The Portrait and the Void/הדיוקן והריקנות

Within an hour she manifests in twain.
By sunset, she is indescribable, uncapturable, unparalleled beauty.
Painted in hues only conceivable by the eyes,
and unable to be imitated by the hands.
All we can do is create facsimiles of her glory, the sun setting along her horizon.
In her, we see the awesomeness of G-d Hands, the boldness of His works,
the ultimate power of Creation.
As the sun’s rays bounce on our skin, we stare off into her distances and see
blues of every palette; our dyes could never begin to reflect this spectrum.
We hear the waves crashing, the tide ebbing and flowing, the power of the sea unbound.
Magnificence in reality, divinity captured in a moment.
The sun’s setting fills our bosoms with awe.

By night, she becomes an entirely different entity.
Gone is light’s warmth, gone is the pomp of the sunset, gone is the majesty.
All that is left is the darkness and the feeling of endless space;
and the sound, the sound and the feeling of the ocean’s endless depth.
You can stare into the void, never seeing the horizon, but feel the strength surrounding you.
It is not magnificent, it is humbling. It is calm in it’s power, but is unending.
This is the place where nightmares come from,
the unknowable mere feet below the surface.
Will something peer back at you from the pale, or will the emptiness
swallow you whole?

The sea is both beautiful and mysterious,
both life-giving and life-taking,
both magnificent and dreadful.
She is our eternal mother, and she always calls out to us through the waves.
We cannot help but stare and hope to see something on her horizon,
but what it brings we shall never know.

My Conversion Story/סיפור הגיור שלי

It’s a question I literally get asked by almost everyone I meet

For those of you that don’t know, I converted to Judaism. I know, shocking; Hutchison is such a Jewish-sounding last name (and really easy to spell and pronounce in Hebrew – הוטשיסון). I think being half-Filipino and not looking like your stereotypical Jew has something to do with it ( although I have been called Roma before by some guy at a convenience store, with a kippah and tzitzit on). Even though I’ve written a lot about being Jewish, this guy used to be a good Catholic young man.

This was the first regular photo of a Jewish guy in a stock images site. We don’t all look like this nice-looking man.

People are always trying to place one another, so when they learn that I converted, it’s immediately fascinating to them. Even though honestly it’s something very personal, it’s something I am constantly interrogated about. I used to mind it when people asked the question, but then I just started saying it’s because I’m crazy (that answer is a lot funnier when people know you actually have mental health problems). Really, it’s like asking someone why do they love their spouse, or what do they think is wrong with their children, or have they ever committed a crime. It’s a deeply personal question that I get asked at bars, at cafes, sitting on a bench by a random person next to me, and today in my meeting with my case manager.

I gave him the answer, so I thought, maybe I should actually write it down in case I forget one day.

It all started with a nice Catholic boy…

I grew up in a blended household. No, I don’t mean that I grew up with step-siblings (I did though and they know a lot more about Judaism than your average Gentile); I mean that my mother was a more-spiritual-than-traditional Catholic Filipina and my dad was a white not-very-religious Protestant. I remember my mother always telling me when I was growing up that her and my father had to go in front of a priest and sign some kind of document to get married in the Church that required them to raise any future children in the Catholic faith (went well for sixteen years mom).

“Put this around your kid’s neck or this isn’t official…”

So I grew up Catholic, which can mean a lot of things, so I’ll be specific. We had pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in our house, we went to church every Sunday (my mom always complained that the church by our house was too modern because it had seats instead of pews), we observed Advent (Christian Hanukkah), we didn’t eat meat on Fridays during Lent, and I had my first communion and went to confirmation classes when I was old enough.

In fact, one of my earliest memories takes place in a church, or at least in a church parking lot. This was back when my parents were married, so I was a pretty young kid, and we were attending Christmas Eve mass. I remember the church where we lived at the time had this big golden sculpture that held everything for the sacraments, real awe-inspiring stuff. When we left the service, we went to the parking lot and found that our van had been broken into and the TV and the mobile phone from the console (yes, a mobile phone as in a literal corded phone that was also wireless in the console) had been stolen. We went back to the church to call the police, and I swear to this day that when the priest answered the door, he was wearing basketball shorts and eating Cheeto puffs.

Cheetos aside, I really was a religious kid growing up. I think that part of how easy it was for me to transition to Judaism, and why I never had an angry-angsty-atheist teenager phase, was because I’ve always had a very strong belief in G-d and His presence in my life. I went to Brazil when I was fourteen with my mom to visit family in São Paulo, and when I was there my mom was buying souvenirs from one of those shops that sell things carved from wood. One thing that really sparked my interest, besides the wooden ninja katana, was a rosary. When I got back, I started carrying it with me wherever I went. I learned the extra prayers for it that I didn’t already know. It really bumped up my faith level.

Before tzitzit, I was still literally wearing my religion on me

Losing my religion…or at least changing it

So, at around sixteen I started confirmation classes. They were fine enough, although as a teenager I definitely did not appreciate having to spend extra time in Church when I could have been hanging out with my friends. The priest leading the classes was nice enough from what I remember, and he always answered my questions.

There was just a certain point though where I stopped feeling it; I lost the vibe. Something about all of it just felt unreal and unlike me, even though it was all I had ever known. I started having my first doubts. I researched other religions, just out of curiosity. When I started reading about Judaism, something just clicked. I don’t know if it was the traditions, the peoplehood aspect, the emphasis on actions as opposed to just beliefs, or my own theological doubts about whether or not Jesus was really the Messiah; but something about Judaism just fascinated me.

