Chapter 0 - Pre-history of My Jewish Journey

"Chapter Zero" - Pre-history of My Jewish Journey

About two years ago as I write this, I was going through a spiritual crisis. Neither the religion of my upbringing nor any of the religions I had tried since was speaking to the deep inner needs I felt at that time. I had been raised in the United Methodist Church, which is known for doing a rather good job of meeting the religious needs of a pretty wide variety of people, and yet which I had drifted away from as an adult for a number of reasons that I will try to explain in this chapter. I could have done what many of my peers have done and simply walked away from the religious life entirely, but I would have missed the sense of identity and community and values and purpose and rhythm-of-life and getting-my-soul-fed that having a religion gave me. So I spent roughly 20 years of my life cycling through a handful of religions that each seemed to contribute some of what I needed, but that each also seemed to leave a part of my soul un-fed, a part of my identity left out, a part of my belief system compromised, or some of my religious needs un-met.

What sort of religious needs am I talking about? I needed my worth as a person, my ability to do good in the world, and my basic faith in the goodness of humanity affirmed. I needed to know that God-as-I-understood-Him (to borrow a phrase from the 12-step world, which I had also visited once or twice) had a spot in His heart for me, a plan or a purpose or at least a hope for my future, and some guidelines for what to do in the meantime, today, on the way to whatever the future might hold. I needed to hear that things could get better in this world, and not just in some future after-life. I needed to know that my progressive values, my intellectual bent, and my tendency to argue with every possible point of view on the way to understanding were welcome somewhere in the religious world. I wanted a joyful way to mark the passage of time in a life that was become more and more monotone as I entered middle-age.

And perhaps most of all, I was looking for an identity to adopt and a people to belong to. I needed to find "my people" from among all the others out there. I was seeking a community to celebrate good times with and mourn losses with and raise my children among and grow my own soul with and contribute my piece to and feel welcomed and at-home among. I needed to belong to a people who would both accept me as I am and work to bring out the best in me, to find and develop my hidden talents and buried treasures and to share with me theirs. After all, at their best and each in their own ways, I think that's what all religious groups aim to be.

This religious drought in my life reached the crisis point about two years ago, when issues like the hordes of illegal-immigrant children on the Texas border and the Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage were causing religious groups in my neck of the woods to wring their hands or split down the middle, when my eldest son was starting to internalize Christian messages of "inherent depravity" as meaning that he would never -- could never -- amount to anything or be a good person, and when the God I was looking for to help me sort all of this out didn't seem to be represented in any of the religious groups I had a foot in. For the first time in my life, I was about ready to walk away from the whole religious enterprise -- and for someone who had cared enough about religion to spend three years as a seminary student, that was saying something.

So, about two years ago, I did what people of my generation sometimes do: I wrote a post of utter existential despair to my social media network and waited to see if any of my "peeps" had the answer for my troubles. All manner of people -- including a startlingly large number of Lutherans -- suggested that their religious system had a place for me. But most of my friends were suggesting paths that I had already tried. But I was looking for something bigger and more disruptive than a fresh look at one of the religious groups that had already failed to "fit" me in the past; I needed to get off of this path of religious paralysis.

Instead, I had a sense that what I was looking for was a complete paradigm shift, something clearly different from all of the spiritual homes I had tried before. Like the college student who moves halfway across the country to have space in which to "find himself," I needed to try something new and completely different, taking the chance that such a change might only send me back to square one, or worse reinforce the idea that I didn't "fit" anywhere. Some experiments I had done with mindfulness meditation had me considering Buddhism for a time, for example, but maybe that was too much of a paradigm shift for me. I didn't want to disengage from the world, after all, I wanted to live more fully in it.

So, having rejected pretty much all of the suggestions my good and well-meaning friends had made, I was beginning to head toward an even deeper despair when one last suggestion caught my eye. An old friend and former professor of mine made a suggestion that I realized I had been wanting to hear for some time: try Judaism. After a little bit of nervous research -- what would I find in a synagogue, and would I even be welcome there? -- I decided I would give the world's oldest religion a try. After dipping my toes in the waters of Shabbat once or twice, I decided to take a year of my life to see if Judaism might in fact offer a better fit than everything else I had tried. One year led to another. And the rest, as they say, is this book.

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But let me take a step back and try to explain two things to you: why none of the religions that were more in keeping with my upbringing provided what I was looking for, and why I had the inclination that somehow Judaism did.

