Archive of Our Own

I am one year and seven months old when I am baptised. My mother will tell me years later that I was one of the easy children, I did not cry at the water being poured over my head by a gentle-faced Protestant pastor, over the golden shallow bowl catching the rivulets in the middle of a Catholic church. I am too young to understand why I am in this white building with extended family. The pastor concludes: ‘May God bless you and keep you. May God’s face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May God lift his face upon you and give you peace.’

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I am six years old when I discover my parents’ huge, illustrated children’s bible. I am enthralled, spending hours pouring over small paragraphs and colourful drawings. I return to the story of Samson, and I idly wonder why men rarely have long hair anymore, and I think of Samson three weeks later when I sit in a black chair and the hairdresser behind me chats with my mother. My hair descends softly onto the floor.

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I am seven and a half when I ask the deacon leading our youth services and weekly classes why we never focus on the Old Testament. I will not remember her answer, but I will remember the shame, confusion and dismissal, and I will remember not to ask again.

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I am nine when I partake in a week-long church summer camp during which we get to produce and perform a play, and I am playing Saul. I enjoy digging into his character, his lines, what he must feel, and I return to pouring over my children’s bible. I feel reverence, annoyance, sadness, jealousy – the gritty human emotions that I know Saul felt, that I know God dislikes and get so caught up on it I almost hit a seven-year-old girl’s head with a plastic teacup I’m meant to throw the first time we’re performing. The immersion shatters.

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I am eleven when I have an existential crisis at my desk instead of completing my maths homework. I put my soul under scrutiny, really trying to look at myself – if I am good or I am bad. I try to concentrate, listening out for Him, they said He was out there, always listening. I decide I do not want to burn in hell, but I cannot erase all of the mistakes I have made in my eleven years of life already, and I flush hot with shame. I wish He could avert his eyes and cease to perceive me. Years later I will notice that I was not raised to understand that humanity does not exist in binaries, and I was not raised to understand that that may be purposeful.

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I am twelve when I start confirmation classes, and I know most of my peers do the course perfunctorily. I do not, and I judge them harshly inside my own head, but nothing of the sort ever spills past my lips.

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I am thirteen and a month old when me and my Bible have a stare-off in the silence of my room. It is a ghastly shade of orange with a hot air balloon on the front cover, and small letters spelling out that this version is the Luther translation. It does not call to me. I open it and I cannot decipher anything. I feel frustrated at myself and at the Bible, it’s meant to mean something to me, isn’t it? All I find is emptiness and struggle. I wish I could return to reading my children’s Bible.

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I am thirteen and two months old, and getting out of bed every Sunday to go to church becomes a chore. My faith condensed into tally marks on the deacon’s list in her office. My faith condensed to points, acts of what I will later learn to call chesed, forced upon me as if to demonstrate that I am a believer, worthy of confirmation, reduced to marks on a sheet in a deacon’s office. If they act like I am going to dislike participating in faith, how am I supposed to feel any differently?

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I am thirteen and four months old when I burst bubbles of doubt as soon as they arise from what I have learned to call my soul. There is no way around this. It is the path that I am on, and it is right, and I am not at liberty to question it. No human being is. I will remember, later, that the deacon and my parents had sat down and discussed the fact that I was confirming my faith in a religion despite the fact that I was not yet fourteen, the age of religious maturity – it has never been my own decision, has it?

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I am thirteen and five months old when I recite the declaration of faith in front of fifty people, most of them family of the thirteen- and fourteen year-olds behind me, some of them old ladies who are there every week. I do not understand why they come. When I had asked my mother, she explained to me that many find comfort in their faith. I clarified that it was only old people I saw there regularly. She clarified that many of them were lonely, and church offered them companion- and friendship. Years later I will remember pulling a face, grunting skeptically and retreating to my room, while thinking about how church has never been respite, comfort, companionship to me. It is a chore, and I spend the entire hour wishing time would run faster.

