The Baalei Teshuva Project: Marching to the Beat of My Own Drum
By Steven Gotlib
I was always different from the rest of my family. My dad liked sports, I liked chess; my mom liked Broadway, I liked comic books; my sister liked boy bands, and I watched anime. It was therefore no surprise when I ended up loving my experience in Hebrew School at the Conservative synagogue where I would have my Bar Mitzvah and later my wedding.
I made sure to devote time outside of the three days a week of Hebrew School to continue learning Hebrew and reading the Torah portion. I even got curious one night and stayed up for hours, reading as deep into the Books of the Prophets as I could get. Because of the passion I showed, and to get me out more, my parents sent me (and my sister) to Camp Ramah in Nyack, where I would later work.
My curious passion even got me through what may in retrospect have been my first crisis of faith. I vividly recall being an 11 or 12-year-old and asking one of my Conservative Religious School teachers if we really thought that G-d handed Moses this book (pointing to my Etz Chaim Chumash) on a mountaintop.
“No, but we believe He inspired it,” my teacher replied with a smile.
That was enough for me.
No more theological questions. The Torah was inspired by G-d and therefore the laws that stem from it are holy. Living a Jewish life could make sense even if I didn’t yet have a deep theological framework. I didn’t have to get lost in the gritty details or questions of the Torah’s temporality and I was content with that.
Though it may sound like I was growing up as a perfect Conservative poster-boy, my religious exposure was actually quite diverse. On my father’s side of the family, my grandparents were the type of post-WWII secular Jews who spoke Yiddish and had a deep sense of cultural connection, but did not exactly raise my father and uncle traditionally. My uncle on that side brought up his family Reform and I was able to experience that kind of Judaism at all three of my cousins’ B’nai Mitzvot. Even when I was 10, the musical instruments and presence of so much English in the service threw me off, but I knew it was a beautiful expression of Judaism in its own way.
My mother’s side of the family was a bit different. That side had been in America much longer than that of my father, with both grandparents having been born here. They brought up my mother and uncle traditionally Conservative, keeping Shabbat and Kashrut while attending services weekly. Although my uncle eventually became Orthodox, donning a black hat and beard for much of his adult life, my mother was content within the Conservative movement in which she grew up and wanted to raise myself and my siblings in a similar light. Though we did not grow up keeping Shabbat or Kosher in the strict sense, I grew up knowing that each Saturday was a day for synagogue attendance and having a distinct distaste for bacon, shellfish and cheeseburgers.
Aside from the plurality within my family experience, even growing up in my hometown showed me many different styles of Judaism. Fair Lawn, NJ was home to three Conservative synagogues when I was growing up. The one my immediate family and grandparents frequented was egalitarian (they allowed women to count in a minyan, read Torah and later, to serve as rabbis) while the other big one was decidedly non-egalitarian (counting only men for minyan, and letting Banot Mitzvah mitzvah girls speak, but not read from the Torah or lead services). There was also a Reform synagogue, two Chabads, two Modern Orthodox synagogues, and one Sephardic synagogue. As I grew up, I saw that demography change drastically, going in a much more Orthodox direction.
I knew that I could not take the way I chose to practice Judaism for granted when there were so many other possibilities right next door. I saw diversity and plurality all around me and wanted to learn from each perspective, even if I found my home in one particular movement. My uncle’s Orthodox Divrei Torah at Shabbat dinner every week was just as important to me as hearing one of my father’s friends constantly talking about Mordecai Kaplan, or the sermons of the Conservative rabbi that rejected the world being created in a literal seven days. It’s in this context that my BT story begins.
While spending a summer on USY on Wheels, I started taking Shabbat, Kashrut, and prayer more seriously with the support of my friends. My experiences in Ramah and Religious School told me that halakhah (Jewish Law) was important, and I finally had the independence to try it out unhindered. When I came home, however, I was disappointed to realize that there was no one my age who wanted to be observant in either Conservative synagogue in town. The local USY chapter as well was made up of people who were on a very different page than I was. While I acknowledged their right to do Judaism how they felt was best, I was deeply uncomfortable.
It was ultimately suggested to me that NCSY might be a more comfortable environment, so I began going to local onegs (growing up in Bergen County, there were no shortages of those). Suddenly, I had friends who were strictly observant and lived five minutes away. As one of the rare people in the area who didn’t grow up going to the same day schools as them but still had an interest in observing Judaism, I soon became well-known.
And then I was called a heretic.
Certain advisors of mine took it upon themselves to sit down with me and explain why what I was taught growing up and the type of Judaism I was raised in (where men and women sat together, women participated in the service equal to men, interfaith families were accepted as members, and one did not have to believe that Moses literally wrote the Torah on Mount Sinai) was antithetical to “real” Judaism and participation in it would lead to a slippery slope of abandoning the age-old mission of our people.
Nearly every rabbi and advisor I spoke with made it clear to me that if I really wanted to be religious, I would have to stop attending my family’s synagogue, trust less of my parents’ Kashrut and take time to learn in yeshiva before going to college (preferably YU or Touro). At the time, I had my heart set on going straight to either Rutgers (where my mother went) or JTS’s List College. A lot of pressure was put on my relationship with my family, who now saw my taking on observance as a rebellion and as though I was abandoning everything I was raised with. I felt like I was in the middle of a game of tug of war and had no idea which way to go. Asking my parents if I could spend a year at Yeshivat Orayta with friends of mine from NCSY was their last straw. It seemed like arguments were happening left and right and I had no idea what to do.