Now, as an aside, there is this idea in chassidut that a convert is someone who was born with a Jewish soul, but it just happened to get placed in a non-Jewish body. The whole time, this Jewish soul is thirsting for Torah and Judaism, and that’s what eventually leads to conversion. I don’t know if I really believe all of that, but honestly, that’s what it felt like. When I was researching Judaism and reading Jewish texts, something just felt right.

So, one day I just told my mom that I wanted to stop going to confirmation classes. I told her that I didn’t know if I really believed in all of it, and that I didn’t think it was for me. She was disappointed but supportive, and I’ll always be grateful for her reaction. In general, she took all of my transition to Judaism pretty well, minus the whole not eventually being able to eat in her house thing.

Fast Forward through a lot of cringe stuff

When you come from an area with almost no Jews and want to convert to Judaism, you do a lot of dumb stuff. You do things like eat at your school’s cafeteria (not even kosher-style), while wearing a kippah and tzitzit. You get written about in your school paper because who the hell converts to Judaism in a school of thousands with like less than a dozen Jews? In college, the Chabad house rabbi immediately knows you’re not Jewish because you bike up to him in a kippah and tzitzit and he has no idea who you are beforehand. Eventually, I learned to take that stuff off until I was ready, but man I must have looked like a real idiot.

Not how someone should look while eating a cheeseburger at their college cafeteria

Eventually by my senior year of college, I started taking stuff seriously. I kept Shabbat and kosher, and I usually stayed at a friend’s house who was within walking distance of the Chabad house on Shabbat. The rabbi gave me the code to the building, and I would go before my morning bus driving shift to pray shacharit. After I graduated, I went to a summer yeshiva program in Morristown, New Jersey and really learned about Judaism and how to learn about Judaism. I stayed in the dorms, went to shiurim, attended fabrengens, and I even spent Gimmel Tammuz by the Ohel.

The Rebbe and his teachings have changed my life more than almost anyone else in the world.
Photo Credit: By Mordecai baron; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 03:35, 1 January 2012 (UTC) – scanning photograph taken by Mordecai baron, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17867973

Eventually, I ended up back in Houston and moved to where the Chabad community was. My studying consisted of my continued individual learning as well as from a reading list that my beit din sent me, but it was also important just to live a Jewish life in a Jewish community. Seeing how daily life flowed, keeping a kosher kitchen, going to shul for davening during the week and Shabbat, and eventually dating in a kosher way. What I needed was just time to prove to them and to myself that I could do this, that this demanding lifestyle was for me. On the second of Kislev in the year 5774, I officially became Aryeh Leib ben Avraham, and it’s been a continued adventure ever since.

Yours truly on the big day

The More Important Question (I Think)

So, people ask me all of the time why I converted to Judaism. I’ll admit, it’s different and unique. There’s a lot of converts out there, each with their own individual story, and I could never speak for them, but I can tell my own story. However, I think that the more important question never gets asked.

Why am I still Jewish?

I mean, conversion is permanent, and if I was to fall to the lax side I’d still be Jewish; but I mean why stay observant? After everything I’ve been through, all of the mental health problems, all of the pain and trauma I’ve endured, how can I still remain a believing and practicing Orthodox Jew? How can I believe in a G-d that has let me suffer so much? Now that nearly a decade has passed since my mother passed away, my eyes have been opened up to all of the sadness and suffering around me. I worked closely with trauma victims for years, and I’m still paying the consequences for it. I’ve been hospitalized, days away from killing myself. So how am I still a believer?

I think it all goes back to that simple faith that I have in G-d. Even when I was in the hospital, and I didn’t feel His presence like I once did, I still knew He was there. Prayer eventually saved me in that place, it kept me going through all of the horrors that come along with being in a psych ward. I still believe in the beauty of Judaism, and how it allows us to elevate every physical object in this world to a new spiritual height and imbue our actions with holiness. I still have faith regardless of what has happened to me because I have seen the power of belief and persistence, and the wonderfully amazing things that happen in this world because of G-d’s continued involvement. I love being part of the Jewish people, and being a part of this huge shared history and tradition. I love how I am now helping to build a State for our people, and it feels like I’m living with miracles here.

I love being Jewish, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Sure, sometimes it makes my life a little more difficult, but it’s those tests that make me feel like I’m really trying at something meaningful in life. It would be easy to abandon everything, but I get more out of life now than I ever did before. I get asked the conversion question all the time, and I’ll never get tired of answering it. I’m proud that I chose this, and that I get to live my life with purpose and meaning. I think anyone can find their own way in life, and that’s what I did. It’s one decision I will never regret, and one I will always cherish for the rest of my life. May we all increase in our connection to G-d and one another, even if it means answering personal questions all the time.

Living with Tekhelet/חי בתכלת

Last Shabbat I actually went to the synagogue for morning prayers. I was up, and I couldn’t deny the need within me to connect with G-d in one of His dwellings here in the holy land. I had a dilemma in front of me however, and one that reached deeper than the simple color it embodied.

Some background explanation is needed. In Judaism, it is a positive mitzvah, a commandment, to wear tzitzit, ritual fringes on a piece of clothing. Many religious Jews accomplish this by wearing a four-cornered garment beneath their shirts with the tzitzit attached to them, either showing outside of their clothing or tucked into their pants, depending on their specific tradition.

