A few weeks ago, I accidentally attended Tot Shabbat.
This would have been fine, had I possessed one quality that every other adult in the room had: A child.
Without one, I was simply a thirty-something woman sitting alone in a synagogue while parents bounced infants on their knees and regarded me with the particular wariness one reserves for people who linger near playgrounds without explanation. I considered leaving. But anyone who has ever tried to exit a quiet room mid-ceremony knows that staying put (and dying slowly) is always the more dignified option.
So I stayed. Far from the epicenter of sticky fingers, desperately hoping I didn’t look like a predator who had wandered in off the street for the free challah.
I had shown up expecting a regular Friday night Shabbat service -- the kind my Reform synagogue does well, which is to say meaningful, but brief. One of the perks of being a Reform Jew is that the clergy understands modern priorities. Yes, God is important. But so is television. The rabbis and cantors operate with the quiet wisdom of people who know that faith competes directly with HBO, and Tony Soprano is winning.
And depending on the rabbi, a merciful early dismissal that allowed congregants to sprint home and watch whatever prestige television drama currently held emotional custody of their Friday nights. These days, it’s Outlander. Back when I was a kid, it was Friday Night Lights, which, frankly, felt just as sacred.
But this week, I had simply shown up on the wrong Friday.
The third-graders from Sunday school were up on the bimah, presenting what they’d learned that week: The Ten Commandments. Their teachers, apparently in a moment of inspired pedagogy, had asked each child to propose an Eleventh Commandment. If God had somehow found the energy for one more commandment, what would it be?
The answers were what you’d expect from people who have not yet had to file taxes.
“The Eleventh Commandment should be that I get to play with my trucks before bedtime.” A boy delivered directly into the microphone at maximum volume, because children have no concept of acoustics.
“Everyone gets ice cream on Wednesdays.” A girl who clearly did not want to be up there whispered, and who, I thought, had a real future in labor organizing.
“Recess should last an extra hour!” Moses would have been proud with that answer.
But then a few of them actually thought about it.
“We should be kind to animals, recycle, compost, and plant seeds.”
“We should be vegetarians once a week to lower our carbon footprint.”
“We should share our lunches if someone forgets theirs.”
These kids were going places -- most likely Oberlin College.
For a demographic not widely known for ethical restraint, some of these eight-year-olds spoke with the earnest confidence of kids who purely wanted to do some good.
For the most part at least.
The day Zayde died, my mom, my dad and I drove down to San Diego in the late evening to check in on my Bubbie. My aunt and my uncle were already down there and I started going through Zayde’s closet, thoroughly cleaning it out. My father had warned me that there was a chance I’d uncover a poorly maintained secret porn collection, which (thankfully) I did not. Though my dad and I did find a small stash of sultry perfume ads tucked near the bottom of a desk drawer, so the instinct had not been entirely wrong.
In the back of Zayde’s closet, stuffed into a velvet bag, I found his tallit -- a prayer shawl, yellowed with age, very clearly untouched in years. I brought it to Bubbie and asked if she would like Zayde to be cremated in it.
“No,” she said.
“But why?” Cremation, which Zayde had requested, was already technically forbidden under Jewish law -- the body is considered on loan from God, to be returned to the earth with dignity. Like leasing a phone. You try not to run it into the ground, and when your time is up, you hand it back in more or less the condition you received it. God, in this scenario, is T-Mobile. Omnipresent, tracking everything, and deeply unamused by the damage you claim you didn’t cause.
But it was Zayde’s wish to be cremated, so I didn’t question it. I assumed there was a specific, private reason why he preferred a fiery exit over the traditional burial our customs so strongly suggested.
But Bubbie looked at me with the patience of someone explaining something they’d assumed was common knowledge.
“Jacqueline,” she said. “Your grandfather and I stopped believing in God.”
I waited for the rest of the sentence. There was none.
“What do you mean you stopped believing in God?”
“We stopped believing in Him in 1994,” she said, calmly. “After Schindler’s List came out.”
“You stopped believing in God because of… Schindler’s List?”
“It had more to do with the Holocaust, Jacqueline.” A pause. “How could God allow six million of His own people to die like that? His chosen people?”
In the doorway, my Roman Catholic mother’s spine went rigid. She believed in God the same way she believed in Drew Bledsoe as a quarterback -- absolute, unwavering, not subject to review. But her father-in-law had died that morning, and she kept her mouth shut, and I could tell it cost her.
You see, in traditional Jewish law, Judaism is passed down through the mother -- a biological inheritance more binding than eye color and apparently just as permanent. But because my mom was Catholic, it meant that according to certain interpretations, I was Jewish the same way almond milk is milk. Technically similar, widely accepted in some places, but deeply controversial in others.
