From Reform to Orthodox and Back: My Unusual Jewish Journey
By: Eric Rosenberg
Tags: Israel, Religion, Judaism

From Reform to Orthodox and Back: My Unusual Jewish Journey

I will never forget the first time I visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem. It was a Friday evening, December 31st, 2004. I had just flown into Israel for the first time that morning to join Israel Experts Birthright bus #3.

This bus took me on a life-changing journey that deepened my connections to my religious roots.

Our whirlwind first day began when our chartered El Al jet, filled to capacity with Birthright Israel participants, landed at Ben Gurion Airport just outside of Tel Aviv. After picking up our bags, making our way through Israel’s very strict border crossing, and making our way out to the bus to pick up our cell phones, our bus rolled onto Israel’s highway 1 toward Yerushalayim, known in English as Jerusalem.

Our first stop in Jerusalem was at the rakevet, an overlook where you can see the Old City of Jerusalem in all its glory towering above the Arab neighborhood below. We then checked into the Prima Kings hotel on French Square, took long overdue showers, got dressed in our Shabbat finest, and boarded the bus toward the Old City.

Taking in the view on my first trip to Israel in 2004

Like nearly every other participant on bus #3, this was my first visit to Israel and Jerusalem. Like them, I was surprised to see the armed guards and airport level security to enter the Old City plaza that houses the Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall or Kotel. I made my way into the line, through security, and as I walked into the open plaza where I would then approach the Western Wall for the first time, I was overcome by many emotions and began to cry.

This didn’t make much sense to me at the time and still doesn’t. I have since made it through the funeral of a grandparent without shedding a tear. My wife still jokes with me that I must not have many emotions if I could make it through our entire wedding weekend without tearing up. But on Friday, December 31st, 2014, I cried as I walked up to a wall.

So what made me cry? Was this going to be some pivotal moment in my religious lots of things about my Grandma, but her most important influence on me was making me Jewish.

How I Became Jewish

Okay, that header might make this sound like some sort of long conversion story, but it isn’t. Did I have a massive spiritual awakening? Was I touched by God? No. I missed my Grandma.

Just a few weeks before my trip to Israel, I was in Minneapolis to bury my Grandma Dorothy. Grandma Dorothy wasn’t a typical American grandmother, but I bet if I polled many of my friends, I would find that she was a typical Jewish American grandmother. I will never forget her unending stream of oys and other Yiddish words that made it into her daily speech. I will never forget showing up to Bar Mitzvahs and weddings an hour early with her so we could get the best seats. I will never forget how she always knew the right thing to say when any of her grandchildren were having a tough day.

What does my grandma have to do with me becoming Jewish? Well, I became Jewish the same way 99% (or likely more) did, I was born this way.

In Judaism, the religion is passed on maternally. If your mother is Jewish, you’re Jewish. That’s pretty much how we look at it. Growing up as a member of a Reform synagogue, however, there was a lot more gray area. In Reform Judaism, they’ll probably accept just about anyone willing to join in the next capital campaign for the new religious school wing or remodeled sanctuary. If any parent was Jewish, they’ll call you Jewish. But that’s not how it works elsewhere.

In traditional Jewish law, what many of you would call Orthodox law, you are only Jewish if your mother is Jewish or if you go through a very arduous conversion process. Lucky for me, my mother’s mother, my Grandma Dorothy, is Jewish. So my mom is Jewish. That makes me Jewish.

However, like with most anything in life, your family influence goes a lot farther than your genetics. Until she passed away, my Grandmother was the Jewish anchor of our family. The daughter of Eastern European immigrants, my Grandma was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota just like my mom and me to follow. Like most Jews of her generation, she grew up with a kosher diet. Even after marrying my Grandpa Walter, she kept her kosher kitchen at home.

It wasn’t until she reached a point in life where her housekeeper, a woman who was not Jewish, mixed up the dairy and meat dishes that she gave up on the thousands of years old religious practice. After all, what would you do if you had to choose between keeping kosher and having someone else keep your house clean for you?

So she gave up on the kosher home. My mother and her brothers grew up as members of a conservative synagogue in Minneapolis. My mother then met my Dad, a life-long Reform Jew from Texas, and not too long after their wedding I came along.

