Adams: Future Jew?Like Rosie O'Donnell and John Mayer, singer Ryan Adams is a celebrity who really likes to blog. Lately, posts on his Tumblog have hinted that he's converting -- and not converting like Madonna, who's just about Kabbalah, but converting like Mare Winningham, who genuinely became a Jew. From today's post:

5. I am not catholic nor baptist. I am quietly converting but by the books, to a much older and less mystic religion which seems to respect God as someone to be feared and not understood, as I fear and don’t understand.

"Less mystic" is kind of a nice and thoughtful way of describing it, no? Also, because I know you were wondering, he thinks Bryan Adams is "not a serious artist."

 

According to a recent survey, Americans are very likely to leave the faith into which they were born and brought up -- if you count shifts from one Protestant denomination to another, a whopping 44 percent of Americans have changed their religion. Our post about this a few weeks ago sparked some serious commentary, and ultimately inspired us to assemble a collection of American conversion stories. Below you'll find personal accounts of conversions to Judaism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Christian Science, and Islam. If you or someone you know has a conversion story to share, add to this collection in comments!

Torah Teresa Lane, United Methodist to Jewish: I converted to Judaism almost four years ago. I did a conservative conversion through a relatively formal class. As the only “non-coupled” person in the class, I was a bit of a novelty. It was kind of great, as it gave me an automatic air of sincerity, but it also meant that I got a lot of the question, “And why exactly are you converting?”

So here’s my answer: I grew up in a very Jewish area of St. Louis; I may be off on my stats, but I think my high school was about 40% Jewish. Then I went to a college, where, let’s just say, Hillel is a big deal. All my life most of my friends have been Jewish, so I felt somehow connected to Judaism in that way. Even though I grew up in the Midwest, I have very little concept of a world where Jews are an actual minority. Not long after college I dated a guy who brought me to a seder, and I was hooked (on Judaism; the guy didn’t last). I picked up books on Judaism (Heschel’s The Sabbath, Kushner’s To Life!) and decided to take an “Introduction to Judaism” class. The idea was just to learn some more, not necessarily to convert. But, to be honest, that statement about "learning some more" kind of sounds like BS now, even to me. I must have been searching for more than I consciously realized.

Four years after entering the mikveh, I’m not really observant. Which, it seems, a fair number of people find funny. All the same, there's a lot I love about Judaism. The way it celebrates life, the attitude of stumbling through life as best we can, trying to make it better, but having that mostly be enough. Even “Jewish guilt” (though because I don’t have a Jewish mother I may not be qualified to use that phrase) is so different from the Christian guilt of my adolescence that it’s hugely refreshing to me. I love the rituals of Judaism - lighting candles, hearing the same prayer over and over at services, the seder. I find them beautiful and comforting, even if they are still sort of foreign and a little bit stressful for me. Perhaps most of all I love the sense of belonging to a community, or at least knowing it’s there should I choose to become more involved.

I am sometimes jealous of people who grew up as Jews, who know all the little things that Jews just do, that they don’t teach you in a conversion class. But sometimes I know that I'm lucky to be without the baggage of memories of being shushed in services and dragged to Hebrew school; that I consequently have a unique opportunity to appreciate all the beauties of Judaism.

Daibutsu Buddha Brad Warner, Non-practicing Protestant to Zen Buddhist Monk: I'm not sure I ever really "converted" to Buddhism, because before I got into Buddhism I had no real religious affiliation at all.

When I was a kid I lived in Nairobi, Kenya for three years. There were a lot of Indian people and Indian culture around there. One of my dad's best friends was Indian and when we'd go over to his house I used to see all the paintings of Krishna and stuff. His wife and kids were vegetarians, which is something I'd never encountered back in Akron, Ohio, where I was from. I found all that fascinating. Later on when we returned to Ohio and I got to be a teenager, I started thinking a lot about death. That's what teenagers do, I suppose. But I had extra reasons since two of my aunts were, at the time, dying of an incurable genetic disease that I stood a good chance of inheriting myself.

I looked into Christianity but it all seemed so cheap and tawdry and fake. I was interested in Judaism as well, but it seemed too closed to outsiders. In college I looked for some kind of Indian religion to study, thinking that might be a more pure path. I could only find one course available and it was Zen Buddhism. I had no interest at all in Buddhism and would have taken absolutely any other Indian religion if it had been offered. But Zen Buddhism was all they had, so I took it.

The first day of the first class the teacher read this piece called the Heart Sutra, which contains the line "form is emptiness, emptiness is form." When I heard that I was hooked. I had no idea what the Hell it was supposed to mean, but I knew it was right. I'm still trying to work out what that line means...

The Golden Temple Sat Daya Singh, Roman Catholic to Sikh: I was raised Roman Catholic, and was first exposed to the Sikh path early in life, when a preschool friend was a Sikh. My next major contact was while living in New Mexico for a few months in 2005. Since I do not view Sikhism in purely religious terms, I do not feel like I ever left my previous religion. I look at my adoption of a Sikh lifestyle as an upgrade. Sikhism is not a religious-based dogma. The principles of a Sikh lifestyle (uncut hair, a vegetarian diet, constant meditation on God, selfless service, etc...) are used to illuminate the path to happiness. They are markers on a map up the mountain where the peak is unshakeable serenity. By being stronger in myself, my presence can help others.

