And I Got To Choose It Too

Family Dynamics

2008-01-26T15:55:00.000-08:00

I just returned from another visit to my maternal grandparents. I've written about them quite a bit here, especially in this post. This more recent visit was much much much easier. I'm sad to say that the reason it was easier was that I went without my mother.

I went with one goal in mind... to introduce my grandparents to my one-year old daughter. In the past I was trying to help smooth the way for my mother to visit too, but that was just so difficult last time.

As my visit to them neared, my grandmother wrote me a worried email... my aunt and cousin were both sick with the flu and my grandfather was in and out of the hospital. At this point he's receiving repeated blood transfusions, is constantly on oxygen and struggling to breathe even with that. I arrived after a long plane ride and an hour long drive, just as my grandmother and another aunt were helping my grandfather into the house after another blood transfusion. He was so drained he barely spoke to me. I didn't know if it was because he was ill, because he's nearly deaf, or if he didn't want me there because of issues with my mother.

Well, I didn't want food to be too much of an issue, so what I did was tell my grandmother that I was coming in order to help. That was my reason for coming despite the flu going around, and also so I could take over the kitchen. By the end of my visit she and I had a long talk. She said this was the easiest it's ever been when any of us visited. In the past, she said, she felt that as accepting as she's tried to be towards my mother for the conversion and the need for Kosher food, that she always feels bad when my mother cames. She says, "It's my duty as a woman to cook for the family and it doesn't feel good when my daughter can't eat it. But when you come and just give me a break in the kitchen, we can all eat it and I get a break from cooking."

There were so many conversations about how much my grandmother loves my mother, how they are such dear friends, and how much my grandmother loves my mother, but feels like food comes between them. Oh, it was painful.

And it's not perfect... my very fundamentalist uncle and aunt are much less accepting of my mother's conversion and have made that quite clear in the past. "We didn't leave her. She left us," my uncle has said about my mother. And in fact, when I cooked spaghetti one day when they were there, they ate very quickly and left. Frankly, it didn't taste that good, but I get the impression they took issue with my preparing it at all. When I said to my grandmother that they hadn't seemed to like my cooking she said, "It was just fine. But honey, people pay a lot of money to eat in restaurants and get food they don't like, so you don't worry about that."

If I can just get my mother to emulate what I did. I can't though. If she cooks, she's going to complain about what she doesn't have available, about what spices and ingredients she just can't find in Wimberly, about how ignorant her mother is about all this etc.

I can't change that.

I can't change her.

But I can do my best to smooth the way just by example. From here on out I can just tell her how I did it, and leave the rest to her to work out with her mother.

There are problems still between her and her father which are much deeper, which I'm not even going to write about here. But at this point I have to just let it go. Not all of the conflict is about conversion. Some of it is personality and needing a therapist to step in and that won't happen. I hope they're both praying, in their own ways, to mend the rift between them before he dies. There isn't much time left.

Introduction

2007-09-24T20:01:00.000-07:00

There's a weird story behind this blog. It used to be a project I was doing with someone else, but we kind of lost contact with each other and she stopped posting. It was set up in her name, but I wanted to take it over under my own control. So going to copy and paste all my old postings into here and start fresh.

I don't add to it frequently. This is not an aspect of my life that I think of too much, but it's always there under the surface, especially when I encounter the non-Jewish parts of my family, my mother's past, or when I watch others convert in ways very different than I did.

I was raised a Jew and was always incredibly strong in my observance, especially for someone growing up in a small town with few role models and no observant friends. I was a leader in my College community and so on and so forth...

...and then I had to convert anyway because my mother's conversion had not been complete.

It was a painful process for many reasons discussed throughout the blog. There were some terrible road blocks of bureaucracy and insensitivity along the way and I've had to face parts of myself I didn't like.

But I got an opportunity that not many get... I was born a Jew, and I got to choose it too.

More Family Business

2007-04-08T01:00:00.000-07:00

My goodness it's been a long time since I've written on this blog. I guess I reserve my entries for especially difficult times in the religion-sphere.

My paternal grandfather died earlier this year. At the funeral my dad was speaking with a Chabad Rabbi who knew him pretty well. The rabbi told him the following story:

"Your father once said to me that Orhodoxy stole his son from him. And he asked, with some annoyance, why every Friday when he talked to you, you always said 'Good Shabbos.' It annoyed him in some way like you were hammering home your observance. I said to him, "Do you realize how many men in your temple wish their sons called them every Friday? Orthodoxy didn't take him from you. It brought him closer!"