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I am thirteen and seven months old when I hear the story that I will later identify as one of the later cracks in my Christianity. It goes like this:

“One night I had a dream: I was walking along the sea with my Lord. Against the dark night sky, images from my life shone like rays of light. And each time I saw two footprints in the sand, my own and that of my Lord. When the last image had passed my eyes, I looked back. I was shocked to discover that in many places on my life's journey there was only one track of footsteps. And these were the most difficult times of my life. Concerned, I asked the Lord: "Lord, when I began to follow you, you promised to be with me in all my ways. But now I discover that in the hardest times of my life there is only a track in the sand. Why did you leave me alone when I needed you the most?" He replied: "My dear child, I love you and will never leave you alone, especially not in times of need and difficulty. Where you only saw one track, I carried you."

I am thirteen and seven months old when my instinct is to scoff and pull my guard up higher. Jesus has not carried me. I am thirteen and seven months old, when I truly, genuinely realise that people are not faking the comfort their faith offers, and I ask myself what’s wrong with me, and think that maybe, maybe, there isn’t a God at all.

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I am fourteen years old when I declare myself an atheist. The only response I receive is my own blank face staring back from the mirror, as if I hadn’t just whispered a life-shattering truth at it. I have believed my entire life, faith an undercurrent to my every action. But much like my face remains blank, so does my soul. Later I will realise that I had been lying to myself.

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I am fifteen years old when I decide I will not turn sixteen.

I do, eventually.

I do not feel carried.

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I am sixteen years old when I make myself a tumblr account and, by chance, stumble over neopaganism. It gratifies me, I feel as though I am seen, like something is responding to me, and yet the thing that remains with me through all the three-and-a-half years that I will remain a pagan is the fact that the universe’s will will always trump anything I am trying to do, that the gods and goddesses I worship I feel are doing, that I still, somehow, believe in greater things.

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I am nineteen years old when I start university and realise I know nothing about Judaism. I chastise myself, how can I be a respectable Holocaust historian and not know anything about Judaism? I make a mental point to do some research, but I will not get around to it.

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I am twenty years old when I am sitting in my friend's living room and create a character who goes through a religious crisis, learning that everything she has learnt to date was lies and is now floating aimlessly through life. I do not realise that playing her is easy, because I am her.

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I am twenty years and eleven months old when I am so desperate I take a quiz on religion, and have to suppress the queasiness I feel when the letters ‘JUDAISM’ stare back from the site. Later I will realise the quiz is reductive and at points inaccurate, but I remain steadfast that Hashem works in mysterious ways.

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I am twenty-one years, three months and five days old when I first step foot into a synagogue. It is a cold building, raising goosebumps on my skin, and I am half an hour late, and I have no idea what I am doing. I expect a revelation, but nothing comes – only a quiet sense of contentment, and when I leave, the realisation that not once during the two-and-a-half hour service have I sent a glance toward a clock.

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I am twenty-one years and six months old when I learn about the concept of Jewish souls and gerim and I have to hold myself back not to cry. If nothing else, then this is the one truly truthful thing I will have ever done. The rabbi concludes with ‘Y’varech’cha Hashem v’yishme’recha. Ya’er Hashem panav eilecha vi’chuneka. Yi’isa Hashem panav eilecha v’yasem lecha shalom.’, and I find myself irrationally angry that I have not realised that this sentence, the only thing I remember from Sunday services, really, was Jewish all along. I walk out of shul steaming that I half – expected her to draw a cross in the air like my pastors always did.

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I am twenty-one years old when I have my first genuine religious experience. The sanctuary’s lights turned off, my congregation is huddled around the Havdalah candle, singing the melody – niggun, I know now – and I am perched on a chair, close to passing out because I did not drink enough before fasting. I feel tears springing to my eyes, and I cannot answer when someone to my right hands me a glass of water and asks if I am alright. My eyes are glued to the powerful flicker of the yellow, braided candle, being passed around for everyone to hold their nails to the flame. It is not the kind of experience in which I think I feel Hashem – I feel stunned into silence by the holiness of humanity, and my soul is at rest. I realise that it does not matter if there is an objective conclusion to Hashem existing or not existing, and it does not matter to me if They are unknowable, knowable, personal or impersonal. Hashem has not called me to be here – my soul has. And my soul will continue to pull – until I am right where I am meant to, among bnei yisrael. And I know in that moment, that at one point in this lifetime I get to have, I too will have stood at Mount Sinai and said ‘we will do and we will hear’.