The easiest way to do that is to take you for the quickest possible stroll through the decades of religious searching that had led me to the point where this book begins. Now, doing full justice to some 20 or 30 years would really require a whole other book, and that's not the book you were hoping to read today. So I'm going to hit the highlights, and focus on those two questions: why the other religions weren't a perfect fit for me, and how I had acquired the sense that Judaism might be.

Let's begin at the beginning, shall we?

I was born in 1977 – yes, the same year Star Wars hit the theaters – and was very quickly baptized in my parents' United Methodist Church. I was also circumcised, but apparently that doesn't make you Jewish unless you have a few other ingredients involved. So I started life as a Christian. 

I remember three things about growing up Methodist.

First, I knew I was a Methodist, and while I really had no idea what that meant or how it might differentiate me from other religious folks I knew, it gave me a religious identity in a small Texas town that expected one. Author James Michener once wrote that Texans wear our religion on our sleeve -- it is not by any sort of active prying that I happen to know the religious leanings of a good half of my community college students these days -- and I had no reason to make myself an exception to that rule. So, I was quite proud to claim the Methodist label and quite happy to think it made me better than those silly Baptists across the street, whatever being a Baptist might mean. 

Second, I instinctively felt that religion was Important and I drank up all of it that I could get my hands on as if it was the most worthwhile intellectual endeavor possible, easily tied in importance with the science that I would eventually make my career out of. As a child, I read and re-read books of Bible stories, which I mercilessly quizzed my mother about (what do they mean when they say Mary was a virgin? if Samaritans are good, why aren't we Samaritans? Why don't people hear God talking to them anymore like Abraham and Moses did?) As a youth I started seeking more details, asking more serious questions. If the Bible says God is one, why do we believe God is three? How could Jesus be a literal son of God - was his DNA half divine? What is the "method" in Methodism? I wanted to know all about my own religion, of course, but I knew there was more wisdom out there and I also wanted to find out what I could learn about the other religions (which, in small-town Texas before the internet, was not a whole lot). When living in the Washington, DC area for a couple of years, I made a good friend whose family had fled Iran on account of being Baha'i, and who caused me to realize that a lot of the Christian doctrines I had taken for unquestionable truth were in fact quite questionable. My sister had a good friend in high school whose Catholic father and Jewish mother also challenged what little I knew about how religious identity worked and got passed down. And that, for better or worse, was about the limit of my interfaith experience prior to college.

Third, I learned that my strongly intellectual and deeply questioning approach to religion, while not discouraged by Methodists to the extent that I have heard it is in some other Christian traditions, did not really pay off very well for a preteen or a teenager in the world of a small-town Methodist church. My peers did not like it when I rocked the religious boat, and while my Sunday school teachers and youth leaders showed every sign of wanting to talk about the real issues that affected our teenaged lives, they seemed to want to rest their discussions on solidly established religious ideas that never let me ask my deep and nagging questions. If an answer could be found by having someone look up a single Bible verse, especially if it were a saying of Jesus, then what was there to discuss? And if that didn't work, there were the many Christian doctrines we had been raised with that were similarly expected to be beyond question...even though I personally questioned almost all of them. Certainly, I never got the feedback that my sons get in Jewish religious school that "he asked a great question that really challenged us / added a lot to the lesson." Sigh.

Oddly enough, point number three never made me question points one and two. Religion was important and my religion was Methodism, so I just needed to find my own way to claim that label. I started skipping Sunday school. Sometimes I would just hang out in the church, reading the Bible or other religious literature on my own. Sometimes I would crash my mother's adult Sunday school class, the one that often seemed to have lively intellectual debates, but I got the sense that some of the adults were not so keen on having a teenager in that space. Years later, now a parent myself, I suspect that I probably was interfering with one of the few spaces where my mother could have adult conversations apart from her children. None of these alternatives really worked, so I just got to feeling more uncomfortable about church.