Well, now it's Pesach and I'm visiting my parents. Tomorrow we're getting together with my dad's son, my half-brother. Things are a little strained between them from old family history, but I know that the observance that my parents and I share is going to add to the problems, as well as be blamed for the other problems. My brother suggested a picnic, but we're dependent on Pesach food and my mom was clear ahead of time she didn't want to prepare anything, but I can't just do it without conferring because it's not my kitchen. As I was navigating all this I felt the temperature rising and brought back all the tension that always comes with making things work when observance is on the line, and with both sides feeling judged as well as inconvenienced.

So frustrating. I think all family's have problems. This one just plays out through religious details at tme. I would write more clearly, but my daughter is calling me right now.

Visit To The Relatives

2006-07-03T22:50:00.000-07:00

My mom and I flew out to visit her Christian parents last week. Much of it was nice, but it ended quite painfully. There are a lot of family dynamics that I won't write about, but if the week were a song, the chorus would be something about Kashrut.

Every day centered around food from saying hello over breakfast to preparing lunch and dinner and every time we ate there was the hurdle of Kashrut.

(Reminder: my mother converted to Judaism and we both later had to have an Orthodox reconversion.)

My mother and I deal with it differently. I'm the sweet little granddaughter (or I always felt that way until now) and could just say, "Oh, I can eat this," or "I can't eat that but that's okay. Let's cook this together instead." I took great satisfaction during my last visit (3 years ago) of kashering their oven with a blowtorch. It made them uncomfortable, but they were fascinated and willing, and my doing that helped enable my mother to eat Kosher food which might have been too stressful without me there.

But my mother often tried to explain things to her parents, including miniscule details like looking for bugs, which just reinforced that she couldn't and wouldn't eat what they offered her or take any suggestions they made. To make matters more difficult, she is on a diet. So even if they bought the right thing, it wasn't good enough.

There were many other tensions but everything came to a head on our last night there. And again, the climax had nothing to do with Kashrut but with another family issue. But when I went in later to try to do damage control, what happened was that I sat with my grandparents and my uncle and chatted about what they were chatting about, then talked about food, eventually concluding that I would be happy to eat any cookies my grandfather made for us if I could help him do it and he used the oven we had Kashered. (Self-cleaning this year.)

That seemed to help, but what do you know, he got up very early and did it without my help which meant he also didn't use the dishes I'd put aside. The oven was kosher enough by then - it turns out someone had heated some bread in it - so I went ahead and ate 2 cookies to preserve the family peace. (Took a bag of several others home too. Haven't eaten them. They were too sweet anyway.)

But that last night, my mom couldn't sleep and we ended up talking for several hours in the middle of the night. I told her once again of things I thought we (she) could have done differently to smooth the ground with her family, but she cried and talked instead about very old wounds. Some are related to Judaism, some aren't. But in short, when she was young she always always tried to be her best and she had a lonely childhood because of it with the label of a goodie two shoes. Later in life, trying to do the right thing, she married a man that hurt her very badly. When she finally left him, she was considered at fault and the church abandoned her.

Everything she tried to do right backfired from where she was coming from. No wonder she needed a new community.

When she met my dad she became interested in Judaism and, like many women converts I know, became interested DESPITE their fiancees. Instead of her following him, he eventually followed her to a deeper appreciation of Judaism.

I've always been impressed by this.

But of course, when I was growing up, we weren't so observant. And when I became attracted to keeping Shabbat and keeping Kashrut more seriously, my father followed. My mother felt dragged into it.

So one day on this trip mom said, "It didn't use to be so hard to come home."

"What changed?" I asked.

"Your father changed he rules," she said.

I was stunned. The way I see my parents, it is always my mother that make the rules and my father that follows. But as I've grown to understand, she doesn't like to view it that way. She'll say, "Your father will get mad if I do that," which really just means he finds it annoying but certainly doesn't make him into a scary person and surely he would listen if she explained her reasoning.

I assume so anyway.

Anyway, back to Judaism. When she said Dad changed the rules I didn't know what she meant. She went back to talking about my teenage years when she feels he and I sided against her in increasing observance. (Again, this was a path I took on my own and that my dad chose to follow. I did not intend to bring them along on it.) I pointed out she is more religious than I am in many ways. (She is more strict about bugs on veggies, and is unwilling to discuss options for feminism within Orthodoxy.) I don't like being accused of turning her towards something she chose and was so proud to choose. I'm surprised she would wish to give up that power of having chosen to make this change.