In addition to tzitzit, there is a separate mitzvah mentioned in the same paragraph in the Torah, the mitzvah of tekhelet, a blue string amongst the other white strings. For centuries, the source of tekhelet was lost, with various scholars debating its source. In recent history, one organization rediscovered the source of tekhelet. Not everyone agrees on the subject, but this post is not the place to go into the debate on it. [Here is a great article on the debate if you’re interested]

I say this because for years following my “falling out” with Chabad, I started wearing tekhelet. I believed that it was real, and it also helped me identify more with the dati leumi/Modern Orthodox world that more readily accepts tekhelet as authentic. However, in the past few months, I reverted back to wearing Chabad tzitzit, without tekhelet. I did it out of a longing to be back in the Chabad velt, and my increasing desire to get back to my roots when I first became Jewish.

As I’ve written about, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about where I fall in the bigger Jewish world here in Israel. Tekhelet, that little bit of blue string, believe it or not, plays a big part of it. I came to Israel wearing tekhelet; it made me feel more connected here. I saw other guys in knit kippot wearing tekhelet and it reaffirmed to me that I was part of their world. I saw it on guys who looked like the me I wanted to be, settling the land and being the pioneers I dreamed about being. That’s the whole reason I’m really here, because I too want to be writing Jewish history instead of just experiencing it.

So, last Shabbat, I took out my old tzitzit and tallit with tekhelet and brought them with me to the synagogue. I didn’t know a single person there. I only understood a few words of the sermon in Hebrew. I had to move several times so that the regulars could have their seats, making me feel even more like an interloper. But, when I saw the blue fringes between my fingers before I recited the Shema, something just felt right. I felt like I had given up all of the battles I was waging within myself about who I was and was just doing what felt like it was right. It felt right to be there. It felt right to be there with my tekhelet (even if I was the only guy there with it). It felt right to feel like I was fulfilling a rediscovered mitzvah in a land renewed.

So, today I bought a new pair of tzitzit with tekhelet. My old pair is too small and worn, but I felt completely different this time buying them when I bought the Chabad pairs. When I was buying the Chabad pairs, I felt like I was buying them out of a sense of obligation, and I even felt a little bit silly since my halachic observance is no where to the level that the average Lubavitcher in Israel is up to. When I was in the checkout today, it just felt right, like I was going back to who I chose to be.

I came into the Chabad world because it’s all I ever really knew, I never really had much of a choice. I fell into it, and I’m grateful for everything it gave me. I still have so much love for the Rebbe and his teachings, I learn Tanya, and I still default in my mind to the chassidic teachings I’ve learned over the years. My view of Jewish life, of Yiddishkeit, is fundamentally Chabad; but I know what I am and where I want to be.

The Chabad life isn’t for me anymore. The people that I really look up to now that I live in Israel aren’t the rabbis who struggled in Russia to preserve Judaism. I still have immense for the Rebbe’s shluchim; but I know that deep down I would trade everything I have now to be one of those first dati leumi settlers setting up religious kibbutzim. I believe in the holiness of the State of Israel, and in the sanctity of building up this land. My heroes built the settlements on the borders, they taught the Torah of Eretz Yisrael, they set up yeshivot in Judea and Samaria after the Six Day War, they were the men and women who combined service to Hashem with labor on the land. That is who I want to be like, even if I live comfortably in a Netanya suburb.

To me tekhelet symbolizes all of this. It symbolizes the idea that something so immensely holy can be found again with hard work and science, and not abandoned to messianic times. It stands for the idea that we can change reality now, that we can change the future now. Tekhelet is a mitzvah that serves to remind Jews not only of the mitzvot, which all white tzitzit do as well, they also serve to remind us to perform those commandments. They remind us that we are a people of action, not simply of remembrance and observance. I want to be a Jewish man of action, I want to change the world for the better with my actions. If that string of blue does it for me, I’m going to cling to it, and everything it stands for.

The things I cannot say have become more powerful than what I can/אני לא יכול לדבר עליהם

Secret, defined as something that is kept or meant to be kept unknown or unseen by others.
We do not speak of them, lest we betray their very essence;
but sometimes the invisible makes up the foundation of how we live our lives.
The history we do not tell to others, the things we hide behind smiles,
behind reassuring eyes,
behind the great lie that everything is ok.
They say that the truth will set you free,
but it is our secrets that define us.
We all wear costumes in this performance of life, hiding what we really think and feel.

I have a secret, or at least one of many.
I cannot tell another living soul about it, but it burns inside of me.
It tears at my heart, thrashing about in my chest, screaming from inside
to be set free.
It is a secret from everyone close to me, shared with only those bound to it.
It is something that I want to build an edifice to, because it is a secret that I built my foundation upon.
There is no physical monument, save the scars that will slowly fade with time;
but my memory of it will never fade.
So I must write it here, even if I am writing about nothing that exists past my own walls.
I must make a mark of it somewhere, I must at least acknowledge its existence,
even if I can never let it see the sun.

I would walk to the middle of the forest,
find a tree that reaches to heaven,
and carve this secret into the bark.
Leave it somewhere I would never visit again,
let it be marked somewhere else forever so I can leave my own behind.
Perhaps one day someone would come upon it and share in it with me anonymously, never knowing its source.
An eternal bond made between strangers to cement one long gone.

Not a day goes by that I do not look down at them,
these remnants of a memory forever etched into my flesh.
I run my fingertips over the scars,
transport myself to the moment of their genesis,
and the moments that they capture.
I am addicted to my past, this stumbling block to my own progress,
I cannot leave them to whither, I cannot countenance their fading.

