In the photo above you can see our current Marina City balconies. They’re no different than most other balconies here, so there’s no need to point them out. As you can see, there’s an eternal consistency to life here at the corncobs. Some of that consistency I’ll miss, and some I’ll be glad to leave behind. Ryan and I have signed a lease on an apartment in Edgewater Beach for March 1st. We signed the lease a couple of weeks ago. It just took me a while to realize that this is the end of an era in my life.

We’re moving because we realized that our lives are centered elsewhere–primarily on the far north side and the northern suburbs of Chicago. North is where our synagogue and most of our synagogue friends are. North is where the heart of the Chicago area’s Jewish community lies. North is where most of the restaurants and stores are located that we like to frequent. After a year living in Marina City and more than a year of living Jewishly, it just turned out that Milan Kundera was right. In our case, life really is elsewhere.

I’m looking forward to the move. For years I’ve blogged about the consistent agony and ecstasy of life in the Marina City corncobs, and all of it still applies. You always know your neighbors. Via foot, ‘L’, bus, or expressway, you can easily get anywhere from here. The architectural and cultural wonders of the Chicago Loop are your front yard. And the 61st-floor roofdecks are sublime.

However, an eternally combative condo board, nonstop punishing noise from every-fifteen-minute emergency sirens and late-evening Chicago Riverwalk cafe music, fraternity-level antics from numerous college-age residents, a noticeable lack of neighborhood amenities, and the persistent feeling that once you step outside your lobby, the block belongs to hipsters lined up to get into the House of Blues and drunks stumbling home from Dick’s Last Resort, bring any sense of soul soaring right back down to earth.

So I suppose, at long last, these are my final words on Marina City. I was thrilled to move into Marina City in 2005, but in the end, I agree with my last last statement about living here. It’s cheap and well located, but it’s not worth the quality-of-life trade-off you have to make to be able to live here and keep your sanity. Unlike last time, though, this time I’m leaving on my own terms. I won’t be back.

We’re off to an apartment twice the size of our current one for only slightly more rent, in a Sheridan Road high-rise with a spectacular city and lake view. It’s near two of our favorite supermarkets, the Red Line is two blocks away, and an express bus is outside our front door. But what really matters to me is that we’ll be living on the same block as our synagogue. For at least one Reform Jew, gaining the ability to walk to synagogue on Shabbat–and in five minutes, too!–really will be a dream come true.

But far north side living is a far cry from a lot of my life that came before. Growing up in New York, it was my life’s goal to live as close to Manhattan as possible. Eight years living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, satisfied that urge. A graduate degree in urban planning sealed my then-permanent anti-suburban sneer.

During the past nine years in Chicago, it’s been much the same thing. First I tried to live as close to downtown as I could get. Then I moved into it, and for seven years downtown is where I’ve remained. A boyfriend moved to New York, but I stayed. I moved out of Marina City once already, but I still stayed downtown.

But life goes on, and while doing so it changes us, little by little, until it changes us a lot. For many years, I haven’t been an urban planner. Over time, I’ve realized how much more I like Chicago’s outer neighborhoods–and suburbs, too–than I ever liked their New York counterparts. And in converting to Judaism and joining a synagogue, I did something I never dared do back in my hometown. I put down roots. Those roots just happen to be planted in soil that isn’t in the 42nd Ward.

And so. I guess this is the point where Mike Doyle, the post-college, agnostic, pessimistic, inner-city, out-of-place Gothamite is finally let go of by Michael Doyle, the forty-something, religious, optimistic, city-as-neighborhood, where-he-belongs Chicagoan. Who I’ve been for a lot longer than I’ve let myself realize.

I guess I’ll never be an urban planner again. Or a New Yorker. Or maybe even someone with a 15-minute walk to work. I’ll never brag about living in a Goldberg building again, or meditate on my life from the panoramic roofdeck of one. There are a lot of “I’ll never agains” when you reach past forty, I’ve come to see now.