My previous lifestyle was not bringing me as much serenity as I sought. I became much more stable and strong as a Sikh. It felt like upgrading from DOS to Mac OS/X. The most difficult part of my "upgrade" has been my dealings with my family. I can only compare it to experiences I have read of homosexuals coming out of the closet. Initially they were furious, and I can often sense their bewilderment in conversation.

Quran Stephen Suleyman Schwartz, Unaffiliated/Protestant to Muslim: A little more than a year ago, on February 19, 2007, I published a statement in Jewcy about my road to Islam. I have been asked to restate the story of my becoming Muslim in a simpler form. For many people in the U.S., it is obviously shocking to hear that someone with a “Jewish” family name became Muslim. (Elsewhere it is typically assumed I am of German Christian background.) Jews who react in this way often seem to forget that people with “Jewish” family names may not be halakhically Jewish. In my case, my mother came from a Protestant Christian family, and although my parents were leftist and antireligious, the first faith of which I gained detailed knowledge was Protestant Christianity.

I later explored Buddhism, Catholicism, and Judaism before becoming Muslim; my journeys took the form of travel, reading, and study. But I was not what we call in California a “shopper for God.” I was an intellectual with religious beliefs, not a compulsive joiner seeking a home. In my new book, The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony, which will appear at the end of summer 2008 from Doubleday, I describe my encounter with the Jewish Kabbalah as a peak moment in my spiritual development. But my introduction to Kabbalah--which is so deeply influenced by Islamic mysticism or Sufism that it has been said that Kabbalah is Sufism in Jewish garments--proved a bridge to Islam for me.

My entry into Islam may be explained most basically as follows: the Islamic conception of God is simpler than that in the other monotheistic traditions; the Islamic path to God through Sufism is the most direct. I love Christianity and Judaism but Islam is rigorous in its rejection of anthropomorphism, i.e. equation of the form of the Creator with the form of the human being. This embodies, to me, a liberation of the mind. All the rest – the problems besetting the sacred Jewish people because of their small numbers, the infection of contemporary Islam with radicalism – are matters of human history, not religion. I found in Islam a purity very close to that in Judaism, but with a broader, more universal reach – Judaism for gentiles, as Saadiah Gaon argued. And since I was born a gentile, this path, which may seem more difficult to others but was simpler for me, beckoned. Finally, if I may be forgiven a bit of immodesty – Christianity and Judaism have a surfeit of modern intellectuals. Islam today needs intellectuals more than clerics, demagogues, or academics. And so in Islam I found a spiritual and rational place.

Star Of David Paul Widen, Protestant to Jewish: A few weeks ago I barged into the office of a shaliach that previously had declined to take my case before the special committee at the Ministry of Interior that decides who gets to convert (an illegal act, I later learned [his declination, not my barging into his office]). With his secretary as interpreter we were all sort of shouting for a few minutes, which I guess is what it took to make them realize that I'm serious and that I'm not giving up. However, they kept saying that I didn't have enough to show for myself ("What, you've only davened three times a day for six months?") and that my letters of recommendation were insufficient. I demanded that this shaliach see me again in a couple of months, at which time I assured him I'd have more to show for myself (e.g.,Yeshiva studies). He told me OK, to set up a meeting with the secretary. So the two of us went out of the rabbi's/shaliach's office and into the hallway, where we continued talking, and she asked, "What's the rush? Why don't you just wait for six months and then come back?"

I was incredulous. "I'm 30. I want to convert and get married and get on with my life." She wasn't convinced. "The Moshiach might come," I said, and this teenage, national-service excuse for a human being, started laughing at me. I got tears in my eyes and I said, "What are you laughing at? You know it's true, you know it's true." And I thought, "Wow, I almost believe this myself."

"Credo quia absurdum" as the saying goes. "I believe because it is absurd." To proclaim this impossibility, to demand this, to stay true to this hope every day when nothing in the world seems to ever hint that it will happen, that is how I see Judaism. Judaism tells me that there is something wrong with the world, that it's broken on a fundamental level. This appeals to me, because this is how I feel.

It is strange to long to be a part of religious community whose members are completely indifferent to my longing: It's even perceived as a bit suspicious, almost pathological. In one breath you can become a Christian or a Muslim: A simple prayer and you're a gold member. In Judaism, however, the potential proselyte is to be turned down thrice before being accepted: Thrice is the door to be slammed shut in his face. It's sort of like the movie Fight Club, where the candidates to Tyler Durden's nihilistic revolutionary club "Project Mayhem" are forced to stand at attention for three days while systematically being ridiculed by him for even trying to be accepted. Or, in a more tasteful metaphor, like Imre Kertesz's book Fateless, in which the Jewish protagonist is ostracized by his fellow inmates at the concentration camp because he doesn't speak Yiddish. "Di bist nischt ka jid, d'bist a shaygets. You're not a Jew, you're a Gentile," Kertesz writes. "That day I felt that I was struck by the same awkwardness, the same creeping insecurity that I remember from home, as if I didn't meet the criteria of the ideal, in one word: a little bit as if I were Jewish."

Christian Science Seal Kelly Riley, Catholic to Christian Science: I was raised Catholic, the youngest of eight siblings. We all went to Sunday school, we all went to catechism. At catechism they'd tell me that I was bad, that I was going to go to hell, just that I was inherently bad, and if you get hurt or sick, it's a punishment of some kind.