Growing Up Reform

I always grew up knowing I was Jewish, and that Jews are a minority. That’s all I really remember about being Jewish when I was little. Eventually, we would move to Denver, where I finished pre-school at the Temple Sinai pre-school in Southeast Denver.

We would always celebrate the “high holidays” each year, going to the synagogue for Rosh HaShana, the Jewish near year, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. We would celebrate Rosh HaShana with a big meal with family friends. We would often host the Passover seder at my parent’s house, bringing in several other families to eat Matzah, bitter herbs, and tell the Passover story.

When I reached kindergarten, my parents sent me to Herzel Day School, a conservative Jewish day school. It was there where I believe my strong Jewish identity really developed. Of course, my Grandmother’s influence, a very proud Jew and Israel supporter, left an impression on me. And growing up in a family that valued our religion enough to send me to a Jewish school didn’t hurt, but we were not particularly observant at home.

At Herzel, all of my friends were Jewish. Literally 100% of my class. It was not by intention by my parents, but they sent me to school in a place where I only saw Christmas on TV, and didn’t learn about the Christian majority from my classmates. A secular spring break was swapped out with a thoughtfully timed two week Passover break.

Each day, I would go to my regular math, science, English, and social studies classes that every American elementary school offers. We had P.E. and music classes. We had recess and played kickball on the playground. But we also had Hebrew and Jewish studies every day. We began each weekday with the morning prayers, sachrit, and began each lunch with the blessing over the meal. At the end of the meal, we would sing the full birkat hamazon, the after meal blessings, together. Each Friday the entire school would join together in the gym for the first of the Friday evening services, Kabbalat Shabbat, and always remembered to pick up the pre-ordered challah loaf before going to the carpool for our early dismissal on Fridays so the religious families could get their kids home before the weekly holiday began.

But when I got home on Friday night, we would watch TV. We might have dinner at home, but we might go out. My parents never stopped me from ordering a bacon cheeseburger if I wanted one. On special occasions like Father’s Day, we would even make bacon at home, but never brought ham into the home. Like most Reform Jews, we were as Jewish as was convenient.

After third grade, my parents moved me from the small private school to the much bigger public elementary school in our neighborhood. I wasn’t getting Jewish identity pressed on me each day, but the damage had likely already been done. Just like Snake Plissken in Escape From New York, I had a something floating in my blood waiting to be triggered.

My family belonged to Temple Sinai, the second biggest Jewish congregation in Denver, and the closest to home of the two big Reform synagogues. I had my Bar Mitzvah at Temple Sinai, followed by Saturday afternoon dancing and non-kosher dining options for our guests. Of course, the highlight to me was not reading from the Torah, it was the two Denver Broncos cheerleaders dancing with me at my party.

I was active in our synagogue’s youth group, where I made most of my friends in middle school and high school. I even went to Jewish camp three summers. Of course, the first stop on the way home from the drop-off at the Jewish Community Center was for a double bacon cheeseburger at Red Robin.

At this point in life I was old enough to know the difference between what was kosher and what wasn’t. And I didn’t mean that in a figure of speech sort of way. I actually knew that beef was okay and pork was not. I knew that “good Jews” ate kosher chicken, but my kind of Jews at shrimp and lobster. But I was okay with that. At least at the time.

Then College Happened

I didn’t move off to college expecting a major identity shift, but most of us don’t ever expect major identity shifts when the sneak up on us. No, I was just going to be a typical Jewish college student. I would get better than average grades, I would have lots of Jewish friends, I would go to Hillel on Friday night for a free dinner, then I would go get drunk with my friends at a house party.

Visiting the Aish HaTorah World Headquarters in the Old City of Jerusalem in 2010

I moved into my dorm, Libby Hall, at the University of Colorado as an early move-in. Working at the local Boy Scout camp all summer, I didn’t have a chance to get to one of the welcome weekends for new students mid-summer. I came up a few days before the semester began for my orientation and move-in.

On the drive into campus, just as we turned off of US-36 onto Colorado Avenue and into the campus, I noticed a little white building on the right that said Hillel on the sign. I had been there once before as a high school student and was excited to drop in and say hi to my peers, who I hoped would also want to get a free dinner together before going to the parties on University Hill. I ended up visiting Hillel before I visited a classroom as a student at CU, which was fitting considering what was going to happen over the coming years of my life.