On the other hand, I’ll never again wonder where and how I’m supposed to fit in on this planet. I’ll never again feel lonely in a room alone. I’ll never again face a challenge, yell “Why?” in my head, and fear there’s no Eternal being out there to hear me cry out. I’ll never again hate the suburbs like I used to. I’ll never again fear outer neighborhoods like I used to.

And you know what else? I’ll never again fear moving on like I used to, either.

I’m gratified to note that versions of this post (edited by the respective editors) have been re-published on the following national Jewish websites:

• Jewcy.com on December 21, 2012, under the title, There’s No Such Thing as a Hannukah Bush;
• InterfaithFamily.com on December 8, 2012, under the title, Fifteen Christmases and a Festival Tree.

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I thought about adding, “Or, how to decorate a Chanukah bush” to the title of this post. Except it isn’t. It’s an Eitz Moed. I’m very specific about this point. As I blogged last year during my first “holiday season” spent Jewishly, though all my life I’ve been a lover of big, fat, giant–and in my case, secular–Christmas trees, as a fairly newly minted Jewish man, I just don’t have another one in me. And yet, the urge to have an end-of-year tree runs deep. The same eight-year-old in me who did backflips when he realized he was a Jew and put his yarmulke on for the first time just won’t let this one go.

It isn’t that my former Christmases were religious; they weren’t. It isn’t that I ever believed in the virgin birth of the son of God; I didn’t. And as I wrote last year, a year of Hebrew calendar holidays fills me up from Kislev to Kislev with a similar feeling of joy and wonder that I used to get only once a year on Christmas. But in my personal history book, Christmastime was usually the one time of year my dysfunctional family managed for a few moments to pull itself together and rally around a flag of compassion and tenderness.

The seven-and-a-half-foot, 2,000-branch-tip, 1,300-light trees I’d eventually and carefully put together as an adult, year after year in week-long paroxysms of decorating frenzy were, I suppose, some sort of monument to those rare, annual happy moments of my childhood. Seeing my mom alive for the last time on a mid-1990s Christmas Day added even more emotional weight to the season. Last December, temporarily not living in my own apartment, I didn’t have to directly face that hackneyed specter of the Jewish “December dilemma.” Even had I wanted to put up a tree, mine was in storage. So I threw myself into Chanukah and that was that.

I’ll keep Chanukah well again this year, the holiday’s message of cultural survival resonates for me. But a year later, I know something in me must survive as well from what has come before. I spent all year trying to explain it to myself. By Thanksgiving, I gave up trying to explain it and tried to figure out what I was going to do about it. As almost any Jewish blog post on the subject will tell you, Jews don’t celebrate Christmas so Jews don’t put up trees. End of story.

Except maybe not so fast.

I honor the discomfort many of my fellow Jews–most especially Jews-by-birth–feel when faced with the idea of having in their living rooms massive, green, leafy items used by millions to celebrate Christian theology. In fact, I share it. The idea of a Santa Claus-laden (much less nativity scene-laden) tree in my home is unacceptable to me. But as far as my inner eight-year-old and outer forty-one-year-old are both concerned, the idea of a tree in and of itself is a different story. I’ve read many convert accounts of hand-wringing and holiday tears surrounding the difficulty with letting go of the tradition of decorating a tree. The easy way out is to label the tree a “Chanukah bush” and go on with your life.

Except, you know, there’s no such thing.

So with fifteen adult-on-my-own Christmas seasons and one year living Jewishly under my belt, how on earth to mark the time of year that it is hard-wired within me to mark so deeply that I feel at a complete loss to explain it to non-convert Jews? Could I possibly stop worrying and do my own thing? Forge my own tradition to mark who I am and where I’ve been in the context of who I’ve become and where I’m going?

Yadda. Yadda. Yadda. I know. Even considering something like that is grounds for some Jews to throw around the dreaded “S’ word: syncretism. That is, merging differing religious traditions into something new–and potentially in conflict with the original traditions. There is, of course, the point that that’s how almost all Jewish (and Christian) ritual came to be. Almost universally, our holidays were once someone else’s, with different meanings and different theologies attached. But why quibble? I’m not looking to start a new religion, after all, just a new personal minhag (tradition.)

