Author: pamchernoff

Blogging about my experiences as a Methodist then Congregationalist who has become increasingly involved in her family's Jewish practice and synagogue life. I am at work on a memoir titled The Edge of the Map: A Life in Two Faiths.

That was two decisions?

frogs-1413787_1280

Before we married, we made two decisions that seemed like one at the time. Any children we had would be Jewish, and we would look for a synagogue that fit both of us. We were clear that we wanted to find a synagogue where we were both comfortable—that sending Joel and our then-theoretical offspring off to synagogue while I stayed home wasn’t going to work for either of us.

For me as an individual, this was a big decision that I didn’t recognize as one at the time. Back then, it felt like a natural part of deciding to raise a Jewish family. Of course we would find somewhere that I felt comfortable. But treating the synagogue search as something we were doing together as a family, not just as something Joel was doing, was the first in a series of baby steps.

Here’s what I thought: I would come along to services sometimes and try to be enough a part of things that I’d feel connected when kid activity time rolled around. My primary commitments would be at a church. And my relationship to Christianity would not change.

As the Yiddish proverb goes, “Men plan, God laughs.”

As it turned out, the decision to make the synagogue choice a family decision nudged me toward not just parachuting in, but really and truly trying to—and increasingly succeeding in—being part of Jewish community, sometimes by baby step, sometimes by leap.

The fact that we both saw involvement in a faith community as an important part of settling in and making a life for ourselves was important in and of itself. It wasn’t that one of us felt strongly about engagement in a faith community and the other was averse or apathetic. We both wanted to feel connected, to start making friends in our new home; and we both saw synagogue membership as an important step in that direction.

My need to feel part of a community is heavily influenced by being an introvert who has spent much of her adult life starting over in new places. I love knowing people; I do not particularly enjoy meeting them.

I can happily wade into a crowd of people I know and ask follow-up questions—How’s your mom doing? Have you heard from the school yet? Did you see we changed the meeting time? But making small talk with a clutch of strangers exhausts me. On a good night, I can chat away about anything. But if I’m tired, I have a hard time starting a conversation with a stranger, and if one does actually get started, I’m terrible at keeping any momentum going. I start into rounds of, “uh huh, uh huh, that’s great,” that even while I’m doing it I know is conversational death.

My years as a newspaper reporter helped teach me how to talk to people I don’t know. I got so I could pick up the phone or walk up to a stranger without an internal pep talk first, but it was learned behavior, not my natural way of being. As a reporter, I had the news judgment but not the conversational fearlessness I needed. When I was in graduate school, one of my professors (a copy editor) told us that if you’re basically a salesman, you’re a reporter, if you’re basically an accountant, you’re a copy editor. At the time I resisted the analogy, but it was only about a year before a city editor recognized which one I was and sat me down in front of a computer to edit to my heart’s content.

In a conversational pinch I will use those years as a reporter to fall back on just interviewing the other person if they’ve said something that intrigues me, but that’s not a very balanced way to have a conversation.

In a faith community, I know I have something in common with the other people there—maybe not all of our specific beliefs, but at least certain common ideas about what is important in life, and that we should take care of each other. Since I can plod along for too long at the small-talk level, being in a religious community, where people have relationships, where they talk about life cycle events—the good and the bad—is the ideal place to form friendships, because it gives me somewhere to ask how I can pitch in and then feel like I’m contributing something while I’m getting comfortable—or really, more accurately, as a way of getting comfortable. Who knew that joining something could be an introvert’s way in?

What I Believe

Whenever I pick up a book about religion, I’m curious about the author’s sensibility. Here’s mine:

I believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah (but I can never get the matriarchs in the right order).

I believe that God is what God is, and that my attempts to understand are by definition imperfect.

I believe that we’re supposed to struggle with the material, and I hope God sees engagement in the struggle as a sign of faith.

I believe it’s important to teach my daughter to love God and that we have responsibilities larger than ourselves.window blog

I believe that a life of faith is best lived out in community.

I believe that my life has been enriched by my Christian upbringing and enriched again by being in Jewish community.

I believe that God loves us all, and that learning to understand each other is part of the test.

I believe that sometimes the test you think you’re taking and the one you’re really taking are two different things.

I believe in the still small voice and grace and love and forgiveness.

I believe in divine nudges—that God doesn’t cause bad things, but sometimes nudges us toward good things when we’re quiet and listening.

I believe in “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.”

Map Pixabay

I believe that when I walk off the edge of my own map, I should try to be brave and open and see what I can learn.