So when I was born, Bubbie and Zayde had one request: Convert me. I was not to be raised half-Jewish. I was to go all the way, properly Juda-tized, a whole Jew. It was important to them. It was important to God.
And then, in 1994 -- one year after my conversion had been finalized, the ink barely dry on whatever paperwork the universe keeps -- they saw Schindler’s List and stopped believing in God entirely.
I have thought about this sequence of events many times. Which raised a question I have never fully resolved: Was I converted to Judaism as an act of faith, or as a numbers correction? Six million lost, one gained. Were my Bubbie and Zayde just trying to close the gap and making up the difference after six million losses? I could live with that. I have lived with that. I simply would have appreciated knowing that the theological foundation of my entire upbringing had about a twelve-month shelf life. Meanwhile, my mom’s own faith had no such expiration problems.
That night, we took Bubbie out for Chinese food at her favorite restaurant, and while waiting for her to get ready, my Uncle Chris and my dad stood outside in front of Bubbie’s car conversing over their mutual fear of going to the dentist.
“You know when the dentist says you need a root canal?” Uncle Chris said. “They numb the whole area but you believe they didn’t numb you enough. And then you hear the whirl of the drill, and there’s that one moment, right before it touches your teeth,” he paused. “Atheist or not, that’s the moment you believe in God.”
So do I believe in God?
I believe in God the same way my Uncle Chris believes -- usually when something bad is about to happen to my teeth. Beyond that, I do believe in something. But I suppose it just depends on my mood that day. If I’m feeling religious or spiritual.
Some days if I’m feeling religious, I believe in the traditional version -- the long bearded man who sits upon a celestial throne. And if some days I’m feeling spiritual, I’ll think that there is some entity that exists entirely outside our human comprehension that is the one pulling all of the cosmic strings. And some days when I’m neither in a religious nor spiritual mood, I believe what Stephen Hawking had argued: That there’s nothing at all.
Hawking believed death was exactly what it looked like: The end. The brain runs, the brain fails, the brain stops, same as any machine. No afterlife, no continuity of consciousness, no you persisting somewhere in a different form. Just the screen going dark and staying dark.
Hawking’s position made a lot of people furious. Maybe people were mad at him for the simplicity of it all. Maybe people just like complex answers when you find yourself living in a complex world.
When I heard it, I felt relief.
You just stop.
There was something clean about it. No divine server maintaining a backup copy of you somewhere. The screen just goes dark. Just done.
Fun fact: Jews don’t believe in Hell. We find the concept of eternal damnation, frankly, a bit dramatic. What we believe in instead is Gehinnom -- a temporary purgatorial state, lasting at most twelve months, in which the soul reflects on its transgressions before ascending to whatever comes next. Not fire and brimstone. Not Dante’s Inferno with the inverted popes and the nine concentric circles and the whole baroque production. More like court-ordered therapy for the soul. Twelve months of sitting with what you did, really looking at it, and feeling, genuinely, bad about it.
It’s kinda like the journey Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol encountered. We all remember the Scrooge of the early chapters. The miserly, joyless recluse. But through the visits of the three ghosts, he is forced into a state of deep remorse and shame that mirrors the work of Gehinnom.
The point isn’t to burn; the point is to transform. And Scrooge by the end emerges as a generous, joyful, benevolent man. He raises Cratchit’s salary, becomes a second father to Tiny Tim, and buys a massive turkey in the adrenaline rush of his newfound appreciation for life. That is the purpose of Gehinnom. A total recalibration of the spirit. One year of intense self-reflection, a sincere apologies tour for the soul, and then you’re clear for whatever happens in the Great Beyond.
I find myself thinking about this in relation to certain historical figures. The orthodox answer regarding Hitler is that the irredeemably wicked may simply be annihilated -- no Heaven, no Gehinnom, just nothing. But I prefer to imagine him stuck in Gehinnom indefinitely, reliving on an infinite loop the day the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna told him he lacked the talent to be an artist.
It’s morbid, I know. But it’s also worth noting that six million lives might have been saved if one admissions committee had made a different call.
Zayde might also have gone to his grave believing in God.
My dad, being a lawyer, required tangible evidence for anything more complex than a parking ticket. God, who has never once produced documentation to him, didn’t stand a chance. This made my dad a functional atheist which, (unlike my grandparents’ dramatic 1994 resignation) had always been simply a fact of life in my household. Like his love for the Peanuts comics and his collection of signed first edition Dr. Seuss children’s books. He didn’t believe in God, but he didn’t do much to fill the void in our household with Jewish culture either.