Others might find it in poor taste for a Jew to borrow holiday traditions from non-Jewish sources at a time where we’re marking a holiday–Chanukah–that is centered on fighting against cultural assimilation. Except the Maccabees whose military victory we celebrate were essentially ancient religious extremists whose aim was to force the moderate balance of Jewish society to accept their strict religious lifestyle and to force non-Jews to convert. Or, you know, die.

Why are we celebrating this, again?

According to the Talmud, because two-thousand years ago or so the Romans told us we couldn’t have political aspirations anymore, destroyed the Second Temple, and in those two things made our formerly most-important religious holiday, Sukkot, impossible to celebrate. So the turn-of-the-Common-Era rabbis (*cough*) made up (*cough*) a new backstory for Chanukah, something about oil in the menorah of the re-dedicated temple miraculously lasting for eight nights–a crafty ploy to reframe Chanukah from a political holiday into a religious one, thus giving Jews under Roman rule a safe replacement for Sukkot.

That tells me two things. First, although it’s often derided as a minor holiday, it’s perfectly okay to celebrate mightily around Chanukah–that seems to be what the rabbis intended. And second, if the metaphoric meaning of Chanukah is more important than the actual, messy details, then I think any Jew is on firm ground who wishes to celebrate their Jewish journey in equally metaphoric ways.

Just not with Christmas trees, because we’re Jewish. Or with Chanukah bushes, because that’s just cheating. And then I had an idea…

I thought about the details of what I felt I would be missing without a tree. It occurred to me I used my non-religious tree-trimming tradition to honor the one time of year in my personal story that God (not a Christian God, just plain, you know, God) and goodness used to make sense to me. It wasn’t necessarily ever about a religious Christmas for me. It was about what Christmas emotionally represented in my life. That is, a few secular moments of peace and happiness.

I wondered if I could find a way to adapt the same tradition to honor the many times of year that God and goodness now make sense to me as a Jew? A way to mark everything that came before, as well as everything that I’ve found in Judaism? And most importantly (because you wouldn’t know it from this post, but I can be a purist about ritual matters), a way not rooted in my observance of Chanukah, but simply rooted in the secular calendar? December comes, the tree comes.

Since I’m a conscientious Reform Jew, I thought about it and thought about it until I made everyone around me crazy. And then it hit me: if I’m dead set on having a holiday tree, then why not really have a holiday tree? Not a Christmas tree. Not a Chanukah you-know-what. But a literal holiday tree? Every Shabbat we sing that the Torah is an Eitz Chayim, a tree of life. The order of the Talmud that deals with the Jewish holidays is Moed, festivals. And on my Jewish journey, the times of year that now help me find my way back to goodness are the parade of Jewish festivals that march across the Hebrew calendar.

So, why not instead of a secular tree full of folk ornaments riffing off of someone else’s tradition, a secular tree full of folk ornaments riffing off of my own? Not because I’m marking a holiday on a Hebrew calendar, but because my soul is yearning for a way to embed the celebration of my spiritual journey in my secular experience?

And the next thing I knew, I was looking for frogs…and wild beasts, and hail, and lulavs, and etrogs, and apples, and honey, and shofars, and masquerade masks, and chanukiahs, and driedels, and kiddush cups, and first fruits, and every other Jewish holiday symbol I could think of. Hopefully, all in a convenient holiday ornament size perfect for hanging on a…

That trail-off perfectly describes how hard it is to find overtly or accidentally Jewish-themed tree ornaments. I mean, seriously, it isn’t like Jews who actually put up trees in December go around publicizing that fact, so the market for such ornaments is understandably understated. (God knows I’ve Googled the topic in earnest.) But with a little ingenuity, numerous trips to Judaica stores, Macy’s, Target, Wal-Mart, and World Market, and not a little bit of repurposing (read: hot glue-gunning by Ryan), the job got done.