As the beautiful fall weather in Boulder began shifting to winter, the CU Hillel, a Jewish student organization found on many campuses around the world, hosted a course called the Maimonides Leaders Fellowship. As a leader in both Scouting and my youth group in high school, I was excited to find a course designed exactly for me. I was for people who are leaders and Jewish. Win-win. Even better, successfully completing the course would land me with a modest stipend and included an all-expenses-paid weekend in Los Angeles. Free trip. Free money. Jewish leadership. Sign me up.

The program was led by Rabbis from the local Kollel in Denver. A Kollel is a local Jewish learning center for working adults. Those who attend are generally Orthodox men that fall into the Litvuk Jewish observance, following the Lithuanian Jewish teachings of the sage the Vilna Gaon, a revered Jewish teacher of the 1700s.

Each week, we would meet at Hillel for a class with one of the Kollel Rabbis. I quickly became close with some of the instructors and would stay after class to ask inquisitive questions on Jewish topics not breached in my Reform upbringing. We discussed topics surrounding the afterlife and the rules and laws of living an observant Jewish life.

Unlike with my days at Herzel, however, I was old enough to comprehend the depth of these lessons. Growing from eight to eighteen will do that to a guy. I enjoyed learning new lessons from old stories. I enjoyed looking for the next level of meaning in what I always took as shallow stories with simple life lessons. And then we visited communities where people actually followed the laws we were learning.

Hanging out with the rabbis on a Shabbaton, a religious weekend trip I took to Los Angeles during college.

Reform-a-dox

I remember driving down to Denver’s West Side Jewish community from Boulder. We rode in a white van, conveniently sized to haul around a family of up to a dozen kids or schlepping a group of college students down from Boulder. On the radio on the way down, while sitting shotgun next to our driver and Rabbi, the song I’m Too Sexy by Right Said Fred came on the radio.

As an oblivious 18-year-old, I quickly began singing along, as did several others in the car. Adam, the driver, is a ba’al tshuva Jew originally from the Baltimore area. Ba’al tshuva literally means “master of return,” but in practice means someone who grew up non-religious and became observant as an adult. Adam was as familiar as I with Right Said Fred’s famous song, but he turned the song off while explaining that he is a religious man and he avoids sexy topics and temptations.

When the van stopped for me and my friend Dan to hop off, we were greeted by a friendly religious family in the chaotic throws of preparing for Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. Unlike my Reform friends and family growing up, observant families follow all of the laws on Shabbat. They don’t stop after eating Shabbat dinner like I did.

When you are an observant Jew, you follow a list of prohibited activities from sundown on Friday evening until sundown on Saturday. For that roughly 25 hour period each week, you can’t touch anything that uses electricity or batteries. That includes light switches, TVs, and even iPads. You cannot touch a pen or pencil. You are forbidden from breaking or cutting anything that doesn’t relate directly to eating. On Shabbat, we are forbidden from heating anything, including food. We can’t even carry anything in our pockets outside of our yard or, in some cases, a community eruv that connects your yard with your neighbor’s in a Jewish version of mi casa su casa.

I was nervous as I entered that home. While I had a pretty good idea of what was not allowed on Shabbat, I was going into someone’s home where I was expected to follow along and respect their way of life, which was foreign to me. I was worried about hitting a light switch at the wrong time. I was worried about turning on the hot water by habit. I was terrified of the worst-case scenario. What happens if I need to visit the bathroom and need to use toilet paper. We are not allowed to tear the paper on Shabbat, even if it is perforated.

It turns out I love Shabbat. We sang and dined together. We snacked and enjoyed drinks into the night, saying l’chaim and taking a small shot of whiskey after each Jewish story from one of the many Rabbis who joined our group that Friday night. I enjoyed the Orthodox prayer style in the synagogue, though it was hard keeping up with my level of Hebrew. After all, Reform Jews say a sentence in Hebrew before a few pages in English.

