“In true compassion, there is no room for anyone to be left out.”
In mid-October, I received an email from Dominique, asking about my dual experiences with Judaism and Catholicism in JVC. It was a good question. I just didn’t know how to answer it.
And so I ghosted her email, which is the most on-brand action I could have possibly taken. I buried the unanswered question deep in my internal register of Important Things I Ought To Confront, and tried to move on with my year.
Easier said than done.
Before I continue, there’s something I need to mention about Lazarus House, my community in Kansas City. Like many other JV houses, it’s full of broken stuff. It took me a while to understand that our house only acquired such things because they were broken. Free stuff is frequently broken. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles, and we full-time volunteers love free crumbs.
At Orientation, I must have viewed Lazarus House as an island of misfit toys and defective appliances. Now, at Dis-Orientation, the brokenness of material things has a certain romance to it. Broken things are sent here, or they inevitably break within our threshold. This is a place of fissures, a place of not just breaking, but breaking open.
Now let’s crack this nut.
I am what I like to call a “cashew,” or a Catholic Jew. My dad is Jewish, my mom is Catholic, and neither of them really care. My dad’s Jewish parents, however, definitely do care. These grandparents are my favorite people, and their approval means the world to me. Since the beginning of the pandemic, my extended family has gathered every two weeks or so for a Zoom call. This new tradition has been a godsend, for the most part. Getting to check in and see my grandparents on a regular basis has been a privilege and a delight.
And yet, I always freeze up when I go to turn on my camera. Zoom is where I can view myself through the eyes of Grandma Evie and Grandpa Bud, with the striking perspective to witness what has become of their granddaughter.
When I went to college at a Jesuit school and drank the kool-aid, we just didn’t talk about it. Over my four years at Marquette, I fell in love with Ignatian Spirituality and became Catholic. We didn’t talk about that either. I wanted to stay in love, and let it decide everything, so I chose to do a year of post-graduate service in JVC after graduation.
And off I went to Kansas City, over-emphasizing to my grandparents the roles of service and social justice. I’m always excited in our Zoom calls to tell my family what I’m doing in JVC, but I cringe at the prospect of showing my extended family where I live.
Lazarus House is a shrine to Christianity, a cornucopia of miscellaneous trinkets. Gazing over our dinner table is a large, mass-produced oil painting of the visage we affectionately refer to as “Smolder Jesus.” There are endless pictures of saints, rosaries, and crosses all over our house. One would think a JVC house might put inclusivity into practice by diversifying the range of religious clutter, but alas. Ours is an unmistakably Catholic place.
All my grandparents want for me is to be happy, but there I was, feeling awkward about being seen. I never went to Hebrew school, or had a Bat Mitzvah. I’m so barely Jewish, but I still had this weird Catholic guilt about it. I felt such overwhelming sense of shame for supposedly abandoning the legacy of my ancestors. I was terrified my commitment to JVC would effectively give my whole self to Christianity, forfeiting my already limited Jewish identity.
My heart was a mess. I came to JVC for Ignatian Spirituality, but I was disturbed to get here and realize that wasn’t going to be enough. I was no longer a rookie in all things Jesuit, and I wasn’t quite sure where my previous awe and wonder went. For the first time since I got involved in Campus Ministry at the age of eighteen, I felt suffocated. Part of me reveled in the constant presence of Catholic symbols, while another part of me felt unsettled by the lack of religious diversity of my world in Kansas City. The steadfast faith I’d come to know was starting to crack.
Maybe it was the stifling presence of aggressively Christian tchotchkes everywhere I looked. Maybe it was the fact that my entire world was suddenly engulfed in a blanket of binary spirituality, as I worked full-time at a Catholic college and lived full time in the Catholic petri dish of pandemic JVC. Maybe it was the sadness I felt when a twenty-six-year-old coworker from rural Kansas told me she had never met a Jewish person before.
The call was inarticulate at first, but grew increasingly resolute. There was this radical sense of clarity in the contrast. It let me see who I am, and choose what matters to me. It forced me to choose the kind of person I wanted to become.
I knew what I had to do. This very Catholic place would experience Judaism in one way or another. This- the Jewish heritage of my birthright, however fragmented it may be- was and is worth sharing. And so my quest began.
My scarce education in Jewish tradition is mostly informed by cultural foods of the high holidays. Obviously, the kitchen was the best avenue for my undertaking.
In late September, before my troubles really even kicked in, I baked apple and honey cake for Rosh Hashanah. When I reminded my community-mate Veronica about it in the spring, she remembered the cake, but not the holiday. That was good enough for me.
In December, I hosted a makeshift Hanukah spirituality night. We ate potato latkes from Trader Joe’s and watched the classic Rugrats special. Unfortunately, the endless religious clutter of our JV house does not include a menorah; and my agency at a Catholic college offered no other leads. Our community arranged miscellaneous tea lights and scented candles in a row in the name of simple living.