And then I went off to college. While most of my peers took this time as a chance to declare their independence from religious observance for a while, I took the world of college as a chance to finally be counted as a religious adult and get to explore religion at an adult level. That didn't quite turn out like I had hoped. The Methodist world is organized into a lot of age-and-stage groups, and so they had two ministries dedicated to college students: the Wesley Foundation, a sort of peri-congregational organization that provided a religious home-away-from-home for college students that had various events throughout the week, and a college-student worship service on Sunday nights that first fed us with guitar music and then fed us with lasagna. I slowly worked my way into these religious homes, glad to still be able to hang on, however feebly, to my Methodist identity. I found that there were plenty of college students who still didn't want to have any deep conversations that would challenge their religious faith, but I also found a small group of religious intellectuals who did want to have those conversations. And we went to worship or vespers together and then we hung out in lounges or coffee shops until the wee hours debating about all of the deep religious things we had always wanted to talk about (blindly heavily with college topics and pop culture references, of course).

And that's where the trouble started. One of those intellectual types told me that he had taken an Introduction to the Study of Religion class at the University, from a professor who had himself left Methodism to become a Quaker. Huh, I thought, I wonder why. His experience encouraged me to start asking my tough questions in more and more public ways. My Junior year, the Wesley group seemed to be governed entirely by people of an evangelical-fundamentalist bent, and they decided to change their annual Spring Break mission trip from a service trip to rebuild homes in some socioeconomically-challenged place to an evangelizing trip to give Bibles to the homeless in Denver. To me, this represented all of the worst impulses of Christianity, assuming that the spiritual salvation of people we didn't even know was somehow more important than meeting their physical needs. When I dared to suggest that the homeless of Denver needed food and shelter more than Bibles and tracts, I was asked to stop coming to the Wesley.

And so, for the first time in my life, I felt spiritually homeless. My people had rejected me.

Now, I know what you are going to say: it wasn't all of Methodism that rejected me, just a bunch of temperamental college students. But I was a temperamental college student myself at the time, and it felt like all of Methodism had just betrayed the trust I had put in it, and I felt spiritually homeless as a result. It was time to try other options, if I could just figure out where to look.

It was, interestingly, about this time in my life that I had my first Jewish experience. The sister of one of my best friends from the dorm had "married into" Judaism, and she invited my friend and I to attend a Tu B'Shevat seder at the home of a Jewish friend. It was another world, and it was amazing. Here I found a religion that was entirely focused on the positive: being in community with fellow Jews and other invited friends, thanking God for the gift of a planet whose plants and fruits nourish us, sitting out in the cool winter night and sipping wine and eating fruit and just being together. No mention of sin, or anyone having to be saved from it, or dwelling on all of the mistakes we had made in our lives so that we would recognize how desperately we needed to be saved, or any of that Christian "conviction" nonsense. I loved it. I felt at home there. I wanted to marry a Jew myself just to gain admission to that group.

And therein lies one of the big problems with Judaism as it stands today: our marketing, to put it bluntly, sucks. As far as I (or anybody I knew, including at least one comparative-religion scholar whose works I had consulted) was aware, the only ways to be accepted into the world of Judaism were to be born into it or to marry into it. While Buddhist and Baha'i and Christian – definitely Christian – groups advertised around campus seeking new converts, Hillel (the campus Jewish organization) advertisements were aimed squarely and solely at convincing lapsed Jews to rejoin their religion. Not even at the Tu B'Shevat seder I attended with such enthusiasm was I encouraged or even invited to explore Judaism further. 

Now, before you get discouraged, this lack of advertising on the part of Jews is not, generally speaking, meant to exclude anyone from the Jewish party. Rather, after nearly two millennia of being hounded by Christian and Muslim communities to convert away from Judaism, it doubtless seems to most Jews like an uncommon courtesy not to prosyletize others. It also carries the force of a long-legislated habit: at many times in our long history, conversion to Judaism was punishable by death, leading to a rabbinical law that a prospective convert must be turned down three times before they are allowed to proceed. The fact that the rabbis still allowed newcomers to convert if they made the request on three separate occasions is a testament to the fact that Judaism, even under adverse circumstances, saw itself as having something unique and valuable to offer the religious seeker. 

But back in my college days I did not know that, and so I never turned toward Judaism as a possible religious home. Instead, I enrolled in that study-of-religion class my friend from the Wesley had recommended. For the first half of the class, we went through roughly one world religion each week, and I dutifully "tried on" each religion as we came to it, often with the help of my girlfriend at the time (herself a recovering Southern Baptist who fancied herself a non-practicing Baha'i). During our Hindu week, she tried to teach me yoga and I worked on finding a mantra and practicing my dharma, but try as I might I just could not connect with the multiplicity of gods in that religion (even if, as the scholars say, they are all just projections of The One). During my week as a Buddhist, I meditated on the bus to and from my apartment each day and I tried to release the desires that held me in samsara. 