I enjoyed the Saturday afternoon walk around Sloans Lake, even if I had to do it with empty pockets. I enjoyed the discovery of shalos shudis, the amazing bonus meal observant Jews eat on holiday. I enjoyed every moment until Havdallah, the short ceremony that brings Shabbat to a close.

Lucky for me, we had two more of those on the schedule, plus our weekend away in Los Angeles.

In our weekend in LA, bankrolled by a wealthy Jewish investment professional, we enjoyed a similar experience, but replace the modest West Denver homes with the sprawling ones of LA’s Jewish elite. Guests that weekend included a former Simpson’s writer, who told us the story about how he earned the nickname “Disappearing Jew” for slipping out early on Friday nights. It was rumored that Edward Norton lived in the neighborhood because most of his Orthodox neighbors didn’t own TVs and wouldn’t know who he was.

It was around this time when I had a revolutionary experience in my life. One morning at the Libby Dorm dining room, I was walking down the buffet line filling my plate with the same breakfast I had nearly every day. Eggs, bacon, hash browns, and toast. It was pretty all American. Until this day. This day I thought, “I don’t really need bacon today, do it?”

I have not tasted bacon since that day. It has been over ten years.

Ba’al Tshuva — ish

I attended a pro-Israel rally met with anti-Israel demonstrators in Denver in2009

Many Jews joke that we are the only religion with a qualifier. I’ve never met someone who was Catholic-ish, Muslim-ish, or Buddhist-ish. I’ve met lots of people who are Jew-ish.

Unlike Christianity in America, where religious holidays blend into our everyday life, most public schools outside of New York City don’t close for Yom Kippur. We are off on Christmas and stores are closed on Easter. We even celebrate a secularized version of Saint Valentine’s Day and we all become a little Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day. But I don’t see masses of Americans lining up for Mazzah on Passover or getting fershnickered on Purim.

As a culture within a culture, Jews have done a great job dropping what makes us different. A people without a homeland for most of the last millennium or two, we have gotten used to living in other people’s countries. While we have always dealt with varying degrees of anti-Semitism and existential threats, we have become integrated with most societies that will have us. We were doctors and lawyers and bankers in Spain before the inquisition, Germany before the Nazis, and other parts of the world before we took up our favorite professions to give our mothers something to brag about at the Mahjong table here in America. Maybe there is an underlying thought that keeping Shabbat is what makes people hate us? I suspect something else is at play, but that is a topic for another article.

Anyway, back to America today. The story you just read about my Orthodox great grandparents from Europe, then my less-religious grandparents, then my less-religious parents is pretty common. Ask most Jews in America today about their heritage. Most of us came from places where some part of our family was killed in the Holocaust. Most of the relatives that migrated to the United States were religious. And then, it just started to slowly become less and less important.

Today we are at a point where Jewish America is facing a different kind of existential threat. As Jews intermarry and assimilate even more into what is probably the easiest place that has ever existed to be a Jew, other than modern Israel, we forget about the hard work it took our forefathers to give us this identity. So we become Jew-ish.

Many of the Jews you find in the United States today will call themselves “culturally Jewish.” I’m not always clear on how one does Jewish without the Jew part, but for most people it means calling yourself Jewish but not really doing any of the Jewing. No Friday night Shabbat dinners, plenty of bread on Passover, a bacon filled breakfast on Yom Kippur, but still keeping the big nose and names that end with berg, stein, or owitz.

Growing up as a Reform Jew today, we are encouraged to learn and challenge the parts of the Torah and Jewish religion to decide what applies today. We use that to justify not following laws that are no longer convenient in our day-to-day life, or that we simply don’t find any personal meaning in. But Judaism is a religion of laws, and without those, who are we to say we can breed the best lawyers?

I was once discussing with a co-worker during my time as a Boy Scout camp staffer. My friend Kevin asked, “if you are Jewish, why do you eat bacon?” This was an innocent enough question. I told him that in the days of the Torah, there was a high likelihood that eating pork products would give you some sort of food poisoning or illness. Today, the USDA ensures we only eat clean pork products, so the law is no longer valid. He responded with something that has spent quite a bit of time shaping my thoughts of how I view Judaism. He said, “so now the USDA outweighs God?”