But I understand, she's torn.

I can understand that.

I have always felt a certain amount of pride in having such a different family from other Jews I know. I like that I have roots in the south and in different perspectives even if I completely disagree. (You should hear political discussions at their house.) In fact, the only thing I want to inherit (not for many years) is a miniature Xmas tree that I've always been fascinated by at their house. It's made of beads and is under a small glass dome. My grandmother has seen me gazing at it and I think has always thought I was wishing for something that my mother wouldn't let me have. I've tried to explain otherwise.

But this difference cannot be bridged as neatly as I used to think. And part of it is religion, and part is personality conflict between family members.

It hurts.

I guess what makes us nomal is that, like most other families, ours is far from perfect. One of the things I love about Judaism is that it acknowledges that life is not all love and pink roses. Our family also has pain. I suppose that is as it should be.

There is more about this from my uncle's perspective, but I think I might write it later, if at all.

Mixed Holiday Message

2005-12-25T21:26:00.000-08:00

Well here's an ironic turn of events.

Last night I called up my Southern Baptist grandmother to wish her Merry XMas. She and my uncles and cousins were all gathered there together. They had a quart sized jar filled with coins from my Uncle and Aunt's house. (The same Uncle and Aunt who at least used to be pretty sure my mother was going to hell for converting to Judaism. Incidentally, I happen to love them all dearly.)

My grandmother told me everyone was guessing how much money was in the jar and whoever got the right answer got the jar. Everyone was allowed 3 guesses. Just for fun I made a single guess of $55.

It was $55.47. She called me up tonight, on the first night of Channukah, singing "We Wish You A Merry XMas."

I told her I felt I was crashing their party to get the jar when I wasn't even there, but she assured me that everyone there wants me to have it.

Well, not the jar itself. I guess I'll get a check. :)

So what's up with this one, Hashem? Proud of me for calling my grandmother? 10% to tzedakah, if not more, I promise. (And by the way, with tzedakah, saying you plan to give it counts as an authentic and binding vow. I have to give the money away as soon as it arrives. I wonder where it should go.)

A Story About Being Pushed

2005-08-03T21:26:00.000-07:00

I once took a phenomenal Greyhound road trip with my best friend to California for a Phish concert. It was so romantic to throw caution to the wind and head down there together just to see a concert… I’ve never done anything like that again before or after.

One of the challenges in the trip was that I did keep Shabbat and a certain level of Kashrut, and the concert was not until Saturday night. My friend, who was not Jewish, and I stayed with an old friend of my father’s who was Jewish, but Reform. It was not the best experience. The guy was very insulting to my friend, including suggesting that I use her as a Shabbos goy to drive me to an Orthodox shul. (Ironically, she instead walked with me Friday night to a Reform temple several miles away and waited outside for me. She was too uncomfortable with religion and has had enough struggles in life to have good reason to doubt the existence of a God.)

When we got home we had to fend for ourselves for dinner. The family had actually either gone out for dinner, or left us something very treif. I can’t quite remember which. In any case, at that time in my life I had recurring nightmares about eating on Yom Kippur or about accidentally breaking Shabbat. I now stared at the non-Kosher, non-Shabbostic dinner I had pulled together for myself and my non-Jewish friend and I broke into tears.

“I don’t know,” I explained to her. “I don’t know if I’m observant enough. I don’t want to go too far, but I’m missing something.”

She looked at me, stunned, and said she envied that I could struggle with something like this. That with her lack of belief in G-d and her resistance to religion, she could never experience something like that.

That incident remains in my memory as a symbolic turning point. I didn’t become more observant anytime immediately after, but I remember seeing myself in her eyes and realizing how much I wanted MORE out of Judaism, how much I was holding back.

But as I alluded to in The Myth, I’m not sure I ever could have taken the final steps without the unexpected conversion process “forcing” it upon me. Sure, I wanted it, but why? And I had few enough role models to help me become observant. Yes, my Kashrut standards went up as soon as I moved post-college to my first Jewish Orthodox community, but even that was simply a test. I wondered if I could do it, gave it a trial run after Yom Kippur one year, and found it satisfying. As for pushing some of the other limits, I might always be asking the question of whether I could go far enough but for one thing. During my conversion process, I went further than was right for me (and further than I think should have been expected halakhically). Once I’d gone too far, and then settled back to what was right for me (and my family) and acceptable halakhically, the nightmares stopped.