Buddhism would continue to tantalize me throughout my adult religious journey: I admired the discipline it taught, the emphasis on having compassion for all living beings, and the idea that one could rise above the trivial day-to-day sufferings of life. Still, I could never make peace with the disdain it has for this material world we live in. My goal was not to escape life but to live it more fully, not to eschew desires completely but to tame them, not to reject the world with all its foibles and failings, but to repair it. 

Now, I wish I could tell you here that my week of being Jewish was the best of the six, or that it stuck in my mind the longest, but I can't honestly say that I remember much of it. I believe I practiced taking a Sabbath-as-I-understood-it (which was surely far short of how observant Jews understand the day-of-rest), and I recall swearing off any pork products for the week, but I don't think I got anywhere near the essence of Judaism in that one short week. I can tell you that, when the Jewish week was over and it was time to spend a week being Christian again, my girlfriend was terribly disappointed. 

Where that class did lead me, however, was to finally visit a Quaker (Friends) Meeting, something that had been on my religious "bucket list" ever since I had found out that my mother's favorite author, James Michener, was a Quaker. I was enchanted by the idea of sitting for an hour in silence, waiting for the Spirit to move someone to speak, a religious ritual that amounted to one long pregnant pause in the constant stream of dialogue and monologue that is our life.

I was not disappointed. The silence was far from complete – there were plenty of chair-shifting and bird-chirping sounds to pay attention to when one started feeling the sensory deprivation – but it was complete enough. Toward the end of the hour, several Friends delivered brief, poignant messages, with a respectful silence punctuating each one. I feel a twinge of guilt about it, but even I felt moved to speak, partly in response to something someone else said, but also in response to an inner quickening that I can only describe as a stirring of the spirit. 

I came back the next week, and then the next. I never formally joined that Meeting, or any other (the Quaker process of seeking "clearness" on such matters as membership, a sort of group pastoral counseling process, truly intimidated me – I had a nagging sense that I didn't quite belong among the Quakers, and what would I do if a clearness committee made that conclusion public?), but in a process that set the pattern for several subsequent shifts in religious identity I would have, I jumped in with both feet and quickly adopted a Quaker identity. I joined Quaker newsgroups (remember those?) and was soon heartily arguing with people who had been Friends much longer than I had about what it meant to be a Quaker. When people asked about my religion, I proudly told them about modern Quakerism and how far it had come from that guy on the oatmeal box. I attended Meetings for Worship and Meetings for Business and various social events. In short, I tried desperately hard to make this group "my people."

And there were plenty of reasons why they should have been "my people." There was no creed or other statement of belief to get stuck on, and yet there was no question that Quakers believed in certain ideas, stood for certain ideals, behaved in certain ways. There were in fact, in place of the required esoteric beliefs I grew up with in Protestant Christianity, a list of Testimonies that were eminently applicable to everyday life: simple but powerful words like Truth, Simplicity, Equality, Peace, Integrity, Community, and Stewardship that a Quaker (or a group of Quakers) could come back to whenever they faced a difficult moral quandary or needed to know the way forward. There was a true belief (more often than not born out in practice) in the individual supporting the community while the community also supported the individual. Many, if not all, of the progressive social/political causes I had long championed were Quaker causes. And perhaps most of all, it was a small religious group that had managed through the centuries to be influential beyond its numbers, which made it both recognizable enough and unique enough to be both religion and identity.

But, alas, though I sojourned with many groups of Quakers at many different times in my life – my last year of college through my first year of grad school, my last year in grad school through my time at Cornell, a couple of periods back in Austin both before and after my ill-fated trip through the Seminary there – I could never make that identity stick.

The silence was sometimes too much for me: my ADHD mind appreciated the break from constant activity up to a point, but eventually it would start starving for something - anything - to latch its attention onto. Couldn't somebody say something, sing a song, do something?

Perhaps because of this, I delivered my own messages perhaps a bit too frequently. I was once or twice taken aside and "eldered" (Quaker-speak for a stern talking to) about my over-indulgence in "vocal ministry," apparently not having quite got the knack of knowing which "messages" to share and which to keep to myself. I felt a need to share my spiritual insights, but apparently some people in the Meeting did not feel a need to hear all of them! 