So that day when I didn’t eat bacon, it was me telling God, and myself, that I thought the thousands of years of Jewish tradition and laws are not overthrown by the USDA. I was making a statement that my beliefs are stronger than America’s bureaucracies.

Not long after, I was debating the value of the Jewish prohibition of mixing meat and dairy products. The Torah specifically requires we do not “boil a calf in its mother’s milk.” But we interpret that to mean don’t eat meat and dairy together. Unlike the USDA certifying bacon as safe, there was no government agency allowing me to put cheese on a burger. The next logical step in keeping kosher was not going to be an American overthrow. It was going to be because of faith. There was no other logical reason to stop eating meat and dairy together.

So I did what any logical Jew would do when making a life changing decision. I went to Chipotle. I ordered my favorite meal, which did not include pork carnitas. I ordered a steak burrito with cheese. I told myself that if I could live without another one of those again, I could live without meat and dairy together in any circumstance.

That was the last time I ever had meat and dairy together.

I Don’t Roll on Shabbos

Around this time, I was ready to take my third trip to Israel. In the time since that Birthright trip and Los Angeles trip my freshman year, I had spent a month at a Yeshiva, an all-male Jewish learning institution, in Jerusalem.

I spent my month at Yeshivat Aish HaTorah, the world headquarters of the Aish HaTorah movement. Aish HaTorah is a global Jewish organization founded by Rabbi Noah Weinberg, arguably the most influential person in the short history of the modern Ba’al Tshuva movement. Aish, like its cousin Ohr Someach, has a fairly clear goal of bringing less observant Jews back to more observant Judaism.

I visited the gravesite of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, the author of the main book of the Kaballah, on a holiday commemorating the anniversary of his death.

Many Reform Rabbis, including the one I grew up calling “my Rabbi” in Denver, have a severe dislike of Aish HaTorah and its mission. Aish has been accused of brainwashing, breaking up families, and other nasty things. But my time there didn’t feel like brainwashing. It felt like immersion religious school. Just as the best way to learn a language is to go live somewhere that you speak it, the best way to become orthodox is to live with orthodox people.

They are pretty wonderful people. My experiences with observant families and people have, with few exceptions, been warm, caring, and genuine across the board. When you see and experience something that makes you happy, you want to bring that into your life and your family. That is what happens with many people that visit Aish. I don’t believe they were brainwashed. I believe they found meaning in a place where before they found emptiness. They found love in a place where they didn’t expect it. And it stuck.

Part of my month at Aish, and the semester I would soon spend living in Jerusalem while attending Hebrew University, was keeping Shabbat. You might recognize the Ashkenazi (Eastern European) pronunciation of this word from Hollywood. In the big Lebowski, Walter reminds us of the major prohibitions that I tried out for the first time on my trip to the West Side of Denver. He angrily explains to Donny what Shabbos means to observant Jews. “That means that I don’t work, I don’t drive a car, I don’t fucking ride in a car, I don’t handle money, I don’t turn on the oven, and I sure as shit *don’t fucking roll*!”

So for those Shabbats I spent in Israel, I didn’t roll. I didn’t do anything that was on the extensive list of prohibitions. And I really did enjoy it. I enjoyed the sense of community. I enjoyed the singing and festive atmosphere. I enjoyed the delicious meals. I enjoyed the time unplugged from the Internet and my phone. And I didn’t mind the occasional l’chaim over single malt scotch that I found many Rabbis prefer.

So after one long trip to Israel, I didn’t what I tried before. I decided it was time for me to try keeping Shabbos at home, which at that time was the Bear Creek Apartments in Boulder, Colorado. And I did it all right. I pre-tore my toilet paper. I pre-set my lights. I made a traditional Jewish stew, chullent, in the crock pot so it would be hot and ready for me on Saturday afternoon. And I had a few friends over for Friday night dinner to celebrate.

That was not the end of my use of a car and lights on Shabbat.

Peak Orthodox

At my peak level of observance, I was wearing a yarmulke, or kippah in Hebrew, every day all the time. Both a public statement and a self-imposed reminder that I was Jewish all the time, not just at the synagogue, and a reminder to follow all of the many commandments I was incorporating into my daily life. I was wearing tsit-tsit, a square undergarment with strings hanging from the corners representing the commandments of the Torah.