My father’s Jewish practice was less a religious commitment and more a series of brief, seasonal cameos. For Hanukkah, he would retrieve the bronze menorah from its hiding spot beneath the kitchen sink for eight nights. Rosh Hashanah consisting of us snacking on apple slices and honey after dinner. And Passover was similarly streamlined. My dad would eat buttered matzah not because it was the bread of affliction, but because he’d convinced himself it was a weight-loss tool.
Beyond the Hanukkah candles, there were no prayers. For the major holidays, there were no parties, no big dinners, and certainly no organized Seders. In the Abelson household, the most sacred days on our calendar were just Mondays when dad would cook my brother and I pasta for dinner.
Meanwhile, my mom, for all her Catholicism, knew almost nothing about Judaism when she married my dad. What she did know was that she wanted me to have some spiritual structure -- something to help me navigate the larger questions life would eventually end up throwing at me. She consulted a neighbor up the road from us named Dana. She was so Jewish, in fact, that her non-Jewish husband had converted for her, which my mother regarded with the same awe usually reserved for Olympic athletes or men who assemble IKEA furniture without swearing.
“Thank God for Dana,” my mother told me once. “I wouldn’t have known what to do with you without her.”
Thanks to Dana’s guidance, my mom enrolled me at Temple Sinai in Glendale. But we didn’t talk much at home about what I was learning at Temple Sinai. In truth, I wasn’t entirely sure why I’d been enrolled in the first place. The working theory, as best I could reconstruct it, was that whatever Jewishness my parents couldn’t produce between them -- the culture, the traditions, the language -- the teachers and children at Temple Sinai would pick up the slack and supply it to me. A kind of religious outsourcing. They would get me up to speed, and I would arrive home already assembled. What nobody mentioned was that this placed the entire weight of our household’s Jewish identity squarely on me -- a nine-year-old who was still unclear on the difference between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and had recently eaten pork chops without guilt.
I did not always enjoy going to Temple Sinai. The girls in my Sunday school class were, with a few exceptions, a specific kind of mean -- friendly during carpool pickups and drop offs, arctic upon arrival. There was a girl named Ramona who kicked me under the table. A girl named Monica who pretended not to know me in front of her cooler friends. And then there was Sora.
Sora would invite me over to her house after Sunday school with the warm hospitality of someone who genuinely enjoyed my company, and then proceed to destroy me at Kingdom of Hearts with the focused efficiency of someone who had been waiting all week for the opportunity. Every time. Without mercy. With visible enjoyment -- which was somehow worse. Her father, a chiropractor, watched one of these massacres from the doorway and offered, completely unprompted: “Well, of course she beat you. She’s better than you.” He said it the way you’d tell someone it was raining. Factual. Helpful, almost. He went back to whatever he was doing, and I sat there holding my controller, newly acquainted with what it felt like to be assessed by a man whose entire career was based on telling people their bodies were wrong.
Father of the Year.
The boys, meanwhile, were absorbed in Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and unavailable for comment. Yet, they apparently had a lot of opinions to share with me about my “so-called” Jewish background.
“You’re not actually Jewish,” one kid informed me, with the authority of someone who had clearly consulted no one but himself on this matter.
“Yes I am,” I said. “I could have a Bat Mitzvah if I wanted one.”
He scoffed. “During the ceremony, both parents have to hold the Torah. And you have to be Jewish to hold the Torah. If your mom can’t touch the Torah, you can’t have a Bat Mitzvah.”
This was complete and utter bullshit. My mom couldn’t hold the Torah, true. But she could bow to it, stand beside it, acknowledge it respectfully from a tasteful distance.
By my twelfth birthday, I had been treated as a second-class citizen at my Sunday school long enough that my family sat down to discuss the obvious question: Did I actually want to do this? Did I want to go through with a Bat Mitzvah? To spend a year learning Hebrew, to stand on the bimah in front of everyone, to claim, publicly and formally, a community that had spent the better part of four years debating whether I qualified for it?
My father assumed the answer was no. The evidence suggested I had not enjoyed a single moment of Sunday school. He was, by his own admission, shocked when I told him I wanted to do it.
Hebrew is not a Romance language, the alphabet goes the wrong direction, and there are rules governing pronunciation that seemed designed to defeat me personally. But I found a workaround: I memorized everything. All of it. If I treated my Torah portion and haftarah as songs and committed the lyrics to memory, I could get through the ceremony with something resembling competence.
What I ended up with, inadvertently, was two hours of liturgy I could reproduce from memory for years afterward. I believe this is also why I remember, in cinematic detail, every humiliating thing that has ever happened to me. Train your brain to hold Hebrew liturgy and it will not stop there.
