This sounds too daunting to write - So I'll approach it in pieces.
The first I'll call my earliest spiritual memory - or my first experience of God; I don't remember how old I was - but in the first house I remember, we had frosted louvered glass in my parents bathroom - through the glass I could see god. It was an amorphous radiating light that came through the window (the moon? an outdoor light bulb?) and I knew it watched me because when I moved; it also could move.
At some more verbal age, I began "Sunday school", not because our parents had any deep religious conviction, but because when my siblings and I began to come home with stories about Baby Jesus, they realized that we could become christianized by default or something - so we better have some Jewish Education.
This was not memorably a very spiritual experience Shabbat was not even celebrated in our home. Sunday school was a place to learn the bible stories - and for me the best part was singing. I knew the cantor liked me and gave me solos to sing and special encouragement. I had no idea what the importance of all this was to my parents - since outside of Pesach at my grandparents, High Holy Days at the Baldwin Theater with hundreds of other once a year Jews, I don't think that there was really a strong commitment to a jewish life.
In retrospect, perhaps my parents didn't really know either why they were doing it - and that had potential to cause some confusion to teenagers seeking answers especially during the bullshit detector years (13 - 20). My mother was known to go to Shul on Yom Kippur with a novel inside here prayer book - or at least to be reading the Torah when everyone else was singing God's prayers. She especially hated Kelohenu or D'VAR TORAH that she felt was sanctimonious. This was not specific to Judaism of course. She was a proclaimed agnostic intellectual and disliked all organized religion.
Yet, we also went to Jewish camps in the summer, another thing that cemented my love of Jewish tunes, folk dancing, and most important my feeling of spiritual connection to other jews and to nature. I know that it was at this camp in an outdoor chapel that I decided I would leave L.A. and move to the country.
I knew this stronger than anything else in my life - stronger than wanting a partner, or children or college or a job. I wanted to live in the country at that point in my life. That desire became more important than Judaism - it was part of a spiritualism that I didn't see was at all connected to the religion I grew up with. In my teenage years I learned backpacking and yoga, in college I studies natural dying, weaving, anything that brought me closer to the earth and myself - this was my spiritual pursuit. It wasn't until I had my own children that I felt it was time to revisit and re-explore Judaism. Even in doing this, I felt more connected spirituality through the earth and other forms of prayer I had learned. But this was so personal and individual, and I couldn't figure out how I could teach it to my children. It then dawned on me that this might be the reason that organized religion existed. I couldn't create a spiritual community for my children on my own, and if I expected them to relate to it, I had to figure out my own relationship to being Jewish, and also figure out how to blend some of what I thought was spiritual, to religion.
Now this is an ongoing process, I'm glad my children have a Jewish community to be a part of; they identify as Jews and feel positive about this. They are learning about their religion and their culture. I still don't know how it is possible to teach them spiritualism, especially since I can't define it, and half the time it still alludes me.
But now I participate in Jewish observances because I choose to, whether my children are interested or not. I find that some rituals, individual and community, give me the structure and the time to continue this relationship with spiritual self/god/other.
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Last updated 05/29/98 (rge)
Copyright MCJC 1998