My oldest brother is nearly 20 years older than me, so I was still very young when he got married. They were Catholic also. His first child was born healthy, but his second child got very sick when he was one. Doctors were baffled, and despite taking the child everywhere, no one could heal him. Getting desperate, my sister-in-law remembered someone from her college days--one of her roommates--who was a Christian Science practitioner. She tracked her down and said, "My child is going to die in six months, can you help me?" Her old roommate, who was in New York, said she could help. She flew out to Michigan, stayed with them, and within a week she had healed the child. After that, my brother and sister-in-law said, "That's it, we're turning to Christian Science." My sister-in-law even became a practitioner. They had six kids, raised them all in Christian Science, and they all turned out super successful.

I remember times when I was a kid and I would get ill, and my parents--even though they were Catholic--would send me to my brother's house. My father just knew that something was good there. My sister-in-law would tell me that I was good, that God loved me. She was purely positive, which was confusing because it contradicted everything I'd been taught in Catechism and Sunday School. It was really hard to comprehend.

Eventually I grew up and moved out to California. I was in a horrible relationship--I was 22, living the good life, very rich in a big mansion, but I was living in hell. I was getting beaten by my husband. We're talking broken arms, broken legs--you name it, I've had it all. I had watched one of my sisters transform her life through Christian Science as well, and I would call her, locked in the bathroom after a beating, and she'd heal me over the phone.

Finally I said to myself, "That's it, I'm going to do it." My brother flew out, helped me get out of that marriage, and I came to Christian Science.

Jewish Symbols Michelle Golland, Psy.D., Catholic to Jewish: I was raised Catholic. We were religious when I was younger but even when my family really stopped attending church, I continued on after college. I even found a Catholic church when I moved away from home and up to San Francisco. In a way I was searching for a community but it seemed not to be found for me within Catholicism. I loved the pageantry and ritual but could not find comfort or peace in the dogma and lack of debate.

As a sophomore in college I started to explore different spiritual paths. I finally settled on Judaism because I felt inspired and challenged at the same time. I realized that while in Catholicism I was "being good" to get into heaven, Judaism was about "doing good" to experience "heaven on earth." I respond to the focus on the present, which is grounded in tradition and ritual.

My parents were supportive of my interest in and eventual conversion to Judaism, in part because they loved my boyfriend, Michael, who was Jewish. They were happy I was going to marry a "nice Jewish boy." This was important, because I tended to bring home more rebellious guys that frankly scared them a little. The struggle I have with my family of origin is not specifically religious, but more an issue of making different life choices overall. Inviting them in and creating a sense of inclusion was essential to fostering a happier relationship with them.

I have been a Jew for sixteen years. Soon I will have been a Jew longer than I was a Catholic. I actually look forward to that year, I guess because I believe I was waiting to discover my Jewishness my whole life. Who I am as a person, the things I long for, how I fight authority, the way I question things and want answers, the experience of having a personal connection with God which requires no middle man—whether that is Jesus or a Priest—feels at home and honored in Judaism.

I was always the child in the room pointing out the big elephant that nobody wanted to see. My catechism teacher—who finally kicked me out of class for asking too many inappropriate questions about birth control and abortion—would agree I am a much better Jew, because I failed miserably as a faith-filled Catholic. My spiritual awakening within Judaism has many layers that are still being discovered. The Torah for me is one big storybook that I choose to attach myself too. I gain insight, wisdom and hope from the reading of these stories, which are so beautifully filled with human flaws and struggles. As a Jew I don’t believe that any one religion or spiritual path is better or “true,” it’s just personal.

Jason Zengerle has a really worthwhile piece posted at TNR online (subscription required, I think) in which he details the growing number of converts to the Orthodox Church in the US, a large number of which are former Evangelicals. He charts a general disillusionment with the materialism, politics, and anti-intellectualism of the Evangelical church that has a lot of younger believers turning to the Orthodox Church: 

 This is an appealing idea, particularly to younger Orthodox converts who view evangelicalism as corrupted by the generation born right after World War II. "Baby boomers had an overweening confidence that our creativity and spontaneity was fascinating and rich," says Frederica Mathewes-Greene, a one-time charismatic Episcopalian who's now a prominent Orthodox speaker and author. "The following generation sees it as not all that rich. They find the decades of the rock band onstage performing songs kind of shallow. They're looking past their parents for something earlier."

 In the past year, two friends of mine, both from reform (if that) Jewish families, have graduated rabbinical school and, to the confusion and chagrin of their parents, become conservative rabbis. Along with Zengerle's article, I think this too hints at a nascent conservatism in my generation that is not so much political as it is private and personal. It's not necessarily at odds with political liberalism, though I think that's because one aspect of it is a disillusionment, if not a disgust, with political promises (which is often then realized as a sort of reactionarily willed ignorance). Zengerle writes of one young convert:

 But it wasn't just the foreignness of the Orthodox Church; it was its bigness that appealed to DeRenzo, as well. Indeed, as she continued to talk, it became clear that, as an evangelical, she had felt very small and alone. It was a surprising sentiment to hear from someone about the evangelical movement. After all, ever since the rise of the Moral Majority, American evangelicals have arguably been the most politically powerful religious group in the country. But perhaps the most telling revelation of the Orthodox conversion trend is that this political power has not translated into a sense of spiritual power--or belonging. For these converts, it seems, the Orthodox Church has solved the unbearable lightness of being evangelical. "When I was in [an evangelical church], I was thinking, This is great, I love this,'" DeRenzo said. "But I thought, and I don't mean to be morbid, but eventually some day this pastor is going to die or I'm going to move away, so if this is the only place in the world where the truth is, that's tragic." DeRenzo paused and looked around the sanctuary at the icons and the candles. She went on, "Coming to the Orthodox Church means that I am in communion with that church no matter where I am in the world, that I can go into that church wherever I am and have the same liturgy and celebrate the same way. I'll be in communion with other people. And that is so huge. That hugeness is so exciting."