One thing I always struggled with was keeping the Shabbat commandments while living away from a religious community.

With my friend Rabbi Yisroel Wilhelm, a Chabad, Rabbi, while he visited Israel during my semester abroad. Rabbi Wilhelm later officiated my wedding.

The following semester after the most difficult, and by difficult I mean boring, Shabbat of my life, I moved my way to Hebrew University for a semester abroad. Unlike most universities in the world, my roommate assignment paperwork for Hebrew U had the option for either observant roommates, who kept both Shabbat and kosher laws, or not. There was no in-between or trying-to-figure-it-out option. So I picked the religious option to challenge myself to live as a religious Jew for my entire semester in Israel.

It started very easily. I was already keeping Kosher in Colorado. Keeping Kosher in Jerusalem is much, much easier. The grocery store up the block was virtually 100% kosher, and the on-campus dining options were all Glatt Kosher and Mahedrin Kosher, upholding the highest kosher standards in the world.

And in the beginning, keeping Shabbat was easy, but it was easy by my own design. When my great grandparents came to the United States in the 1930s, my great great aunt and uncle moved to Jerusalem, at that point under the British Mandate of Palestine.

They were living in what is today Ukraine, and my great-great grandfather was an observant Jew in a not-so-friendly place for Jews. Because he would not work on Shabbat, he lost several jobs and had trouble keeping regular employment.

When my family realized that a very dangerous wave of anti-Semitism was making its way through their homeland, they decided to pack up and move. Some of the family wanted to go to the new Promised Land, the United States. The rest wanted to go to the biblical Promised Land in what would become Israel 12 years later.

When my great-great grandfather applied to leave the communist state, the government interviewed his past employers to decide whether or not he was worth keeping in the country for physical labor. The employers said that he would not work a from Friday afternoon until Saturday night, and that he was worthless to the Soviet Union. They granted his approval to emigrate.

Those cousins in Jerusalem had children, and they had children, and some of them have children. I call them all cousins.

When I went for my semester in Israel, I was fortunate to bring along contact information for my Grandma Dorothy’s first cousin Shifra, who welcomed me into her home and family as if I was her grandson.

My family that moved to the United States slowly became more and more secular, but my family in Israel did not. So I would go spend Shabbat with them most weekends. I will always fondly remember those experiences. I enjoyed the true break from the stresses of life. I would read books, go to the synagogue, take long strolls around Jerusalem’s Mount Herzel, Jerusalem Forest, and the Bayit Vagan, Har Nof, and Arnona neighborhoods that my cousins call home.

I even had the rare opportunity to visit the most ultra-orthdox, or haredi, neighborhood in the world. Me’ah Sharim is a neighborhood in central Jerusalem that is a place most tourists never get to see. They are not welcome in Me’ah Sharim. The name, which appropriately translates to A Thousand Gates, is the hub of several Chasidic Jewish dynasties. A friend of mine from elementary school moved to Israel with his family and became a member of the Shomer Emunim (which means keepers of the faith) sect. I was able to see their Rebbe in person and spent the holiday Shavout and one Shabbat with them.

At a Shomer Emunim home, I was able to witness a Jewish life that I was not aware still existed in this century. Rather than set their lights on timers like most observant Jews today, we ate by candle light. We washed our hands from bucket (running water was a no-no), and the kids spoke Yiddish as a first language, reserving Hebrew, the holy language, for prayer.

I kept all Shabbat observances that semester with few exceptions. I stayed in my dorm one Shabbat, and the antsy feeling that I needed to get out and do something, or even turn on a computer, was almost overwhelming. I also spent about one weekend each month with my cousins in Tel Aviv, who were not religious.

Israel is a very diverse place. Even within the 80% of the population that is Jewish, there is a spectrum of completely non-observant Jews and the most religious ultra-orthodox. There is no better metaphor for the diverse populations than a comparison of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Hadag Nachash, a popular Israeli band, captured it perfectly in their hit song Hine Ani Ba, though you probably only recognize it from the Adam Sandler film Don’t Mess With the Zohan.

