I chose Reconstructionism via process of elimination. I know that sounds like a left-handed compliment at best, but stick with me.
I had a Jewish childhood that was confusing and unpleasant in ways that will be familiar to many Jews born in the 1970s or before:
When I was small lots of folks had lots of opinions about Jews. These opinions were rarely accurate, and mostly either callously (if inadvertently) cruel or awkwardly and unjustifiably admiring (to your face, at least).
My earliest memory of public school was being relentlessly bullied on the bus by a kid nearly twice my age who didn’t like Jews, but did like detailed descriptions of Jews being tortured and murdered throughout history. At home in the neighborhood, a friend’s parent interrupted our game of touch football to pointedly insist that my parents were “real top-drawer people.” It was the only time I recalled him saying anything to anyone, apart from yelling at his own children to cut something the hell out. Years later I finally put together the puzzle when I began to notice how often someone would learn I was Jewish (“Oh!? You don’t look Jewish!”) and then abruptly opine that Sandy Koufax had been one helluva ballplayer, or that Mel Brooks was a real funny guy, or that Carl Levin was an honest politician and that was really saying something.
But clumsy or mean gentiles were only half the unpleasantness in my unpleasant Jewish childhood. The other half was Jews who took offense to me calling myself a “Jew” when only one of my parents had been born Jewish (…and the father, no less!).
Unsurprisingly, I had my bar mitzvah and didn’t set foot in a temple or synagogue again for nearly a decade.
When Cara and I got married, the rabbi who officiated was lovely, but was not from the large Metro-Detroit Reform temple where my parents were members and I had been bar mitzvahed; that congregation was uninterested in officiating an interfaith ceremony in West Michigan. The rabbi who did officiate (semi-retired from a tiny West Michigan congregation) had only one condition: that we promise to raise any children as Jews. Cara and I agreed without thinking much of it. My wife was raised Catholic, and was more than happy to raise Jewish children instead of Catholic ones. I didn’t object because I didn’t have any problem with being a Jew; I had a problem with being treated poorly by people who had unresolved issues with Jews and Jewishness.
Then we had kids, and those kids got old enough to need religious instruction in order for us to make good on our promise to the very nice man in the very thick glasses who’d officiated our mishugina wedding in a Saugatuck gazebo.
One of my freelance gigs at this time was copyediting the Washtenaw Jewish News, which meant I read every word about every Jewish organization in town at least twice each month. This made me oddly well-informed about local congregations and their programming, given that I had been avoiding Jewish organizations for going on two decades and had never intended to ever join one again.
Being well informed wasn’t encouraging. This was 20 years ago, and some of what I saw local congregations promoting was too close to what had stung me when I was a kid: workshops on how to “cope” with your child’s or grandchild’s interfaith relationship, talk about how they “tolerated” people from all traditions, and so on.
I didn’t want my wife and children to be “tolerated.” I wanted them to feel welcomed. (Never mind that this was also an extremely convenient reason to keep avoiding the Jews I’d been avoiding since I was a teen.)
Cara—who was stuck leading this charge, because she makes good on her promises and her husband was refusing to productively process his childhood trauma—asked what about these guys, these Reconstructionists? Did I have a beef with Reconstructionists?
I did not. I’d never heard of them. I’d been bullied by Reform Jews and Conservative Jews and Humanist Jews and just sort of ignored by Chasidic Jews, but never to my knowledge even met a Reconstructionist. The word wasn’t even in spellcheck!
So we came to AARC Kabbalat Shabbat. I didn’t really know what “Kabbalat Shabbat” was at the time, and when it was over I still didn’t really know what it was: The liturgy and order of service and songs seemed almost entirely foreign. For me, this was a feature, not a problem: nothing about AARC reminded me of the Judaism that had excluded me when I was small. Besides, everyone was very friendly and helped me find which page we were on, and there was plenty of kale and quinoa to go around afterward.
All of that was nice. But what has kept me choosing Reconstructionism with the AARC is the religious school.
I’d gone to religious school for years, and it had taught me to at once be ashamed of not being a “real” Jew while also being conceited about my natural superiority as a Jew moving through a goyische world (“when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon,” and so on).
At AARC my children learned to be comfortable and confident as Jews without any sense that this made them better (or even really meaningfully different) from anyone else. Over the years we’ve had different Boards, different Rabbis, different teachers and curricula, different members, but the heart of it has remained the same—which is good, because my children have learned this, but I still have a lot of work to do.