 In truth, I think that the thirst for this "hugeness" is much more evident in the careerism, obsession with dating and marriage, and general "life plans"--which evoke an undynamic and conformist conservatism more in tune with the political Evangelical brand--that mark my generation than in any sort of general turn towards a deeper, more meaningful, more individual religious experience rooted in the authority of tradition. Still, it has me rethinking my initial contempt for my ex-hebrew school buddies turned conservative rabbis, though also wondering whether their new conservatism (which lets them wear NY Yankee yarmulkes) shouldn't be considered next to the more drastic, and, arguably, subversive, turns towards Orthodoxy. 

Writing about your life is dangerous. The only thing easier than putting your audience to sleep (“I remember the rich aroma of my grandmother’s delicious matza ball soup”) is shocking your audience so thoroughly that you’ll never get hired or go on a date again (“I remember the rich aroma of my grandmother’s delicious matza ball soup the night we first made love.”) A good personal essay has to tell a good story, and most of the time, the best stories are the most personally incriminating. Which is why we’re always so excited when Jewcy users respond to a personal essay—or a feature, for that matter—with long, nakedly honest stories of their own. They’re not usually signed, so the risk isn’t quite as great, but it’s still sort of amazing to watch the one-way writer-reader relationship explode into a campfire storytelling session. Below, seven of our favorite commenter overshares:

It’s rare that you hear about a celebrity’s foray into Judaism that doesn’t involve Philip Berg and the Kabbalah Centre. Madonna changed her name to Esther, but we haven’t yet seen an album bearing that nom de plume. Like Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher, many celebrities dabble in Judaism for a few months, get a Hebrew tattoo, and then move on to the next big thing. (It would be an interesting study to see how many Scientologists once tried davening.)   When I first heard that the actress and musician Mare Winningham recently recorded a CD of Jewish country music following her recent conversion, I looked to see if Berg was thanked in the liner notes. Not only was his name missing, but it was obvious that Winningham’s conversion didn’t begin with a course on Jewish numerology. Unlike many other Hollywood searchers who find Judaism as a way of making sense of the world, she isn’t a dilettante—she’s a ger tzedek.

On her album Refuge Rock Sublime, released this year, Winningham transposes traditional Jewish songs such as “Etz Chaim” and “Al Kol Ele” onto a country template. The result is an almost uncomfortably passionate expression of being a Jew. Winningham says she has a hard time talking about religion, but she lays herself bare on these songs, investing them with something that you don’t ordinarily hear in Jewish music: raw emotionalism.

Winningham is often remembered for her role in the quintessential ‘80s film St. Elmo’s Fire. But this was the least of her long and prolific acting career, which has spanned the last twenty years and includes her Oscar-nominated performance in the 1995 film Georgia, in which she played a country star. Recently, Winningham has been performing in a Broadway musical based on the songs of Patty Griffin called Ten Million Miles. I spoke with her a few days before the show closed.

Teen idols: The cast of St. Elmo's fireEven today, in 2007, you still represent for so many an icon of the '80s. What was that like?

Truthfully, I don't feel a part of that at all, and I didn't feel a part of it then. I had a career in television, and the rest of the St. Elmo’s Fire cast were movie stars. I was a little bit older and I was a mother. And, frankly, when they did all the publicity for the movie, I wasn't really asked to do it. I don't want to say I was excluded, but I just wasn't included.

Did that cause tension, or did you not care because you already had this life for yourself in television?

Well, I was probably a little bit of a snoot. At the time, I remember kind of thinking that I wasn't really a big fan of those movies, so I was pretty snobby about it.

So you didn't feel a part of some cultural force that was going on?

I didn't at all. When people say that era defines a generation, I am shocked. For me those were years of bad music and bad hair.

Well, I've been spending a lot of time with your new CD and I’m curious about your religious life, even before your conversion. Did you always feel like you had a religious sensibility or was there something particular about Judaism that led you to be religious?

The second. I've been secular my whole adult life. At some points I guess I would call myself anti-religious.

You grew up Roman Catholic, though.

No. My mother is Catholic and churchgoing, and we were all catechized. We went through our First Communion when we were little and then we went to catechism school on Saturdays, but all of this is before you're a young adult. When it was up to me I stopped going, which was right after Confirmation, around 16 years old.

Did you have support from your father or other family members?

My father was never involved because my mother married a non-Catholic, which was probably an unusual move for her, having gone to Catholic school all her life and being very religious. My mother is just a really unusual religious person in that she's just so comfortable with her own faith. She doesn't feel a need to talk about it or pass it off on other people.

So she wasn't disappointed?

I'm sure she must have been very disappointed. I think she was disappointed when each of her kids stopped going.

Preaching the gospel: Winningham's new albumBut was she worried about your mortal soul?

No, no, that's what I mean. I think she must be an unusual Catholic in that while religion is a beautiful thing for her, she doesn't turn it into a reason to worry or condemn or judge anybody else.

So then not going to church for you wasn't some kind of spiritual crisis.

Well, I really wanted to be honest about it. I could not continue to participate in something that just didn't seem true to me. It just wasn't right.

In my adolescence I explored Buddhism and alternative religions and wanted to learn about them. Did you have that kind of search?

