These days I find myself in a peculiar situation. I have started the process of converting to me. My mother is Irish (disillusioned Catholic). My father is Jewish. As I tried in vain to explain to the Orthodox rabbi who meets with me once a week to tell me what being a real Jew is about, I “raised myself” Jewish. From this end, the early years of my Jewish awakening look like a physics experiment from high school where a mallet sets a ball into motion; the ball lends its momentum to another, and another and another until something finally takes off flying.
It sounds silly, but I woke up one morning and announced I was going to Hebrew School. Luckily for me, my urge tapped into my father’s own latent rabbinical aspirations, and before I could say “shalom aleichem,” we were en route to the nearest Jewish Renewal synagogue in Berkeley. With just a year to go until Bat Mitzvah age, I threw myself into the preparations.
Shortly after my love affair with the Alef-Bet and the stories of the Torah, the inevitable political conditioning of the San Francisco Bay Area began taking root in my 13-year-old psyche. Thanks to Berkeley’s far-left sense of political correctness, I hated Bat Mitzvahs and Jews and Israelis until six years later when I got to college in Charlottesville, Virginia and found someone to hate more: Campus Crusades for Christ and Co.
Through Hillel, Torah study, Jewish-Arab Dialogue, and my eventual choice of a Religious Studies major, I made it clear that my people were not their people. Hillel and Chabad showed their approval by sending me brightly colored cellophane-wrapped holiday packages with phrases like “Happy New Year! Enjoy the honey sticks! Love, Hillel!” and “Purim Sameakh! Hope to see you soon! -Chabad.” With a little help from an unfamiliar environment, I was in the express lane moving toward some resemblance of an adult identity.
But then I moved to Israel.
Israel has controversial immigration laws, which in an ironic inversion of Hitler’s Nuremburg Laws, grant anyone with a Jewish grandparent citizenship in the Jewish state. While this affords Israel’s protection to all those who would have suffered under the Nazi regime, it does not guarantee that all Jewish Israeli citizens are Jews – at least, not under Orthodox law. Through a bizarre loophole, I and my compatriots of paternal Jewish descent are entitled to live here. We just shouldn’t call ourselves Jews.
Sometimes I feel like I might as well be a cross-bearing Peruvian. The Israeli Rabbinate doesn’t care that when I studied in Argentina, I volunteered at a Jewish community center and sought out a different temple every week. It doesn’t matter that I earned the title “Super Jew” at the university café where I served coffee to sleep-deprived students. And they certainly aren’t interested in the fact that my mother attends High Holy Day services more faithfully than I do. “Bruchim habaim leYisrael! Welcome to Israel, where your homeland welcomes you with the right hand and pushes you away with the left!”
I am not sure if there has ever been a moment in Jewish history when Jews were not divided by philosophy or geography or degrees of religiosity, so I suppose the situation of modern Jewry is pretty much on par with schisms of the past. The Reform and Renewal Movements told me I belonged. Israel’s Orthodox told me that I was misinformed. The Israeli government says I should live where I live. But for me, it all comes down to one nagging question: Am I really Jewish? The truth is that I’m not quite sure anymore.
Today, my Jewish CV looks different. You can find me shopping for ankle-length skirts at the mall in Beer Sheva. I bought a Schottenstein siddur, too. Klal Yisrael and Jewish solidarity is unrealistic, so I have opted to meet and/or surpass everyone’s standards of Jewishness by becoming halachically Jewish. It may not be exactly who I am, but maybe it’s something we can all agree on.