Last year, I considered donating away my tree. This year, tree luckily still in hand, I do have four sizable bags of gently-used Christmas ornaments to gift. They sat off to the side as I finished my (uncharacteristically only three-day-long) old-school, fully manual tree constructing, lighting, and decorating frenzy early this morning. Stepping back to take in the finished product, I was taken aback. I expected to see a tree that was a pale imitation of a Christmas tree–my old Christmas tree. I also expected, somehow, to feel wrong about it.

However, from the sparkling Star of David tree topper, handmade by a Wyoming stained-glass artisan to celebrate her interfaith family, to the lulavs and etrogs that we somehow managed to create out of thin air and lack of sleep, I felt an unexpected sense of pride. Not in my handiwork. In the Yiddishkeit of it all. Before me, where myriad reindeer and Santas and snowmen once hung, in their place I saw Purim, and Pesach, and Shavuot, and Rosh Hashanah, and Sukkot, and Chanukah, and Shabbat smiling back.

Christmas Tree? Chanukah Bush? Say what you will, I make no apologies. But one thing I know for sure. To those ornaments holding fast to her, she is, indeed, an Eitz Moed.

___________________________

Visit my Facebook page to see my Eitz Moed photo album.

Read my follow-up to this post, The December Dilemma Is a Choice.

For a wide variety of perspectives regarding the “December Dilemma”, I encourage you to visit the InterfaithFamily.com Hanukkah and Christmas page.

I remember getting caught in a rainstorm on the Brooklyn Bridge the weekend before 9/11. I was on my way back to Park Slope from a shopping trip to Newark, New Jersey, for Portuguese pastries. I got off the PATH train at the World Trade Center and decided to walk the rest of the way home. I huddled on the wooden walkway next to one of the bridge towers and watched the clouds race by the trade center while I waited for the rain to pass. The sky was a moody pink, not unlike the view from the towers’ skydeck in the photo atop this post. That’s the last time I remember seeing the World Trade Center, and it’s a memory I cherish.

In the past ten years since 9/11, I’ve watched almost no graphic news coverage from that day. Remembering the cloud of acrid smoke that stretched from Lower Manhattan to the horizon is enough of a memory for me. While much of the world revels this weekend in sensationalistic headlines like, “Can you look at the falling man photo now?” and “What if they had Twitter and Facebook on 9/11?”, I prefer to think no one who was in New York or D.C. when the events occurred could ever be less than appalled at reading the articles below such titles. I suppose those who weren’t there will always wonder what it was really like–never knowing how lucky they are for never really being able to know.

Ten years later, my life back then seems almost unrecognizable to me. That day on the bridge, I was a native and lifelong New Yorker, an urban planner, a Lusophile, a recovering Christian, a very angry person, and rather aimless about it all. To the older but wiser, blogging Jewish Chicagoan that I’ve become, about the only thing that still resonates for me is the sense of loss. It’s still there. It always will be, and life goes on. Life has to, because that’s what life does.

In 2006, I blogged about my personal 9/11 story. Last year, I told my 9/11 story to StoryCorps. This year, there’s not much more to say. Other than that this weekend, I miss and honor the city that I knew. And pray for peace.

May the one who makes peace in the heavens make peace for us, for all Israel and all who inhabit the earth…

Oseh shalom bim’romav,
hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu.
v’al kol Yisrael, v’al kol yoshvei teivel,
v’imru…

Amen.

Today is my unofficial Jewish birthday. One year ago today, my Jewish journey began. Considering that I used to be a public transit planner, it shouldn’t have surprised me that my journey began on the Chicago ‘L’.

Regular readers may recall last year, after the economy finished imploding my consulting work, my first five years at Marina City (where I happily returned this February) came to an end. I moved in with roommates to lick my economic wounds and search for a desk job and a way back to my own apartment.

Emotionally, life was no better. My roommate situation was far from a happy one. I felt a lot of sorrow and shame at my economic situation. And my longtime Buddhism just wasn’t working anymore. Try as a might, I just couldn’t find a calm center anywhere in my life. Except, maybe, for my belief in God–a personal belief that I’ve carried around my whole life, but made explicit in my late thirties. If anything, that belief became stronger during my time in socioeconomic exile last year.