I missed holidays. Quakers, for all that they tout a lack of creed or other theological statement that anyone has to sign on to, have some firm beliefs about other things. The equality testimony is not just about the equality of all people (which, by the way, means that every person from life-long Friend to newcomer to pre-teen child is equally allowed to contribute to all activities of the Meeting) but also the equality of time: in order for each day to be equally sacred, the most orthodox Quakers recognize no religious holidays. Besides, Easter and Christmas are well known to have pagan origins and in Quaker tradition (if not necessarily in present practice), any hints of pagan religion in the majority culture are to be abstained from. That technically also means no Halloween, among other majority-culture holidays, but I can't say I recall any Quaker families who forbade their children from donning a Halloween costume. I should also add that it is human nature to make some days "more equal than others" and most Friends Meetings I have been part of have held an occasional celebration of the turning of the seasons or the beginning or end of the secular school year or other non-religious occasions. And in the life of a young man who has a packed schedule of goings-on, most related to my ongoing schooling, this lack of holidays to keep track of seemed more a blessing than a problem. But as I approached middle-age, with children that made my world increasingly inward-focused, it became all too possible to see life as an endless and monotonous stream of all-too-same days -- and my time with the Quakers felt increasingly holiday-deprived. 

But perhaps the thing that made me most uncomfortable in Quakerism was the strong belief in human perfectability. On the face of it, this sounds like a tremendously positive thing: humans can perfect themselves, and in so doing contribute to perfecting the world we live in. But the act of always trying to be "more perfect" in one's moral and ethical life can start to feel oppressive, especially when everyone else around you seems to have mastered something you haven't yet. The person who always buys environmentally friendly soap and recycled paper products for the Meetinghouse; the person who always eats (and encourages you to) locally-sourced, all-organic, vegan meals to save the farmers, their plants, and the animals all in one swoop; the person who wears only sweatshop-free clothing with all-natural dies and/or trendy liberal slogans; the person whose children are so well raised that they choose to raise money for the needy rather than keeping their lemonade-stand sales to pad their allowance; the person who frets that even driving a hybrid car isn't doing enough to save the environment (okay, that last one was me at some point); the person who spends every bit of free time at an anti-death-penalty rally, or helping prisoners learn to read, or lobbying congresspeople for fairer laws; the person who successfully keeps their children from ever playing with "war toys." You get the picture. I was not able, on my limited budget and with my limited capacity to change my habits and those of my children, to live up to the standard of moral and ethical perfection that all of these people added up to. 

Now, don't get me wrong: no Friend ever took me to task for wearing Target-bought clothing or for not dragging my children to a death penalty protest. It's just that my own inner perfectionism combined in a dangerous way with a religion that said perfection was not only an ideal but a practical goal to produce a person with a serious inferiority complex. It was I who compared myself with the countless stories of historical and contemporary Friends who had dropped everything to pursue some "leading" to speak for a group that had no voice, to work for a cause that needed help, or to complete some grand creative or spiritual project. And it was I who took every life experience shared by a "better" Quaker as a sort of statement that I needed to do better, and quickly.

Did I want a religion that believed human goodness was possible? Absolutely, but I also needed one that encouraged starting where you are comfortable and making a slow build toward goodness, rather than one that held up so many examples of people who took the fast track to moral exemplar status. In Judaism, it is rare to find an example of even a great rabbi who didn't have a few faults or a few bumps or delays on the path to sage-hood, and the everyday Jew is encouraged to climb the moral ladder at his or her own pace -- better to find solid footing on each new rung than to run the risk of slipping backward.

Which should remind me to mention my second, much more intense brush with Judaism. My second year of graduate school, a number of things fell together from a number of directions to make me a sort of "Jew groupie" -- only one who never made it to any of the concerts.

First, I found myself living with a Jew, who was constantly talking up Judaism and talking down the Evangelical Christian private school he grew up in. I know he was Jewish because he would never let me forget it, but I can't say I ever noticed him doing anything noticeably Jewish. Instead, I would notice that kind of activity on the campus where I was doing my graduate work, as Jewish students brought their handmade hanukkiot into the newsroom each December, or their boxes of matzot in the spring. They took such pride in carrying out what seemed to me like a bunch of quirky rituals that came with their religion that I started to feel pangs of religious jealousy. I wanted that kind of strong religious identity to be proud of.