But hey, I got a great Bat Mitzvah out of it.
The one thing I remember clearly about those years -- the thing that felt genuinely right and, more than anything, was the reason I loved being Jewish -- was the hour my Sunday school class spent inside the sanctuary itself. Outside those doors, the world was a minefield of social friction. The sharp kicks under the table, the cold shoulders, and the exhausting, constant relitigating of whether I was really Jewish or just Jewish-adjacent. But inside the sanctuary, the noise of the playground politics was replaced by singing. And when we sang, the air changed; I felt safe.
By that point, I had done so much rote memorization that the prayers weren’t just lines in a book; they were etched into my brain. I knew the exact cadence of the words, the precise moment to bow, and the perfect timing to lean in and kiss the Torah as it was paraded through the aisles. In those moments, I didn’t need to explain my lineage or defend my credentials. Because I knew the choreography of the faith by heart, I felt a profound, unshakeable sense of belonging. How could I ever doubt that I was Jewish enough when, in the middle of a spoken prayer, I felt more authentically chosen than ever? It felt like I was exactly where I was destined to be.
During my first year in New York, I was on the hunt for a Reform synagogue near my place on the Upper East Side; a spiritual home base that didn’t require a cross-town trek. Looking for a lead, I reached out to a former professor of mine from Boston -- I’ll call him Patrick -- who connected me with his friend Reba. Reba also lived on the Upper East Side, but at some point between when Patrick had last seen her and my arrival in the city, she had converted to Orthodox Judaism. A detail Patrick either forgot or didn’t think was relevant because Orthodox Judaism and Reform Judaism were vastly different from each other. When I finally got in touch with her and mentioned that Patrick would be in town, she invited us both to her synagogue Saturday morning service. I said yes, and so did Patrick.
I should tell you a little about Patrick before we go any further, because Patrick matters to this story in the way that a slow leak matters to a tire. You don’t notice the damage until the whole thing is flat.
Patrick considered himself progressive in the way that certain people consider themselves good drivers. As a fixed personal quality, requiring no ongoing evidence. He had the politics, the vocabulary, the tote bag -- three of them, actually, each from a different independent bookstore, rotated strategically so no one would think he had a favorite. He used words like intersectional and hegemonic with the fluid confidence of a man who knew that, in his social circle, being asked to define them was considered a microaggression.
In practice, Patrick had confused having a Twitter feed with having a character. He spent his adult life performing his values for an audience that had never requested the show, turning every happy hour into a seminar on “decentering the self” while remaining the most central, loudest person in the room.
He once refused to stand for the national anthem at Fenway Park to protest the latest Trump-era atrocity -- a stance he announced at a volume intended for the three rows behind us while holding a sixteen-dollar Fenway Frank. When I gently pointed out the irony of a “solidarity protest” funded by a multinational stadium corporation, he explained, with a completely straight face, that supporting the stadium’s unionized mustard-pump operators was actually a localized act of community resistance.
And that was the thing about Patrick -- he always said bullshit like it with a straight face.
He drank with the joyless, dedicated efficiency of a man trying to outrun his own shadow. Between sips of beer he name-dropped famous actors and screenwriters he’d “consulted for” with the casual frequency of a man who believed proximity to fame was a transferable skill. He didn’t just tip twenty percent; he laid the receipt flat on the table, face up, and lingered over the total as if he were signing a peace treaty. He had a way of paying for dinner -- slowly, theatrically, with a heavy, martyr-like sigh -- that made you feel as though you had personally extracted a pint of his blood and would be expected to provide a formal thank-you note by morning.
I kept him around because he knew people in the publishing world and in Hollywood, and because after my mentor Jeff died, Patrick was essentially all that was left of that world. I am not proud of this calculation, but I am committed to the honesty of it all.
I arrived at the address Reba had texted me wearing a blazer and dress pants -- modest, neutral. Patrick arrived in jeans, and a printed T-shirt advertising a band I had never heard of and suspected he hadn’t either.
“I just hope it’s not one of those ones places where they won’t let you ask questions.” He muttered, as we reached the door, as if we’d agreed to donate a kidney -- his kidney, specifically, under duress.
“It’s a prayer service, not a deposition, Patrick.” I said. But he didn’t seem to hear me.
I had never been to an Orthodox service. The differences from Reform Judaism are significant. In my Reform world, Hebrew was a melodic suggestion -- softly sung, accompanied by a guitar, and paced for those of us who still needed the phonetic transliteration to keep up. But for the Orthodox religion, Hebrew was a high-speed rail. It was read with a rapid, rhythmic fluency by people who had clearly been speaking to God in the original text since they were in diapers.