But I must leave it here, lest further temptation lead me to the deluge.
Life must be lived with things unsaid, actions untaken, feelings never shared,
but they must not turn into regrets.
It is the way of life to have secrets.
Everything cannot be shared, to do so only leaves the ground beneath your feet exposed.
May I always remember, even when they fade away, because I never want the memories to leave my recollection.
It is too precious to part with, to intimate to share, but I must say that they exist; these secrets we build our lives on.

Caught Between Worlds/תקוע בין עולמות

I feel caught between worlds.

In Israel, Jewish life is not segmented into convenient boxes, dominated by one synagogue over another. Your yiddishkeit, your Jewishness, is not bound to one place, to one rabbi, or to one way of life. Things blend together here, religious life exists on a spectrum of expression. In America, my orthodoxy was so visible; here, I am just another man with a kippah in the crowd. Religious people are everywhere. They are not hidden, shuttling back and forth between the synagogue, the office, the kosher supermarket, and back home. Here, the janitor is a religious Jew, and so is the soldier, the beggar, the artist, the woman at the checkout lane, as well as the doctor and the lawyer.

Oh, how these Jews express themselves! They are trendy, they are hippies, they are classic, and they are so very fresh. They wear black suits and hats, skinny jeans, short sleeves and slacks, shorts and tee shirts, and biker jackets and boots. They are infinite in their variety, and conspicuous in how much they belong. It is impossible to define them, and impossible to contain their world to a ghetto.

It’s honestly beautiful, how something so holy and different can be so immersed and meshed with daily life here. Jewish holidays are my days off, I would be hard pressed to find a situation where I couldn’t get kosher food at almost anytime, and there are literally four synagogues within a ten minute walk of where I live (I really should go more often). The fact is, it is impossibly easy to live a religious life here, but that is where my dilemma lies.

In America, my observance defined me, it marked me as different, it stood me out on its own. Here, I must struggle to define myself within the melange of life here. With Judaism so wild and unrestricted, I’m struggling to find my true north. When I was back in the states, I shed many of the things that made me Chabad, although I always stayed sheltered in its world and never gave up the halachic restrictions that world gave me. One of the first things my wife and I did when we got to this new country was go before the beit din, a Jewish court headed by our local rav, and performed hatarat nedarim, the annulment of vows and restrictions, to free ourselves so that we could start fresh in our new community. Gone were the welcoming chains of the old world, and all that was that left was the uncertainty of freedom and free will. We chose customs and standards that fit our community, wanting to blend in and bind ourselves to some kind of shared social base. I went to a new synagogue, built on its variety of parishioners, and I stuck to what my fellow Anglos did. In my desperate attempt to navigate my new Jewish Israeli identity, I clung to whatever was around me.

But it left me feeling incomplete.

When I was with Chabad, and it still happens whenever I go back to a Chabad synagogue, I knew who and what I was. I may have taken off my kapota and shaved my beard, but I was still Chabad in my head. I am still a Lubavitcher in my mind, the rebbe is never far away, and his teachings and lessons are like a warm blanket on this cold journey.

When I was in the mental health hospital, I was in a really low place, lost in my mind and my soul. For the first couple of weeks, I couldn’t pray, I couldn’t hear the calling within me, I couldn’t feel G-d’s presence like I once did. When my wife brought me my tallit and tefillin, she brought me my Chabad siddur, my prayer book, as well. This prayer book was special because it was given to me by my rabbi on the day of my conversion, and the pages are stained by my fingertips from years of repeated prayer. In the recreation room of the hospital, I found my faith again, the one life raft I could cling to in the sea of mental anguish. I found myself rediscovering the words with new eyes, the longing and calling for healing found bee resonance in my heart. When King David cried I cried along with him, my tears staining the pages. The tightness of the tefillin straps kept me bound to reality, the weight of my tallit on my shoulders grounded me to this world while connecting me to the hidden world around me. So much of my life was dominated by confusion, prayer and meditation kept me tied to the truth.

Now, I am out again in the free world, but I don’t know where to turn to. Even with so many synagogues within my grasp, I pray at home rather than deal with my spiritual identity crisis. Am I Chabad? Am I Modern Orthodox? Am I dati leumi? Do I check the “other” box? Who do I turn to when I have questions beyond whether I just made a spoon not kosher? Where do I look to for inspiration? There is so much more to observance than mitzvot, there is an entire culture wrapped up in every label; and I often do not understand or feel comfortable with any of the labels?

Maybe that is the solution, to live between the lines. I had a meeting with the rabbi of one of the local synagogues, one that caters to Anglos, and he told me that I don’t have to limit myself. That I can take from each of these worlds the beautiful, the meaningful, what works for me. Maybe that’s the real test, to see how I swim in this vast ocean, building myself an edifice from the mass of materials around me. Each of us here is such a unique soul, maybe this whole place only works if it all blends together.

Part of what makes galut, exile, so harsh is the regimentation. While we were initially put into ghettoes, we internalized them and put ourselves into boxes. We had to act this way, or look this way, pray this way, eat this level of kosher, do what this rabbi said. The beauty of this new state, of this new plane of existence for Jewish consciousness is that we are building it ourselves, sometimes making up the plan as we go along. That’s why we live for today, that’s why say that it will be ok, and to take things slowly. It is a marvelous thing to build a new Jew here, combining elements from Jewish practice and tradition from around the world and through centuries of different experiences.

