outsider/outsider: geek/jew

I give people all sorts of very sound, very Jewish advice.

Find a synagogue you like going to. Check out your local JCC. Check out services. Find your own unique, awesome way to celebrate your Jewishness, your faith, your culture. Get involved with people romantically who understand how important faith is or isn’t important to you.

I don’t know if I’ve ever said ‘Find the Geeks.’

It’s important, a life-saver, really, to find the people who get you. Who understand you, who take you as you are, even the fiddly bits you’re not so proud of. I had my hands in the guts of my computer this weekend, which merrily shot my ability to do–well, everything–but it gave me time to think. I could focus this on the bits that depressed me, about being honest with myself about how mainstream Jewish culture is off-putting for me, that going to services, belonging to a synagogue and Jewish communal life is painful.

I want to do all these things I tell people to do, which namely boils down to living a Jewish life communally, and every time I do, I come home feeling emotionally like I’ve been physically punching myself in the face region, repeatedly. That sensation may be a whole story–or series of them–for another time.

So, I can focus on bitter parts. Or I can focus on the good parts.

Find the Geeks.

My fellow geeks, Jewish or not, are the people who bolster my ability to be not only myself, but live a Jewish life. The guys who come over to game, who wish me a Yom Tov after a holiday’s recently passed. The people I’ve played with the guts of computers with, gamed with, fragged each other–we celebrate Pesach together, giggling as we sing the Four Questions, doing shots with each other on Purim. Frying really, really weird food together on Hanukkah is a tradition. And the hugs, long and silent, when someone in our family dies, are some of the most meaningful I have ever received. There are enough of us that the non-Jews in our social node have picked up a heartwarming fluency in our religion, our culture, our complicated selves, and I believe we do our best to return the favor. Caring about other people in general, let alone your friends, requires a commitment to cultural fluency, to an ability to understand the emotional languages of selfhood.

I may not get that much in mainstream, institutional Jewish life, where I feel like a doubled outsider, a woman and a Geek, whose love stories and relationships are entwined with astrophysics and computer hardware, but my social network keeps me from ever giving up. Curiosity, support, an open mind, a willingness to subject oneself and a situation to analysis—these are the Geek traits I carry with me from late night debates about Torah and computing into Friday night services, into holidays and meetings. I may not have many fellow Geeks in my mainstream Jewish existence, but their presence in my life is what keeps me going back, again and again, trying to find my own way, and helps blaze a trail for the other outsiders-in-outsiders, making a home for all the misfits after. It’s hard to make a community easy for all to belong to, without ghettoizing or demeaning people for differences, but it’s the only option that has a heart, and the love of all in mind.