My story is a familiar one, almost a cliché: I married a Jewish man, began raising Jewish children and, after many years, chose Judaism for myself. Of course there is more to the story than that. This is part of that story.
In the season of t’shuvah – which literally means turning toward – I think of its opposite, m’shuvah, which means turning away. M’shuvah is one of the Hebrew words for apostasy, which is the act of renouncing a religious or political belief. I am an apostate.
Long before I met my husband David, I turned away from Catholicism. That act of m’shuvah was just one of many that characterized my early adult life, including turning away from secularism to raise Jewish children.
M’shuvah and t’shuvah are connected. You can’t turn toward something without also turning away. But I found that it is quite possible to turn away without really turning toward, and my ability to do that made being part of an interfaith family easier. So turning away became my default posture. I was, to coin a word, a m’shuvnik.
My state of spiritual incoherence caught up to me eventually, but old habits are hard to break. It took me 14 years to say out loud, “I think I want to convert.” Yet at that same time of pronouncement, I wrote in my journal that perhaps I had been too hasty. M’shuvnik.
I spent years studying and grappling with the why and the how of turning toward a spiritual life, and then toward Judaism. The entire time, m’shuvah, faithlessness, haunted me. Having fit easily into a Jewish community and having by all appearances taken on its values and beliefs, I was terrified and half-convinced that I would fail at creating a meaningful, transformative process. After all, following my Catholic confirmation, I lived in pretty close accordance with a covenant for seven years. And then I walked away.
My journal from that time of study with my rabbi conveys my fear: My head hurts. I come out thinking “whuuuut?” But it’s good. And it’s challenging. And it’s hard. And it’s not really my head that hurts. It’s my heart. I fear that I no longer have the capacity for belief. That I am essentially faithless. And I feel foolish. I don’t want to make a contract with my imaginary sky friend. I want to…I don’t know what I want. To have access to a spiritual discipline or to have a structure for exploring those ideas…To have a shot at being a person of faith.
Through the process of becoming Jewish, I came to understand that I couldn’t keep turning away from my acts of m’shuvah; I had to allow them into my story. Failing at Catholicism opened the door for conceptualizing a life of meaning, ultimately allowing me to contemplate the gifts of being a Jew – one of which is sitting at my table, with the people I love, in a house that I built from the cherished stones of a lost faith and the mortar of a found one.
Along my path of change, I had shattered like a plate dropped on a tile floor. With a plate, you have to figure out how to put the pieces back together. And even if you can, it will be a different plate. Breaking and mending, taking the pieces of our experience and reordering them. This is the creative cycle, the acknowledgment that beginnings are also endings, m’shuvah connecting to t’shuvah – a circle, both complete and infinite.
By Lisa Timmel
Lisa Timmel is a member of Congregation Rodeph Sholom in New York City where she lives with her husband and two children. She is a freelance dramaturg who works with The Huntington Theatre Company, Sundance Theatre Institute, Denver Center Theater and Stacey Mindich Productions, among others.
Photo by Kristian Thøgersen.
