I have had a number of circumstances occur in my life the past few years that have compelled me to look into what I believe and why. These are things that are important to me. I don't expect them to mean anything to you, and I frankly don't care what you think of what I believe. I am simply stating these things to satisfy your curiosity.
Growing up, there were some odd things in my childhood that I assumed were normal things that every family experienced. I now realize as an adult that these were not normal things and were in fact evidence that my family was part of a larger drama that will remain forever carved into the history of the world. My father had little contact with his family for his own reasons, and thus my major familial influences came from my mother's side of the family tree. I knew that my father had decided for his own reasons to convert to Judaism and have the family convert with him. I also knew that my mother considered this whole affair more of a technical matter and somewhat superfluous given her father's background. I had never been to a church until I was an adult. I played with toys bought at the syngagogue gift shop that I was given for Hannukah. We had Challah and kosher wine and candles every Friday night. I knew these things were specifically Jewish things, just as Roman Catholic children did specifically Catholic things and the other kids did specifically other religion things, but that these things were not inherently bizzarre or anything. There were other things in my childhood that I never gave a second thought, things that were much more odd.
My mother comes from a very large family. Because most of them live overseas, I didn't meet my cousins until we moved to Holland for a year when I was almost ten years old. I met my aunts and uncles and first cousins and some of my first cousins' kids. I had been aware of their existance all my life, so meeting them was exciting and yet at the same time uneventful. I assumed everyone has first cousins, just as I assumed no one has second and third cousins and extended family beyond one's grandparents. It was something I never thought twice about until my older sister pointed out a week and a half ago why we didn't have second and third cousins, something hideous and evil that I confirmed and documented last Friday during Thanksgiving weekend.
This new information really has nothing to do with my decision, but it has certainly strengthened my resolve in it. However, it is related to something that did trigger it.
I spent my first three years of college in a tradition-bound Southern university, one of those great Southern bastions of White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and Football. Although my entire time in college I always retained some residual ties to the Jewish community, I decided to run from my upbringing and embrace Protestantism. What teenager/twenty-something doesn't want to do all they can to fit in with their friends? I didn't consciously realize I was running from anything, although I certainly exhibited a level of hostility and embarassment about my background characteristic of someone seeking the unknown and running from herself.
One day at church the pastor included in his announcements that Schindler's List would be airing that night and that everyone should watch it. I called my family and they said they already planned to watch the movie. There was a part in the movie where the Jews were forced to build a sidewalk with headstones stolen from Jewish cemeteries. My mother very casually turned to me and announced, "That's what happened to your great-grandfather's grave." (I had known his grave was missing because the cemetery had been destroyed, but I had never before made the connection that the cemetery had been destroyed by the Nazis during World War Two.) The following weekend I took a long bike ride during which I realized I was trying to run from myself. Other than a few social visits with friends, it was the last time I ever set foot in a church.
Through various social contacts I had been getting more and more in touch with my Jewish roots. By the time I visited some Israeli friends in Kfar Sava (a suburb of Tel Aviv) early this fall, I had been very seriously questioning my acceptance of Christianity. I think the pivotal moment in my rejection of Christianity came when a friend jokingly announced after a concert we attended that he was G-d. What if Jesus was just kidding? I thought to myself. By the time I had talked to a rabbi about getting documentation for Aliyah (and doing my own form of Ba'alat T'shuvah, about which I don't care to go into specifics), I was pretty sure I was doing the right thing. That weekend I came across some information about verses in the Bible that made me sure I was. There is a link to that information on my home page.
Since then I have done some research on my family. It has been known in my family for quite a while that my maternal grandfather was Jewish, although he was very secretive about this fact (he told my oldest uncle this shortly before he was taken to a Japanese POW camp). My mother recently told me her family did not, in fact, have Christmas trees and Easter eggs, nor did they eat pork when she was growing up. My older sister told me last Sunday that my grandfather's cousins were killed in the Holocaust. I confirmed this on Friday at the U.S. Holocaust Muesum archives in Washington, DC. Approximately 400+ members of my mother's extended family were killed in Auschwitz, Sobibor, and other camps during the Holocaust. Two of them were babies.
So there's my story. Incidentally, I've stopped biting my fingernails since I made Ba'alat T'shuvah. :)