Becoming a Jew

The many ways we can tell our story

Today, I spent a few hours preparing a “glimpse” of myself for my Jewish Studio Project Creative Facilitation Training cohort.

Every two weeks for the next year, one of us will get 10 minutes to do this in whatever way we choose. For better or for worse, I opted to go first – to jump in head-first as it were – and after some procrastination, I ended up really enjoying creating 20 slides that share a slice of my life journey so far. For obvious reasons given the nature of the training, I focused on how my work and life have unfolded Jewishly.

High school is when I began to awaken to my Jewish identity. In 1990 – the fall of my senior year, when I was 16 – I took a class about the Holocaust. It was during those months that I wrote this poem. Or it might be more accurate to say this poem came through me.

The feeling of my Jewishness preceded any knowledge whatsoever about Judaism, Jewish history, or Jewish practice. I may have had a deep sense of belonging to the Jewish people, but when it came to an actual community, like, actual people being and doing Jewish, I was an outsider. Much of the last 33 years is the story of how this has changed. How I have changed.

Life is made up of so many different narratives that converge and diverge at different moments, and we can all tell our stories in many different ways. I could tell the story of my queerness, for example, or the story of how creativity and writing have continuously unfolded and evolved, or my professional story, or the story of my body.

Come to think of it, any one of these can become a prompt: tell me the story of your…

Creating this short presentation reminded me that the Jewish story of my life is so much more than a story. It is life itself. (Maybe I’ll find a way to share it here…)

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