At least I got an A.
I grew up with a lot of ambivalence towards my religious traditions, especially Judaism. My family participated in holiday rituals for Christmas, Easter, Passover, and Hanukkah, but we never attended services. As a result, I was educated in the cultural dimensions of Judaism and Roman Catholicism with none of the faith. I was never baptized and I was never a bat mitzvah. There were times when I attended Mass or synagogue with my respective grandparents but I was never required to absorb any of it, so I never tried. The stuffy, crowded confines of those houses of worship and vague references to “the Holy Father” and “Adonai” failed to arouse my imagination as a fidgety, anxious little girl.
I learned more about Jewish tradition every Seder than I ever learned about either Judaism or Christianity in all my visits to church or synagogue. The private and personalized ritual of Passover just felt more accessible than formal worship. I was included in a way that I never was in a congregation of initiates. As the youngest member of my father’s extended family, it was required that I read from the Haggadah every year. The reading was always lead by my Uncle Joe, my father’s younger brother and the only member of our secular Jewish family who could still read any Hebrew. The whole ritual was very lighthearted and humorous. Joe, famous for his appetite, would present the so-called abridged version of Exodus, with a refrain of “ya-da ya-da, etcetera, etcetera” until it was finally time to eat. It was the humor and the theatrical (as well as the culinary) experience that made Passover memorable for me. It was the feeling of inclusion that leant the ritual recitation meaning for me, a feeling which I never felt during Christmas with my mother’s family.
I grew up identifying myself as half-Catholic, half-Jewish, as testament to my mixed heritage. But when I entered middle school, for the first time I experienced the phenomenon of rejection by other Jews. Many of my religious Jewish classmates were approaching the magical age of thirteen and the big mitzvah pay off, literal and figurative, of all their hard work in Hebrew school. As “real Jews”, they felt some cliquish need to distinguish themselves from the corrupted likes of me. If I self-identified as “half-Jewish” in their presence, I was almost always met with one of two responses: “You can’t be half-Jewish,” or, “Which half?” Since my mother wasn’t a Jew, then I couldn’t be. Never mind my Hebrew last name or my great-grandparents’ loyal involvement in the Jewish community. I didn’t go to Hebrew school or synagogue and I would never be a bat mitzvah. Lighting Hanukkah candles or eating matzo and latkes didn’t cut it. Time after time they declared their verdict: guilty of goy.
Needless to say, I was turned off. I had had enough traumatic experience with the ruthless world of adolescent socializing to accept my role as misfit with a faint sense of relief. At the same time, like most teenagers, I felt like an alien at home. Holidays became little more than meaningless routines I ambivalently complied with. I didn’t recognize myself in my family, I didn’t recognize myself in God, I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. I found meaning in music and sought acceptance in subculture.
For most of middle and high school, music was my only religion. It was the only thing I felt I could safely invest my faith in. I passed in and out of my school’s various subculture cliques, which I identified with more through common musical tastes than any ideological impulse to subvert norms. But the pressure to conform to group expectations was not exclusive to the popular cliques, and it always left a sour taste in my mouth. For me it was about music and expression, not fashion or rebellion for its own sake. As I proceeded through high school I alternately rejected and was rejected by scene after scene, from punks and alt-rock kids to metal heads, hardcore thrashers, or straight-edgers. I never found the kind of curious acceptance the Riot Grrl movement gave to Jennifer Bleyer, but I never stopped believing in a supportive community.
It was around this time I developed an interest in Wicca. In part inspired by exaggerated media portrayals, I browsed local bookstores for information. What I found was a religion with just as much history and tradition as any monotheistic one, without any of the formal constraints. It appealed to me for much the same reason it appealed to Ryiah Lilith. I could be a solitary practitioner, communing with the divine elements of nature beyond the scrutiny of a community. I finally had a name for that feeling of calm that swept over me when I sought solitude in nature. I recalled numerous occasions sitting awash in moonlight by my window in the middle of the night, or listening to the rustling of leaves by the breeze in a park. There were also single memories of watching the sun set over the Pacific from a shiny black perch of prehistoric lava flow in Oregon, and the cool smoothness of river rocks beneath my feet and the swirl of water around my ankles in the Smoky Mountains. Wherever I traveled, near or far, that feeling stayed with me. There was a harmony to nature, and Wicca awakened my spirit to its place in it.
Unfortunately, the distractions and pressures of the social and academic spheres won in the competition for my fickle teenage attention, and I abandoned Wicca as a way of life by the age of sixteen. I sometimes regained the feeling of unity I experienced in nature, but I stopped relating it to spirit. Not until my second year of college on Long Island did a profound longing for meaning return. I was struggling through the mire of apathy and self-loathing that my social life seemed to thrive on. Many of my friends sought to numb their feelings with alcohol and other drugs, and for a while I did, too. But the gnawing dissatisfaction in my gut gradually forced me to reevaluate my lifestyle. Experimentation with psychedelic substances in the past had, on more than one occasion, sparked moments of profound self-realization. Psychedelic experiences had inspired me to make positive change for myself in the past and change was what I needed more than anything. I longed for a confrontation with the uncomfortable reality of my unhappiness, its sources, and its solutions, so when the opportunity presented itself, I embraced it. My catalyst was psychedelic mushrooms, and for eight hours I wrestled with the ugliness of an inner darkness that threatened to engulf me and the beauty of outer lightness my unveiled eyes revealed. When I finally sobered it was with the conviction that the heart of divinity resides within. In myself I had discovered the ultimate spiritual authority.
That revelation of spiritual autonomy has been the single most dynamic event of my entire life. Without it I never would have left Long Island, and it is the foundation from which I have gained the strength to assert my social, intellectual, and sexual autonomy, as well. To a large degree I have my cultural Jewish heritage to thank for planting the seeds of that autonomy, without which I am certain my experiments would have been fruitless. And like Billie Michele Mandel, my grandmother was very influential to my development. She has lived a long, challenging, exciting life. She married at a young age, leaving college after her first year to have three kids, and worked as a kindergarten teacher. In the early 70s she divorced and went back to college part time. After her children were grown, she traveled around the world, finished her degree, worked as a biofeedback engineer and yoga instructor, and retired in the 80s. But what I consider the biggest testament to her strength of character and devotion to her family was when she accepted responsibility for me and my older brother, raising us in her home when neither of our parents was emotionally or financially capable. Because of her constant nagging and reinforcement, it was simply a given that I would attend college. She never set a limit on what I could achieve and always pushed me to live up to my potential. Though she never explicitly stated it, I knew very well that the pressure she put on me to choose whatever life for myself I wanted directly reflected her lack of choice as a young woman. And as much as I resisted her pressuring at the time, without it I would not be the fiercely independent individual I am. But my grandmother is not a feminist in the conventional sense. Her cause is not women’s rights, but her family. It was through Jewish traditions such as Passover, and to a lesser degree Hanukkah, that I first came to understand the importance of family and my responsibility to strengthening its bond. I feel fortunate to have grown up without any formal religious training. I may not believe in God, but thanks to the values I inherited from my family, I believe in myself.
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