Reflections on my own Jewish identity

Wow, I really AM Reform, because I'm reading everybody's blogs and responding to them on Shabbat! Life is full of compromises. I took our daughter Abby and three of her friends to the North-South football game and dropped them off tonight, but not till we had lit the candles and said the blessings (we blessed pizza instead of challah tonight, but, hey, it's still bread!)

My Shabbat deal with myself is that I only do what I enjoy on Shabbat. I ran into a friend at Lowe's once on a Saturday morning and she said "I'm not shomer Shabbos!" and I agreed "Obviously I'm not either!"

I've been thinking a lot about what someone said in class the other day -- that a person who converts should have to learn Hebrew. I talked about this whole issue with one of my best friends, Rabbi Sue (from Hillel) when we took an exercise walk the other night. I thought that perhaps if I had had to learn Hebrew, and if my instruction in Judaism had been a lot more intensive, perhaps I would have felt at home in Judaism much sooner. Earning my place with knowledge might have made the first few years more comfortable. But then again, the Hebrew thing might have kept me from converting at all. In any case, Sue said "Conversion is the start of your journey in Judaism, not the end." I really appreciated that, and in my case, it is so true.

My own feeling of belonging, my own feeling of being a Jew, has come much more from engaging in service, not from knowledge of Torah or Hebrew. I think it is a cop-out to have a lot of book knowledge, but not feel obligated to do service.

In a way, I see this as people valuing the "male model" more than the female. In our synagogue, I'd bet that just about everybody who volunteers to take food to the sick is a female. Why don't males feel obligated to do this service? To me, it is just as holy as sitting around a table discussing Torah.

In our synagogue, knowledge is very valued (obviously, in a university town, Beth Shalom is full of professors and professional people). But people who don't have Hebrew can also feel comfortable. Everybody knows I'm a convert, and I don't have Hebrew. But I'm vice-president of the board there. Last year, just after Abby's bat mitzvah service ended, Alvin Rosenfeld (former head of Jewish Studies at IU) came up to me and said very kindly "You can't realize it (because I don't have Hebrew, he meant) but Abby read beautifully." I think that moment was one of the happiest moments of my life. (I wished my mother-in-law Shoshana, may her memory be for a blessing, were still alive to have heard that.)

Back when Amalia did her bat mitzvah, we didn't yet belong to the synagogue, and Amalia did not learn how to chant Torah. She memorized and used transliteration. But she did a huge amount of service -- she took the training at Middle Way House to be a volunteer and she went there every week that year. She also studied history and ethics with Jordan (her dad). But, later, at IU, she took Hebrew as her language and she felt great about that.

Adam did service work and he was able to do the Hebrew for his bar mitzvah by studying with Jordan. I hope he takes Hebrew as his language. To me, one of the neatest parts about his bar mitzvah was that, since Jordie's mom was very ill, Jordie and Adam flew to New Jersey a few weeks before the bar mitzvah and Adam did his Torah portion for his grandparents. Then we also had a speaker phone on the bima so they could listen during the actual service.

I'm glad that our children have knowledge that I do not have. What I wanted for them from their Jewish education was a sense of belonging. In earlier years, when we talked about being members of the synagogue or not, I used to say that I wanted them to own their Judaism; to be able to walk into a synagogue and never feel like a stranger, or feel stupid or disconnected. And I feel we have given them that.

Even more than the Hebrew and the knowledge of how to do a Torah reading, how to chant the blessings for an aliyah, etc. -- one thing the kids really get, I think, is that once you have passed your bar or bat mitzvah, you can't just think of yourself. Amalia is always taking care of other people and when she comes home to visit, she jumps right in with whatever there is to be done. Adam is the kind of man who would go to shovel snow for some old people (although, probably, not his own sidewalk!) He is tremendously kind to his friends. And Abby, too, really gets the service part. When I was chairing a welcome-back brunch at synagogue recently, she came early on Sunday morning to help. I was able to say to her "Just go out to the hall and greet people and have them do nametags." Later it occurred to me that not all 14-year-olds would do that.

I think that, in Judaism, one has to earn one's place to feel a sense of Jewish identity. Whether it's doing the learning and service connected with a bar mitzvah or whether it's standing in the synagogue kitchen peeling a hundred hard-boiled eggs for a community meal, or whether it's getting a call at work that there has been a death in the community: "Can you come tonight?" or whether it's manning a voter registration table or organizing an effort to call congress people about Darfur -- that kind of service is, to me, what it's all about in being a Jew. I'm glad for the other parts and I'm glad my children have them -- but the heart of it, to me, is the decisions a person makes in everyday life. That part of Judaism feels rich and fulfilling to me.