So maybe I can be ok in my jean shorts, tzitzit down past my knees, and a Rick and Morty tee shirt. Maybe I can still have 770 on my tallit bag even though I eat rabbanut. Maybe Hashem is just happy that I’m here trying my best, or at least maybe He’s happy that I’m happy that I’m trying my best. I always have room to grown, and thank G-d, there is so much holy space here to grow in and so much holiness to fertilize that growth. I can be me, and that’s enough. I may live between worlds, but all of the worlds are holy, so I can’t go wrong. It may be uneasy, but I will find my way here.

I do not understand/אני לא מבין

I do not understand.
Surrounded by a sea of words, sounds familiar, meanings hidden behind the mist.
Matters and subjects I know intimately made foreign by ignorance.
I miss punchlines, shared understandings, the feeling of
being part of something greater than oneself.
Eyes, mouths, and sounds blanket me in alienation.
I pick up a word, a morsel, only to have the slice taken from beneath my tongue.
Why do I subject myself to this?
This continued exercise in my general separation from society?
Must I bang my head against the wall again and again
until the words finally seep between the cracks in my skull?
I want to speak, to laugh, to express, to share, to love;
I want this probationary period of ignorance to end.
I almost hate that I heeded the call to return,
for it was spoken to me in a language unspoken here.
Am I doomed to slowly slowly?
Slowly slowly I am losing my will.
Slowly slowly I wish my ears did not hear.
Slowly slowly I am losing my connection to humanity.
I will do anything, slowly slowly, to end this partial existence.

On being an Orthodox Ally

It’s the last day of Pride month, and I wanted to share a little about what it means to me to be ally to the LGBT+ community, and specifically as someone who is an Orthodox Jew. An ally is a heterosexual cisgender person who supports equal civil rights, gender equality, and LGBT social movements, challenging homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia. I’ve been an ally since my college days. I was even president of the Allies association at Texas A&M University, marching alongside the LGBT+ community, handing out information about services available to LGBT+ students and staff, and supervising ongoing training for new Allies so that they could provide more safe spaces for students to feel comfortable opening up and exploring who they were.

I remember getting threats and jeers for marching with my kippah proudly on my head, but I didn’t care. I knew that whatever I went through was a fraction of what my fellow students had to go through on a daily basis, and I heard so many stories of people who had horrible hardships coming out to their loved ones; but I also saw the beauty and passion of the community. I saw people fall in love with partners they would eventually marry, and I saw how much joy and positivity the community added to our school and to my life personally. So much of the dialogue when I was growing up focused on the pain of coming out or the awkwardness of trying to navigate a heteronormative world; but I slowly began to realize that LGBT+ people not only deserved to be in the same world I lived in, but that they made it better. Ultimately it’s not about tolerance or acceptance, it’s about affirmation that these are whole people, not missing anything, and that they bring something to the table that no one else can.

It’s not been easy having this mindset while also remaining an Orthodox Jew. People would criticize me within my community for supporting a “lifestyle” that didn’t jive with their view of the Torah, they accused me of abetting sinners and encouraging people to stay in their wicked ways when they could be changed. I heard some of the worst kind of homophobia and transphobia from people that I shared a table with, and it boiled my blood to hear them say it. For a long time after college, I just ignored what they said and chalked it up to just ignorant people saying ignorant things.

But that is not enough.

It is not enough to sit idly by while people stereotype, defame, insult, and degrade good and loving people. It is not enough to simply be comfortable in the fact that you know you’re not a bigot, while allowing those around you to stoke the flames of bigotry. It is not enough to be an ally to your LGBT+ friends while staying silent amongst your straight ones. It takes more.

It takes action to be an ally. It means stepping out of the comfort zone you have because of your heterosexuality and cisgender identity, and taking a stand. It means having difficult conversations and answering hard questions.

As an observant Jew, it means even more. It means engaging with your community in a way that is inclusive and open. It means making sure that everyone feels safe and welcome in your home. It means grappling with Halacha, even erring sometimes, in order to fulfill the commandment to love your fellow as you love yourself. It means being understanding when people leave Jewish practice behind because they cannot deal with the internal conflicts, and working for a world where people don’t feel the need to leave. It means putting yourself out there as an example, that a ben Torah can be an ally too. You have to be able to answer LGBT+ peoples’ questions, and have good answers as to why sometimes we can flex and sometimes we can’t, all while remaining compassionate and loving.

I want someone to see me as a resource, a shoulder to cry on, a listening ear, someone to explain things, but most of all as just someone who has love to give. My kippah and tzitzit shouldn’t automatically make me an unfriendly person, and I hate that we live in an environment today where that is still the case.

Thank G-d, things are slowly changing. Rabbis are working on the issues specific to the LGBT+ community, and doing so honestly and with integrity. There are still people out there that will say the Kaddish and write off a son or daughter, but those days are numbered. Slowly, slowly, the religious community is starting to realize that these people are not going anywhere and we cannot change them. I hope one day that the inclination to grieve or to mourn over lost dreams will be replaced by the simple love we can share with one another.

The other day, I was in a very Haredi area buying a new hat, and the guy helping me out noticed my pride bracelet that I had made. He asked me if I knew what the colors meant, and I told him I did, thinking that he was going to explain to me how the rainbow was simply Jewish, and try to dismiss any connections to pride. Instead, he simply said that he liked it, and that it was nice that I made it. I’ll never know if he was being genuine or not, but his knowing smile told me that he wasn’t just pulling my leg.

