly suggested to a roomful of conservative Christian students that the focus in life might be the 'here and now' rather than the 'hereafter.' For the first time in my life, a person in a position of religious authority stood before me, shrugged expressively and said, “I don’t know. What do you think?”
I was stunned... and enraged. How dare he waltz into my cozy little self built castle and knock down the walls I had so carefully constructed for so many years? I didn’t want a relationship with God of any sort, personal or otherwise. I wanted God, with all my heart, to GO AWAY. Driving home that first day, I pulled over and wept, then stepped out of my car on an old country road, looked up at the sky and yelled, “Why won’t you just leave me the f--- alone? What have I done to deserve this?”
The answer was, and always has been, the sound of wind blowing down a long, lonely stretch of road.
And that was, and is, my answer to ‘why.’
The sound of wind convinced me that there was something out there greater than myself, and that something was unknowable and miraculous. I stood there, my hair blowing in rhythm to this thing I could not see but only sense, and bore witness to the existence of God. I'm not implying that I was moved by a spiritual presence into becoming a 'true believer.' I mean that, finally, after many long years of struggle and torment, I simply took a new step along the path to/with Judaism, which was this: I agreed to acknowledge God's existence. Not worship it. Acknowledge it. Quietly, I conceded, “Alright. You exist.”
And nothing changed. No divine voice came to me and said, “Behold, thou hast seen the Almighty! Go forth and do something Interesting!” Nope. Just me, alone on a country road, talking to the wind. I sat on the hood of my car, mulling over what the rabbi had said. Over the next decade, I did not follow any particular faith, but I observed basic tenets of Judaism while refusing the trappings of organized dogma. I believe there is a ‘oneness’ that is greater than the sum of its parts. I believe there is a ‘contract’ to keep this oneness whole and healthy, and in return, keep us and all of creation whole and healthy. I believe the Torah-- and all sacred liturgy-- is, in part, our historic search for connection to this “oneness.’ I believe there comes a time every year when a person must take stock of what they have done in this life, and the wrongs they have committed unto others, and to hold themselves accountable for this. I believe the whole point of living is to repair the world, to honor the ‘Contract’ between that which is us, and that which is greater than us. I believe it is our task to search for meaning in ways that reconnect us with that ‘oneness.’ I believe that when the wind is cold and the road is long, you should put on a jacket and keep walking.
I keep visiting that long, lonely stretch of road so that I can continue to honor that moment when God and I progressed to meaningful speaking terms. I’m a cyclist, and the hours I spend alone in the saddle, miles from nowhere and surrounded by the vast expanse of this living world, are the hours that convince me to keep struggling. When the sound of my breath merges with the whoosh glide of the wheels beneath me and the dull roar of the wind in my ears, that’s when I witness perfection. That’s when I feel both the freedom and the burden of an immense Contract with something far, far greater than myself. There's something humbling about traveling all those miles to witness a single moment and recognizing you've only reached the halfway mark of your journey. The return awaits. Without these excursions, these moments of self-exile and return, I would never have allowed myself to approach the institution of organized religion. Yet as the years passed, I found I needed something more than my superficial observances and acknowledgments. I wanted a framework to continue my debate with God, which now involved any multitude of other issues. I wanted to read the fine print of this Contract I intuitively followed and renegotiate the terms and conditions.
Unfortunately, humans have this nasty habit of turning the most beautiful expressions of love into shackles of oppression, and I remained deeply skeptical. I read Michael Lerner’s Jewish Renewal with interest so intense I couldn’t sit still. I subscribed, with my partner, to Tikkun Olam. Still, I trembled in fear at the thought of stepping foot into a religious institution again. I feared having more fingers pointed at me and half-expected a sign at the synagogue to read, “Queers and/or free thinkers not allowed here.” Yet I had traveled too far down this path, and I needed ‘something’ more. So, Karrie and I attended a local synagogue. We were greeted with warmth and acceptance, and I found myself overwhelmed by the sensation of finally coming ‘home.’ I encountered a sort of ongoing, slow motion ‘deja vu.’ The songs, the Hebrew, the rituals-- everything rang so profoundly familiar to me that I seriously began to entertain the idea of past life experience when I never gave credence to such notions before. But ‘home’ to me was never a place without contention, and I continue to struggle with my own issues and history. I deeply distrust the Torah because it has been used in other contexts to oppress or control me, yet I believe that much beauty can be found amidst the pain.
As one of my great passions is textual analysis, I’ve often wondered if I’m missing my calling by not following the path of literary criticism rather than art criticism, but then, the two really aren’t so different. At any rate, I now find myself full circle, confronting the very texts I rejected so many years ago. In truth, it’s still too painful for me to read any religious text, but especially the Torah. I still equate it with the oppressive Old Testament of my youth. Reading the Torah initiates a flight or fight response in me, which, more often than not, ellicits a combative mode on my end. I’m much more comfortable reading someone else's take rather than the text itself, but I’m getting there. I’m trying to learn Hebrew, not because I ‘want to be Jewish,’ but because I want to see for myself and wage my struggle on my terms.
One of the first things my rabbis told me, as have many of my Jewish friends, is that not every synagogue will consider me Jewish. As ours is a reconstructionist synagogue with a large percentage of lesbian feminists in the congregation (and my partner and I have added to this), I can see where some orthodox or conservative institutions might find my status problematic. The difference between myself and the aforementioned women is that many of them were born Jewish and there is no questioning their identity. I was born a mutt with Native American heritage in Southern Baptist Country. The only possible Jewish link in my family is a great grandmother of unknown parentage who emigrated from (we think) Warsaw, Poland... but she’s paternal, so it doesn’t matter anyways. I’m choosing the Jewish path after years of struggling, but the particular branch of that path I follow is controversial.
And you know, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Rabbi Irving Greenberg writes in his book, The Jewish Way, that “the Jews are witnesses, outsiders and challengers, not infrequently the object of fear and anger.” Outsiders and challengers. My entire life view has been from an outsider perspective; I’m not sure I could embrace a path that didn’t have a few obstacles to navigate. I don’t want to be part of a belief system that accepts me without question, just I would not accept a belief system without my own questions. When my first child, still in the womb of my beloved, comes of age, I will expect him or her to choose the path of spirituality that meshes best with his or her world view.
So I’m not really interested in being Jewish as much as I’m interested in living Jewish, though I identify as Jewish privately. Am I right to feel this identification? Can I say I’m a Jew, even if I formally 'convert'? Can anyone say it on my behalf? I don’t know, and to be honest, it’s neither here nor there (and is another essay altogether). What really matters lies somewhere between here and there, when my breath merges with the wind as I look down a long, lonely stretch of road. That’s the energy, the synergy, that drives me to keep searching and struggling upon my inevitable return.
Ready for more? Part Two is here...
