The Ner Tamid (eternal light) above the Aron haKodesh (The Holy Ark, where the Torah scrolls are kept, is the holiest place in a synagogue, analogous to the Tabernacle in a Catholic Church) at Kehillath Israel in Brookline, Massachusetts. The Hebrew is a list of the Ten Commandments, abbreviated.
How do I define myself? Does my life reflect what God says is important? (In relation to God's having commanded the People Israel to obey his commandments and to be a "kingdom of priests and a holy nation." Exodus 19:6)
If I know anything, I know about new identities.
I came from a Christian family - albeit with a mother who had disenfranchised herself from organized religion and chose to allow me to "make up my own mind" - and though I was not baptized until my late 20s, I lived most of my adult life as a devout Christian and attempted to raise my children as such. However, in 2000 - for reasons that I am only now beginning to understand - I left the church, converted to Judaism, and for twelve years I lived and breathed Judaism and identified myself as Jewish. In June of 2012 I returned home to the Catholic Church, to my Christian roots.
In a way, my life is an embodiment of the old and the new, the passage of time between the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament. I know what it is like to have lived with the absence of Christ; I also know what it is like to have experienced the coming of Christ after a twelve-year Advent. As I transitioned from my Jewish life back to my Christian life, considering what to do with all the mezuzot on my door posts and whether to continue to keep kosher, I lived out some of the issues that the early church faced. Part of the reason I returned to Christianity was, in the end, even as I chanted the Hebrew prayers, kept strictly kosher - at home and outside - and observed a Saturday Sabbath, my identity was too deeply rooted in Christianity to ever really feel Jewish. I think I may have telegraphed this to potential employers - even though my voice was good enough, my Hebrew was certainly good enough - I wasn't that believable as a Jew. Even my son said to me one day, "Mom, you're not Jewish." In the end, I had to face the fact that no, I wasn't Jewish; I was deeply Christian (the toy lamb I slept with every night those ten years I lived in Brookline - an Easter present from my childhood - should have been a clue). I heard a story once about Abraham Joshua Heschel. He was speaking at a seminary, and during the question and answer period a young seminarian asked him,"Rabbi, you know everything there is to know about the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures. You know more about Jesus than some of us here do. Why aren't you a Christian?" To which Heschel replied, "Because I'm a Jew. I was born a Jew and I will die a Jew." So it is with me; I'm a Christian and that's all there is to it.
So, what exactly is my identity? Does my life reflect the kind of holiness that God is calling me into?
At the end of my Jewish journey, while I was essentially unaffiliated and feeling totally disconnected, I did consider that perhaps I had entered a phase of being "everything and nothing;" a mish-mosh of Christian and Jewish; able to morph myself into any situation - the ultimate expression of ecumenism and political correctness - but this was short lived, as I knew in my heart that what I needed was to call myself something and to stand for it proudly. I hated being nothing; the world is filled with empty, aimless people, and I was not going to be one of them.
The interesting thing is, I am now realizing that my Jewish background - knowing Hebrew, and having been trained in the cantorial arts - has deepened and enriched my Christianity, for which I am increasingly grateful. The other thing I have discovered - after attending a friend's mother's shiva minyan recently, where I was pleased to find that I have not forgotten my Hebrew and am still able to daven a maariv service - is that while, as a Jew, I was not free to worship in a church, as a Christian - even as a Catholic Christian - there is no conflict with praying in a synagogue (at least to my knowledge). After all, praying in a synagogue is to pray to the same God of Israel we pray to in church, and to whom Jesus refers in all of his teachings. So there's an odd "door-opens-in-only-one-direction" dynamic here (I have also been surprised to find that much of the Mass is very Jewish. It turns out, I didn't need to convert after all to explore the Jewish roots of the Church - it's always all been there.)
Okay, enough for today.
Dear Lord, you have kept me safe throughout my journey, you've led me to places I've never heard of, you parted the seas and led me to freedom, kept me safe in the desert, and brought me home - to you and to myself. Help me to be holy as you are holy.
Our Lady Star of the Sea, Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts.
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