What Has Judaism Ever Brought Me?

An Origin Story from the Not-So-Dark Side

An afternoon in the Galil. Photo by author.

In that forgotten 1970s masterpiece of rock-comics¹ From Beyond the Grave, Peter Parker, at his lowest ebb, facing the possibility that his Aunt May may be murdered by the King Pin because of Spider-Man, wonders

What have my spider powers ever brought but pain to those who love me? . . . . Everything bad that ever happened to me happened to me was because of my secret identity. Because I am Spider-Man. But I wasn’t born with superpowers. I wasn’t born wearing a mask . . . . When it all started I never dreamed it could end this way . . . .

And then the scene shifts to that “fateful day” at Mid-Town High when a lone spider descends through crisscrossing radioactive gamma rays.

Yes, low ebbs are good times to revisit origin stories, and so I take my cue from that great Jewish storyteller Stan Lee to structure this latest entry mulling over my own superpower, Judaism. Excelsior!

As I doomscroll through Israel-hating X tweets, as I discover long lists of antisemitic colleagues, as I witness the relative silence of friends and allies to a global resurgence of antisemitism, I sometimes ask myself, what have I gotten myself into? What has Judaism ever brought me other than membership in a hated minority? I wasn’t born with a brit milah. I wasn’t born wearing a kippah.

I could have stayed a depressed, but safe, Lutheran instead of a slightly less depressed, but anxious, Jew. I could have gone about blithely ignoring or downplaying or arm-chair-quarterbacking “the Middle East conflict.” I could be feasting on some yummy kid boiled in its mother’s milk.

But no. I had to go and get kiruved. I had to take the long march of middle age into Orthodoxy, put a beanie on my head, dangle knotted strings from a t-shirt, give up driving on Saturdays, and start paying Waygu prices for sub-standard cuts of kosher beef.

How did it all begin? How did I get here?

It’s October 2005. I’m sitting at the Shabbat table of Alan and Bonnie Cohen just outside the Old City in Jerusalem. We’re “bentching”—saying the prayer of gratitude following the meal. A young Jewish woman is beside me, her finger leading my eyes from one Hebrew word to the next, helping me to follow along, her finger pointing to letters I can’t read and to possibilities I couldn’t imagine until now, that maybe I could actually find what I was looking for, in Judaism, that I could find a place in the home my family had left, that there might be love and life in my future, maybe not with this girl pointing the way, but with someone who could speak and read Hebrew, a Jewish woman who would help me build a Jewish home, a Jewish life.

I was 41 years old. I was in a long-distance relationship with an attractive, intelligent woman, a Christian, a scholar I had met on the way to a James Joyce Conference in Dublin. She had told me I needed to find a way to God if I was ever to be happy. I had come to Israel looking for Him.

I looked for Him in Galilee, where they said He walked on water. I looked for Him in the River Jordan, where they said He had been baptized. I looked for Him in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where I reached down through a hole in the floor to touch the Rock of Calvary, where they said He had been crucified.

I found Him in none of those places. But I thought maybe I had found Him that night at the Shabbat table where Jeff Seidel had sent me.

“I don’t even know if I’m a Jew,” I had told my fellow diners.

“Oh, you’re a Yid,” they said. “You’re definitely a Yid.”

“You don’t know what it means to leave behind Jesus,” I protested.

“You don’t know who you’re sitting with,” said the young rabbi across from me. He had been raised Catholic. His wife grew up, like me, not knowing she was a Jew.

There were lots of coincidences like that, lots of moments in the last ten days of my month-long trip to Israel.

There was the Orthodox Rabbi who said to me, “You’ll never find what you’re looking for in Shelley.” How did he know who Shelley was? How did he know I had looked to him for answers? The same rabbi had said to the class I sat in on Yom Kippur day that, when the angel touched Jacob’s thigh and injured it, it was a euphemism for a blow to the testicles and that this was a reminder to Jewish men that sexuality was their special weakness, an interpretation I have never heard before or since, but which was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment.

I thought I had Jerusalem syndrome. I called my one Jewish friend Jonathan and told him so. I thought he might have to come get me. I canceled my planned trip to Bethlehem and sat, instead, all day Saturday in the Lutheran Guest House in the Old City pondering what was in my heart.

It’s November 2005. We’re in a West Rogers Park synagogue in Chicago. I’ve just sat through a movie called Inspired. It’s about Jewish outreach. I turn to my new friend and mentor, Perry Baver. I’ve learned a new word.

“Perry,” I say. “I think I’m a ba’al teshuva.”

“We all are, Tom,” he says.

“I think I want to get circumcised,” I say.

“I know just the guy,” he says.

It’s November 2006. I’m leaning against a wall outside a closed restaurant where I’m supposed to meet the woman from J-Date. We go to a diner instead. We talk about the Holocaust. Her mother was in Auschwitz. My parents went into hiding after they lost theirs.

She’s Israeli-American. She’s not practicing, but she’s been immersed in religion, and her brothers are Chabad rabbis. Three months after we’ve been dating, they’re like, “Nu? Where is this going?”

Our courtship is as brief as my first marriage.² I propose to her on Easter Sunday. I give her a ring worn by an aunt I never met, who was murdered in the Holocaust. My brothers think I’m crazy for getting married so quickly. We’re joined together three months later under a chuppah in Givitayim, Israel. My mother is there and two relatives from Hungary.

It’s fall 2007. Merav and I are in a fertility clinic in Chattanooga, TN. The doctor is telling us her eggs are too old, and my guys don’t swim fast enough. He suggests an egg donor. We say, no thanks, we’ll try it the old-fashioned way.

We do what we can. We use temperature measurements and timing.

In December we go to The Ohel where the Lubavitcher Rebbe is buried. We don’t go there because we expect anything. We don’t go there with a mission. It’s just that Merav’s parents are in town, and it’s the holidays, and it’s just kind of a thing Chabad people do. I don’t consider myself Chabad. I don’t really believe in these kind of things. But I slip the Rebbe a note anyway, asking for his help.

Less than a year later, our son is born. The miracle child. The one good egg.

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Where has this Jewish thing gotten me? Further than anything else I’ve tried. Further than sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Further than my foster religion, Christianity, grateful as I am for all it gave me. Further than Percy Byshe Shelley, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and all my other Brit lit idols. Further than meditation, visualization, rebirthing, Reiki, Tantra Nova, and The Mankind Project.

It’s gotten me my bashert. It’s gotten me a son.

It’s gotten me a community, an extended family, a feeling I belong to people who share more in common with me than a love of literature and martinis.

It’s given me focus, a lens through which not only to view the world, but also to choose among the seemingly endless and, therefore, tormenting, options for living, learning, and growing.

It’s given me a coherent worldview to pass on to my son. And it’s given him a safety net upon which he can always fall back.

It’s given me a way to relate to God that I haven’t had since college.

It’s given me something to write about, something to puzzle over that’s meant more to me than parsing poetry. It also given me an audience that is, so far, modest in size but significantly larger than the handful of readers I got writing fiction.

Yes, it’s given me my share of agita, a big share of late. But, all in all, I can’t complain. Though I do.

Shabbat Shalom.

1. Not to mention the only one.

2. Not Jewish, and not really a marriage. My brother’s best friend said to me, “Tom, that wasn’t a marriage, that was a long date.”