How Did I Become Frum?

If I could describe my decision to become frum in one sentence, I would say that I always flirted with God and finally decided to enter into a committed relationship.

I would also say that there is nothing more special about my becoming frum than anybody else's. The only reason I'm writing about it is so that I can understand it. And it's long as it's written I might as well post it.

Over the years since I became frum (in 2001) I've occasionally stopped to think of why I did so. It was a recalculation, revisitation, and re-establishment of the decisions and processes that occurred during that important year in my life. With the clarity of hindsight I am better able to identify the various moving pieces that came together in that decision. To put it very simply, many converging elements intersected that made Orthodox Judaism a very clear conclusion.

I attended a Conservative Jewish school from Kindergarten to sixth grade. At that point I left that school and started attending a public school, which marked my first real interaction with Gentiles. By seventh grade I had no Jewish friends, and aside from Jewish family, most of the friends who attended my Bar Mitzvah were Gentiles.

The most vulnerable of those elements was a constant search for an identity that made sense, and by made sense I obviously mean for one that made sense to me. Notwithstanding that all people need a sense of identity, my particular search was related to my being raised with a foot in two countries (Israel and America). My mother is Israeli and my father is American, and the fact that my mother is Sefardi and father Ashkenazi contributed to a partially confused identity. Either way you cut it I was all over the place and was only partially able to identify with each. I sought out a stable, anchored identity.

This led me to piece together an “map,” moving backwards through layers of identity. Being Israeli was a good place to start, but Israel was young. America was older, but I knew that I could reach farther back than that as well. I eventually reached a conceptually satisfying stopping point; the Torah was the one thing capable of producing a stable, defined Jewish identity. It was the origin of who and what I was, and so I stopped there. But it was only theoretical and conceptual – I had not yet started observing Judaism.

My scattered identity also didn’t make high school easier (does anything?). During those years I growingly and painfully realized that although I had much affection and appreciation for my American Gentile friends, there were things about me that they could not fully understand. It was a portion of myself that I had to keep away from our friendship, an aspect of myself that I could only enjoy in the presence of my family. Even then, I was limited in this regard due both to my restricted knowledge and to my family’s comfort level. This led me on a silent, inward journey of establishing a personal system of beliefs. But this system too was only theoretical and conceptual.

This system was undoubtedly colored by our home, which contained Jewish religious objects, such as menoras, mezuzahs, and matzos. But the short-lived weekly practice of Kiddush and yearly visits to synagogue weren’t enough. I often pushed my family to spend more time lighting Chanukah candles. My parents are to credit for bringing these things into the home and I yearned for them. At the same time I also began thinking about intellectual, philosophical, and mystical topics, which gave me great joy, but also put me at odds with my friends and family. I was very spiritual during this time, fond of whatever I knew of Judaism, but not at all interested in religiosity. I lacked a very basic understanding of what Jewish practice even meant, and the concept of obligatory practice was more foreign than anything.

In college I came to a brief conclusion that atheism was the logical outcome of monotheism and considered myself an atheist for a time. This was also a meager self-defense mechanism against the arguments of a Christian adjunct professor that I had in college. By the end of my Old Testament class, in which I was the token (ignorant) Jew, I began pondering whether Christianity was true and what my family would think of me. Since I didn’t know enough about Judaism to successfully deter Christianity, I simply activated an emergency shut down to my spiritual system. I was not capable of explaining why I rejected Christianity, but I felt that it was the farthest thing away from anything pure or good or right. I preferred to abandon spirituality than to associate the desires that came with it with this foreign, alien, system. This was a time of great turmoil.

Sometime after begin to attend the University of Arizona, I had met some Jewish friends and together we ran an Israel advocacy group on campus. It was the first time in about eight years that I had made Jewish friends. During that time I began thinking about my defenses of Israel, and one day I went home and made a list of all the arguments I’ve heard against this country. I told myself that if I found one fundamental flaw in an argument I would discard it and move to the next. After eliminating the fundamental driving force behind each one (of about ten major points), I concluded that no good reason existed for the hatred of Israel that I witnessed. Desperate for an explanation, I grabbed for something that I had not bothered to consider; perhaps the prophets of Israel were correct. Perhaps our disobedience to the Torah was causing us problems? If so, although I advocated for Israel, I was actually part of the problem. It was all too much to handle so I pushed the idea away into the recesses of my mind.