But as I write this I anticipate lectures from people saying I’m no authority, that whatever the rabbis say goes, that I have no right to decide what’s right for myself.

In theory, those lectures would be on target.

And yet I suspect that I’m where I need to be and those lectures are much louder for me than for someone who never has had to face conversion in any form.

Hence, once again, the secrecy. Don't ask. Don't tell you're a convert.

The Myth

2005-08-03T21:25:00.000-07:00

One of the more difficult things that converts face is the fear that if they ever slip a little in halakha, someone will “catch” them and question their status as a Jew. And people WILL question it. I know that. (All the more reason why it is hurtful to expose a convert.) However, a beit din cannot take away your status. Once the mikveh is done in a completely Kosher way, it’s done.

I think the myth partly comes based on how many people – my mother included – have had conversions and were later expected to “upgrade.” And I once had the miserable experience, before my own re-conversion of being treated as a totally different person once I’d let slip that my mother had converted to Judaism. (At the time I was less obviously observant so the person who treated me that way assumed I was utterly ignorant. In a way he was right. That was the first sense I ever had that my mother’s conversion could not have been legitimate enough for me, and ultimately this helped me become more osbervant. But I still resent the way I was treated by that man, and I feel a little cheated that I had to be almost forced to enhance my halakhic growth rather than just get to it in my own time. It’s for another time to discuss whether I ever would have reached a point when I was happy with my own observance if I hadn’t been pushed in that way.)

In any case, while a beit din can legitimately question a non-Kosher conversion, it cannot take away a Kosher conversion. At the same time, however, if a person has a halakhic conversion and then openly and brazenly violates halakha, the beit din will become much more cautious about converting anyone else. The truth is, I think that if I were on a beit din and responsible for making a person into a Jew, I would really keep an eye on them to make sure my sense about them was well-founded. And I can see too why a beit din can be so very slow and cautious about completing a conversion for that very same reason… to make sure they’ve done the right thing. But it’s not fun, or fair, to live in fear of Jewish eyes in that way.

Defensive

2005-07-17T10:33:00.000-07:00

I was a guest last Friday night.

Two older women at the table started talking very casually about a number of "converts" in the community very openly. They were talking about these people fondly, not saying a thing negative. But something about it made me feel really uncomfortable. One person said how amazed she was hearing the path that many of these converts had taken to get to where they were. The other seemed to think that conversion simply involved doing 2 years of study. Neither seemed to know that it is a heart-wrenching process.

And for some reason this made me really defensive.

And I got a little carried away.

I didn't say a word until someone said, "I heard that in _____________ it doesn't take as long." and someone else said, "Oh, those aren't Orthodox conversions." They simply didn't know what actually happens in a Beit Din.

So I jumped in and don't even remember all that much of what I said except that sometimes it takes years and years. I said I'd known people who waited for 5 years and had done everything the Beit Din said but they still weren't converted and didn't know why. I complained about how some rabbis simply lose their calendars and so conversions take way too long.

I said a bunch of other stuff too.

I don't know why I did. I could have stayed quiet. I don't think anything I actually said served a purpose and I'm not even sure how much of it was true. If anything I might have cautioned them not to talk about converts behind their backs, even lovingly.

Clearly I've got some stuff to work through here.

At some point it would be really good to have a long and candid talk with a good down-to-earth rabbi who believes in the process but who is willing to hear stories from "the other side." From a sincere convert's perspective.

I'm still too stuck in my own issues to think about the reasons a beit din operates the way it does.

Disclosure

2005-07-13T11:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I disclosed to a very good friend the fact that I went through a conversion process. I gave her the whole rundown you see in my introduction. For all the weight that accompanies the experience I went through, disclosure tends to be anticlimactic. This isn't the first time with me. For all the fear I have about someone "catching" me and discrediting who I am again, friends respect me for who I am regardless of whether I was born with all the right "paperwork" or not. She wasn't surprised or shocked. And I was almost disappointed. I think I'm on the brink of seeing this whole identity/experience differently now that I see it's not such a big deal to some people. Maybe in some ways I've blown it up bigger than I can deal with.