I don’t want to make this post about me, because being an ally isn’t really about who you are. It means standing up for what’s right, and acting when you can to make the world a better place. As an Orthodox Jew, that’s always been my mission plan, to reveal the goodness in everything. As pride closes this month, being an ally shouldn’t stop today. It doesn’t take wearing rainbow colors or marching in a parade to make a difference, and people in the Orthodox world are in a unique position to change things for a lot of people that are suffering because of longstanding discrimination and misunderstanding.

At the end of the day, G-d is love, and He loves us all, and He made us all in His image; and He doesn’t make mistakes. Halacha will have to learn to move with the times, and we will move along with it. No one needs to compromise their beliefs, because ultimately we all should believe that everyone deserves to be treated fairly in life and that everyone has value and meaning in their lives.

I’ll still keep wearing my pride bracelet tomorrow, not because I want just showcase that I’m someone that can be talked to, but because I want to remind myself of what I stand for. I stand for a world where love is love, and G-d is ultimately understanding. I cannot change the world, but at least I can be one guy in a kippah that’s willing to listen and ready to stand up when the time comes. I don’t think that G-d would have it any other way. I don’t have all the answers, but that’s ok, no one does. All I can do is love to the fullest, and hope that love can continue to change the world.

Finding Home

It’s been a few days since I first got here to the land of Stars and Stripes, and in many ways it’s felt like stepping onto an alien world, albeit one where everything foreign feels slightly familiar at the same time. I take the wheel of my rental car and remember what’s it’s like to drive the open road, but I cannot help but marvel at the grandness of the highways and the speed at which I travel. I see signs and buildings that stir memories in my mind, but the sheer amount of space around me and the size of everything makes me feel like I am closer to exploring the moon than being back in the country I called home for twenty-eight years. It’s the strangest feeling, reconnection with derealization, walking on old steps you’ve tread before while seeing that maybe your feet just don’t fit in the grooves you’ve worn into them.

Being “home” in so many ways has only reaffirmed where I truly feel home. I already miss my apartment, my neighborhood, and all the sights and sounds of living in Israel. As relieving as it is to speak in English with everyone around me, I catch myself putting on Israeli music, comforted by the language I barely have a grasp of. My mind is no longer the same, it has been opened up to an entirely different world, and this old one seems so strange and foreign to me that I feel like the alien in the land of my birth. Imagine an astronaut, on a mission to make a new home on Mars, given a two week pass to come back home, only to realize that he pines for the red dust more than the rich soil of the Earth.

Perhaps the old saying is true, that absence make the heart grow fonder. I first knew that I was in love with the woman I would one day marry when we were apart, realizing in a moment that everything was better with her in it, and that I never wanted to spend another night away from her again. I realize now that I am no longer truly an American, or at least more than what it says on paper. When the heart and soul yearn and look east towards Zion and hope for the return, maybe I am truly an Israeli. I breathe in the air here and it does not fill my lungs, the water does not quench my thirst, and the soil feels lifeless underneath my feet. I long to be back home, to feel the connection between myself and the place I am meant to be in, to feel and see G-d’s presence in everything around me.

I’ve gone from the holy land, and I can feel the emptiness. Exile is real and I can feel it in my bones here, and it goes past the inconveniences of being in a place where there isn’t kosher food everywhere or that I can take for granted that the people around me share a common fate. The distinction runs to my very soul, and for the first time in my life I really feel it. I know that I was completely right to pack up my belongings and make the journey to Israel, to build something in the land. Everything outside of it seems so strange, even though most of it is the only things I’ve known for the vast majority of my life.

I am enjoying seeing my family, they are one thing that keeps me bound to the earth here and let’s me see through haze of this land. Blood is thicker than any amount of ocean between us, and they are what make this trip worth it. I love them with my whole heart, but I can finally admit to myself that I no longer love this place. This place is not home, and it never could be again. I have seen the promised land, and I can never go back to living without its light.

Sending love to my brothers and sisters across the sea, and to my friends and family here in the land of the free. I hope this trip continues to go well, because this sojourn has been fraught with crises of identity, and I want to be back to the space where everything in my life just fits into place.

Am I home?

The reality is that that I am still living in-between worlds, a foot in each door, not really American, but not really fully Israeli.

In less than forty-eight hours, I will be in the air, travelling hundreds of miles per hour, over a vast ocean, to a place that I call home; or at least I did. I catch myself calling America home, and I always feel the need to correct myself; that I left the old country behind to build something in this new state in an old land. I have to say to myself that the United States is no longer my home, that I made a conscious decision to leave behind my possessions, my friends, my community, my family, my entire way of life to make a go of it here in Israel; but I still keep catching myself saying, “back home in America…” The reality is that that I am still living in-between worlds, a foot in each door, not really American, but not really fully Israeli.

Today, I was talking with someone and he said that he was Israeli and that I was American. When I corrected him and said, no I’m Israeli too, he said to me in broken English that I was still an American. There is something unbridgeable between the sabra and I, or at least while I still speak broken Hebrew. This language barrier always comes up when I am in a big group of people that are speaking Hebrew. My mind still thinks in English, so I spend so much time trying to keep up with the fast-speaking sabras and translating in my mind that by the time I finally understand what’s happening, the conversation is already on another topic. When I’m speaking one-on-one with someone in Hebrew, my mind can switch, but inevitably I run into the wall of not knowing a word, or how to translate a phrase, or conjugate a verb correctly; my mind stops working when it’s in Hebrew mode, and I can acutely feel the inability to express myself in the language of this place I desperately want to call home and speak with the people who I long to be equal with; but is more than that.

