Friday evening:

At 770 Eastern Parkway, men and boys transform the floor into a dancing mass of black hats and free-falling curls.  The Chassidic women sit in two balconies that face each other over the chaos below.  The balconies are fenced in by mirrored windows and constricted by long, narrow benches.  The women are not dancing tonight, and that bothers me.   

On the Upper West Side, the keyboardist at B’nai Jeshurun insists on accompanying every prayer, including the “Barchu.”  I lean over to my companion and whisper that I feel like I’m in a musical. 

Romemu, a kehilah that meets in the basement of a church on 114^th Street, prefers for parishioners to sit in a circle, some on pillows on the ground.  We chant and beat drums, and soon I am filled with the image of desert earth falling away beneath me.  This kind of worship is the essence of Judaism—a cult in the wilderness devoted to praising God.  Only that woman’s wailing is really irksome.  Isn’t she just a bit over the top? 

The sermon at another synagogue is filled with blind Zionist sentiment.  A fifth shul is not adequately committed to egalitarianism.  At a temple in Boston, we are forced to sing a song from “Fiddler on the Roof.” 

Shabbat should be a day of rest, but my quest to find the perfect synagogue has transformed every service into a critical exercise. 

Growing up, my mother was my rabbi, and as a result, every platitudinous sermon, every garbled melody, every attempt to rephrase a blessing into a more progressive version of itself compels me to protest.

The only right Judaism is the Judaism of my childhood.  It consists of some mixture of my father’s Moroccan cooking, my mother’s cloying Debbie Friedman tapes, and being told to get up and get ready for services already because this is my mother’s job and she really cannot be late.  It also consists of telling my friends that I can’t come to the football game—sacrilege in a Texas town—because I’ve got to spend Friday evenings around the dinner table with my family.  The Judaism of my childhood requires that I eat cake for breakfast on Shabbat morning, and spend Shabbat afternoons reading on the living room couch as the sun sets lower and lower until someone calls out “Havdalah time!” and my siblings and I shuffle gladly into the kitchen. 

I’ve tried hard to recreate the Judaism of my childhood and found snippets of it in various places: at Chabad of Cambridge, England, where I studied abroad; while reading Jewish and non-Jewish theology; in holiday celebrations held with transplanted San Antonio Jews in New York City.  I have searched for the Judaism of my childhood as Jews throughout the centuries have sought to return to the authentic kernel of Judaism—that essential something that makes a thing Jewish or not Jewish.

I may be a discriminating connoisseur of Jewish practice, but when it comes to authenticity, the Judaism of my childhood is not a judgmental one.  As a kid, I was encouraged to meditate and study Buddhism, to work with Christians and Muslims for peace.  But others have repeatedly questioned me about my Judaism’s validity.  People want to know how my dad—an Orthodox Sephardi Jew—can tolerate my mom being a progressive rabbi.  They want to know more about the Renewal movement, which sounds a little wishy-washy and suspicious.  They want to know how I can earnestly believe that Israel has damaged the Jewish community despite my large family there. 

I have tried to defend my Judaism by comparing it to other, established forms—“Martin Buber argued a century ago for coexistence with the Arabs in Palestine!” “Renewal Judaism is just like progressive Chassidism.  It’s very scholarly” “My parents were Orthodox when they first got married.  My family’s pretty conservative, I promise!”—but the questions have not stopped coming, and so I have countered their claims of legitimacy with my own divisive claims.  I have been left feeling alienated, left whispering in the back of shul after shul, “This is not right.  No, not right at all.”

More and more, I believe that a search for the essence of Judaism is similar to my attempts to recover the Judaism of my childhood.  It is simply not possible.  That reality—if it ever existed—is gone. 

That my vision of my Jewish childhood is tenuous became explicit recently, while driving my mother home from the airport after a Renewal conference.  I told her that I was giving her this chance to defend herself, to provide me with the particular turns of phrase that would enable me to better stand up for her.

“Well, don’t tell them I had my chakras aligned at the rabbinical retreat,” she responded.

“Mo-om,” I replied.  She was being deliberately difficult.  Here I was, doing my best to defend her to the Jewish establishment, and she was off partying with tree-hugging pagans who made pot hamantashen on Purim!

“Isn’t it true your tree-hugging pagan friends make pot hamantashen on Purim?” I asked. 

“She was just one lesbian Wicca rabbi, okay? Not everyone makes pot hamantashen.  Besides, your savta used to bake hashish into her cookies on Purim.”

My savta—my father’s mother—that beacon of spiritual authenticity, baked hashish cookies for Purim?

It took me a moment to digest that very silly information.  And in that moment, I realized that my mother did not want or need me to stand up for her.  Her Judaism was genuine in her eyes; my insecurities were my own.

Who does deserve authority? My parents? My ancestors? Myself? The Big Guy Upstairs?  Anyone at all?  I guess the nice thing about my particular brand of Jewish chameleonism is that I get to keep struggling with that.