Does the fact that her lack of surprise surprises me mean that I personally view converts differently?

I don't know. I have many friends who are very commmitted Jews who converted in. And once I'm convinced (it doesn't take long) that they are living (or trying to live) an observant lifestyle, I consider them kindred.

A discussion for another time, but most of the converts I've known, I've felt in my heart were Jewish even before they finished the necessary (and potentially beautiful) step of mikveh. There are the odd ones who don't really care so much about mitzvot. I don't feel kindred with them. And I suppose I feel threatened by the fact that they are able to convert in. It makes things confusing and hurts the reputation of gerim in general.

(On the other hand, that non-observant conversion could be one step towards growing towards an Orthodox one. IF that's the right thing. IF the beit din doesn't ask so much that the person no longer wants to be Jewish. Is it fair to ask baalei teshuvah to go slow and take one step at a time, but that converts need to go all or nothing?)

There are a million tracks this entry could take me down, but I'm going to stop here and leave them for another time.

Welcome

2005-07-04T20:45:00.001-07:00

The following entry has been slightly edited. The contents of this blog used to be shared with a friend, but we seem have to lost touch with each other and, as much as I miss our interactions, I want to have a little more control over the format and content of the blog. Please also be sure to read this "switchover" entry.

At the same time, I really want to invite dialogue with other people who have anything to do with Jewish conversion. Today's actual date is September 30, 2007. The entry below, with a few omissions, was originally written on the date associated with its posting:

(Please forgive the length of this entry!)

In this entry I want to tell you as briefly as I can (no easy feat) who I am and my impressions of the purpose of this site.

What’s up with the name NotBat? Well, I was born Jewish, raised Jewish, and brought further and further Judaism to my family from a young age. When I was born we were Reform, and as the years went by we became more and more interested in becoming more observant. When my parents sent me to a Conservative Jewish summer camp I learned how to daven and came back to teach them how to bentsch after meals. In future years, with other influences, I became observant in other ways as well that affected my family. When I stopped turning on and off lights in my room on Shabbat during my high school years, my parents picked up on it too and eventually we were, without question, living an observant, almost even Orthodox Jewish lifestyle.

In college I continued my religious path, learning how to learn and considering whether or not to take on Kashrut full-time, both in my home and out. I was a leader in my community, one of about 3 to be cornerstones in bringing traditional Friday night services to a place that had eclectic and creative services with little consistency.

So it was a shock when I was told that I was not Jewish. It was a hard time in my family, about a year after my graduation. My father, my half-brother and his ex-wife had all three been diagnosed with cancer. My mother went to our rabbi for comfort and was confronted with the fact that she had never had an Orthodox conversion. As a result, neither she nor I were technically Jewish. (And I will say firmly here, and in future entries, that I agree with the accuracy of this discovery. That does not minimize the depth of the soul-searching it forced upon both of us.)

Hence a long and painful process began of questioning my own identity, living up to a beit din’s vague and inconsistent expectations with little regard for the awesome leaps I had always taken in my personal growth with Judaism. When finally the conversion was complete, I was bitter that the document they gave me said the standard, _____ Bat Avraham. My father was Jewish, and having always known myself to be Jewish, saw no need to adopt a new father, even if the father of all Jews. Hence my identity on this site, NotBat. I am Not Bat Avraham. I am the Bat of my own father.

This name choice is not meant to discredit the thousands of Jews, including my mother, who are bar or bat Avraham, but is instead intended to highlight my own unique situation.

As for this site…
Recently I had the privilege of having a long and soul-searching conversation with Ger-Alicious (my previous partner on this site). A few weeks before I had a very uncomfortable conversation with someone else, also on the subject of conversion, and I observed how much pain I still feel about the process I endured. Yet I am also grateful that I went through it. I know without question it was a cleansing process sent to me by Hashem.

Regardless, the baggage from it is tremendous, and I realize I have few safe places in which to discuss it. Usually when I talk about my “conversion” it is with others going through the process, often quite painfully amongst people who don’t understand. Hence, the necessity of this blog.

I have wanted to tell my story for so long (5 years), and yet have never known where to begin, who to tell or where to tell it. My storytelling will be choppy and sometimes I may say things that contradict, or show my own vulnerabilities, or seem judgmental to those who may not understand or agree with the harshness halakha sometimes brings.

But it will be my story.

And you will tell yours.

Welcome.