Then who will I be?

Warning: navel gazing ahead.

Since the High Holidays, I have been in deep contemplation mode. The value of ritual for me has always been its ability to focus my attention on the salient issues of my life, and the ten Days of Awe were transformative for me on many levels. I sat out sukkot because I felt overwhelmed and overloaded by the experience. From what I’ve read, many modern Jews see sukkot as a regrounding, a coming back to earth after the heady days of self-examination. But i needed some time away, alone to think.

Since Yom Kippur, I’ve come back to the problem of identity. So far, I’ve been framing my journey into Judaism as an accretion, a layering onto myself; not a renunciation of my past or heritage, not an overthrow of the Ego. Judaism has filled many holes in my life, spiritual and social, but it feels like a continuation of who I have already been rather than a replacement.

Judaism is an ancient tradition, whose history of outsiderness has produced a tight identity structure that is unique among the monotheisms and which keeps demanding that I pay attention to it and take it seriously. It’s so tight that many of the world’s Jews will never consider me Jewish at all. A dear friend of mine, Jew by birth, notes frequently that Judaism is both an ethnicity and a religion. The ethnicity appeals to me on an aesthetic level, in the way that human culture generally appeals to me. I find Jewish tradition beautiful and life affirming on the ethno-cultural level. But I’m not sure that I would or ever could be ethnically Jewish. [Part of the Americanization of Judaism has been the restarting of a rather robust conversion stream, historically, which had been dead for centuries. So many of us Jews begin in a non-Jewish ethnicity. I think this could be a vital and important piece of the future of Judaism writ large, but that is for another post.]

What has drawn me to Judaism as a convert is the spiritual, or religious, piece. (I still have a bit of a scholarly, rationalist shudder when I write or say something like that.) For my personality and spiritual needs, Judaism is a near-perfect fit. As an ongoing struggle with god and text, and as a sanctification of everyday life, of the mundane, and as a tradtion anchored in some of humankind’s deepest yearnings, I find Judaism to be a grounding and meaningful way of life, one that says “home” to me in an irrational, intuitive way.

Yet I’m still stymied by the identity piece, the thought of what this all means for who I am. Full disclosure: I am not by disposition a joiner and I’m deeply uncomfortable claiming and living identities generally. This is partly due to a my scarring early life experience with Mormon identity; but it is also as much my personality. I have always bucked against being put in any kind of identity box. Identities feel reductive and confining to me, almost like a cognitive or social jail. Dangerous. Suffocating. Whenever people put me in any kind of identity category, I resist. For example, 15 years ago I accepted the fact that I was sexually attracted to men rather easily; yet it took me years longer to make peace with being called or calling myself gay. Another example, my refusal to identify as a professor early in my carer ended up leading me to some bad pedagogical decisions.

Identity categories come with sets of assumptions and scripts that I may or may not want to be associated with nor obliged to perform. Whereas I’m perfectly comfortable saying “I love men” or “That guy is hot” or “I teach university” or “I practice Judaism”, all “I am” constructions feel constraining, imprecise, too easily misunderstood or purposefully manipulated, fraught with rules and expectations, constricting, suffocating.

And so I find myself resisting the part of conversion that brings with it a new identity, an “I am”. What would identifying as a Jew mean? How can I be the kind of Jew I find the most meaningful, when “Jew” as an identity carries with it tight scripts and a world of assumptions, both within and without the Jewish community? That means people around me will assume that I think, believe, and act a certain way. Confining. Restricting. Can’t breathe. If I, Todd Ormsbee, identify as a Jew, then who will I be?

• As a Jew by choice, am I still the child, the great great great grandson Danish Mormon converts?

• Would I still be a seeker, or does conversion imply that the search is over?

• Can I still be a freethinker, one of my most treasured identities? One who refuses to believe without evidence?

• Am I still of northern european descent, and may I still honor my ancestors with objects and stories from my biological past? For example, can I still observe solstices and equinoxes?

• As a humanist, it has been nearly 20 years since I believed in Jesus, but as a Jew, can i still love Jesus as a devout Rabbi who sought to reform Judaism with a pharisaical focus on the greatest commandments of ahavah?

• I have admired the a buddha as a key figure of Human history and thought and spirituality for nearly 20 years, and have considered myself a casual buddhist. What becomes of my Buddha nature upon conversion?

I am universalist by disposition, but have come to believe over the past few years, that living as a universalist without a chosen path of practice is to be unmoored. In many ways, that unmooring can be deeply nurturing to a wounded soul, and indeed it has been nurturing for me over the past fifteen years. But now I’ve arrived at a point where being a lone seeker is no longer enough. I need to share the journey. My thought is to make of Judaism a home base from which to be a seeker, a place to anchor myself in ritual and ethics and community. A way to create a cohesive daily, yearly, and lifetime practice. But I don’t see myself ever stopping from learning and exploring other traditions.

I still feel a deep connection to this process of learning and adopting Jewish practices and hope that my shul can give me some more concrete direction in the required process in the near future (my only complaint about my shul has been the very California, inchoate process of conversion, in sharp contrast to the clearly delineated requirements at other shuls).

Judaism is the path for me. So this post isn’t an indication of doubt or wavering. The choice is the right one, in a way that I thought would never be possible. It is instead a searching of what this means for me. Once I am officially a Jew (to be honest, I already feel Jewish and already practice Judaism), then who will I be?

[edited 10/17 for clarity]