And I noticed that religious identity in other places as well: among the community theater group I participated in, a strikingly high percentage of actors and backstage artists were Jewish, and they seemed to have an instant and strong connection with one another, like members of an extended family - they anticipated certain details about each other, knew each other's food preferences almost instinctively, shared inside jokes that few of the rest of us "got", shared a set of holidays most of us were only slightly aware of (while also having a shared annoyance with all of the Christian holiday over-celebration that was forced on them a few times a year), and perhaps most intriguing, they seemed to know exactly how to respond to each other's life happenings -- tough times and high points alike.

My curiosity was piqued. I wanted to know more, even to the point of asking that Jewish roommate of mine how one could become Jewish. Sadly, he discouraged me. Looking back, I'm not sure how much he actually knew about what was involved in a conversion to Judaism, or if he had any idea how common such religious transitions actually are, but he gave me the distinct mis-impression that the Jewish people were not at all welcoming to newcomers. I'm not angry at him, after all of these years, but I am disappointed at the missed opportunity that came from listening to the opinion of only that one source. He did give me one interesting "pro tip" that stuck with me though: that if one really wants to get to know the soul of the Jewish people, one needs to get to know not their theology or their philosophy, but their humor.

Net result: I did not become Jewish at age 20. In fact, I never even visited a synagogue or a campus Hillel activity, despite tremendous curiosity. I regret that, but as you will see in the next chapter, I found my way home eventually...another couple of decades down the road.

But this chapter is getting long, and I need to keep moving. When I got married, I decided to leave my interests in Quakerism and Judaism behind, at least for a time, and work with my wife to find a more mainstream religion to raise our children in. Now, my wife had grown up with a blend of New England Congregationalist and Kentucky Southern Baptist experiences and then largely left both of those behind in college for the sort of do-it-yourself blend of spiritual and religious practices that was quite common in college students of my generation. It didn't help that Christians of the time were doing a lot to convince my wife that the Church was anti-gay, and my wife had become a very out member of the LGBT community. But, like me, she longed for a religious identity. I knew I was in love when one of our early dinner dates was dominated by an hour-long conversation on various religious perspectives we found interesting, and we spent a good part of our courtship trying to figure out where our common religious home might lie.

If you had told either of us that we would ultimately find that common religious home in Judaism, I think we would have laughed. Elie wanted to raise our children in a church of the more mainstream sort that she grew up in: the one where all of the good-people-to-know-in-town would be found on a Sunday morning. As a result, we tried a couple of Methodist churches, but the pastor at the first practically yelled at people from the pulpit for watching such Satanic movies as The Lord of the Rings and for leaving the church too quickly for Sunday brunch. We lasted a little longer at the second, where we were quickly put in with a Sunday School class called the "homebuilders," full of friendly parents of young kids and (like us) parents-to-be. What made us leave, though, was seeing the head pastor require a new couple to affirm Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and throw themselves upon his grace to save them from their manifold sins -- just to transfer their membership from another church. We knew that neither of us could go through with that, so we started feeling about for what else might exist in Southeast Texas that was on the believe-as-you-will side of the religious spectrum.

And so, thanks in part to the advice of my wife's sister-in-law, we wandered into a Unitarian Universalist church on my 26th birthday, and there we stuck for the better part of four years.

Anybody who gets the joke can go ahead and laugh at us now. If we were looking for something more mainstream than Quakerism or Judaism, we had taken a step in precisely the wrong direction. Most people have at least heard of Quakers (if only from their oatmeal boxes) and everybody seems to have some opinion of the Jews, but I was now finding myself having to define Unitarian Universalism to anyone and everyone who asked about my religion (and here in Texas, it is surprising how often that comes up). It got really annoying, really fast.

To make a long story short, there were a number of positives that came with UUism, but as with Quakerism I slowly found the drawbacks starting to outnumber the positives. Nevertheless, it was in UU circles that I first came to feel a "call to ministry" that would eventually lead me to enroll in seminary. It was in UU adult education classes that I first really sifted through the baggage of my religious upbringing, where I was first able to decide what I really believed in my own right. It was in UU churches that my thirst for intellectual discussion of religion was first richly rewarded. And it was in my UU phase where I first struck a balance between wanting to live into a set of ideal Purposes and Principles and being comfortable starting with who and where I was.