In March, my Jewish heritage really came calling. My older sister Haley and I were enlisted to be the “tech guys” for my Grandma Evie’s “Zoom Passover Team.”
I have to show you the invitation my Grandma made. I’m still obsessed with it.
Helping my grandparents prepare for Passover was quite an ordeal. My work consisted of transforming my grandmother’s preferred JPEG images into a modifiable Haggadah document. I was a glorified scribe, which might be extremely Jewish after all. In the painstaking retyping process, I found myself examining the story of Exodus and the meaning of Passover. Away from the holiday distractions of food, relatives, and celebratory traditions, I was in the present mental space to study what my childhood favorite holiday was all about.
Most of this process was done by my lonesome, but my community-mates witnessed the work. They knew I was putting my heart into it, because it was important to my grandparents.
It was a humbling, centering experience. I was tasked with the project of creating a technologically literate Passover Seder for my legitimately practicing Jewish relatives. It forced me to work honestly, spiritual shortfalls and all. It was liberation from the culture of hiding I had created for myself.
My relatives don’t know me as a “cashew.” They already know I’m not a practicing Jew, but they know I share their Jewish heritage. I can’t claim to know more than I do, but I am expected to do what I can. It was time for me to actually learn about this tradition I’ve been celebrating for my whole life. And now, for perhaps the first time, I feel like I understand why we celebrate Passover. It’s more than the story of Exodus and eating matzo ball soup. I know why we continue to observe this tradition year after year.
My housemates were amazed at the sight of the Seder table I set up. After rising to the challenge to take Passover- and my barely Jewish self- seriously, it only felt right to take the traditional table seriously, too.
My housemate Emma remarked that she, just by living in our Catholic-based community, had participated in more Jewish traditions this year than her old sister’s actually-Jewish fiancé.
I’m not sure if my community realizes the gravity of their influence in my journey. They didn’t call me a hypocrite when I eagerly went to mass on Sundays, and literally hid from Jesus as I took Zoom calls with my relatives hours later. They didn’t act as if I was joining the convent (as my family did) when I waxed poetic about my friend Sister Sharon and her work in our campus food pantry. They didn’t laugh at me as my heart and soul broke open. They accepted me for who I was, and who I am- in suspense and incomplete. Veronica, Emma, Erin, (and even Sara RIP), you shared a love with me that I could not show to myself. You created a space for me to come into my own.
The Passover season is about liberation, and I aptly experienced a breaking open, too. This very Catholic year brought me closer to my Jewish heritage than ever before. And somehow, vice-versa. It was only when I embraced my Jewish roots that I legitimately felt comfortable being Catholic.
It was just after Passover that I decided I was finally ready to get confirmed, as I had planned before the pandemic. When it came time to pick a confirmation saint, I chose to honor the holiest Cashew I knew of, a Catholic convert and Carmelite nun who refused to renounce her Jewish identity. Edith Stein, aka St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was the perfect choice.
It took a year in a household of broken things for me to discover the feeling of my own wholeness.
There’s a saying at the end of the Passover that has stuck with me well into the summer. It translates to “next year in Jerusalem.”
Until *relatively recently* (the late 1940s), there was no “Jewish State” and no “Jewish Jerusalem” to return to. It was just a wish, for all Jews to return to the homeland, as they did in their exodus from Egypt. Now that Jews can and do reside in modern Jerusalem, the statement’s context has evolved. “Next year in Jerusalem” can be endlessly interpreted.
(Jerusalem’s name means the “city of peace,” which is ironic for a place besieged twenty-three times and a now colonized land considered the Israeli capitol.)
The Jerusalem we refer to is our inner Jerusalem, the ultimate ideal. As Aron Ross put it so simply, we are “in Jerusalem” when we are at peace with ourselves and with the world.
I’m not in Jerusalem yet, but my community makes me believe I might just make it there. They taught me to believe in my own special Jerusalem, a holy land where I am exactly who and where I’m meant to be.
“Next year in Jerusalem” is a testament to the audacity of hope, the resilience of the Jewish people, and radical faithfulness. I love infinite someday in the perpetual “next year;” a subversive glimmer of hope on the horizon. Every year, the Passover seder acknowledges the progression of time. It tells us that we have grown ever closer to the Promised Land, though we aren’t quite there yet.
“Next year in Jerusalem” certainly broke my heart this year. Maybe it feels like prolonged isolation has created emotional diasporas, scattering us far away from our communities of identity. And here and now, more than a full year into this pandemic, my heart aches for the people, places and spaces I call so dear. “Next year in Jerusalem” is the dream of homecoming. My heart aches for this state of mind, this amalgam of gratitude and togetherness. I am who I am through and because of community. These places and these people made me, with such a certainty of love that could only have come straight from God.
Time continues progressing, but we haven’t made it to the Promised Land yet.
So we’ll keep hoping. Maybe just maybe, we’ll find ourselves in our Jerusalem(s) next year, together again.