That belief managed to catapult me into the worst afternoon I ever spent as an adult–and most likely the best, as well. One day it all became too much. Sitting in my borrowed room on my borrowed bed looking out my borrowed window, I realized my life had become a very pointed conflict–between my belief in God on one side, and on the other all the pressure in my life to buckle under, remain hopeless, or simply keep my thoughts about God to myself.

Most of all, I felt those pressures in Buddhism–which simply sidesteps the question of deity entirely, and in my long-term recovery work for codependence–which told me the people I talked about Higher Power (for me, God) with every week had to remain secretive and anonymous.

Finally, on the afternoon of August 31, 2010, I literally felt the emotional bottom drop out of my life. I thought about all of this and realized that my relationship with God had no natural home in the context of my life. I felt a punishing sense of spiritual homelessness. It was palpable, like being covered against your will with a heavy, scratchy, wet, cold blanket. And it was harrowing.

Feeling all of this as I looked out my borrowed window, I lay down on a borrowed pillow and sobbed. I knew there was no going back to the Christian religion of my birth–Christianity had never connected with me to begin with. And I knew there was no safe harbor for my spiritual life in my life as it stood in that moment. So I cried and cried, and felt very small and alone. And when I came up for air, I very humbly asked God where, after all and if anywhere, I belonged.

I decided to try and shake off my sorrow by scraping together a few dollars and heading up to Lincoln Square to blog from a neighborhood Starbucks. (At the time, I had hoped to eventually move to the neighborhood and was spending a lot of time there.) I couldn’t lose my dejected feelings on the walk to the Brown Line, so before I got on the train I reiterated my small prayer. God, I can’t figure this out. But I know there’s somewhere, somewhere that I belong, and I’ve known it all along. May I please, finally, know where that is?

Then I sat down on the train for my half-hour ride to the station at Western Avenue. Looking out the window at the city passing by below didn’t help me feel any better, so I decided to pull out my smart phone and begin Googling world religions and the spiritual traditions of the people who have been closest to me. I figured I had nothing to lose, and I also knew full well that it was not very likely that in a moment of despair and frustration, comparison shopping for paths towards God on the Brown Line was going to be more than a futile effort.

And then I began reading about Judaism. Until then I knew it as the religion of many of my closest friends back home in New York City. There, Judaism is so ever-present, such a fact of life, you almost don’t notice it. It is simply one of the main dichotomies of Gotham life: white/black; city/outer borough; English/Spanish; gentile/Jew. Jewish inspiration is so much a part of NYC life, when I moved here I had to learn that many of my mannerisms and turns of phrase and much of my humor was directly related to my upbringing in a significantly Jewish environment.

But I had never thought about Judaism in anything more than cultural terms. The Israeli boy I dated in my teens before he went into the army. The rugelach and macaroons I would scarf down at my Jewish friends’ houses during various holidays. The tattoo on the forearm of a friend’s grandfather who had survived a Nazi concentration camp. Very pungent. Very much a part of my life. But not my tradition.

There’s a familiar story from Vayetze, one of the weekly Torah portions (parashot) read in synagogue during the Jewish year–the story of Jacob’s ladder. Jacob, one of the Jewish patriarchs, lays down to sleep during a sojourn through the desert and dreams of a structure with heavenly beings descending to the earth and ascending back up from it. In the dream, God tells Jacob that God’s presence will always be with him and will always be with his descendents–that, in fact, it has always been so. When Jacob awakens, he realizes he has spent his life being willfully unable to recognize God in the mundane moments of life. He exclaims, “Surely, God is in this place, and I did not know it!”

I read about Judaism for most of my thirty-minute trip up the Brown Line. It seemed to be telling the story of my life. Everything I’ve ever believed about God, and humanity, and the relationship between the two, and the relationships among humans, ourselves. All of the ethics I’ve ever been moved by, all of the things I’ve ever wished to find valued by another person, much less an ancient community of people, all of the metaphoric power of ancient myth I could never find in the “second half” of the Bible, I realized I was very unexpectedly reading about on a four-inch screen on an ‘L’ train. I was reading the story of Judaism, and at the same time I had an inkling I was reading the story of me.