What, you may ask, is a Unitarian Universalist? For those who don't know, Unitarian Universalism is a Christian-derived religious tradition -- and anyone familiar with Protestant Christianity will still feel right at home with the order of events in a UU worship service -- but each year it seems to drift further from its Christian roots. They gather for worship and coffee hour (both equally sacred, it often seems!) on Sunday mornings, more because it is a culturally convenient time than for any deep religious reason. They celebrate Christmas and Easter, more-or-less, only with most of the Christian elements stripped away. They regard the Bible as a somewhat outdated or outmoded source of wisdom, and tend to educate their children more with stories from a random scattering of other world religious traditions instead.

Based on the name, UU's "should" believe in a Christian-style God who is one, rather than three (Unitarianism) and who offers universal salvation to all (Universalism). Those ideas appealed to me. As it has evolved since the 1960's, however, UUism has come to be a religion where you can subscribe to whatever theology you like, or none at all, as long as it isn't anywhere close to Trinitarian Christianity. There is a joke that UU's believe in "at most one God". As for universal salvation, there is another joke: when Christians die, they hope to go to heaven; when UU's die, they hope to go to a discussion group about whether or not heaven exists.

In practice, in other words, UU's can believe pretty much whatever they want to -- Buddhist with a taste for Sufi poetry? Great! Neo-pagan with Taoist leanings? Sure! Humanist with more of a concern for libertarian politics than for theology? Glad to have you! -- unless what they want to believe in any way smacks of traditional "theism". "Cultural Jews" and "recovering Christians" are welcome, but woe to those whose religious views lead them to pronounce the name of God in UU company. I found myself in one church being told by a well-meaning parishioner that she wasn't bothered at all that I found myself drawn to "God language" and to reading from the Bible, and then wished me good luck in finding a liberal Christian church to go join. In another, I found myself hounded by a particular atheist member who kept coming up to ask my opinion of some example or another that made Christian beliefs, or theist beliefs in general, look silly or inconsistent. Mostly, I had people tell me that I was welcome to be there, even encourage me to get a "UU Christian" group going, but then not show up to that group when I followed their advice. It was a lonely life being a liberal Christian in a Texas UU Church.

Now, don't get me wrong. There were things I loved about UUism: the lively discussions, the encouragement to follow one's conscience, the enthusiastic welcome to newcomers (not to mention a new-member process that takes a few hours in place of the months or years that Quakers or Jews require of prospective converts), and the emphasis on action rather than on belief. Where Christians have a Creed or Statement of Beliefs and Quakers have their lists of Testimonies, the UUs have an elaborately worded set of seven Principles that each represent a sort of call to action in one's own life, in the context of one's congregation, and in the wider world. The Principles are difficult to parse, but they hold layers of meaning that (important for UU's) provide plenty of fodder for discussion.

Much like my complaint about the Quakers encouraging too much perfection, however, the UU's encouraged too much politicization of religion. On the one hand, it was great to be among a group of people who believe in their own power to effect positive changes in the world through concerted group efforts. On the other hand, the lack of any religious center to focus on can make a political cause (or an entire suite of them) become the de facto religion of a UU congregation. Quite often, a church full of refugees from mainstream religion will even replace religious language altogether with a sort of religious political correctness. And again, woe to whomever happens to take the other side of whatever political argument this congregation has banded together around. And I'm not just talking about "big" political causes like gay rights or saving the environment (both of which I tend to like). Don't like fair trade coffee? Don't go saying that out loud! And at one UU congregation, the group mind was so in favor of breastfeeding that my wife was tempted to wear a sign saying "medically required to bottle feed" to ward off all of the well-meaning true believers who wanted to make sure she knew that "breast is best."

But I digress. While I had many good experiences in UU churches, made many life-long friends there, and kept coming back to UU churches when I needed a refuge from the conservative Christian environment that suffuses of most of Texas, it eventually became clear to me that I was looking for a little more of a traditional religious and spiritual experience than a UU congregation was going to provide. I believe in God, for one thing, and while I cannot even come close to articulating what I mean by that, I want a religion in which the existence of some higher or deeper reality than myself is expressly acknowledged. And UUism is just not that religion. Further, while I am not one who takes such things at their literal meaning, and I like playing around with various critical interpretations, I do value having a central set of holy writings to keep coming back to, especially in raising my kids. Again, UUism is not that religion. And I value having a religion that will help me teach my children a certain set of moral and ethical values that are just simply right and wrong, perhaps with room for discussion in the corners, but not in the moral center, and UUism is most definitely not that religion.