During this time I had become aware that, regarding the subject of Israel, the majority of American Jews had either left wing sympathies or were apathetic. I slowly realized that many young American Jews were stuck in a sort of social conditioning that forbade them from deviating from that milieu. To make bold, yet in reality moderate and conceivable statements, such as "Israel belongs to the Jews," cast suspicion of extremism or insanity. And yet Arab youth, either in America or elsewhere, were not plagued by the same epidemic of insecurity in their nationalist sentiments, to whom it was quite natural to love. Notwithstanding that Arab societies often take it to the other extreme, being a Jew seemed associated with accepting a bullied and meager position of sheepishly avoiding confrontation. I found this very personally denigrating and felt it was wrong to feel guilty.

Yet this feeling was difficult to shake. Being proud to be Jewish was a matter of necessity unless I was prepared to abandon that identity altogether. Little did I know that this pride would later take me to the brink of religiosity, a transformation that was at once seamless, yet not obvious. Religiosity was the natural conclusion of being comfortable in my skin as a Jew. I would later find it impossible to separate my Jewish identity from a religious one. How could one be authentically Jewish stripped of the element of religion, which gave birth to the Jewish identity in the first place?

A while later I went on a Birthright trip to Israel. I was initially rejected, but through the phone call of a member of the Hillel at the University of Arizona, I was accepted. During an amazing trip, we spent a Friday afternoon at the Kosel in Jerusalem. I told myself that I would let God take control of this situation and move myself out of the way, but was insecure in how long I could stay in that position. I put my hands on the Wall and prayed the only way I knew how and eventually I had what I can only explain as a series of powerful visions that came in the form of what I guess you would consider to be very concentrated thoughts. I cannot describe them here because there were many, but in this state I decided that I had to become an observant Jew. That Shabbos I briefly went to a Kabbalos Shabbos, and although I enjoyed it I found myself lost in the service, and probably left early. I slept in for Shacharis.

When I got home during early January, I believe, I began to think about my experience and to plan out my foray into Judaism. I did this first by giving other religions a chance. I immediately filtered out all eastern religions on the basis that they were not monotheistic. I then would consider Christianity only if it provided answers to questions that Judaism could not. And if Christianity could not answer these questions, I would consider Islam. Since Judaism provided a good answer to every major issue I thought of, I found no reason to try something else.

See Part 2 for how I started my process of observance.

By the way, here's something that I managed to pull "out of the archives" from December 2006:

I eventually realized that the views that I held could no longer be considered secular. The change was not so dramatic that I could say it occurred overnight, but rather was a growing set of changes that were occurring in the way I thought about things. At a certain point in time, and it’s possible that it could have occurred earlier or later, they culminated into a coherent set of ideas that were not accurately representative of what you would normally call a secular person. At the point in time of that culmination I looked at myself, and although I saw the same person that I had always been, I had realized a new facet to my being, that I was not a secular Jew and could not associate with that identity. That was more or less the realization that I was an Orthodox Jew and that the Orthodox world was the world in which I belonged. It was as if the sum of my parts came together and I understood a more complete picture of whom I actually was. This was in no way a replacement of who I was but rather a certain coming to fruition of my personality and my thoughts; you could definitely consider it a type of maturation. It was a rounding off of the edges, a placing together of disparate pieces of my being into a more coherent picture.

Previous to this, the external manifestation I was going through was expressed as a level of discomfort with certain things around me and often times came with a feeling of not belonging. The discomfort generally applied to social situations, and in this I open up my experience to the criticism of a person who wants to pin my change on social awkwardness. However, it would be more accurate to say that I was frustrated with the nature of the interaction of many of my friends and peers, behaviors that I considered superficial, negative, and to a degree, resembling a power struggle between those very friends. This was not something I felt I wanted to or could be a part of, and so I was always a bit on the outskirts of my relationship with those people.

There are reasons other than philosophical retaliation, if you want to call it that, for my feeling separated from my friends to the degree that I did; the way they thought and behaved was not the only factor. It was clear that my Jewish identity was a part of me, and although it was an obscured identity that often confused me more than it shed light, it was as if it was infused onto my bones and into my blood, and I could not shed it. My ability to realize that I was different in this sense from my friends, all of whom came from Christian families, played a serious role in putting certain obstacles between them and me. The culture in which my parents raised me, although generally not observant, had fostered a deep awareness of our Jewishness. It was only when I was only able to figure out how that piece of myself fit into the whole that I was able to feel comfortable with it and to love it. Until then my Jewishness was a bittersweet concoction of identity that both blessed me and cursed me. In retrospect I can understand how Jews have chosen to assimilate, Jews who were in much more miserable situations than was I (such as those of the Inquisition). I should thank G-d every day that I chose to assimilate in rather than out. My friends were not to blame for my feeling of alienation from them, it was a symptom of my inability to recover from my Jewishness and for the most part they tried to be as accommodating as possible.