I am caught in a place where my mind is stuck between worlds, between my old home and my new one. It’s been two years since I first stepped foot on these shores and the Ministry of the Interior handed me a little laminated card that said, Status: Israeli Citizen. In those two years, I’ve slowly undergone the process of klitah, absorption, into this society. I’ve changed the way I look, the way I speak, the way I interact with people, the way I view the world, and the way I view myself. I started off surrounded by fellow olim in my Hebrew ulpan, all of us coming from different corners of the world, trying to make sense of this new citizenship and this new identity of being an [insert country of origin] Israeli. Now, I’m surrounded by natives and every day is a challenge to navigate their world, or is it mine too? Everyone says I’m doing well for how long I’ve been here, that it takes time and patience, slowly slowly; but I still feel like something is missing, that I am out of place. I do not feel like I fit in to the puzzle that is this country.

Where did it all begin, this feeling of never having a place feel completely whole, of never feeling completely whole in a single place?

My parents got divorced when I was a small child, and I think that’s when I lost the real concept of what it meant to have a home. Shuttling back and forth between my parents, having two houses, two rooms, two places filled with “my” things, I learned to never put down roots. Every day could bring about a new change in where I slept at night, and that makes a kid think that nothing has permanence. I think that the old euphemism for my situation was that I came from a “broken home,” but my therapist said something different today. She said that really, I learned what it was like to be homeless, to never feel settled in a place, to have a place where I could crash and sleep, but never call home in the way that all of my friends spoke about the places they lived with their families. I would always envy my friends who went to summer camps, or went on trips together, or just always knew where they were going to be for holidays. I was jealous that they could just go to the same little building every day, go to their own designated quarters, and have a place they felt was theirs. It’s hard to sleep in a bed when you know that you have another one a thousand miles away that you’re also supposed to think of as yours. It’s hard to attach yourself to things when you also have treasures hidden away in another state. It’s hard when a parent has to tell a child, like a guest, that they’re always welcome in a place that’s supposed to be their home.

So, I spent most of the time after I left home at eighteen thinking exactly like this, thinking that no place was really home. Every year in college I moved: from my dorms, to my fraternity house, to an apartment with friends, to living with my girlfriend, to my first apartment after college, to my next apartment after that, until I finally got married and shared a space with someone again for the first time in years. I built what you could call a home, or at least a decent apartment. I bought furniture, decorations, bathroom furnishings, all the little things that make it yours. In five years of marriage, we moved three times. I never felt completely at home in any of them, or at least, I was already for the next move. I never felt so connected to any one place that I knew that this would be my home. It was always home for now, until we got something better, or felt like doing something new. Even with the best of intentions, I sowed the seeds of my own rootlessness.

Then, a little over two years ago, my wife and I made the ultimate decision to really cut off our roots and transplant ourselves to a place that we had only ever known on brief excursions. It was fun and exhilarating, but I’m only now beginning to understand how traumatic and stressful it all really was. I’ve always had mental health problems, and I feel like they were just bubbling beneath the surface in America, with occasional flareups making me get help. When we came here, everything that I had that kept all of those dark thoughts and problems under the surface just disappeared. I lost my support group, my habits, my routines; I lost the ability to just blend in and hide the problems away. Eventually, things got to a breaking point, and after a year here I was hospitalized in a mental institution, and my world literally shattered. I had gotten so used to changing places that I felt at home in a psych ward more than I did in the outside world. I got used to the cotton pajama clothing and sharing a room with a stranger, I got used to it all so quickly that when I tried to leave for a couple of days I completely lost my connection with reality and had to be readmitted.

Thankfully, things are better now. I’ve been in my outpatient program for a while, and things are finally starting to feel better. I still have bad days, but I can deal with them. What I still haven’t been able to get over, and this is one of the things that keeps me up at night, is still feeling like I’m an alien here. That as much I answer people that question, why I would choose the challenges of Israel over the comforts of America, with my love of this place and feeling connected here more than I did in America, I still feel disconnected from society; and if that’s the case, what does that say about how connected I ever felt to anything back in America?

I think it all comes back to what I think home means, or at least what it means to have a home or feel at home. It’s hard for me to define, such a simple concept. It’s a building, a place, but that word means so much more than any physical structure. It means having a place where you feel comfortable, more than just a place you can rest your head. It means feeling like you have a place to call your own, and not just a place that you feel like you can stay at. It means feeling like you have a sanctuary, and not just shelter. It means even more than anything you attach to the place, it is a feeling you have with the life that is connected to that physical location. The home is what you base your life on, the foundation for everything else. All of the other places in your life are in relation to home, and in relation to yourself. You may be a worker at your place of employment, a congregant at your place of worship, a patron of your favorite bar or restaurant; but your home has to be the one place where you can feel like you can be completely yourself. The rest of the world could be going to hell or feel like an alien world, but your home is the one place you’re supposed to feel safe enough to be in your own skin.

When I close my eyes and imagine the home I want, I see experiences and not things. I see myself watering the plants in my garden. I see myself sharing a meal with my wife and laughing. I wish that my home would be a place where I can take off my shell and let myself feel comfortable in being exposed. I want it to be a place where I can sit and write to my heart’s content. I want it to be a place where I can curl up and just feel relaxed reading a book. I want to look around at then things on the walls and see expressions of what I hold dear in life. I want my bed to feel like the safest place in the world, and not just where I go when life’s troubles have me to exhausted to keep on going.