And then the inkling grew into a knowing, like a giant spiritual light bulb going off above my head. It did not take long for me to make that mental and emotional leap. It no longer felt as if I was reading about someone else’s tradition. It felt like I was reading about my own. As if I had been meant to have this moment for a very long time, and little by little I had been led to it, to experience it. To understand why, raised a Roman Catholic, my entire life seemed to have been spent with one foot in Judaism.

To know.

When I got off the train at Western, I paused a long time before heading down the steps to the sidewalk. An afternoon of browsing Judaism over coffee, a month of seeking a synagogue, and a year of conversion studies were about to follow. And, somehow, I knew it. Most conversion journeys begin in struggle, and proceed apace. Over the next several months the lack of inner struggle on my part would surprise my rabbi. But it just wasn’t there. For me, the struggle had been in the years leading up to that moment. But not in that moment, and not anymore.

So I stood there, surprised and awed, humbled yet overjoyed–what Abraham Joshua Heschel might have called a moment of radical amazement at the Divine. And from a depth inside of me I never knew existed, knowing. The feeling stayed with me as I finally made it down the stairs to the street, into the cafe, onto the Internet, finding a synagogue, studying through several thousand pages, attending several dozen services, and immersing in mikvah.

Today, on the anniversary of my tap on the shoulder from HaShem, I now realize two radically amazing things about that day. I came to know who I am. And sometimes, moments can last a lifetime.

You might think my big news today is that my blog, Chicago Carless, is six years old. It is, but the buried lede is that tomorrow (or today, by the time you read this) is my forty-first birthday. I did an uncharacteristic thing during my fortieth year: I completed a task I set out to complete before my next birthday. That task was joining the Jewish people–and, boy, were people who know me well blown away that I went through with it.

Oddly enough, I’m not surprised at all. Now that I’ve been officially Jewish for three months, the previous almost forty-one years seem a bit different than they used to. I’ve become aware that they’ve all inexorably been leading up to the discovery of my Jewish soul.

For the past six years on this blog, I’ve groped–as really, do we all–to find the meaning (some meaning? any meaning? know what I mean?) in the unexpected twists and turns of an average American adult life. The gist of those six years of posts (more than 600 in all) boils down to my yearning to know how and why I felt pushed to leave my native New York City home in my early thirties to forge a new life, new career, new friendships–and, ultimately, a new outlook–in a city and region that until then I had only ever considered flyover territory.

And more importantly, throughout the difficulty and heartache that at times has characterized my Midwestern life, why have I always felt that I belonged here, no matter what, for an important, deeply personal reason that just…hadn’t…happened…yet?

Looking back at my past six years’ worth of posts (see the Cliff’s notes in my earlier anniversary posts for this blog’s first, second, third, fourth, and fifth birthdays, as well as my Jewish conversion archive which pretty much covers the past 12 months of year six), I can see clearly how both the searching on my part and the clues I kept getting back from life, the universe, and everything led me to this point. Those who don’t believe in a higher intelligence or power read sentences like that, shake their heads, and sigh.

What do they know?

It’s a wondrous thing to run your heart and mind around the contours of a life experience that only and finally makes sense as the result of a two-way relationship between what you are and whatever made you come to be in the first place. I’ve believed in God for some time, and spent many years as a hopeful agnostic even before. But there are many things that don’t seem accidental anymore, after 41 years of me and six years of my blog under my belt:

• Growing up in New York City with an almost exclusively Jewish set of friends;
• In elementary school, wondering why I was being raised into a religion (Roman Catholicism) that I knew wasn’t my own–something I clearly remember thinking as young as eight years old;
• In college spending hours arguing with my Christian friends that no matter who my parents were and how I was raised, I wasn’t Christian;
• As an adult, taking pains to make it clear to friends that my Christmas traditions were secular in spirit–and wondering every year why I was continuing them;
• Having a lifelong sense of being one step away from where I was supposed to be, and because of that always almost but not quite fitting in (in time, in space, in spirit, in general);
• Feeling an insurmountable urge to leave my hometown–the most Jewish place on the planet outside Israel, but so all-encompassingly Jewish I now know I’d never have figured it out with the answer right under my nose like that;
• Spending most of the past eight years in Chicago searching, very deliberately, for a spiritual home, as if an egg-timer went off inside of me when I got here;
• Buddhism, in which I found much wisdom and solace in my thirties, never, ever feeling quite right (likely why I never, ever joined a Buddhist community);
• My Jewish journey practically popping fully baked out of a box the moment I realized God needed to be a part of my spiritual life; and
• Not for nothing, the longing I have always felt for my hometown–a place where I choose not to live for secular reasons (yay, Chicago!), but where I know now how–and how deeply–I fit in.

You know, among other things. More than I can find the words to say over my now-tepid afternoon coffee in an Edgewater cafe. Life’s messy like that. But trust me, a lot makes sense now.

There’s a lot I want to accomplish before 42, too. Perfecting my Hebrew (Biblical and modern.) Chanting Torah on Shabbat (I’m learning cantillation now.) Visiting my substantially Jewish hometown, for the first time, as a Jew. (Seriously, who goes to Chicago to become a New York Jew?)

Writing this blog more regularly wouldn’t hurt, either. In fact, now that my journey to Judaism is over, there’s so much more about finally being Jewish that I want to share. A lifetime of topics, really, God-willing. So Happy Birthday, Chicago Carless. Happy Birthday to me. And most of all, baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu melech ha’olam she’asani Yisrael.

Finally, and amen to that.

I’m getting married in the morning!
Ding dong! The bells are gonna chime.
Pull out the stopper! Let’s have a whopper!
But get me to the shul on time!

I’ll potentially be Jewish before you read this post, but as I write it this is my last night before mikveh, the last few hours of my pre-Jewish life. The slightly abridged version of the above, famous My Fair Lady song has been going through my head all day. God, it’s tomorrow. God, I better not be late. What are you supposed to feel the evening before becoming a Jew, or joining any major religious tradition officially? Me, I’ve had butterflies in my stomach all day.

I know some people who took mikveh day a lot less weightily than I’m taking it. But the closer the date for the official rituals that will make me a Jew drew near, the more I realized the import of the day. It’s like getting married. After all, I’m in love with a tradition and a people, am willing to cast my lot with theirs (which is a weird word to write, since in my heart at this point I really mean “ours”), and am about to make a permanent, lifelong commitment. Conversion has no do-overs. As of tomorrow morning, sometime before Noon, I will become forever after a Jewish man.

I spent a lot of today allegedly working but really Googling terms like “pre-wedding jitters,” just to gain some perspective that a bit of pre-momentous-occasion nerves is normal and healthy (which it is.) It’s hard to pin down just what’s going on inside right now. On the one hand, I’m having to tether myself to the ground so that I don’t levitate from the sheer joy and anticipation of tomorrow. On the other hand, although I am as sure as I can humanly, possibly be about the decision I am making, what if there’s some unknown-to-me level of even surer-than-sure surety that I’m missing?

Then my anxiety goes around in a circle and I return–over and over, because my heart and head keep cycling through my jitters like a broken record–that even if I couldn’t say being Jewish is what I feel my life has been leading up to for 40 years, knowing what I know now about Judaism, I’d still choose it. I’d still be going to the mikveh tomorrow.

Just writing “going to the mikveh tomorrow” gives me pause. There are very few times one is able to say that an event is a once-in-a-lifetime thing and not be exaggerating. I know straight down through the soles of my feet that tomorrow morning will be the most important morning I will have ever lived in my entire life–and may remain so for the rest of my life, no matter what other momentous occasions may follow it in years to come.

