My Jewish Journey - Column 7

Written by Lana Melman for the SOUTH FLORIDA JEWISH JOURNAL / SUN SENTINEL. Originally published on August 14, 2023.

Although I have always had a strong Jewish identity, I did not grow up in a religious household or attend Sunday school as a child.

My father was a proud Jew but an atheist. My mother was very spiritual and would have liked my brother and me to get a formal Jewish education but didn’t press it. I was agnostic, uncertain if God existed. Becoming a bat mitzvah was not on the table, and I didn’t feel like I was missing much.

I traveled to Israel for the first time when I was 19. I visited a friend who went to work on a kibbutz the summer after high school and then met a handsome Israeli and decided to stay. We had a wonderful time traveling around the country by bus. We still laugh about how cold we were at the top of snowy Mt. Hermon in shorts and T-shirts.

Being Jewish was a cultural experience. Yiddish words peppered conversations with family, friends, and later my colleagues in Hollywood. My husband and I had a secular wedding, eloping to Italy and getting married in a small town just outside of Rome by the mayor.

When children came, I felt something was lacking, and I asked my husband, “Shouldn’t we belong to a synagogue?” Shortly thereafter, we joined a reform temple in Los Angeles.

I began going to Torah study on Saturdays when my four-year-old asked me questions about God, and I didn’t know how to answer him. After fifteen years of learning at my temple, I came away with much more than I ever expected.

First, I loved it. In the beginning of Genesis, God, a spirit hovering over an empty, watery void, creates the world by speaking into the darkness and calling into being light, sky, land, vegetation, and living creatures over the course of six days. Talk about a dramatic opening.

We learned in the Socratic method with questions from our rabbis that challenged us to look deep into the words and ourselves to find the answers and our moral compass. It was a time out from all the complexities of my life and a chance to think about things that really matter.

I learned about the source of my Jewish values. The ethics, the code of conduct, and the ideals that my parents taught me and that my husband and I were passing on to our children are all in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible). The sanctity of human life, emphasis on good deeds, and the eternal quest for justice are all seeds planted in our Holy Books nurtured by rabbis and the Jewish people for millennia.

I met our forefathers and mothers, wonderfully human characters, wrestling with love, jealousy, deception, and faith in God. My focus shifted from my individual experience to the collective Jewish consciousness and my place in the long chain of our people.

I felt the 3000-year-old Jewish attachment to the land of Israel. The word Jerusalem appears in the Tanakh 669 times, and Zion appears 154 times. Going to the land, leaving the land, returning to the land, being promised the land, belonging on the land, being buried in the land, and fighting for the land are all central plot points in our shared story.

Today, my trips to Israel are not about sightseeing, they are about a bond. I feel that connection when I walk the same cobbled streets King David walked in Jerusalem, when the wind whips through my hair on the Mount of Olives, and when I press my cheek against the Western Wall in prayer. Israel is not a faraway place; it is part of who I am.

It might not be surprising that I never went to shul for High Holiday services as a kid either. When I went for the first time as a wife and mother my young sons fidgeted in their seats, but I was moved. I loved the introspection and communal repentance, the opportunity for renewal, the blowing of the shofar, and the haunting strain of Kol Nidre.  The very best moment for me is still the end of services when the entire congregation, arms around each other, chants the words and sways to the melody of Aleinu.

Yet, I wasn’t done. I couldn’t recite any of the prayers which made me feel like a member of the audience not the community.

And so began the next leg of my journey. Instead of dropping my sons off at Sunday school as they prepared for their bar mitzvahs, I stayed. I used the same Hebrew primers my sons did to learn the Hebrew alphabet and the prayers at classes offered by my temple.

What I didn’t care so much about when I was a teen finally became important to me. I became a bat mitzvah in my forties.

I still can’t say for sure whether I believe in the existence of God, but I definitely feel a little more Jewish.

Read the original article here.

Lana Melman is a contributing columnist for the South Florida Jewish Journal.