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I marvel at the fact that long ago I left my religion after sitting in the small shule before daybreak during the first year of my father’s death and nine men showed up so we could not say Kaddish aloud because I did not form the 10th “man” for the minyan. I left that Judaism like yesterday’s news and went out into the world on the arm of many an atheist lover – glad to be done with it, but still cowering in the dark from its influence.

At night, I said my prayers without anyone hearing them – Dear Lord forgive me if I have this day/done any wrong in work or play/always help me to do what’s right/watch over me all through the night. Then I’d ask for health and happiness for me and all my unbelieving partners and animals. I was and remain a believer. It’s just that what I believe has changed so many times over that coming back to Judaism wasn’t in the cards for me, at least, until now.

Joseph Campbell, a nonbeliever until he was dying and went back to his Catholicism said: God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that. And so it is, but saying you’re a Jew means that you are saying you buy lock stock and barrel this God of the Old Testament who is over testosteroned in anyone’s estimation. And remember, I was done with Judaism.

Then I adopted my son and because of the fact that spirituality is to African American what water is to dolphins, I was thinking about his spiritual path and education from the get go. I thought through osmosis he would glean the spiritual education that I’ve had and come to know his own soul’s mind. I thought being adopted by an older white woman in a society that would judge him based on the color of his skin was enough difference for him to endure. I definitely did not want to raise him Jewish.

And then some things happened.

I rejoined my own spiritual journey and arrived at something akin to epiphany after epiphany that helped me see God in me and all around me, in the purest expression of love. When I’m losing my mind these days walking around my house or grimacing at myself in the mirror, I say aloud, “I love you, Rachel” and there my mind and heart and soul finds peace. By happenstance, I picked up a copy of The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz’s book that the New York Times said is a book for “anyone who feels the narrowness of a wholly secular life or who wonders about the fate of esoteric spiritual traditions in a world that seems bent on destroying or vulgarizing them.”

I found in Kamenetz’s book some hidden truths about Judaism that I needed to hear to think about my religion in any kind of seriousness again. I learned it did indeed embrace mystery and dance and revelry and passion but that this had been held in abeyance by the Torah rationalists. Around the same time, I traveled with Tin to a bar mitzvah of my friend’s son in San Francisco and found a welcoming environment in a reform synagogue that was bent on bringing young families together to worship. Returning home, I coincidentally picked up My Promised Land, Ari Shavit’s popular overview of the reason for Israel, and as one thing leads to another that year I learned Tin would have a Christmas tree at his other’s parent’s house. [read: I grew up without Christmas trees and thought my son would too.]

Along your spiritual path, things poke you and prod you and stick with you to bring you to a certain point and it was at this point that I began to look for a synagogue for Tin and I to join here in New Orleans. We went first to the oldest one in the city, Anshe Sfard, in a beautiful old building off of St. Charles Avenue, in an area that once housed many Jewish families. I had met the rabbi dancing in the streets for the Hanukkah second line and adored him from the first moment. But everything about the synagogue reeked of history and moth balls. And so my friend who had introduced me to this rabbi, introduced me to the next rabbi while he was playing his clarinet at the Spotted Cat and the rabbi and his wife had come to listen and dance. This is how I came to make the trek to Metairie and check out that synagogue where young families and better yet, young kiddies were hopping skipping and dancing all around and eating chocolate matzo for the chocolate seder.

But it was sitting down to speak to the rabbi at his breakfast table about joining his shule that made me know he had the direction and vision that I wanted in a community of faith. He had thrown off the formality of the large sanctuary for the intimacy of the little shule in the building; he had joined a group of faith-based African American leaders in the city to work towards social justice in our incarceration problem. He had started a blog where he said the most flak he got was when he brought up Israel, racism, or gun control. And it wasn’t but just a few hours after joining the synagogue that Israel and Palestine escalated its war again and threw off the whole warm fuzzies of my reJEWveNATION.

I went back to the Jew in the Lotus to a passage where Kamenetz quotes Joseph Goldstein, who says, “One reason I don’t feel so connected, and this may be a totally exoteric dimension of Judaism, but I was never comfortable with all its nonuniversal aspect. It seemed separatist to me. The whole notion of the chosen people. This is true of all Western religions. They are not so much talking about the universal nature of the mind, but rather a belief system. If you believe, you are part of a certain group. If you don’t, you’re outside of that.”

Kamenetz goes on to quote Thubten Chodron who “felt Jews emphasized their own suffering too much. ‘I felt very uncomfortable when I got into high school with Jewish paranoia. This whole feeling of unrelatedness to the rest of humanity because you’re Jewish.

I grew up in the time of the Watts riots, with black people saying they wanted equal rights. So were women and Chicanos. That made a lot more sense to me than this Jewish protectorate. I moved into the sphere of social action, taking what I learned about suffering from my Jewish background but going well beyond the narrow Jewish limit to which it was applied.'”

Allen Ginsburg, Kamenetz writes, “said in a 1992 interview that he agreed with the former United Nations resolution stating that Zionism is racism. ‘And the fact that everybody is so screamingly angry Zionism can’t be called that is even worse.'”

And I find my own mixed feelings in these passages; once I had dispelled with Judaism and was simply another wandering Jew, who had left the tribe’s system of belief, it made it easy to sit at a table where everyone was throwing stones at the Jews in Israel and talking about how horrible and racist they are, or when anyone brought their suspicions to the table about Jews who run the banks in the U.S. or Hollywood or just about any business enterprise that a good portion of Americans believe are concentrated in Jewish hands and controlled with blood money. It was easy to be undercover.

And now it’s not so easy. My reJEWveNATION and the bringing my African American son into the fold changes everything, all that was is different, all that will be must change, all that could be has to be realized, and all that is just got even more complicated.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2014 at 9:07 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.