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FAQ: Judaism and me
You converted to marry Dani, right?
Nope. Nothing could be farther from the truth. First, I wouldn't be that casual about something as important as religion, and second, I strongly suspect that Dani would have preferred a gentile. He was dating one, after all.
Proximity to Dani had an effect, I'm sure, but we had already split up when I started exploring Judaism. (We got back together later.)
You mean you're not an athiest or an agnostic or something?
I used to be. I was raised as a Roman Catholic and concluded fairly early that I didn't believe as they did. Maybe there's a pendulum; I rejected the entire notion of God rather than looking for alternate interpretations. Actually, "reject" is too strong a word. I wasn't exactly an agnostic: agnostics don't know if God exists; I, on the other hand, just plain didn't care. Someone suggested the term "apatheist" for this, which I like.
So what happened?
One Pesach I realized, the night before the first seder, that I was upset that I didn't have a seder to go to. (I'd been to a few with Dani's family, and a couple held by friends before that just out of curiosity.) At first I thought it was nostalgia for Dani's family, but that wasn't it at all: the content of the seder, and not that particular seder, was what mattered. I schmoozed my way into a local community seder, realized that this was speaking to me somehow, and went home very confused.
Things might have ended there had it not been for an email exchange with a (then-)acquaintance. He was geeking about languages on a mailing list and mentioned Hebrew in passing, I wrote with a grammar question, he said "I wouldn't have figured a Cellio for Hebrew", and the flood gates opened. He pointed me at some reading material and that led me to a bunch more. No one ever said the word "convert".
Being an engineering type, I eventually decided to hypothesize the existence of God, pray as sincerely as I could, and see what happened. And, um, I saw effects. I started some really basic observance, and the more I did the more "right" I knew this was. I started to pray daily (in English, plus the Shema) and asked for guidance. (It took me several more weeks to work up the nerve to walk into the local Judaica shop and buy a siddur (prayer book). On reflection, it does seem a little odd that I was more worried about approaching Pinsker's and rabbis than I was about approaching God!)
In a lot of ways I was engaging intellectually more than emotionally. We were coming up on Shavuot, a holiday with a tradition of all-night torah study, and that really appealed to my inner geek. So I ventured out into the community and found that, when talking about revelation, I was using the word "we". (I'd always balked at saying "we" as seders.) So this made it pretty clear that it was time to approach some rabbis.
Was it hard to change your fundamental beliefs?
Actually, I didn't. Exploring Judaism was much more about recognizing things I already believed than about exploring foreign ideas. The more I learned the more it all resonated.
But why Reform? They're so fluffy.
I am a Reform Jew for theological and philosophical reasons. I am a fairly observant Jew because my study of our texts and our tradition tells me that these mitzvot are important, to us and to God, but I would be completely out of place in a Conservative or Orthodox congregation because of how I got to that state. Reform is fundamentally about personal autonomy (with study), while the other movements are not. A lot of people call themselves Reform because they're looking for permission to say "no" to mitzvot, but they miss the point in my opinion. I do not expect my fellow Reform Jews to come to the same conclusions I've come to; their practice is not my concern. But Reform does not automatically mean non-observant or non-serious.
More here (2001) and here (2004).
What do you get out of torah study? Is it just so you can learn
the rules?
No. The act itself is interesting even if no practical answers result. And let's face it; there's a lot of stuff in text study that really doesn't have practical results. I've studied talmud on how capital trials are (were) conducted, the rituals of the temple when it stood, and a bunch of other stuff.
There is a concept in Judaism of studying "for the sake of heaven" -- study for study's sake. That's not quite it in my case, though there's some of that too. But fundamentally, I find it intellectually stimulating, it helps me fill in gaps in my knowledge because I wasn't raised in this religion (and haven't learned all its ways of looking at the world), and it leads to fascinating philosophical, theological, and legalistic discussions.
More (toward the bottom) (2003).
You sometimes lead services. Don't you have to be a rabbi to do that?
No. In Judaism any qualified adult can lead services.
Until recently, most of my leading of services was the result of other people asking me to. A few months after I converted my rabbi was away for a couple weeks and asked me to lead the twice-weekly afternoon minyan, which I'd been attending regularly. I wasn't very good, but I did it. Later he asked me to lead a Shabbat morning service when he would be away. A year or so later he took a three-month sabbatical and left me in charge of the afternoon minyan; I also led Shabbat morning a couple times. And so on. One odd quirk of all this, though, is that my rabbi has almost never actually seen me lead services, because if he's there he does it. Tonight, when I led part of a shiva minyan, might have been the first time.
Meanwhile, all along I've been going to another synagogue one morning a week (long story). Their rabbi asked me to lead occasional Friday-night services (in a rotation) when they lost their cantor, which I did with some hesitation. That ended after a couple years (they hired another cantor), but recently the guys in that morning minyan got more insistent that I lead those services, so after dodging for a while (I really didn't think I was qualified) I started doing so.
I am now studying in a para-rabbinic program of sorts, and that's improving my skills in this and in many other areas, but no, you don't need those sorts of credentials to lead services.
That said, many Reform Jews have issues with lay leaders (2003).
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-- Dagonell
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