The best class I ever took in high school, which was the extent of my formal education, was this comparative religions class. It convinced me that all religions were structures for an idea of God, and I didn't think I needed structure. The idea of a God was implanted in me and I was fine with that.

So you believed in God?

I did, for a long time. And then I started to wonder if I believed in God. I felt like an extremist all of a sudden. And then, as soon as I was on the precipice and I didn’t really think I believed in God, I got hit by a powerful wave—it's okay to reject something, but you better be real clear about what it is.

That's the great religious moment, staring into the abyss.

Yes. It was a big moment. And I was forty or so. And it came with the requisite powerful dream. So I signed up for school right away at the University of Judaism.

Why Judaism, though?

Well, my reasoning was they were the first monotheistic religion.

You weren't signing up because you wanted to become Jewish.

No, I feel like I wanted to confirm my atheism. Also, though, I really think that the Jewish people that I've been close with throughout my life have had a profound effect on me. I had a lot of close Jewish friends in the San Fernando Valley, where I grew up, so I attended some Shabbat dinners when I was younger and I went to many Bar Mitzvahs and Bat Mitzvahs of friends.

The birth of Israel: Jacob wrestling with GodWhat happened to you at UJ?

Well, it was a slow, gradual sort of love affair with all things Jewish. It started on a beautiful note. I think maybe the first class or the second class, my teacher, Rabbi Weinberg, said that Judaism is concerned with our behavior here and how we treat one another. And I was like, “Yeah, I'm good with that.” A lot of my problem with religion was the focus on salvation and resurrection. And I just really loved the emphasis on how you treat your fellow man.

But finding a sense of a connection to a moral idea is still different from saying you believe in God.

Well, I was telling you where it started. In that first class the rabbi mentioned Israel. His name was Jacob and became Israel.

It was a fight. A wrestling match.

Yes. You can define Israel as a struggle with God. In this tremendous struggle checking out the Jews, I came upon that definition and it just made me laugh. But I hadn't really read the Torah. My Catholic education emphasized the New Testament. I honestly do not remember if I got those stories when I was young, and I definitely didn't get them when I was older. I couldn't tell you the story of Sarah and Abraham. I couldn't tell you the story of Hagar and Ishmael. I couldn't tell you about Jacob and Leah and Rachael.

And if you got them at all, they were probably conceptualized within a Christian view.

I'm not sure about that. But I didn't have anything. This was a revelation to me, no pun intended. These narratives and these stories really just swept me, and I got so excited and I kept reading. I did all the homework that they assigned, and then some. I was a very good student. And I began having a really strong desire to build a relationship with God.

At what point did I accept that there was a God? Early on, I felt pretty strongly that this book was not written by man. Perhaps it was written by man physically, but I felt the narrator—well, I felt there was too much going on. I would rather not make that simple a statement, but having made it, I would say that of course it's more important to elaborate about what I mean by that, but it would take up the whole interview.

It's all in the interpretation: No Hagar and Ishmael in hereOf course. We're talking about a tradition that is about interpretation. It's about wrestling with the text as much as it's about wrestling with a God.

Well, as I started to look at the Hebrew and be aware of the number of writings that accompanied the text, like the Talmud and Midrash, and when I started to see what was going on and what was available to mankind, why this was given, I really felt that it was the hand of God. And I felt sorry for myself and for everyone who is just running around like chickens with our heads cut off wondering why there's not a manual for life. But it was a slow, gradual, ever-blooming thing. I didn’t develop a relationship with God overnight. It took a leap of understanding, and then it took a lot of prayer and time spent studying.

Why did you stop there? Why convert to Judaism instead going straight ahead and saying, I've done this, I understand the foundation, now I can be a Christian? What was it about Judaism that you said, no, there's nowhere else to go?

I really don't understand the question. I feel like I have gone in a straight line. I feel like I am continuing to go in a straight line. I am plunging forward. It feels to me like you're asking me why then I didn't go to the natural progression towards Catholicism, and that makes no sense to me because that is not a progression to me.

That's an answer—a Jewish answer.

It is? Oh, good.

You were a musician before your conversion, so it makes sense that you would use music to express some of this stuff.

Exactly. Meeting people in the Jewish community that were involved in Jewish music, I was being given records from Israeli folk records to Theodore Bikel records to traditional cantorial stuff. I thought right away that I've got to write some songs.

But you still have a very unique sound. How did you come to that? If you took it out of context or you didn't have the lyrics, it sounds like American music that is traditionally Christian.

That was what I wanted to address. I love country music and I wanted to stop the presumption that country religious music has to be gospel. It's not gospel Jewish, but I wanted to be a Jewish cowgirl and do traditional country Jewish content songs.

He also played Worf's father on Star Trek: An album by Theodore BikelPart of what makes the song so powerful is you can feel that tension inside of it.

In Judaism, there's tension in everything, right?

Jewish music certainly has moments of great passion, there are musical extremes of joy and melancholy, but I don't think about Judaism as an emotional religion in the way Christianity can be. In Christian church services you have people falling to their knees, weeping. Judaism often tends to be more stoic, even in its passionate moments. And yet your music is painfully emotional at times. It's an incredibly candid expression of your spiritual life, which is not common, I don't think, in Jewish music or even in Jewish religious expression. Did you intend it to be this open and this personal?

As much as I think about intent, well, I suppose, yes. I'm an emotional creature on anyone's scale, Jewish or not. From the time I was a little girl my family has always joked that Mare loves a good cry. And I know that's true. I don't like speaking in public very much because I usually end up crying, sometimes for no reason. I'm not very proud of that. I wouldn't fly that flag, but I'm not surprised that you noted it because it's true.