My first Jewish service

Every year right before the High Holidays my friend Dawn, in her official interfaith outreach capacity, sends out an e-mail message imploring couples to avoid making those services the non-Jewish partner’s first exposure to Jewish worship. The services are long. They’re focused on sin and death. Also, everyone is there, so they don’t give you a sense of the week-in-week-out congregation. They are not your average Friday night or Saturday morning at the synagogue.

For most people, this is excellent advice. But I am not most people.

Marin County Civic Center Veterans Memorial Auditorium. (c) Frank Farm
My first Jewish service was an evening Rosh Hashanah service at a huge civic center in Northern California. It was long—a Friday night so we read all of the Sabbath-only red parts in the prayer book, not just the parts specific to the new year being ushered in.

For me, a big, long, and anonymous service was a fine place to start.

First of all, when I’m uncomfortable, I like to be invisible. Feeling out of place in my surroundings makes me uncomfortable. So the anonymity of a packed civic center suited me just fine. I love congregations where people come up after services and say, “I haven’t seen you here before. I’m so and so.” But first I like to sit at the edge, to watch and feel a place before I jump in—a trait my mother assures me I’ve had all my life.

Second of all, the long service gave me enough time to stop worrying about not knowing the prayers, or even the sounds of the language the prayers were said in, and to start watching. And what I saw fascinated me. Instead of standing stock still like the Protestants I grew up with, people swayed as they sang and bowed as they prayed. The readings in English had snippets of familiarity. I’d never thought about where exactly “May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight” appears in the Bible. It’s a Psalm. Solidly not New Testament material. Hearing it evoked in that setting conjured an image of a long-forgotten assistant minister who would begin the service with it every Sunday when I was in junior high.

So by the end, I was feeling pretty good. Sure, I occasionally counted how many pages until the end of the service, but overall I was feeling like I’d spent an enjoyable evening peeking into a different culture.

Then, near the end, a 13-year-old girl, a recent Bat Mitzvah, turned to me, stuck out her hand, and said, “L’shana Tovah.” I shook her hand. I think I mumbled, “Thank you,” or something. But I felt like I’d been outed. Caught being an ignorant imposter at an important occasion. A tourist cravenly peeking in on a solemn moment—the same feeling I’ve had the few times I’ve visited urban African-American churches—like it’s obvious to everyone around me that I’m there to get a look and no matter how respectfully that’s meant or how politely I behave, it’s inappropriate. I’d add that this is a) not how I’d view someone coming to observe a service where I didn’t feel like an onlooker, and b) entirely self-generated.

Fourteen years later, I can toss off L’shana Tovah, and even add u’metukah to wish someone a good and sweet year instead of just a good year, but I still get tripped up by a new holiday greeting on occasion. More often, I stumble over whether to use one with someone who knows I’m not Jewish, or it’s reversed and the other person stumbles over what to say to me.

I trip over these greetings because they feel like a proxy for both what I do claim and what I do not claim. I don’t want to seem to be pretending to be Jewish even though I do worship very Jewishly. And even though I’ve been worshiping Jewishly for more than a decade, I still occasionally feel like I’m pretending or showing off when I wish someone a good Pesach instead of happy Passover, or tie myself into a useless knot figuring out whether “Shabbat Shalom” (peaceful Sabbath) or “have a good weekend” should cross my lips in a particular situation. Hovering endlessly at the edges can be its own vice.

I’m writing this down partly because I’m still finding my own way to the practices that are right for me, and partly because being an intermarried practicing(ish) Protestant balancing between worlds she loves feels lonely at times.

There are lots of intermarried families out there. I have met many people at synagogues who didn’t grow up Jewish. But it’s less common for me to meet an intermarried mainline Protestant who is raising a Jewish family and wants to talk about their own faith journey. They/we are out there. And to be fair, my family tends to move away just as friendships start to deepen. But I also think that if I feel a bit alone in the particularities of my situation, then others may as well.

I’ve traveled a long way in the years since I walked into a civic center, newly in love with a man who didn’t share my religion. This is the story of where that journey has taken me. It is not a how-to book. There are plenty of books about how to have a Jewish household, and an excess of people with shoulds for intermarried couples. I don’t have a magic description of how to be a non-Jew in a Jewish household. My way of being a wife and mother is the right way for me and my family; it is not the only right way.

What I do have is a story to tell about how I went from being so ignorant that I once wished my future husband a happy Yom Kippur (something I still can’t acknowledge without cringing) to being happily and comfortably engaged in synagogue life and a competent parent of a Jewish child while remaining authentically myself. It is not primarily a story about my daughter’s relationship to Judaism. That story will be hers to tell. It’s also not about navigating a marriage between two people of different backgrounds. Lots of people have told that story. This one is about me, about what I have found and lost along the way, and about what I struggle with as my own faith is influenced, challenged, and deepened by two sets of practices.