I don’t have that yet. Besides the physical things, I still struggle to feel like this place is my home. The food in my fridge has labels that I still sometimes struggle to decipher. When I get a phone call and have to speak in Hebrew, that outside feeling of alienation comes into my home. I don’t want my home to feel like a bastion or a fortress, I want it to feel like a hidden garden. I want to feel like life flourishes just for me, and that I am privileged to see it. Everyone brings their problems home with them, but it still feels like my home is dominated more by them than the refuge from them. I want to feel like a part of the rest of the world outside, but I want it to be my part of the world. I want to feel comfortable with not being comfortable all of the time, and I think that leaving America forced me to really do that for the first time. I’ve had hardships before, but there is nothing that compares to this immigrant experience.

Still, I have hope. When I lay my head down at night, it doesn’t feel like a hotel room, I feel like it’s my pillow underneath my head. When I pick up the phone and struggle to speak, I know that it’s ok, and that I am better now than I was when I finished my formal Hebrew education. I have more confidence, and part of that comes from knowing that I am different, and that the differentness might last forever. I look at my government and see people that were not born here, and I feel hope that I might one day make it here on my own terms. So many Hebrew phrases all boil down to the same idea, that things are going to be ok, and that someone upstairs is watching out for us.

When I pack my bags tomorrow, I know that I am not really leaving one home for another. Those days in my life are long gone, I do not have to bifurcate my existence between two worlds. I can be complicated, I can be nuanced, I can live life in a way that is not always one way or the other. There is even beauty in living this complex life, always learning and adapting to new situations. When the first pioneers came to this land, they came speaking a foreign tongue, and even the stilted Hebrew of our founding fathers betrays the fact that so many still spoke in their mother tongues in private. They learned to live and adapt to this world, but they also built it into something new, each generation of immigrants adding another layer to this beautiful Zionist project in the holy land. I may not always feel like it, but I am part of that too. To be alienated here is to also be essentially Israeli, to be a pioneer, to step outside your comfort zone and try and build something amazing even when you don’t always understand everything.

I will always be an American, but I will always be an Israeli; and that is something that I chose. I never got a say in where I was born, but I have a say in my future, and that future is here. I may not be where I want to be, but I will be one day. For now, I might still be between worlds, but I know where my home is. This land, these people, this country, they are mine. This is where I belong. This is where I am building my home, and G-d willing, I will have the home I’ve always dreamed of.

I will make it here. Israelis are resilient like that.

This night never ends

All of these nights just blend together, and they’re killing me slowly,

Each and every night never seems to end,
blending together in a maelstrom of insomnia, rumination,
and endless loneliness.
1 am, 2 am, 3 am, 4 am, 5 am,
meaningless demarcations in an experience that is truly marked by descent into
the void, the emptiness, the staring at the ceiling wondering when this will all finally be over with.

I stopped praying to G-d long ago for any kind of solace,
now I pray to Him only for an end; or I pray to the pills to take me anywhere but here.
When I walk the streets to escape from the sleeplessness, I only encounter the piercing feeling of loneliness.
Calling numbers that will never pick up, having conversations to fill the emptiness, desperately clawing at anything that will make a dent in all this pain I feel.
How do you tell someone that I am talking because the silence draws me deeper into madness?

Nights turn into weeks, weeks into months, and soon,
living becomes a plod to oblivion to the slow cadence of a death march.
Days don’t seem like days, they are a blur, all time becomes a binary experience:
with people and feeling alive enough to live or being alone enough to feel like you’re not alive.
I close my eyes for the few hours rest I can wrestle from the heavens, and when I awaken,
I feel alone with nothing but the remnants of nightmares and alarm clocks to wish me good morning.

Even a nap is dangerous.
Night terrors rob me of any relief, waking to an altered reality, caught in the dreamscape, panicked, and feeling like I can still hear the screams and violence inches from my face.
Uncontrollable sobbing, gasping for air, feeling life strangling me, why would I ever want to wake up?
Caught between the horrors of what my sleep brings and the reality that never seems to really exist,
why wouldn’t I choose the devil I know over whatever unknown this world brings?

But these nights, these damn nights, they kill me over and over again.
Restless, waiting, disappointed, fearful, and all so alone.
The loneliness is the true torture, the real demon that haunts these sleepless evenings.
In prison, in your cell, at least you have someone to talk to.
In this prison of mine, I have to make up all of the voices.
I hate what they say to me, and I hate myself for talking back to them.

So I call, and I call, and I call the list.
Every name a possibility, someone to give me a break from the yoke of this loneliness.
Ten minutes, thirty minutes, anything I can take to make me feel less utterly alone in this pain.
I hate myself for needing them so much, almost as much as I hate hearing the silence when no one answers.
I have friends around the world, or so I think, but it is hard to reach out, to grab hold of some kind of hope
when multiple time zones keep you away from the vast majority of people that ever cared about you.

Maybe tonight will be different, I have been blessed with a new pill to try.
Will it give me rest? Will it silence the nightmares? Will it finally make the voices stop?
I can only pray to whatever is up there that this night will be different;
but I don’t have much hope.
Too many nights have been fed to the hell that I am living, the fires that devour me every night,
the same fire that fills my veins with flames, my mind with a swirling inferno, and turns my soul to embers.

This has all been one long night without end, days are merely punctuation.
Loneliness while awake, horrors in my sleep, over and over and over.
The fire feeds itself and propels my body even though I try and will it all to just stop.
1 am, 2 am, 3 am, 4 am, 5 am,
meaningless numbers that mark nothing but the time left before I have to suffer vertically.
These nights are killing me slowly, lonely, one sleepless hour at a time.