Eventually I took a step back and saw the harm I was doing to my family. How must it look for their only son and eldest child to, in the course of a few years, start wearing a kippah, have tzitzit hanging out of his shirt, stop going to synagogue with them, abandon their Shabbat meals for those of friends, and then ask to leave the country for a year to be around only other people doing the same?
They felt like I was being pulled away from them but every time I told that to one of the rabbis I was close with he would tell me, “Just keep fighting! Soon they’ll give in and in 20 years you’ll all be laughing about this!”
But I couldn’t keep fighting after seeing the pain it caused my family. If being an Orthodox Jew could only come by burning bridges with those I loved, the decision seemed easy. I decided to stop everything then and there. No more keeping Shabbat, no more trying to keep kosher, no more wearing a kippah, no more wanting to go to yeshiva. I didn’t even want to go to JTS anymore. I felt like I had been manipulated just to up kiruv numbers at the cost of my family, and that was unacceptable to me.
I went straight to Rutgers and decided to live in the Chabad House so I could at least be on the kosher meal plan and around people who were religiously diverse (it was home to Jews from across the religious spectrum who wanted out of the regular dorms). That year, I served on the board of the Conservative community, joined the AEPi fraternity and was generally living a pretty relaxed life. Shabbat and Yom Tov slowly became a part of my experience again (marching band commitments notwithstanding), providing time to read for pleasure, play games with friends and avoid the stress of college. Every once in a while, I even dropped into the Orthodox and Reform minyanim to see what was going on.
Then I learned about the Maimonides Fellowship. I got a text from a rabbi I didn’t know who told me one of my old NCSY advisors gave him my number. He heard that I had gone through public school but showed an interest in religiosity and wanted to know if I’d be willing to learn about Judaism in a class he offered for a small stipend. I said yes, but it soon became clear that it was not meant for me. I was actually asked to stop answering the questions he posed before anyone else could.
It turned out all my supplemental learning had paid off and I was in a position where I knew far more than the demographic the class was meant for, so I was fast-tracked to programs like the Lakewood Fellowship at Beth Medrash Govoha and the Jewish Experience Week at Baltimore’s Ner Israel Rabbinical College. Not only did I see what Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) communities looked like for the first time in my life, but I also fell in love with learning Talmud and Jewish law in-depth. Since my Hebrew was already pretty good, I spent most of my days just studying. It was amazing and I wanted more.
I knew going to Israel was out of the question because of the arguments it led to in high school, but I now knew there were yeshivot in America too. After just a few days of talking, my parents agreed to let me spend my summer reconnecting to my Judaism by spending half of it as a counselor back at Camp Ramah in Nyack and the other half studying Talmud at Ohr Somayach in Monsey.
Ohr Somayach changed my life. That summer, as well as the time spent there during other breaks throughout college, gave me the skills to open a Talmud and learn through it. It also imbued in me a passion for religiosity, spirituality, and observance that I saw lacking even in the Modern Orthodox communities I had come to feel otherwise comfortable calling home. Finally, it convinced me to devote my life to serving the Jewish people, using my unique upbringing as a way of connecting Jews across denominational stripes. Perhaps ironically, Ohr Somayach was the first Orthodox institution where I was directly told that it was okay to take my time building up a religious life and see where my dominoes fell without overly pressuring me in any direction. My time there encouraged me to let Judaism be a natural part of who I was and see where it took me.
Each of my summer, winter, and spring breaks from then on were spent learning with institutions like the Center for Modern Torah Leadership, the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, the Orthodox Union and back in Ohr Somayach. While I did not agree with everything I saw in any of those institutions, I made it my mission to internalize the best of what I saw, so that I could have as many tools as possible to expose others to a Judaism that would work for them while being firmly within the bounds of Jewish law and theology.
Since those years, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about where I am religiously. I wear a white knit kippah on Shabbat and don’t believe science and philosophy contradict with Judaism so I must be Modern Orthodox, right? On the other hand, I wear a black hat and spend the majority of my day hunched over a Talmud, Shulchan Aruch and Rav Chaim so maybe I’m Haredi? I also speak a lot about unity and have been known to learn Tanya with friends on a regular basis, so what if I’m Chabad? Didn’t my posek tell me to take on the Spanish and Portuguese customs of my wife’s family when we got married? Does that make me an honorary Sephardi? The answer, I’ve come to understand, need not be a simple one. I’m me, I drum to my own beat, and that’s how it should be.
As I find myself lucky enough to be in my final year of Rabbinical school, I am getting closer to my goal of being able to help as many Jews as possible discover that Judaism can and should be, to quote Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, zt”l, “halakhically legitimate, philosophically persuasive, religiously inspiring and personally convincing.”
Naomi Grant is collecting the stories of Baalei Teshuva around the world with the goal of compiling them into a published book. If you’re willing to share your story, please fill out this form.
