An old joke: Why did Moses wander for forty years in the desert? Answer: Because he refused to stop and ask for directions. Like Moses, I've never been a very good navigator. I never know whether to turn left or right. When a lost driver asks me how to get somewhere, the best I can do is make flapping motions with my hands. "You know, you have to get (flap, flap,flap) over there"--and even then, I'm usually flapping in the wrong direction. Had I been leading the exodus, we'd still be out there traipsing around the desert.

I mention all this because it's an apt metaphor for how I was headed spiritually before I met my husband.

I was raised as a Jew, but my affiliation was more cultural than religious. Both my parents came from ostensibly Orthodox Jewish homes, but the seams were already beginning to show. My father's mother, an intellectual given to questioning assumptions, once ate a ham sandwich on Yom Kippur in rebellion against the ancient strictures. My mother's father would become quite indignant if any of us ate ham or bacon in his presence, but he never met a lobster he didn't like. Let's just say that their children, my mother and father, were proud of their Jewish heritage, but they had some serious reservations about the particulars.

In the 1960s, they joined what I thought was a rather bland and lifeless Reform temple, and we kids whined our way through the obligatory Sunday school. I can’t say I got much out of it. At college, I studiously avoided Hillel; in that New England WASP environment, I was vaguely embarrassed by anything that seemed "too Jewish."

As an adult, I preferred to leave religion to my parents. I'd come home for the Passover seder, light Chanukah candles in their house, and attend services with them on the High Holy Days. Returning to my parents' house for religious ceremonies had more to do with homesickness, identity, and Mom's cooking, however, than it did with religious fervor.

Still, I expected to marry a Jewish man, keep a Jewish home, and raise Jewish children. But if someone had asked me to explain what it meant to be a Jew, I'd be reduced to making those odd flapping motions I use to direct lost motorists.

Had I gone ahead and followed my original map and married a Jewish man, I probably would be as lost today as I was then. My children would have had the natural identification that comes from having two Jewish parents, but there wouldn't have been any urgency to establish a Jewish home. We would be Jewish by definition, period. So if we skipped synagogue, if we failed to light Sabbath candles, if we didn't know the difference between Tishah B'av and Tu Bishvat, what difference would it make? We wouldn't be any less Jewish.

But I didn't marry a Jew; I married Bill, a Christian. When we announced our engagement, neither set of parents raised the religion issue. It helped that, at age thirty-one, I had a long and distinguished dating career dedicated to jerks, dimwits, and probable felons. So when nice, intelligent, creative, thoughtful, funny Bill, with his old-world manners and charms, came along, my parents almost wept with joy and relief. Whatever disappointment they experienced on the intermarriage front, my father rationalized it by announcing, "Bill has a Jewish soul." As for Bill's parents, any "issues" they may have had about my Jewishness they kept to themselves.

Although my religious participation had been spotty, at best, I was very conscious of being part of an ancient history. I did not want the chain to stop with me. I knew I needed y children to be Jewish. Bill was not particularly religious and had no interest in converting, but he was willing for the family to be Jewish and had no problem with the idea of raising our future children in my faith.

My faith. But what did that mean? My parents and my in-laws had adopted a strict hands-off policy, and my husband was willing to be guided. This left me as captain of our family's spiritual ship. Me, the one with no sense of direction.

Within a year of our marriage, Levi was born. It was put-up or shut-up time. Though in a spiritual fog, I did not lose sight of my desire to raise my son as a Jew. Although I had never been observant, I was very conscious and proud of being heir to an ancient tradition and did not want the chain to stop with me. But I still had no idea what being Jewish meant.

If ours would be a Jewish household, I would have to work at making it so. I had to think about how to raise Levi as a Jew, how to make sure that his religious identity would differ from that of his Christian cousins. I felt overwhelmed contemplating the minutiae of a 4,000-year-old religion.

At the time, I developed an obsession with maps. I began to stare at various local maps to figure out faster and faster ways to get from here to there. In retrospect, I think my interest in maps had a lot to do with my religious search. I needed to figure out where I was in the world, where I needed to go, and the best way to get there.

I decided to take it one step at a time. We began by celebrating three holidays--Chanukah, Passover, and the High Holy Days. When Levi was old enough, we enrolled him in a Jewish nursery school. I felt it was important that he feel secure in his Jewish identity early, so he wouldn't be confused later when, in all likelihood, he would be one of two Jewish kids in his

public school classes. I had an ulterior motive as well. I knew Levi would be taught all the holidays and hoped that he'd bring his knowledge of Judaism home. This is exactly what happened. Soon we were decorating the sukkah on Sukkot, dancing with the Torahs on Simchat Torah, and booing Haman on Purim. And we had family Shabbat dinners.

More important, I rediscovered, or found for the first time, my "Jewish soul." I now realized what my father had meant about Bill's Jewish soul. It hadn't been a rationalization. Judaism is based on mitzvah, on putting God's word into action. And what God says is to take care of your family, your community, the stranger in your midst. That is the part of Bill that had most attracted me--how he always helps people, the way he gives and cares. I realized that what I loved about Bill is what I loved about Judaism.

Ironically, we joined the same temple that had bored me as a child. Back then, going to temple was a kind of penance. If I made it through the excruciating services, I was clean for the next week or year. But as an adult, I could participate in the part of congregational life that really spoke to me: social action. In joining the temple committee that fed the homeless in our community, I finally found my home.

This past winter a large snowstorm hit our city. As Levi, now eight, and I shoveled our walkway, he asked if we could do the same for Mrs. Lent, our elderly neighbor. "Of course!" I said, and we ran next door to do it. We wanted to surprise her, but Mrs. Lent saw us and came out. Levi chatted easily with the eighty-seven-year-old woman, pointing out his technique for snow removal and making silly jokes. Watching them, I wondered if his impulse to help her had come from his social activism at temple. And I thought, happily, "He is becoming what I had hoped he would be: a nice Jewish boy."

An even greater irony: the American Jewish community has been concerned for some time now about the amount of intermarriage, fearing the Jewish community will eventually self-destruct through assimilation. But in my case, marrying a Christian has made me a more knowledgeable and observant Jew, forcing me to search my soul for answers to questions I had never thought to ask before. More so than anything else, marrying Bill has opened the door to my Jewish spiritual home. Just like when I used to study maps looking for new routes, I found my way back by going off the main road.

Reform Judaism, Fall 2001