You are a convert to Judaism. That makes you a special kind of Jew. Do you think that you brought some of that to your music?

Well, they always say the convert is very enthusiastic, and that's got to be true. But I was also dealing with Judaism's approach to relations with our fellow man, and those include grief and obligation and responsibility and love—all very emotional issues. I like Judaism's approach to emotional issues, even though I understand what you're saying, that it may not be an emotional approach.

It's impossible not to think, “I'm sitting here speaking to Mare Winningham who is a celebrity and who is an actress.” You’re providing a different example for people of what Judaism can mean for a celebrity. It's not just coming out of some fashionable moment.

It’s a little tricky talking about religion. It feels so private. It's hard to look at interviews and read them and see what I said. If there's something to promote, that's different; I've been doing that my whole life. I can talk about a project, but I have a hard time talking about myself. And I think a Jewish person's most beautiful gift is the ability to transform, like Jacob into Israel. I just have to realize I made the CD, I put it out there, I'm being asked to talk about it, and I better stand up.

You didn't have to be as explicit as you were in your lyrics.

Yeah. I made my bed. I've got to lie in it.

With a decree he released “motu proprio”—that is, without the counsel of others—on Saturday, Pope Benedict XVI authorized a wider use of the old Catholic rite known as the Tridentine Mass. Officially abandoned in 1970, this traditional service is conducted by a priest who faces away from the congregation and mumbles the prayers in Latin. With this decree, Benedict, like the Tridentine priest, has turned his back once again on the modern Church, to sayMumbling The Prayers in Latin: The Tridentine Mass is back nothing of the modern world. The apologetic Catholic in me is constantly trying to defend the Church’s ...

So you wanna be a Jew? The Talmud says:

Our Rabbis taught: One who comes to convert at this time, they say to him: 'Why did you come to convert? Do you know that Israel at this time is afflicted, oppressed, downtrodden, and rejected, and that tribulations are visited upon them?' If he says, 'I know, but I am unworthy,' they accept him immediately…" (Yebamot 47a).

Apparently, if you want to be a member of the Tribe you gotta want it bad, and you have to prove it, too. But if you prove it, you’re in, right? Um, not so much. The next page of the Talmud contains a fairly unsavory comment, “Rav Helbo said: Proselytes are as hard for Israel [to endure] as scabs'" (Yebamot 47b). Ouch.
Ruth Converted: And we're sweet on her...
So what’s the deal? How are those of us born Jewish supposed to react to converts (or Jews-by-choice, as they’re often called today)?

Well first of all, we have to be nice to them. Rav Helbo or no Rav Helbo, the commandment to welcome the ger, the stranger, is all over the Torah. Take, for instance, Deut 10:19 which says “And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt.”

Beyond just a general precept on being a mensch, I’ve heard a number of rabbis speak about precisely what one can and can’t say to a convert. It’s generally accepted that referring to their conversion or to their life pre-Judaism is verboten, because it may cause them shame, or cause them to lose credibility in the community. Basically you don’t want to say anything that will cause the person to be seen as a non-genuine Jew.

To some of this that may seem like a fairly obvious ruling. The law against embarrassing people clearly stands here as it would anywhere else (although I struggle with the concept of Jews-by-choice being ashamed of their past to begin with). But the sad truth is that there is plenty of evidence of the Jewish community being less than welcoming to converts. In the book The Intermarriage Handbook: A Guide for Jews and Christians by Judy Petsonk and Jim Remsen, Petsonk and Remsen write about dealing with negative Jewish attitudes about converts:

Try to let someone's first insensitive comment or glance roll off your back. You are an emissary for all converts and need to keep your image in mind. At first, if confronted, be abstrusely polite or disarmingly direct: "Yes, I was born Jewish, but to Episcopalian parents." "Yes, I'm a convert. Have you known others of us?" "I converted and I'm trying to settle into it. Have any pointers?"

If the person is well meaning, it should be easy to fall into pleasant conversation. But if she is scornful, you can turn on a bit more tartness. Tell her there are Irish Jews, Chinese Jews, blond Jews, black Jews--and there always have been. Tell her that Judaism honors you as a righteous convert.

As this is happening, remind yourself of the many people who have welcomed you into the religion. Try to redraw your friendship circle for awhile so that it brings you into contact with the welcomers and not the rejecters. Gail has felt suspicious glances from some parts of the community, but she has tried not to let them penetrate. "To some people I will never be Jewish," she says. "That's the way they feel. But that doesn't mean that I can't consider myself Jewish, just because one Jew in the whole world doesn't feel that I am Jewish."

I wish I could write off Gail’s experiences as the exception, and not the rule, but I recently read Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner, a memoir about a woman from an intermarried family who converted to Orthodox Judaism in college and then became Anglican in grad school. I expected to hate the book based on its premise, but Winner is an unbelievably good writer, and she makes us face some hard truths about the Jewish community. She writes:

So anyway, when I tell the story of leaving Judaism, I can’t begin with the small space for women.

The story begins instead with a lacrosse-playing, Prada-clad college classmate of mine named Sarah. Sarah was a biology major from New Jersey. She had long curly black hair and a wonderful toothy grin. We were at a party one night, a party where I met a beautiful older man, a man who had moved from New York to Israel as a teenager and served in the army and was just returning, and was full of desperate, drunken, profound stories about violence and rape and suffering. I was standing with the men, over by the window, and Sarah leaned over to a friend and, just loud enough, said that I had only converted because I wanted to marry a Jew.

