maycocksean said:
others "converted" within religion from one faith tradition to another.
I
think I fit into this category--moving from Orthodox to Conservative Judaism probably wouldn't sound like a "conversion" to most people, but within the Jewish community...well, let's just say things get heated enough sometimes that certain ultra-Orthodox factions have been known to spray-paint swastikas on their "heretical" brethren's synagogues and forbid any social contact whatsoever with them. More extreme than anything I ever experienced, fortunately--but it's broadly indicative of how bruising the recriminations can get.
I grew up in a fairly traditional Orthodox family, a few towns down the road from the rural Mississippian Orthodox community we belonged to, at least on Sabbaths. Most families in this community, like most everyone else's in the area, had been there for generations. My parents hadn't; my father was born into a highly assimilated and educated Dutch Jewish family in Amsterdam, my mother into a poor and ultratraditional Greek Jewish family in Thessaloniki. Their families were deported while they were both still children during the War, all their relatives were killed, and through various twists of fate they wound up emigrating here as teenagers, going to college then grad school where they met, and eventually winding up in Mississippi with five kids. As to the Jewish community I thus grew up in, while it was highly observant and all that, like you'd expect an Orthodox community to be, it otherwise wasn't much like the stereotypical Brooklyn shtetl-nostalgia portrait you might see in a movie or something; our rabbi went by "Bubba" and generally wore overalls and a T-shirt, and we all went to ordinary public schools, as there was no way anyone could've afforded to fund a private yeshiva. The rabbi, my parents, and several other couples from our synagogue had been very active in the Civil Rights Movement, and the earliest modern Jewish "icon" I remember learning about was Abraham Joshua Heschel; my parents had up in our living room a photo of him marching arm-in-arm with MLK Jr. at Selma (King was actually on his way to a Passover Seder at Heschel's house when he was assassinated).
I do have some memories of unpleasant religious-associated incidents growing up; there was a fair amount of anti-Semitism in the area, some of it of the "religious" "Christ-killers" type, some of it more racist in nature. There was also quite a lot of racism of the more stereotypically small-town Southern sort, some of it interwoven with religious "justifications," some of it not. It never really occurred to me to see any of this as broadly symptomatic of religion somehow, perhaps because pretty much everyone there--black, white, Jewish--was religious to some degree or another. Perhaps this was naive; I don't know. Anyhow, as far as home life and synagogue, I really have no bad religious memories to speak of; being Jewish I just experienced as a basic and normal fact of life, not something that "happened to" me or anything. My parents were firm believers in the value of a classic liberal education as well as a Jewish one, and supplemented both types at home; after school or on weekends, we might study Talmud with my father one day, then read from Herakleitos or the Iliad with my mother the next as part of our Greek lessons. All pretty unremarkable, really. I don't recall ever feeling any disjuncture between the two at that age.
My father died when I turned 16 and not long after that, I began to get quite interested in Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah). Initially my interest was probably partly psychological, partly also because I'd been attending a Catholic high school, where I'd read St. Teresa of Avila and Thomas Merton, both of whom impressed me very much. At the same time, I'd begun to feel dissatisfied both intellectually and experientially with the inherent anthropomorphism of the conventional Abrahamic conceptions of God, and found it very exciting to have access to this new vocabulary and conceptual system through which to better articulate what had come to seem intuitive to me. Other than that, life, grieving, religious and secular education, and the brave new world of mundane teenage humiliations plodded on as usual.
Like a lot of folks I guess, it wasn't really until college that I seriously began to grasp the notion that all the ideas I came into contact with might conceivably be pointing me towards anything beyond the confines of the world I'd grown up in. This was where I encountered for the first time a lot of the thinkers who I'd today consider profoundly influential on my worldview. 19th-century German phenomenology; Kant; Kierkegaard's Christian existentialism; American pragmatism; Gadamer's hermeneutics; and for that matter the atheist existentialism, utilitarianism, and empiricism of (respectively) Camus, Mill, and Hume were all particularly formative in one way or another. At the same time, in the course of preparing myself to better grasp the cultural backdrop of my chosen field (Indian politics), I took a few courses in Indian thought, and found much there to extend and deepen my grasp of certain aspects of Kabbalah which had most interested me, above all in the area of Advaitic epistemology. Although my formal Jewish education was over by this point, on the side I read a few modern Jewish thinkers who also weighed heavily into the mix, most importantly Heschel and Buber.
