5. When I Was Jewish

Note: the former controversy regarding personal posts has been resolved. I am free to write about my life, within certain constraints intended to protect the privacy of others.

I converted to Judaism in 1984 when I married my second husband, in part because that is what he and his family wanted, but also because it was an easy decision to make at the time.

I was always a spiritual person. My parents, each for different reasons, were not strongly attached to any formal religion, though my father had been baptized Episcopalian and my mother was raised Presbyterian. When I was six, during one of their periods of no church attendance, I walked myself to church on Sundays in Somerville, New Jersey to attend Sunday school. I remember the picture of Jesus with blue eyes and flowing blonde hair, and working on art projects in class featuring scenes and characters from the Bible.

In later years, my mother briefly attended a Presbyterian church in Huntington, Long Island, then switched to a Methodist Church in the same town. I got involved in the Youth Group at the Methodist Church, attending summer camp sessions at the Methodist Church Camp on Shelter Island for a couple summers.

I was spiritual, but not particularly religious. I could not get my mind around concepts like the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus.

In high school and college, most of my friends and boyfriends were Jewish, and I became familiar and comfortable with Jewish culture as I encountered it via friends from mostly affluent New York families. New York Jewish culture washed over me with its warmth, humor, family bonds, religious and cultural traditions, and I was charmed.

When the question of conversion came up, it seemed a simple matter of letting go of the past to embrace a new life with new possibilities. I studied Hebrew and we traveled to Israel, then joined the reform temple where we were married. I learned to cook traditional Jewish food and we celebrated all the holidays with family and friends; sometimes, we cooked for 35 or more people, setting up folding tables in an L-shape reaching from the dining room into the living room. Those were joyful times.

Yet there was a dark side to this conversion. For all of its upsides, I did not feel I was being myself. When I look at photos of myself from those days, like the one above (from sometime in the 1980s at a Bar Mitzvah), I see a person desperately trying to fit in and be accepted. The glamorous clothes, makeup and sparkly smile are more a reflection of what I thought others wanted me to be than who I really was.

The photo below of me attending another Bar Mitzvah was taken several years after the previous one, right after I moved from New York to California in 1990. I came back to New York for the event. The smile in this picture is still sparkly, but by then I was getting tired of the effort it took to stay thin, squeeze into dresses with sequins and smile so brightly.

In all I spent ten years being Jewish. The marriage lasted only two years after moving to California, and after the divorce I had a religious identity crisis. Should I remain Jewish? Did it matter to the kids? (It didn’t.)

One thing I learned from this experience is that religion and culture are radically different, and you cannot really convert to a different culture. Jewish identity has an optional religious component, and many, many opt out entirely or participate for largely social reasons.

Though my young experiences of Christianity were fleeting, I missed them. I missed the hymns, the candlelight service at Christmas eve, Christmas itself, and those brief moments of spiritual transcendence I experienced, like when you feel brotherly love for humankind or when you know your life is part of a bigger picture. It’s not that Judaism doesn’t offer similar opportunities for spiritual growth and transcendence, it’s just that I never felt like it was my spiritual home.

The photo below was taken circa 1981, three years before the conversion. What strikes me about the photos from this time is that I appear as I do now, though it’s nearly 30 years later and I’m way fatter. (Yes, that’s a real Newsday sweatshirt–it belonged to my older brother.)

I reverted to my former tomboy ways after moving to California, and went looking for a new spiritual home, first trying out a Roman Catholic church, and ultimately joining an Episcopal church where I’ve been a member for the last fourteen years.

The process of deciding which church to call my home was primarily an intellectual one. I still can’t get my mind around the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus, but I don’t worry about it anymore. I believe the core Christian teachings about love, generosity and forgiveness and in the big picture notions of redemption and grace. The truth lies somewhere in the tween transforming the historical Jesus as a Jewish teacher into the Christian idea of Jesus as a man who embodied the perfection of God. Or maybe the truth exists outside of time and space, such that all points are true simultaneously and there is no wrong position, just the core message of love.

Sometimes people ask how I can spend so much time at church given my quasi-Christian beliefs. This is a good question. Between choir practice, singing with the choir on Sundays and activities with my women’s group, I spend 5-8 hours per week on church-related activities. Every Sunday I read the words of the Nicene Creed and take communion, though I do not literally believe most of the words of the creed and think of the communion host and wine as the older Jewish Sabbath bread and wine: the bread of the earth, the fruit of the vine.

I go because I feel at home there and I love my church community. I love seeing and singing with them, working on projects together, bringing dinner to someone who is sick at home, preparing a funeral reception for a recent widow in my women’s group. I like watching the young married people with babies, the children growing up, the older people growing frail, the whole cycle as people come up to the altar for communion. (The chancel choir pews are the best seats in the house.)

And I go for the romance of it, especially the sacred choral music, some of which has never been recorded.

I like being part of something old, a layer in a layer cake of cultural eras and their myths, each building on ideas from the past and hopes for the future.