My parents were the first intermarriage in either of their families. My mother was from a pretty devout Southern Baptist family, although she moved
away from that by college. And
my father grew up in a classical Reform Jewish household
-- no yarmulkes allowed in the synagogue, and so on. They
both grew up in Ashland, North Carolina, and their first
date, I think, was the junior prom. My mother went to church with her mother on Christmas, but we didn't go. When I was 11 or 12, which was after my parents divorced and after my mother and I moved to Virginia, I began to be more involved in Judaism just of my own impetus.
Ever since I was a small child, I really believed in God. I really had some unshakable God thing. And I haven't always been able to be very articulate about it, but I really wanted to harness that and engage it and be in a relationship with God. Everything was to that end. Community really appealed to me, but in part it appealed to me as a way to get to God.
I did formally convert to Judaism. Under Orthodox Jewish law, you're not Jewish if you're mother's not Jewish. So I did convert.
I came to New York City and Columbia University specifically because there is a large Orthodox Jewish community, both in the city and at Columbia -- 350 people at a Friday night Jewish Orthodox service on campus. I leapt into that community and was mostly embraced by it. There were a few people in the Orthodox Jewish community who were wary or not respectful of a convert. For most of college, I dated an Orthodox Jewish man whose family was not thrilled that he was dating a convert.
Jewish law dictates what shoe you put on first in the morning, and what types of fabrics your clothing can be. I would get up, and I wouldn't always make it to the 7 a.m. prayer service. But if I didn't make it to that service, I would pray at home. For a couple of years I had a morning study partner. We would get up and do our Jewish text study in the morning. I went to class, and I ate kosher food at all my meals, which meant that I didn't eat at most of the campus establishments. (Columbia does have a kosher dining hall.) Most of my friends in college were in the Orthodox Jewish community. I had one very close friend who was not. And almost all of my extra curricular campus activities were through the Jewish student union. I was on the executive board.
I had always been intellectually interested in Christianity. In high school, even as I was moving personally toward Orthodox observance, I read some Christian theology and history, just because I was interested in religion ... and I was studying American history in college. The history of Protestantism is pretty important to American history, and I just loved studying it. I thought it was intellectually fascinating. That was also part of my Southern identity, I think. I loved reading contemporary Southern literature, and there's a lot of Christianity shot throughout it.
My boyfriend thought I was incredibly incoherent. He just thought I was crazy. The first inkling of actively moving toward Christianity was that I became interested in the doctrine of the Incarnation. I just thought it was really smart that someone had invented this idea of God actually becoming a person so that we can relate to Him better.
At the time, it seemed like this great, brilliant thing; it just was clearly untrue. I could be interested in it; I could study it. But Jesus wasn't the Messiah. He didn't do the things the rabbis said the Messiah would do, and that was the end of it.
My sophomore year of college, I had a dream that I took to Be, upon waking up, a dream that came from God and was about Jesus and his reality. In the dream, my friend Michelle, who is one of the women that I studied the Talmud with every week, and I and a bunch of other women (whom I didn't know in the dream or in real life) were kidnapped by a group of mermaids. We were taken to live underwater with them. After about a year, this group of men came to rescue us. Most of the men were 50-something and silver-haired. There was one beautiful, Daniel Day Lewis-like 30-year-old man. And I knew that he had come to rescue me, and that while he was there he would participate in the collective rescue effort. But he came to rescue me.
And that was it. I woke up, as certain as I had been of anything before or since that this dream was about Jesus. Jesus was this man.
I told the dream to three people: my Orthodox Jewish roommate, my Orthodox Jewish boyfriend, and one Christian friend. The Orthodox Jewish roommate said, "Oh, you must have been dreaming about Elijah the prophet," which I thought was a close interpretation but not quite there. My boyfriend thought I was dreaming about another man and got very upset. And my Christian interlocutor said, "Whom do you think you might have been dreaming about?" I thought, "Well this is ridiculous if she doesn't get it. I understand why my roommate and my boyfriend don't get it, but surely she gets it." So I said, "Well, I think that I was dreaming about Jesus." And she said, "That's clear to me, too. I just didn't know if you would be able to see that, given that you are an Orthodox Jew." And in a certain way she was right, because nothing happened. I ignored the dream. In fact, I actively fled from this knowledge for a few years. It did not fit into my life. I was engaged in this Orthodox community; my identity was very much about that. I was gradually getting my family accustomed to this fact. I was very much in love with this Orthodox man. So there was not a lot of room for Jesus in that life. That is the dramatic moment. There isn't much drama after that.
The colossal theological hindsight is that I was being saved from original sin. I certainly wouldn't have articulated that then, but I have come to believe something about the exclusive saving power of Jesus.
The summer before senior year, I stumbled upon a novel, Jan Karon's AT HOME IN MITFORD. I started reading the book in the bookstore. I had vowed not to buy any books that day, but I got hooked and bought it and the sequel, and left the bookstore with my friend. That next week, when I was meant to be working on graduate school applications, I read those two books probably six times and was just hooked by the faith that the characters had. I was really compelled. These are not literary novels; they are not great novels. But the characters had a faith that I was drawn to.
I was envious. I felt that for several years I had been locked in a commitment that I took very seriously. And I was constantly struggling to keep taking seriously the commitment to Orthodox Judaism. These characters had difficulties; they had problems, but not many of them had very many doubts, which is a failing of the book. But they seemed to have a fundamental serenity.
I read the novels and began to think I really needed to pursue this in some way. I went to talk to a Columbia chaplain I had known since the beginning of college. I did not know him well, but I knew him a little bit. I called him and said, "I need to meet with you and talk about some things."
