The intersections of my identities form the Star of David

There is a double negative for so many of us this week as we reckon with the ways in which our Jewishness invalidates the rest of our identities, as our Jewishness makes us people no longer deserving of protection. I have never been to Israel, and I did not grow up in a Jewish household. I converted in my early thirties and, along with my wife, am raising a Jewish child who is 11 months old this October. I have spent the past week looking for reassurance from everyone who fought for my rights as a woman, as a queer person, to fight for my right to exist as a Jew and have been disappointed time and time again.

I have lost count of the marches I have attended, the votes I have cast, the events I have volunteered for all to protect the rights of women, people of color and the LGBTQIA+ community. I’m a queer woman, but more importantly as it turns out, I’m a Jew. I’ve watched this past week as horrors unfolded in Israel when the terrorist group Hamas crossed the border. I’ve watched as all the people I supported, some for decades, said nothing or came out in favor of the people promising to murder Jews all over the world. I have cried for Israel, and I have cried for what is happening in America as one by one so many of the people I thought were my allies turned out to be something else entirely.

It is a horror to look around and realize that this is how the Holocaust happened. They may have called us Socialists instead of Zionists, but the words all meant the same thing – Jew. So many of the people who stood idly by then thought what so many think now, that they are the good ones. There is nothing righteous about dead Jews no matter how you may spin it to your political liking.

One of the questions they asked at my beit din was, “Why do you want to join a persecuted people?” I told them that the love of my life was Jewish; that her grandparents had survived the Holocaust; that if they came for her, they were coming for me too. I already had skin in the game. I also told them that the best part of my week was Friday night; that Shabbat felt essential; that when I sang the prayers in Hebrew, it felt like coming home; that wrestling with the nature of God was my favorite way to touch the divine.

When my now-wife told a stranger, another Jew, that I was converting, he cried. He cried because he knew what I was getting myself into. Pain and grief, despair and fear, abandonment and cruelty. I knew all that too. I was not naive enough to think that history would never repeat itself because that seems to be the main thing it does. And yet, I knew what I was getting myself into too: joy and ritual, unity and strength, welcoming and love. I would not trade anything I have gained from converting to Judaism for the safety of being a non-Jew. I’m a woman and a queer person – I was never going to be safe in this world. I’m even less safe as a Jew, but I have a sense of purpose and responsibility that pushes me forward, that organizes my days, that creates the future for myself, my family and my community.

We reach back through time every Shabbat and forward too. There’s a teaching that every Jew who was ever born or would ever be born was there with Moses as he brought the tablets down. Time collapsed on itself, and we were all there together, Israelis and Americans, Jews the world over, survivors and those who did not survive, converts and those born to it, descendants and ancestors, the world that was and the world to come. We stood together then, as we stand together now, a motley assortment, a vast family, a mystical revelation, a people who, against every single odd, stood together across millenia and survived.

SARAH GREENLEAF (sgreenleaf@jewishallianceri.org) is the digital marketing specialist for the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island and writes for Jewish Rhode Island.