This year I’d like to bring a new feature to the blog in the form of Conversion Stories. Personal conversions explore the dynamic crossing of belief and practice, skepticism and acceptance, identity and new-found community. Further, they remind us that we are not so unlike the other, even if our conversion/religious journey leads us to a different entity.
To begin, I’d like to introduce you to my classmate Meggie O’Dell. Together we have spent the past semester toiling through Modern Hebrew. Meggie is a rabbinical student at JTS and a converted Jew.
With a name like Meggie O’Dell, I get a double-take when people find out I’m a rabbinical student. No, my name isn’t a relic of intermarriage or a souvenir of an ancestral trek through Ellis Island. Rather, I converted to Judaism when I was 19, and my journey to join the Chosen People– and, eventually, the rabbinate–has been lifelong.
I was born in a small, rural town in central California, a bastion of Christianity and Conservative politics. I was frequently hired to sing in churches from about the age of eight, but aside from the services I attended as a musician, I wasn’t even a Christmas-and-Easter Christian. My mother was a devout Seventh-Day Adventist for most of her young life, but we never attended that church, and my father would probably describe himself as an agnostic.
To complicate matters, I became enamored of Judaism at a very young age. Nobody knows why, but at age four, I came home from my Methodist preschool and told my mother that I’d decided to become a Jew. Maybe it was destiny, maybe it was the Rugrats Passover special, but either way, I devoured any and all material on Judaism from that point forward. Cookbooks, religious texts, folktales– I read anything I could get my hands on, and I (unsuccessfully) lobbied for everything from Chanukah decorations to a bat mitzvah.
At school, I was surrounded by religious Christians, though, and from time to time their parents would invite me to come to church with them. Catholic, Baptist, “charismatic”– I went to every kind of service imaginable, and what I saw there confirmed to me that Christianity was not where I belonged.
The same children who dutifully answered their Sunday school teachers’ questions about mercy and Christian charity were the ones who tormented me daily in middle school, and the hypocrisy disgusted me. As we got older, they denounced pro-choice individuals as murderers and hesitated not at all to tell me that my gay friends were going to hell. I couldn’t countenance any religion that felt it had such a monopoly on truth.
Just as importantly, I was an inquisitive child, and I found my discussions with Christian clergy to be endlessly frustrating. Every logical or moral problem got to a point that ended with “well, you just have to believe.” I didn’t. I couldn’t. What the Catholics called the “mysteries of faith” and some Protestants dubbed the “simple, childlike ideal” I just couldn’t stomach.
Throughout high school and into college, I kept up my spiritual search. Judaism fit, and that never changed. I found that the few things I’d liked about Christianity turned out to be Jewish in origin. I loved the Jewish communities I discovered, the way Jews took care of each other in body and in spirit. I loved that the Jewish religion is an earthly one, infinitely more concerned with the way to live than with what happens when we die. I loved the experience of Jewish prayer, at once individual and communal. And I loved that no rabbi ever answered a question with “that’s not for us to know.” The Torah has 70 faces, according to traditional understanding, and there are 1000 explanations and debates and interpretations for every question it raises.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach says that finding Judaism is like falling in love: you can rationalize and reason, but when it comes down to it, you just know. I knew– I knew at age four, and I know now. I also know now that I’m meant to be a rabbi. “Rabbi” means “my teacher” in Hebrew, and teaching both children and adults about Judaism is the great delight of my life. I could talk about the intricacies of keeping kosher for hours on end if anyone would let me! I can’t wait to be allowed into people’s lives in their moments of greatest need, to bring to them the beauty that Judaism helps me to see every day. I know that there are others who find this in Christianity, in Buddhism, in atheism, and I celebrate that, too. I only hope that my rabbinate can be as multi-faceted as is my religion.
Do you have a conversion story? I’d love to share it on the blog! Contact me for details.
