Constructive Conversations

Hello, friends! This is another re-post of a blog entry I wrote for the CLIP blog about my experiences this past summer, in 2012. I plan to explore some of these issues in greater depth in future posts, but this appropriately gives a large overview of my struggles with Judaism this summer.

As many of my fellow CLIP interns learned this summer, I grew up as the Jewish child of an interfaith marriage: my mother is Catholic and my father is Jewish. We chose a Reform synagogue for my family, and like many other temples on Long Island, it is a very welcoming place for interfaith families. I was raised completely Jewish—I distinctly remember disliking Hebrew School when I went to Torah Tots when I was a toddler, I later had a Bat Mitzvah during which I chanted from the Torah, I went through Confirmation until I graduated High School, my primary research focus at William and Mary is contemporary antisemitism in Europe, and I have even considered becoming a Rabbi. I went much further in my faith than did the majority of Jewish young people that I knew growing up. Judaism for me has always been a religion, and a beautiful, accepting one at that.

I was also adopted at birth. The names of my parents—the ones who raised me—appear on my birth certificate, and I have never had contact with my birth parents. I grew up in a strong, loving household on Long Island, knowing I was both adopted and Jewish, but never seeing them as linked, and certainly never seeing them as a joint problem.

But then I came to CLIP, and discovered that many of the Jewish students I was meeting conceive of Judaism as both a religion and a race, a race that is only passed down through the maternal bloodline. This confused me immensely. What does religion and faith have to do with bloodline? How could anyone say to me that someone who never entered a synagogue in their life, but comes from a “pure bloodline,” is more Jewish than I am?

My blood is no different than anyone else’s.

Blood has never mattered in any part of my life. As one of the only blondes in a family with both Jewish and Puerto Rican members, it may be visually obvious that I am adopted, but we all usually forget that I was not “born” into the family.

The tension I felt between my interfaith upbringing and my situation this summer encouraged me to reflect deeply on my own views, as I strove to understand how I could like my fellow CLIP participants so much as people, yet feel so much like an outsider due to the disapproval of my family’s lifestyle that is far too common in communities across the spectrum of Jewish practice and observance. As I have often said, some days I was inspired by them and wanted to become extremely observant of all 613 mitzvot, and other days I did not want to be Jewish at all.

These allusions to race confused me to say the least, especially since (as one of the other interns informed me) many centuries ago the Jews traced their religion through the paternal bloodline. The intense discussions we had during our Wednesday seminars were particularly interesting in complete contrast with the other four days of the work week, when I was working for the Center for Spiritual Life at NYU, a new multifaith initiative at the university. During my time at NYU, I was speaking with chaplains, imams, rabbis, students of different faiths, so many people committed to creating a stronger world through religious understanding.

I was very lucky to receive such incredible support from Justin and Jay, the leaders of our group. With them, I debated these emotions I had in great depth so that I could attempt to understand the varying perspectives in the group in order to best communicate how I feel about the issue. This type of reflection and introspection are unique aspects of CLIP that I loved—meeting Justin for an intense early-morning discussion over coffee, or sitting down with Jay in Washington Square Park for over an hour probing into these issues—it is not often that I find such people who are really willing to invest their time and energy into helping me better understand myself and the world around me. Justin and Jay really made CLIP an incredible experience that I will never forget.

They both understood where I was coming from, and encouraged me to lead a session on sensitive language for the group. When Justin first proposed this (after he caught me crying after a particularly difficult session one Wednesday morning), I was not extremely eager to do so. I would usually just allow people to have their beliefs and not really challenge them so forcefully, from the belief that individuals with opinions I consider prejudiced would not be convinced anyway. But Justin very seriously looked at me and said, “Allyson, it’s not always easy to be a leader. But you have that opportunity now. If you want to run a program on interfaith marriages, we can give you time during one of the seminars to do so.”

In time, I came to realize just how right Justin was to push me in the way that he did. Eventually I ran a program on sensitive language with two of my closest friends in the group—one who does not affiliate with any particular movement, and one who is strictly Orthodox. The three of us offered somewhat different opinions, but we were also all committed to creating a space in CLIP for honest but respectful discussion. Many members of the cohort came up to us afterward to talk about how much they enjoyed the session—and I noticed just how much the conversation changed afterward, and how people were much more careful when they phrased their contributions on difficult topics. This change really made me feel honored to be part of such a conscientious group of people. Especially as I finish up my last year at William and Mary in a very Christian part of Virginia, I value the strong Jewish community I know I will now always have with my CLIP friends in and around New York City.

As I continue to reflect on how I want my own faith life to look like into the future, a journey that started with CLIP this summer, I will always look fondly back my ten weeks in the summer of 2012. I made fifty new friends, had an incredible internship in Manhattan, and learned a lot about Judaism—and myself.

Now go out and love one another.

<3,
Allyson

The original post of this blog appeared here: http://www.clipnyc.com/constructive-conversations-allyson-zacharoff-clip-2012/