There were lots of Sarahs, lots of pretty Orthodox girls who snubbed me, the convert, never mine all the rules the rabbis piled up forbidding Jews to remind converts of their background. Those small snide remarks, which I should have been able to overlook, those, I think, are where this story begins.

Or possibly it begins with Hank Hirschfield. This was just weeks after the mikvah. He was the older brother of a friend of mine, and met twice, three times, at a bar near Columbia called The Abbey, and he introduced me to his favorite beer, a sweet-tasting red brewed by Belgian Trappist monks. We talked, at that bar, about Torah and God and Tolstoy and the Rolling Stones, and then one night he turned up at my dorm and said really h couldn’t do this, date me he meant, “Because of your conversion,” he said. “Because, you see, I want my parents to dance with my in-laws at my wedding, I want my bride’s family and my family to have giant holiday celebrations together, giant shared Passover feasts and Purim chagigahs. So I could never marry a convert.” I wept that night, cried myself to sleep for the first time ever, and when I woke up, I found that Beth had filled my wall with homemade, hand lettered signs: Lauren is a Jewess, they said, Lauren the Jew, to remind me that I was really Jewish, pay no attention to what Hank Hirschfield said, or how he acted, or how I felt.

It takes a certain kind of callousness not to find this heartbreaking. And yet I’ve heard my friends echo Hank Hirschfield’s feelings. For some reason many of us want a REAL Jew to join us under the chuppah.

I was talking about this with a friend, a Jew-by-choice, and she had a fascinating insight. She said she thinks about her non-Jewish life as an ex-boyfriend. This ex wasn’t an awful guy, they had lots of great times together, and they came from the same background and everything, but in the end the attraction just wasn’t there, and they broke up. And yes she still thinks about him, and she’s not ashamed of him, but she has a new beau now, and she’d rather not talk about the ex in front of the new beau because it seems rude.

That, to me, was the perfect guideline for situations where I’m unsure what I can and cannot say without offending someone. Think about their non-Jewish life as an ex. While it’s not inappropriate to remind one of something that happened while they were with the ex, reminding them that they were with the wrong guy (or girl) is uncouth. It’s a good rule of thumb for conversations with Jews-by-choice.

Winehouse and fianceAmy Winehouse's fiance Blake Fielder-Civil will convert to Judaism for a traditional Jewish wedding. The Mirror reported:

A friend of the couple said: "Amy has asked Blake to convert to Judaism. He isn't religious so it's no skin off his nose. He will do anything she wants and has spoken to her dad about it.

"Their wedding will be a traditional Jewish ceremony. For Blake and Amy, family is very important."

Awwwwwwwwwwwww! Whereas something as significant as conversion seems might have sparked a huge conflict for many couples it sounds like this was a relatively easily reached agreement. Couples who easily agree upon things are build to last. Then again, this is certainly the least he can do for the cheating that lead to their last breakup. Albeit it did inspire her increasingly popular album Back to Black.

Oh, breakups. Strength for the soul and a ticket to stardom.

 

• Courtesy FunkMonk At Devianart.ComCapitalists [& Men Universally] Prefer Blondes. Evicted overweight Asian sorority sisters don't. [The New Republic]
• That's right. Why Should Mel Gibson have all the fun? [PR Newswire]
• I really do miss John Ritter. And subsequently director Blake Edwards' need to overcompensate artistically for his marrying Julie Andrews. [IMDB]
• It's just as hard to be a Jew as to become one, apparently. [Ynet]
• Why is religion always the scapegoat for people's mishagas? [Ziontrain]
• Shalom and Willkommen Ernest Young. Bienvenue. [Zabaj: The Junk In Israel's Trunk]
• The Germans can be such damn Nazis. [Expatica]
• But then again, stupid headlines like these make me think it's universal. [Islamic Republic News Agency]

My conversion ceremony took place on St. Valentine's Day. Appropriate, I know. My final farewell to Catholicism and helloooo Judaism. I wonder if I can find that on a candy heart.

So I had my final meeting with the rabbi at UJ yesterday and am feeling brighter and lighter than I thought I would.  It took so fucking long to get to this place and now that I've decided to "choose Judaism" as they say nowadays (we are not converts, we are Jews-by-choice. ahem.), I feel present and calm and a little alone in a weird way.  I remember this little old lady came into the clinic where I work and, upon learning of my impending dive into one of the most persecuted groups in the history of the world, shouted in eastern-european-accented speech "WHY??  Everyone will HATE you!".  I'm now closer to this woman than I am to my own grandmother (I won her over with a flawless reciting of "Lhitra'ot"), but her first comment to me was indicative of a lot of the reception I get when announcing my decision.  It's not exactly like announcing being nominated for Nobel Prize or finding the cure for cancer or even announcing an engagement or pregnancy.  I've heard a lot of pins drop.

Editor's note: in the enormous (500-plus comments and still growing) threads to the Why are Atheists So Angry dialogue, one site user's comments have elicited a particularly strong reaction. We've invited that visitor, Christine Silk, to post to Faithhacker describing her unlikely voyage from Catholicism to Randian Objectivism to Judaism. Here's Christine...

For almost a quarter of a century, I was an atheist. Only since I turned 40 this year have I become a renegade by switching from the atheist camp to the organized religion camp. I’m an uneasy believer who goes to synagogue, even though I’ve not converted. It’s a strange place to be, after having spent most of my adult life arguing that organized religion is a delusion for people who can’t handle rationality.