So we tried a couple of other forms of Christianity. I almost became an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ (the mostly-quite-liberal descendant of the Congregational churches of New England, merged with a handful of other small religious movements), but was blocked for two reasons. First, despite really and truly loving the group of people who constituted my "home church," I managed to say some things at meetings and on social media that came across in entirely different ways than I had meant them, and my church committee decided that I needed some growth in my social skills before I could be pastor material. But the other reason is that I couldn't honestly tell my committee that I had any sort of "personal relationship with Jesus." I mean, the guy's been dead a long time: how do you have a personal relationship in that situation? They didn't like that answer.

I would have stayed with the UCC even after that awkward exchange, but my new career as a college anatomy teacher had me move to a part of Houston that wasn't anywhere near a liberal-leaning UCC church. We tried the UU church there, and met with all of the same positives and negatives that I just described. Starved for spiritual experience, my wife and I decided to try something completely different: the elegant and eloquent liturgy of the Episcopal Church.

I like to say that it was the Episcopal Church that made it possible for me to become Jewish: if I had not had the experience of a set liturgy and of encouragement to personal spiritual practices that the Episcopal church provided me in familiar Christian terms (and occasionally in Elizabethan English), it would have been that much harder to adapt to these ideas in a Jewish context and in the Hebrew language. The Episcopal Church also first introduced me to the idea that a church could be inclusive to a large number of beliefs -- both theological and moral/political -- while still coming together around a central core of practice. For the Episcopalians, the core practice is the liturgy and its main point of focus, the Eucharist. For Jews, there are many more core practices (the prayer services, the blessings, the mitzvot, kashrut, Sabbath observance) and many more ways to practice them, but the idea is the same: we are not all Jews because we think alike, but because we practice Judaism.

But the Episcopal Church also reminded me how much I was not an orthodox Christian. I had serious issues with the Trinity and with the idea of God becoming human / a person being divine. I liked Jesus as a teacher, but that was about as far as I went if I was honest about it. I also didn't like the theology behind asking God to absolve our sins through eating Christ's body and blood every week. The sermons often sought to make us feel better about how sinful our lives inevitably were, how far short of God's ideal they would inevitably fall, by comforting us that God had us (and everything) taken care of in the ultimate sense through the death and crucifixion of Jesus. For some reason, I was never comforted by this. It puts a tremendous weight on my shoulders to say that I was so hopeless as to need some other guy, a divine guy at that, to die on my behalf so that I could be acceptable to God. It also doesn't say anything good about my ability for self-improvement! 

And my oldest son was picking up some of these negative ideas from youth group: that he was destined by his fallen, sinful human-ness to be an inevitable screw-up, that he was never capable of making a better person out of himself (that was why he needed Jesus, after all), that if even the heroes of the bible were such miserable excuses for human beings, how could he expect to live a good life and make good choices? Who says stuff like that to an already-down-on-himself middle schooler? He began to disengage from school, from life. He, too, needed a religion that would tell him he could be a good person, a person who could start where he was, who could learn to make better choices, and who could ultimately be acceptable to God without anybody having to die.

And then I had concern for my wife and her (our, actually) commitment to LGBT rights. The Supreme Court had just decided that same-sex couples could marry. We knew there were same-sex couples at the Episcopal Church we attended. So we went, expecting a message of love and perhaps even of celebration. Instead, we heard a cautionary message, urging us to put the cause of church unity above that of our own personal politics, for liberals and conservatives to try to reconcile. It wasn't a bad point he was making, but at no time in his sermon did the priest give even a hint that he understood the tremendous milestone of freedom to be themselves and affirmation of themselves as full people that same-sex couples were finding themselves at, he never expressed any gladness that love and inclusion had won this battle over fear and exclusion, he never opened any space for those who were celebrating that day to thank God for the blessing they had just received. Because he was afraid of offending those who were not celebrating, because he even tried to comfort the conservatives by telling them that gay marriage was "not as bad" as the church shooting the week before, he shut my wife down hard. And she vowed never to set foot in that church again.

So my son and my wife were both needing a change, and as I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, I was needing a change, too. I found myself too Christian for the Unitarians and too Unitarian for the Christians. But I didn't want to give up on religion altogether. What was a guy to do?!?

Answer: visit a synagogue. Read on, dear reader, read on...