I stood at the wrong times, couldn’t remember which way the books opened, and hardly recognized a thing beyond “Baruch atah Adonai.” But I found myself unexpectedly moved during a recent Shabbat service—a day that used to mean nothing to me, except more time to scroll online or work.
It was only my fourth or fifth service as an adult, and the first one where I felt something.
I pictured my father in a synagogue, reciting these words. His father, and the ones who came before him. I remembered my sister as a kid, squeaking out phrases like “v’tzivanu” at our seder—how in awe of her I was.
I realized how close I was to losing all of this. Or rather, never really having it in the first place. I’d never had a bat mitzvah, hardly recognized the prayers, but there I was in an ankle-length skirt, crying in shul, which is not where I would’ve expected to be on a Friday night a few years ago. But a lot has changed since October 7, 2023—and October 8—when I watched my peers, including my best friend, celebrate the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust as a righteous victory. The crack that opened that day has only widened. So has my determination to carry forward an ancient tradition that I was on track to abandon.
The story is this: My father is Jewish and my mother, who was born into an Episcopalian family, is an in-your-face atheist. She tells me that as a child in rural Indiana, she once rode her bike past a Pentecostal church. She heard screams, saw convulsions, and said religion gave her the “creeps” after that. My father grew up in a Jewish household in Newton, Massachusetts. His father, an advertising entrepreneur named Harold, was the first of my paternal line to be born in America. Before that, as far as anyone told me, it was generations of generic Shmuels and Rochels in the mists of Eastern Europe—shtetls all the way down. This country has given us safety and, at times, prosperity—but by the time I was born, there wasn’t much left of our heritage to pass down.
We observed Passover most years, maybe Yom Kippur, and were encouraged to develop our own creeds. In fourth grade, I rebelled against Hebrew school.