When I was an atheist, I had this mistaken image that religious people find God in a blinding moment of epiphany, and then walk the primrose path forever more. Well, I’ve had no epiphany. I don’t know if God is real. And my path is not strewn with primroses. It’s full of obstacles and uncertainty. I was far more tranquil in the certainty of my atheism.

I became at atheist at 16, when I discovered Ayn Rand. My Italian-Catholic family was horrified, but I thrived on being a maverick.

Besides the rebellion factor, atheism had other benefits. It was, in some circles, a litmus test for admittance into elite intellectual company, as I found out during my college years.

Among certain students and professors, it didn’t matter how one came to atheism, whether through Rand, Marx, science, or the zeitgeist of modern intellectual life. What mattered was to avoid being branded as one of those naïve religious types. That was the ultimate stigma of uncool: to admit that you went to church or synagogue and actually believed the stuff.

For most of my life I considered atheism to be a hallmark of intellectual seriousness. No matter how smart or accomplished or wise somebody was, if he or she believed in God, that was a strike, in my book.

Atheism gAyn Randave me an excuse not to wrestle too hard or too long with transcendent issues, such as: What is the good life? Where does morality come from? Why does existence exist, as opposed to non-existence? Why order as opposed to chaos? Ayn Rand had worked it out, or so I believed, and whatever gaps she left, scientists would fill in.

Then I got married and had children. Eventually, they started asking questions. Is God real? If not, why do people believe in Him? Where do good and evil come from? What happens when we die?

I wasn’t sure how to answer. I couldn’t simply dust off my dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged and start reading passages aloud to them. So I did the sensible thing: I let my husband answer those questions. He had already moved on from his agnostic phase and was beginning to study Torah.

We had our kids converted to Judaism when they were very young. This was not a problem for me. My atheist reasoning was this: I’d been baptized. Holy water in my youth had not stopped me from becoming an atheist, and a mikveh would be no barrier to them if they chose to give up their belief when they got older. I don’t hold this viewpoint now, but it made sense to me at the time.

Eventually, my husband wanted to join a Conservative synagogue. I was willing, but nervous.

“They’re going to know I’m a shikseh the moment they find out my name,” I told him. “And then when we talk theology, they’ll kick me out when they discover I’m an atheist.”

“Don’t worry,” my husband said. “Nobody will care.”

He was right. Nobody at synagogue gave me the third degree about my religious beliefs, nor did anybody look askance when I said my name. In many ways, I found it easier to be an atheist among believers, than, I imagine, it was to be a devoutly religious person in a secular university.

Not long after we started attending synagogue, I ran into a distant relative entering her sophomore year at college. She announced that she was an atheist. She was glib about it, as if she were talking about pledging for a sorority. As an atheist, I should have felt happy that she was joining my camp.

But I wasn’t. I was taken aback. Had atheism now become a fashion statement among college students? When I was an atheist, it meant something. At least that’s what I told myself. There was a certain gravitas you had when you said it, and you had to be ready to defend your position.Richard Dawkins

But now that atheism was trickling down to the undergraduate masses, it was becoming so commonplace that they didn’t seem to feel the need to defend themselves, as we “old school” atheists did. Had any of these youngsters actually read Antony Flew, Richard Dawkins, or George Smith? Did they know about Pascal’s wager and the argument from design? No? Then they weren’t serious atheists. Or maybe nobody cared enough to challenge them.

But my reaction to this college student wasn’t really about her or her generation. It was about the fact that I was growing older and outgrowing atheism.

The great Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig was once asked whether he put on tefillin. “Not yet,” he replied. For me, those two words sum up where I find myself these days. I’ve had no direct experience with God, no extraordinary insight, no proof-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt of anything supernatural. Not yet. Still, I go to synagogue, celebrate Shabbat with my family, and read Pirkei Avot from time to time.

My kids occasionally ask me if I’m ready to convert. “Not yet,” I tell them. And it’s the best answer I can give right now.

Your friendly neighborhood Faithhacker is in San Francisco right now, to participate in a Jewish Book Festival (November is Jewish Book Month, dontcha know?) and I've met a lot of wonderful people here, and run into some friends too.

But since I was on my "faith" tear last week, and I'm still thinking about this issue (Joey's comments brought up some food for thought, and I'm still chewing) I was particularly interested to hear what Robin Chotzinoff had to say. Robin is the author of a new book, Holy Unexpected, about her experiences as a secular/atheist Jew, and then her conversion. Her Jewish conversion.

Listening to her, I wondered how many born-Jews make conversions. I mean, how many people who grow up Jew-ish decide they want "more" from their religious experience? And then too, of those people, how many make a shift in lifestyle, and go orthodox, and how many end up back at the synagogue where they grew up (or one like it) but with a stronger sense of faith.

And THAT got me to wondering something else...

If you really REALLY don't believe in the spiritual/religious part of Judaism... if you really don't buy the whole God thing, what is the experience of synagogue like for you?

I'm not certain what I believe. For me, faith is a lot like dieting, which is to say that I'm always working towards it. But I do want to believe. And so for me, synagogue is practice. I figure that exposing myself to the faithful is like going to a health food store-- it's getting me ready for "someday."

But when someone who REALLY doesn't believe in God goes to Yom Kippur Services, what does that feel like? What is it like to hear that particular kind of noise around you? Is it about nostalgia, or music, or history? Is there a meaningful atheist Jewish prayer experience? Or do you, maybe, think those people are foolish?