When I was a teenager, I was in two abusive relationships – one with my then-boyfriend, and one with God.
My father’s side of the family is Jewish and my mother’s side is Christian; I was raised Christian. When I was 13, I was confirmed into the Lutheran church – a decision that was essentially made for me – and then at age 15, I started dating my ex.
We had been best friends growing up in our small town, and we dated for a little under four years until we broke up while I was in college. After our first few months of dating, I found myself deferring more and more of my decisions and opinions to his will. After a while, I was expected to defend his bullying of others and allow for his belittling of me, and to say nothing when he was hours late or cancelled on me altogether. He manipulated me into doing exactly what he wanted. Soon, he began to interrogate me about what I wore, if I drank, and who I spent time with.
At 16, I was at something of a crossroads. While it would take me two more years to escape a relationship rooted in gaslighting – a behavior defined by Psychology Today as “a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality” – I was already undergoing a break-up with God.
I remember sitting on my bed sobbing, having decided that later that night I would lose my virginity and terrified that the decision would condemn me to Hell. I remember typing the words “will God hate me if I have sex?” into Google. I was scared to the point of sickness about God and the consequences of sinning.
As I later learned, such a relationship – one of fear, imbalanced power, and insecurity instead of love and acceptance – is abusive.
In the weeks after I lost my virginity, I attended church every Sunday. I was never afforded the freedom growing up to question the belief that Jesus was the messiah. It was expected that I would be an obedient Christian. That was the way things were from when I was a child arguing about having to attend Sunday school, to my high school years getting grounded for fighting about having to go to church when all I wanted to do was sleep in.
But those Sundays after I felt I had done something inexcusable, while I was clinging to any shard of hope that I could be forgiven in God’s eyes, I became angry and began to examine the tradition I had grown up with through a critical lens.
Unlike what I eventually learned through Judaism, my Christian upbringing taught me that being pious meant being God-fearing. In many ways, being constantly fearful of what my then-partner might say or do taught me to act in ways that would avoid conflict and keep me in good standing. But in both my relationship with God and with my ex, I was fundamentally being told that my very existence was something to apologize for. To be born was to be born a Sinner.
In my freshman year of college, I made the personal decision to disconnect from Christianity. On Easter, arguably the holiest day of the Christian calendar, I made a vocal declaration to myself that I would not be celebrating. I still put on my floral springtime dress and sat in the decorated pews of my church as the organ music echoed around me, but I wasn’t having it anymore.
I was not going to celebrate the way that the “miracle” of Christ’s resurrection made me feel about myself, how it made me feel guilty for “sins” outside my control. In my mind, being born and living a human life was not a sin. But in order to be grateful for Easter, I felt that I needed to internalize and accept a fundamental flaw within my being.
The summer after that Easter, I went on Birthright to learn more about another religion, one just as much a part of my ancestry as Christianity. The Judaism presented to me on that trip was incredibly non-conditional. There are some ambiguous teachings about the afterlife, but the focus of the tradition lies elsewhere. The core of Jewish practice, I learned, was the continuous interpretation, questioning, and re-interpretation of the Torah, the repair of the world, and performing mitzvot for yourself and others. This was the first time I felt free within a religion to examine it critically and accept what worked for me. It was exactly what I needed.
Through years of keeping up appearances while allowing myself to be controlled by others’ expectations, I had lost my sense of self. I was just finishing my freshman year of college and was finally coming into myself, thanks to the many miles separating me from my family and former partner.
Something was compelling me, empowering me to become more than the dependent, complacent, and demure mouse of a human I had been for so long. During this period, I was struggling. My grades were slipping rapidly, and I was living with anxiety that manifested in an eating disorder. I didn’t like myself, which I now realize enabled others to exert power over me. It was obvious that something in my life had to change.
5,000 miles away from home, I finally found my community. A week into my Birthright trip, the support of people who have now become my best friends allowed me to break up with my abuser after almost four years of doubting my own sense of reality.
I prayed and cried at the Kotel as I slipped a piece of crumpled paper that read “help me, give me clarity, please” in ink distorted by fat drops of tears into the Wall’s ancient cracks. In the most vulnerable moment of my life, I followed through with the decision I had known for some time had to be made.
That night, we hiked into the vast desert, and I sobbed under the enormity of the sky. It was the closest I have ever felt to God. God was not asking anything of me. I was allowed to forgive myself. The next day, atop Masada, I chose my Hebrew name and began my Jewish life. I was Rivkah, Matriarch; I was done taking shit from any human, institution, or supreme being. The Judaism I found gave me space to be newly brazen, and radically myself.
Because I was still new to Judaism, it wasn’t until the following year that I decided to observe Yom Kippur. In all honesty, it was probably good that I waited because I wasn’t in a strong enough place emotionally to handle a holiday of atonement. I had also at first misunderstood the point of fasting – I thought of it as a punishment, instead of as an opportunity to transcend the body.
This is the fast I desire: To unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke to let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin. (Isaiah 58)
Making this distinction was necessary before I made the choice to fast. When I was finally ready the following year, I felt empowerment rather than a vague and empty shame.
For much of my life, I was told that I was wrong and less-than, but such self-flagellation didn’t actually allow me the opportunity to face the real ways I had erred, and the steps I could take to build a better life.
Judaism, and the teachings of teshuva, not only allowed me to see that what I was living through – both religiously and romantically – was not sustainable, but my Jewish practice has also given me a path forward.
Judaism has granted me the immense clarity that a former version of myself prayed for at her most battered and defeated. As the possibilities of what healthy relationships can look like with others, with God, and with myself have blossomed, I have too.
Featured image credit: Canva.com/Aaron Northcott.