During this time, usually on my own, I would read whatever Jewish material I could get my hands on, completely unaware at that point of the existence of differing paradigms of observance of the Torah. I build up a reserve of stories and partially developed understandings of what Judaism was, but for the most part I kept those away from my friends, and even my family. My interest was sparked from these things and I began to be a bit pushy with my family as to some of the Jewish traditions, such as lighting candles on Chanukah in a specific way, etc… For a few years we lit candles on Friday night, and since my knowledge of Jewish ritual didn’t far exceed that, I sought for my family to do whatever we did in the perfect way. During Passover, for example, I insisted that we read the entire Hagadah from front to back and was annoyed when we read through it quickly, as if just to get to the meal. I even recall expressing my anger to my aunt about how many Jews (in America) were almost totally unmotivated to really feel Judaism.

Another relevant factor was my being born in Israel and my family’s deep attachment to our family “back home,” my mom’s side. Our several trips to Israel over the summers provided me with several positive experiences, many of them occurring on the cusps between adolescence and maturity. Among that, the trips also did something deeper, they put me in touch with a sense of who or what I might have been had we not moved to America when I was six years old. My formative years in America were relatively tough; I developed a dual or hybrid identity forcing me to grapple with the question of who I was and Israel was often the potential key to that answer.

As I began college and slowly but surely saw less and less of my high school friends, I began to meet Jews. My Jewish education ended in sixth grade and during the last eight or so years, my only friends were Gentiles. Now that I was suddenly meeting other Jews, whom also loved Israel like I did, I felt that I could really connect with them. Those people are still my friends to this day. Eventually I joined a pro-active Israel action group on campus that two of them began; finally an outlet for my love of Israel and Judaism. As I became aware of the liberal hatred of the State of Israel on campus, I began to question my previously unquestioned politically liberal views, which to me were inseparable from idealism. Painfully, and after some period of time, I realized that I had to give up some, or many, of my liberal preconceptions on the nature of the universe, scrapping the notion that goodness was to be automatically equated with liberalness. Goodness, it seemed, was not fully formed simply in the liberal view of the world, and slowly, slowly I began to form more conservative views, at least with regards to Israel. My growingly conservative views on Israel, which were identified by not being afraid to state politically incorrect truths regarding the hatred towards Israel. I soon realized, after trying to see it in many ways, that this hatred was held together by one thing above all, that Israel was full of Jews.

Rather than shying away from standing up for our rights as Jews in Israel, as many Jews did, I reasoned that we should not feel guilty about stating what was ours. It was neither necessary nor acceptable to stand up for everybody else’s rights except our own; I did not see it as a violation of liberal thought, but rather as an accurate embodiment of it, to stand up for our own rights. Every year Jews got together on the campus mall to recollect the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust by reading their names from a list; why could we not speak out for the Jews dying today, the living Jews, with the same vigour with which we spoke for those who have already perished? I began to fear that had the Jews who did not speak out for their living brothers lived in the time of the Intifada, similarly they would have not spoken out for their brothers in the camps either. I had already begun to seriously question the resolve of many liberal-leaning Jews to actually bettering their situation. I feared that they were stuck in some continuously repeating time portal of guilt and paranoia that caused them to endlessly read the names of Jews murdered in the past. If their commitment to ending injustice towards Jews was so strong, then there were plenty of Jews dying today for whom they could speak, but more often they violated their “Never Again” ethos by remaining silent.

A while later, “by an accident of the universe,” I was sent on a Birthright trip by which I was initially rejected. Michelle Blumberg, executive director of the Hillel at the University of Arizona, put in a call to the Los Angeles-Israeli Consulate explaining to them that I had never been on an organized trip to Israel. After a moment of her being put on hold, they confirmed that I was accepted to the trip. A week and a half later I was on a plane to Israel, and later, in Jerusalem, standing at the Kotel (Western Wall), the culmination written about in the first paragraph occurred. I knew that I believed in G-d, which meant that G-d had designed a way to communicate with humanity, which had to be the Torah, and that Israel was of utmost importance to Judaism, and at that point in time I realized that I was an Orthodox Jew.

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