And I’m ready. And I’m sure. And my study will continue for the rest of my life, too. But what if there’s more I ought to have studied before becoming “official”? What if I blow the words to the mikveh blessing? What if my fellow congregants realize I’m really just a blowhard pain in the ass where up to now they think they see a very self-sure committed conversion candidate?

What if I don’t exhale enough and I float instead of sinking?

Obviously, I’m committed to exploring every avenue of psyching myself out this evening. When I’m done with doing that–and with writing this post–I’m going to go out on the balcony and have a heart-to-heart with God, which is the same thing I did when my conversion journey began.

Then I’ll attempt to sleep, wake up, and become who I was meant to be 40 years ago. I’m thrilled. I’m scared. I’m full of butterflies. And I am overjoyed to a point I cannot humanly express. Not to mention humbled, and immensely, immensely grateful to have been led to this point.

There’s another familiar song that keeps playing in my head tonight, equally appropriate as the first:

No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips

Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten

For now.

Very early into my Jewish conversion journey, while we were discussing my problematic family history and the problems that led to in my adult life, my rabbi posed a question that floored me. He said, “What if there isn’t a problem? What if the only problem is that you keep thinking there’s a problem? None of us are as perfect as we’d like to be.”

My substance-abusing siblings in childhood led to me in a codependence 12-step group as an adult–not to mention years of anger, knee-jerk emotional reactions, and control freakiness. After a few years, I had finally reached a plateau in my step work where, for the first time, I found myself able to reach out to others in a healthy way and begin to make peace with my past. At the time, my rabbi’s idea that maybe there wasn’t a problem wasn’t an idea I found legitimate.

It took me a while to see his point. It wasn’t that there wasn’t a problem. The point was, there’s always a problem. Everyone has a problem. Life is a problem. From time to time love is a problem, family is a problem. Nothing’s ever perfect or meant to be. And that’s okay. That’s normal, the baseline of life. In other words, I spent most of my adult life making a problem out of the fact that I had a normally problematic life.

I’m not the only person ever to have had a screwed up childhood, to have taken a long time to figure out how to manage the aftermath of it, or to have ended up in a recovery program. Nor am I the first person to be fatter than I want to be, or, at times, lonelier. I don’t have the license on making less money than would be convenient for my creditors, or on being less responsive to my friends than would be helpful to their needs or my heart. It all comes and it goes. Some days, and some moments, are better than others.

An important Jewish lesson in the past few months for me has been the instruction on how to perform tikkun olam, or repair of the world–a central Jewish concern, found in the Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) tractate of the Talmud, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism:

It is not your duty to complete the work. Neither are you free to desist from it.

The instruction concerns how we should live with others on a shared planet. But to my mind, it equally applies to how we should live with ourselves. In both cases: don’t fret because problems exist and you can’t fix them completely; just make sure you’re doing your best to solve them. Being part of the solution is a commandment. Knowing the whole solution and every solution, that’s God’s job.

The more my rabbi’s question sank in, the more I realized how much of a project I had made out of not having a perfect life. That doesn’t mean I desist from working through the emotional damage of my childhood. It does, however, mean I don’t need to feel broken about it for the rest of my life. It was with this realization that I found the permission to finally let go emotionally on my Jewish journey. Worship and prayer, getting more involved in synagogue life, and making friends at temple all started to click the moment I stopped criticizing myself for not being able to wave a magic wand and fix all my life problems.

Over the years, there are many avenues I’ve followed down to try to gain a sense of wholeness, peace, and for want of a better term, un-brokenness. Many places I’ve looked for a solution to all my problems. Relationships. Buddhism. Moving back to New York. None of it has been very successful or has lasted for very long. It was the surprise of my life to find my long-sought sense of normalcy in Judaism.

Funny thing, Judaism doesn’t actually solve any of my problems, which had been my former litmus test for a normal life. It does, however, offer me guidance on how to live an ethical yet normally imperfect life in a normally imperfect world. It helped me to stop obsessing about the destination and instead–as long as I do my best–to be okay with the journey. And with myself.

How perfect is that?

(Photo credit: Devyn Caldwell.)