The Ravenna Kibbutz

Not until recently did I get a pretty good sense of why I’ve had such an ambivalent relationship to Judaism and, in fact, Jewishness in the years since my Bar Mitzvah. After eight years of Hebrew school, which I disliked, and a ceremony that was enjoyable inasmuch as it made me the center of attention and the target of many gifts, I began to drift away from Jewish life, although I occasionally co-directed services at our lay-led Reconstructionist congregation, T’chiyah. In college, my Jewish involvement was limited to grating onions and potatoes at Chanukah and spending one miserable semester as the treasurer of Hillel.

My first six and a half years in Seattle saw me attending the occasional service, usually at either De Hirsch or, more recently, at Kol HaNeshamah, and going to Jconnect events like Jews ‘n’ Brews. My decision in August to move into the Ravenna Kibbutz was the first decisive step back towards Jewishness in my adult life, and yet… I still get uneasy when an assembled group wants to sing too many Jewish songs in a row, or when someone seems, you know, a little TOO into Judaism or their own Jewish identity. Part of the issue, I guess, is my uneasy relationship with identity politics, which I realize is important to an extent but can also lead to divisiveness, balkanization, and paranoia.

Fairly recently, somebody I know used the phrase “Hebrew school baggage” to describe why some young (or not-so-young) Jews have issues with not only certain aspects of Judaism/Jewishness but with Judaism/Jewishness in general. Unease, of course, can be confronted and tamed, but it’s a process. I’ve discovered in just the past six months or so that it’s a worthwhile one, albeit a sometimes uncomfortable one. There’s the underlying feeling that I’m a “bad” Jew if someone else is more into their Jewish identity than I am, but also a measure of envy—why can’t I have what they have? Why can’t I feel more grounded in what I was, after all, born into?

Giving up countless Sunday mornings to sing songs (enforced singing is, for me, no more pleasurable than the enforced reading of the secular school system is for others) and learn Hebrew isn’t exactly cruel and unusual punishment, but clearly there was something missing in the lessons. I didn’t know about the concept of Tikkun Olam until just a few years ago, and the idea that Judaism can be a spiritual path rather than simply a system of arcane, superstitious, and largely irrelevant rules was entirely foreign to me until very recently.

The early years, the Hebrew school years, are formative ones, to be sure, but for every adult, whatever “baggage” he or she may be carrying, one of the chief challenges of adulthood is to unlearn the unhelpful lessons and learn some truly relevant ones. If you have Hebrew school baggage, I’d love to hear about it, and how you hope to leave some of it behind going forward.