Jerusalem, they sing, is a place where people of all religions receive God. Tel Aviv, on the other hand, is a beach paradise filled with nightclubs, bars, and plenty of opportunities to eat bacon. So when I visited my family in Tel Aviv, I did as the Tel Avivans do. I watched Seinfeld reruns on Shabbat.

That semester was the peak level of observance I consistently lived in my life. I wore a kippah, wore tsit-tsit, kept a very strict kosher diet, and kept Shabbat and holiday law, at least most of the time.

A Jew-ish Homecoming

I took a trip to Israel with my dad in 2018 while he was sick with prostate cancer. Here, in Tsfat, I helped him wrap tefillin, a Jewish ritual object used in the morning prayers.

Just as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have very distinct cultures, so do Israel and the United States. One visit to Israel brought me back home through Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. If you want a culture shock board a plane in Tel Aviv and deplane in Atlanta.

I was immediately shifted from gorgeous Israeli soldiers, surrounded by healthy, fit, Jewish people into a land of obesity, fried food, and bacon. Slim Jewish security guards were replaced by something else very different.

While changing planes on the way home from my semester abroad, I had to eat. There was nothing kosher in the airport. So I had a veggie slice of pizza.

Reuniting with my family after our longest time apart was another culture shock. My family was always supportive of my involvement in Jewish life on campus and elsewhere, but not in becoming orthodox. I once joked with a friend that my mother would rather me marry a shicksa, a non-Jewish girl, than an orthodox woman. Neither of those ever came to be, but I still wonder some days…

My parents were happy to have their religiously energized son back home, but just because I went away and got all Jewed out didn’t mean they did. So I struggled to keep a kosher meat diet, eating vegetarian when kosher was not an option. While they never asked me to stop wearing tsit-tsit, I stopped wearing them around my family, and then in general, as I didn’t want to be judged or categorized by my appearance. I never started wearing them again.

I then moved back to Boulder the following school year, after my summer as the newly vegetarian guy at Boy Scout camp, into the new AEPi house on The Hill in Boulder. Having spent three years in the fraternity, I knew all of the guys well, but moving into a house full of Jews doesn’t mean you are moving into a kosher house.

Again, for that year, I struggled to keep my kosher meat, vegetarian out diet. The house was divided into cooking groups, and I was in the kosher cooking group. That meant we had our own kosher pots and pans, but used the same kitchen as the other guys who didn’t care about throwing a peperoni pizza in the oven or cheeseburger on the grill. So I mostly kept to meals I could microwave in my room.

When I graduated from college, I moved back into mom and dad’s house, like many of my contemporaries, as I was searching for a job and the next step in my life. Graduating in 2007 with a degree in finance left my prospects fairly limited, as we were on the way into the great recession. I struggled to find interviews, and when I finally landed one at a local bank, thanks to a business acquaintance of my dad, I took my kippah off on the way into the interview. I didn’t want the whole religious Jew thing to keep me from getting a job.

I got that job, and for a while I would take the kippah off in the parking lot on the way into work and replace it when I got back in the car. But then I got lazy and out of the habit of wearing a kippah all the time.

I never got back in the habit of wearing a kippah regularly.

It is Hard to Be Different

While I didn’t keep wearing the tsit-tsit or kippah, and didn’t get into the habit of keeping Shabbat back home, I did keep the kosher diet.

A couple of years after graduating college, one night I had my long-time girlfriend over for dinner, kosher chicken that I cooked myself. We had been dating for about four and a half years. While it was far from a perfect relationship, the biggest sticking point with that Jewish girlfriend always seemed to be Jewish related. She didn’t care to keep kosher. I did. That was one of the biggest wedges that led to our breakup.

After re-establishing my identity as a single guy, I found that I really liked night clubs. A lot. I got into the dance music scene in Denver, which included regular trips to Beta Nightclub and Red Rocks Amphitheater for the annual Global Dance Festival. One thing about Euro style clubs, however, is that they dance on Shabbos.

For the next years, I often felt torn between wanting to live in two worlds. I loved the serene beauty of religious Judaism, and regularly visited the local Chabad for Shabbat prayer and meals. But then I would head home, throw on my clubbing garb, and make my way downtown.

