Finding My Judaism: An Oasis of Support
"I think Israel represents hope, even for those of us who are culturally Jewish though not observant or religious...Our differences feel less important when our collective identity is under attack."
By Debbie Weiss
A few months after my husband died, I contacted the synagogue I’d noticed on one of my many long, solitary walks. I’d never been very religious, but I was isolated and in search of connection.
This being Northern California, the synagogue was Reform — the most liberal (least observant) branch of Judaism. The building itself had interior wood-paneling and the outside grounds were surrounded by gardens and children from the preschool next door. The rabbi offered to give me grief counseling, a compassionate and generous gesture considering this was my first visit there.
I accepted, gratefully, but warned him that I was an atheist. I’ve been one since my mom died when I was ten, having decided even then that I’d rather see her death as a random occurrence rather than as the conscious act of an omnipotent, but apparently cruel, deity.
“That’s fine,” the rabbi said, smiling, his eyes kind under huge, bristly eyebrows. “If synagogues excluded all Jews who were atheists, we wouldn’t have a congregation.”
He understood irony, and I had found a home.
Grieving took a long time, as my husband and I had been together for 32 years. We’d eaten dinner together every night and were each other’s best, but unfortunately, almost our only friends.
The synagogue helped. At the rabbi’s suggestion, I joined the women’s book club and “red tent” groups, finding community. A few of the women invited me to movie nights and monthly lunches, and I even made a close friend.
At the end of each counseling session, the rabbi left me with a blessing. "You will find peace," he said after our first meeting, when he saw me thrashing around in the turbulent waters of early grief.
“Eventually, you will find love,” he said many months later, when I confessed my fear that I might never again have someone to ask me how my day went.
The rabbi had a pragmatic streak as well. Towards the end of our time together, when I told him about an underachieving guy I was dating who wanted to spend more time together, his end-of-visit blessing was a terse “Aim higher.”
He was right; I took it to heart and ended things.
As the years passed, I moved away and even found a second love to ask me about my day. I’m still not very religious, but I’ve experienced so many blessings since my loss that I’ve become open to the idea of benevolent forces versus a hostile universe.
It’s comforting to know there’s a place to find Jewish community, even for those of us who identify as “culturally Jewish.” It’s something I feel deeply but can't really describe.
But it means believing in the healing powers of my dad’s chicken soup, celebrating with lox and whitefish, and tearing up whenever I hear a woman who sounds like my grandmother Miriam with her “New Yawk” accent. It’s being happy hearing Yiddish and having a dad who said I could do whatever I wanted, so long as it was graduate school.
There’s an intellectual tradition I crave, a questioning of ideas as opposed to automatic acceptance. It includes a reverence for education, all of which is embodied by my father, a retired physicist. There’s also a dry, fatalistic kind of humor which doesn’t shy away from darkness, but embraces it and tries to find comic comfort in the unbearable.
So much of being Jewish is about my family. My Dad and paternal grandparents gave me a wonderful childhood filled with planetarium visits, homemade chicken liver spread, and “look it up in the dictionary” — a childhood I can call happy despite losing my mother so young.
There was so much — probably too much — concern and attention: Don’t be alone with boys or let them pay for anything on dates, or be afraid to let them see you’re smart (from Dad) and don’t sit at a restaurant table that feels drafty, or go out with wet hair, or forget how much we love you (from Grandma Miriam).
My grandparents experienced antisemitism. They couldn’t stay in some hotels, and sometimes my grandfather disguised the fact that he owned his own heating business because he feared people wouldn’t want to work with him. He recalls seeing signs saying “No dogs or Jews” when he traveled. Based upon my grandparents’ stories, most Jewish folk pretty much kept to themselves in the Brooklyn of their youth.
That synagogue I found in middle age was a beacon; many of us shared the same touchstones. I discovered new hope in a place where I could be myself, first in mourning and later as I began to take tentative steps forward.
I think Israel represents hope, even for those of us who are culturally Jewish though not observant or religious. In A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz writes about his father telling him about having been publicly humiliated in his own country because he was Jewish and how, to him, Israel represented the idea of being able to live in peace without fear of harassment.
Five years ago, I went on a group tour of Eastern Europe that included a visit to the Auschwitz/Birkenau concentration camp. Among the many visitors were clusters of young people wrapped in Israeli flags, but back then I didn’t understand why.
At the end of the visit, two couples from my tour group began to recite the prayer for the dead in Hebrew for the relatives they had lost there. I hadn’t lost anyone, but they still invited me to sit with them for the reading. It’s my most vivid memory of that visit.
By my birthday, a few days later, our tour group had moved on to Vienna. Having no one to ask to come with me, I was traveling by myself in yet another attempt to enjoy life as a widow, but it felt lonely much of the time. The couples invited me to have dinner with them, complete with ice cream afterwards. Once again, I found a sense of hope.
The world seems darker these days. From articles demanding concessions of Israel without even mentioning the hostages to Jonathan Glazer’s Oscars speech asserting that Israel “hijacked” the Holocaust — we seem to be kind of alone here. Our differences feel less important when our collective identity is under attack.
I can’t stop thinking about those young people proudly draped in those Israeli flags.
Debbie Weiss is a former lawyer, essayist, and the author of Available As Is: A Midlife Widow's Search for Love.
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