Hey Josep! Been a while since we’ve had a guest letter, eh? This one is from a long-time reader, and someone I’ve known… since the womb, actually.

This was entirely her initiative! Don’t look at me!!! 😉

But while I’m here, I shall take the opportunity to brag about her shamelessly. You said once that I’m one of the most empowered women you know, and if you want to know why, it’s because this woman is my mother.

My mom, Jill Baker Shames, was raised in a secular Jewish family in New York and became religious in college, as she will describe below. But she’s always insisted on doing everything her own way! When she was pregnant with me, she woke up one day with a sudden urge to study a martial art. My dad thought it was one of her crazy pregnant lady things and that it would pass. Well, it’s been 31 years and it still hasn’t passed! 😉 She is currently a fifth-degree black belt in Shorin-Ryu Matsubayashi karate; one of the most experienced and celebrated empowerment self-defense instructors in the country; and a martial arts therapist (and licensed social worker) who works with kids with terminal illnesses and their families, teaching them to use tools from the martial arts to help them cope with pain and stress. She serves as coordinator for Kids Kicking Cancer Israel, an organization that trains and employs martial arts therapists to work in Israeli hospitals. And because clearly she has so much free time on her hands (…) she also volunteers for her local Psychotrauma & Crisis Response Unit, whose personnel arrive at the scene of a traumatic situation (sudden death, car accident, etc.) and work with the witnesses and bystanders at the scene to help them process what they saw and prevent them from developing PTSD.  Did I mention also that she co-founded the Israeli national women’s martial arts organization, which she and I left last year for reasons I won’t elaborate on here, and helped establish a chapter of the Guardian Angels–an organization of volunteer citizen patrols for tough neighborhoods–in Israel? Oh and yes, this is the same mother who donated her kidney to a distant cousin two years ago. (And yeah, she’s a writer too–that link is from her Times of Israel blog!)

In summary, I may have followed in her footsteps in some ways–learning karate and self-defense from her and becoming an instructor under her tutelage–but I will never be as awesome as she is and we all know it 😛

I vaguely recall that you and her may have corresponded at some point many years ago, probably on something to do with Casa Shalom. In any case, she decided to write you a guest letter from her characteristically out-of-the-box perspective. 😉 Without further ado:

Dear Josep,

Your online Jewish Education has given me a great deal of hope and satisfaction. After all, what dedicated Jewish woman would miss the opportunity to be a Yiddishe fly-on-the-wall kvelling¹ about all the things the world–particularly the Christian world–owes to its Jewish roots?

However, I am going to do something that is at once incredibly Jewish and… incredibly not. And that is to express my gratitude to Christianity for what it taught me about being Jewish.

Expressing gratitude is quintessentially Jewish.² HaKarat HaTov, literally “acknowledging the good,” is an axiom of Jewish life. On the other hand, given the amount of suffering that Jews have endured in the name of Christianity over the millennia, having anything nice to say about That Religion is an anomaly at best.

But I never claimed to be normal.³

I was raised in a family with a powerful ethnic Jewish identity but received an extremely limited Jewish education. As a child, what I knew about being Jewish was pretty much limited to a handful of holidays (Chanukah and Pesach being the biggies), not going to school on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, Bar Mitzvah parties, a few Yiddish phrases (not for polite company), chicken soup, bagels, and lox [smoked salmon–DL]. My family gave me a strong sense of loyalty and belonging to the Tribe intellectually, ethically, and ethnically, but spiritually? If Judaism had a spiritual side, I knew little or nothing about it.

Yet, even as a young child, I had a strong connection to Gd. My parents tell me that at the age of 3, I used to stand in the middle of the living room speaking aloud to Gd. I decided to fast on Yom Kippur at a young age. I fasted even when no one else in my family fasted. I wanted to go to synagogue even when no one else wanted to go. As I grew older, I felt my family members saw me as a strange bird in the flock. I was alternately praised and teased for my interest in things Jewish. I did not feel comfortable talking about my spiritual longings. I developed my own rituals and prayer practices. And I started going to church.

Mostly it was something I did on sleepovers. I was at my Catholic or Lutheran or Methodist or Episcopalian friends’ houses over the weekend, so why not join the family in church? I loved the mammoth stone buildings echoing songs and prayers. I loved the light pouring through the stained glass windows, the pageantry of the services, and the fellowship of the participants. I watched and rewatched classic movies like Ben-Hur, The Robe and all those films in which kindly priests stepped in to help young toughs move toward healthy adulthood.

Looking back, I wonder that my parents were able to see going to church as some kind of cultural experiment without worrying that I would be lured away by “the love of Jesus”, the material splendor of Christmas or the ease of assimilating into the majority culture. And they were right. Even when I joined the Methodist youth group, the token Jew arguing with Christian Youth Leaders about the prophecies of the End of Days, even when I watched Christian TV or listened to Christian music radio or sang Latin Mass in school choir, I was never tempted to stray. Rather, I was comforted by finding others in the world longing for Gd. I was filled with awe by the beauty, the faith and the compassion I found in Christianity in all its many forms. I found a fellowship of the spirit and a love and clinging to Gd that I could not find at home. I experienced awe that I had never experienced in the rituals of my own faith. After all, it was easier to get lost in the forest of Judaism’s rules and rituals than to delve into its deep and complex spiritual roots.

It was only when I went to college and could finally access Jewish living and learning by myself that I was able to take all the devotion that Christian institutions had kept warm and flowing for me for 18 years, and plug them into my spiritual path.

So, while it is true that the history of the Jews as a People in Christian lands is a sordid one, my personal history with Christianity remains one of fellowship and gratitude.

So, thank you, Christianity, for giving me the spiritual oxygen I desperately needed until I could learn to “breathe” on my own. In the Jewish Bible, Gd calls us Jews “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”; it entrusts us with helping all the nations of the world find and follow their spiritual paths. Under your spiritual wings, you helped me remember that as long as I had faith in Gd, I was not alone.

In these days of skepticism and anti-theism, I consider it my sacred trust and honor to return the favor.

Jill Baker Shames, MSW
Spiritual Jedi⁴
[DANIELLA’S AMAZING MOTHER.–DL]
www.paths2power.com

^{1. A Yiddish verb that means to take great pride in something or someone, usually quite vocally. Related closely to schepping naches, as defined in 10 Essential Words in Judeo-English.↩}

^{2. The name Judah, from which the word “Judaism” is derived, literally means “giving thanks/expression of gratitude”.↩}

^{3. Everything makes so much sense now, eh Josep?! 😉↩}

^{4. In case you haven’t seen any of the Star Wars movies–and since you haven’t read Harry Potter, I wouldn’t be surprised at such grievous cultural delinquency on your part–the Jedi Knights are sort of mystical warriors who fight against forces of evil in the Star Wars universe. In her work with the Guardian Angels, there was a protocol not to use real names in radio transmissions, so all Guardian Angels had to choose a nickname. She chose “Jedi” because, aside from the obvious, it’s a word that has the same meaning in all relevant languages–English, Hebrew, Amharic, and Arabic. Not a lot of words like that!↩}

Would you like to share about your own experiences with religion–another or your own? Write us a guest letter!