My roommates after my year living back home with my parents were in a similar boat, it turned out. They came from more religious families that I did, but we did a similar lifestyle of kosher at home, veggie out, and bars and parties on the weekends.

I tried as hard as I could to make sense of it, but I never felt completely comfortable living in the two worlds. The Lubavicher Rebbe, the last chief rabbi in the Chabad-Lubavich Chassidic dynasty, taught that America was a special place to be Jewish. Unlike many places in our past, a Jew could be as good of a Jew in America as anywhere else in the world, including Israel. That thought always resonated with me, as it would have been easy to move to a religious part of town and be a part of a community that kept the Sabbath every week. But I didn’t want to.

Instead, I just kept doing what I was doing.

Where to Pray as a Reform-O-Dox Jew

One thing I found in my religious journey was that I prefer orthodox style prayer, or davening as we often call it.

Each return visit to my old reform synagogue in Denver brought up very negative feelings and resentment toward the Jewish teachings I grew up with. I found that I did not like praying in English. I did not like mixed seating with men and women sitting together in the sanctuary, I did not like the changes to prayers to remove the parts that may offend some progressive-minded individuals, and I absolutely hated listening to a choir in the synagogue.

While I was not living an orthodox lifestyle, I was certainly not reform.

I tried conservative synagogue experiences, but the experience actually felt foreign to me. While I didn’t like it, I knew how reform services worked. I led one as a 13-year-old Bar Mitzvah and attended many of them in my life. Similarly, I picked up and understood orthodox prayer as well. Something didn’t feel right to me in a conservative setting.

I realized, at that point, that I didn’t fit into any of the labels of Jewish America. I was not reform. I was not conservative. I was not orthodox. I was not reconstructionist. I was not renewal. I was just Jewish.

Just like with your career, your lifestyle, and anything else you do, you don’t have to conform to what other people want you to. I would later discover Chris Guillebeau’s Art of Non-Conformity, a book and blog where Chris tells his story of living the life you choose for yourself, not the one dictated to you by the American Dream or any other standard.

So I stopped trying to fit in and started trying to be me.

Jewish is a Journey

The world Israel comes from a story in the Torah. Jacob, one of the great Jewish biblical patriarchs, took his family and crossed the Jabbok River, a tributary of the Jordan River, into what would later become Israel. As he crossed, he went back alone to pick up some remaining items and was interrupted by a man whom with he wrestled until dawn.

It turned out that man was not an ordinary man, but an angel. When it was clear Jacob had beaten the angel, the angel pleaded with Jacob to let him go. But Jacob refused until the angel gave Jacob a blessing. As he departed the angel gave Jacob a new name, Israel, or in Hebrew Yisrael. Yisrael literally means one who struggles with God.

Non-Jews may know that there are a lot of differences between the Jewish people and everyone else in the world. Some say that we are bad, others say we are good. Some say that we control Hollywood, the media, and the banks (if we do, where’s my cut?). But one thing that we have that is different from any religion I know is the concept of Yisrael, the struggle with God.

Every day I am challenged by my religious beliefs and observances. Every day I try to incorporate something like a kosher diet into my life. To me, Jewish is something I am every day, not just something I do at synagogues.

I guess I am not all that special. There have been many Jews who struggled with God. Of the Jews who survived the Holocaust and saw the worst of what is possible from mankind, many gave up on Jewish practices. They commonly asked, what kind of God would allow this to happen? And who could blame them?

In this time, I have been fortunate to experience Judaism as a Reform Jew in Colorado, a more observant Jew in Israel, and even spent a weekend with the most ultra-orthodox Jewish sects in the world.

I have found a place where I can keep a Jewish home with my wife in a way that we are both happy. I have found a way to keep a mostly kosher diet, but not have it interfere with my outside social life or career. I have found a way to be Jewish every day, but I have not settled on exactly what that means to me. It changes from time to time. But I am Jewish every day, there is no doubt about that. Because that’s who I am.

I’m not reform. I’m not conservative. I’m not orthodox. I’m Jewish.

I wrote this article six years ago in 2014. My position on the Jewish spectrum is always changing. Having kids and losing my father definitely shifted my current feelings, but I still find this a meaningful and insightful look into my evolving religious beliefs.