At the same time, attending a large public university with classmates from all different walks of life, each of them seeming as familiar and natural to the people who walked them as everyone else's seemed unfamiliar and arbitrary, I started to take a critical look at the world I'd grown up in from a no-longer-immersed perspective--not just its theological outlines, but its social and cultural ideologies as well--and I did not like much of what I saw. Why can't women be rabbis, when nothing in the canonical literature forbids it? What is it that's so contaminating and dangerous about historical source criticism, that our rabbis aren't even allowed to teach or write about it? Why do we say Well yes, admittedly the Oral Law does give rabbis the right to, and guidelines for, reinterpreting and even abrogating laws...but nonetheless, we hereby arbitrarily declare that all worthy uses of that provision were exhausted by the end of the Talmudic period, hence no more? We don't bar adulterers or slanderers or "rebellious sons" from our synagogues, so what exactly is the problem with openly gay people being there? There certainly wasn't anything bold or revolutionary about these questions, and indeed my parents had asked many of them; but I'd never before considered them fundamentally challenging to my place in the future as I'd always, and perhaps carelessly, imagined it.
While proceeding on to grad school I pursued these questions on the side, fuming and bumbling my way through thousands of pages of rabbinic reponsa on these topics. I didn't arrive at final convictions on all the questions I had, far from it, but a few things slowly began to crystallize out of the muddle, and perhaps the most important one was the realization that I simply did not and could not belong in Orthodoxy any more, either spiritually or intellectually. Where else to go...well, Reform Judaism, despite my deep respect for its founding thinkers, left me cold with its categorical dismissal of the place of observing Jewish law in life. Through all my other dissatisfactions and upheavals, the touchstone of spiritual discipline and Jewish identity that had always provided, much like yoga or meditation (though I do those too), had always kept me centered and, paradoxically, more limber in the best sense of that term. Atheism never really even occured to me; the experiential, if inarticulable, understanding of God I'd arrived at by that point suited me just fine, and I wasn't much troubled by the ultimate inexplicability of the universe or the problems of mortality or the like: Judaism has no hard-and-fast doctrines about the potential nature of the afterlife or its relationship to human life and actions, nor any overarching impulses towards Biblical literalism, so I really saw no reason to feel threatened by such matters, anyhow. That left Conservatism, whose simultaneous commitment to preserving an observant life, coupled with an essential receptivity to re-engaging Talmud Torah as that had always been done--through debate among those who had devoted their lives to realizing its precepts--had come to appeal most to me all along, as I slogged through all those responsa.
My siblings and most of my Orthodox friends were all quite supportive of this decision; my mother, on the other hand, was deeply upset for a couple years, and I did lose a few not-so-sympathetic Orthodox friends over it. Which was all right; I was in my mid-20s by then, and sturdy enough to handle that, though I do regret the hurt it caused my mother. But considering the anguish all around I've seen some families go through over such things, I really was very fortunate. It's funny how one's general personality, in addition to all the other factors, enters into the big picture with these kinds of decisions--my younger brother, who was still just a teenager when all this took place, is now an Orthodox rabbi, though on the
far left end of that spectrum. Intellectually and spiritually, he really has so much in common with me, and we agree--often right down to the fine print--on so many of those same questions I had (including, in some cases, agreeing on not having a clue what the best answer really is, lol). But for him, the admittedly true fact that a great many Conservative Jews, unlike most of the Orthodox, are in practice cheerfully hit-and-miss about the finer points of observance is an obstacle he just can't get around: he would rather lead a congregation of resolutely scrupulous, if hard-left-leaning, "fringe" faithful, and as the price, put up with having some (very) nasty enemies in the Orthodox Rabbinical Assembly. Whereas for me...while admittedly unencumbered with his responsibilities...I really am not much bothered by the particulars of how observant the people I attend shul with are, so long as I feel that I'm among friends theologically.
Thanks, maycocksean, for starting this thread, and everyone else for some really intriguing stories.
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