And in Reform Judaism synagogues, families sit together. Here, at the Orthodox synagogues, the genders were strictly segregated, just like at a typical prayer room in a mosque. But the most striking difference was the motion.
This rocking is called shuckling, from the Yiddish word, “to shake.” It is a traditional practice of swaying back and forth during prayer, meant to engage the entire body in worship -- to become, symbolically, a flickering flame reaching toward God.
A kind woman appeared at my elbow within minutes of my arrival. She took one look at my face -- which I can only imagine read as, “Help Me!” -- and appointed herself my guide.
“Come stand with me,” she said. “I’ll show you what to do.”
We went to the women’s side of the partition and I watched her feet and mirrored them. I had no idea what I was saying, but I said it with conviction, which I have found is approximately sixty percent of what any religious service requires. My companion was patient and warm, correcting me with the gentle efficiency of someone who had guided many bewildered guests before me and harbored no judgment about any of them.
But Patrick lasted ten minutes.
I know this because I noticed, during a moment of communal prayer, that the men’s section had developed a Patrick-shaped gap. I found him in a small anteroom at the back of the prayer room, sprawled across an armchair with the defeated posture of a man who had been personally wronged by the architecture. He was scrolling on his phone in one hand and scrunching up the yarmulke in the other hand that one of the men had offered him to wear on his head before entering the synagogue.
“Can you believe this?” Patrick said, not in a whisper, but in the full-throated roar he usually reserved for winning arguments at brunch. He was a guest in a house of worship, yet he was conducting a performance review of a two-thousand-year-old tradition as if it were a poorly managed Starbucks.
“The separation is completely regressive,” he announced, waving a hand at the prayer room with the dismissiveness of an uninvited building inspector. “The shuckling is weird. And I’m sorry, but when the rabbi or whatever finally spoke English, the first thing that comes out of his mouth is remembering the Holocaust? The Holocaust, the Holocaust, the Holocaust. Six million, six million. We get it. Do you really have to keep reminding us?”
There is a specific, clarifying sting in watching a person finally reveal the exact brand of rot you’ve suspected was there all along. It takes a monumental, almost breathtaking lack of empathy to stand in a synagogue and complain that the Jews are being too “repetitive” about their own genocide. Patrick wasn’t even trying to be respectful; he was simply annoyed that the persistence of historical grief was an inconvenience to his afternoon. He said it with the serene confidence of a man who mistakes his own bigotry for “intellectual rigor,” entirely unaware that he had just crossed the line from guest to absolute ghoul.
I said nothing. I had learned, by then, that some responses need to marinate.
After the service, a reception materialized with the synchronized efficiency of a high-end catering operation, overseen by people whose primary spiritual mission was to ensure that no one left the building with an empty stomach. Almost immediately, I was flanked by a trio of young Orthodox men. Their intentions were, I suspected, mostly evangelical -- the religious equivalent of a very polite high-pressure sales pitch to convert me to the Orthodox religion.
I had my script ready. I was going to be the diplomat of the Diaspora. I was going to say, “Thank you, but I’m Reform. I’m just visiting, and I truly appreciate the hospitality.” But before I could launch my pre-recorded message, one of them, Herschel, began a relentless but charming campaign for my attendance at his family’s Shabbat dinner. He spoke of his family’s Rosh Hashanah table with the kind of reverence usually reserved for championship sports teams, suggesting that spending the High Holy Holiday anywhere else would be a theological error of the highest magnitude.
It was, improbably, the most welcomed I had felt in a Jewish space since I started going back to the synagogue right after the pandemic. It was a stark, refreshing contrast to the years I’d spent at Temple Sinai, essentially acting as my own defense attorney against the skepticism of eight-year-olds.
But that was when Patrick materialized at my elbow with the energy of a man who had spotted a situation he’d decided required management. He stepped directly between me and the three Orthodox men -- physically, bodily, like a human traffic cone -- and announced to the general vicinity: “She’s not interested.” Then he gripped my arm, just above the elbow, and steered me toward where Reba and her family were standing on the other side of the room at a pace that did not invite discussion.
“Glad I got there when I did,” he said in the satisfied tone of someone who has just performed an extraction and expects to be thanked for it. “Another five minutes and Herschel would have tried to convert you to be his wife.” He laughed at his own joke. He often did. It was one of his more cringeworthy qualities.
I looked back at the three men. Herschel gave a small shrug, which I interpreted as: It happens.
I am no longer friends with Patrick. I wish I could say the Orthodox synagogue was the thing that finally did it, but the truth is it took me another year and a half to stop making allowances for someone who had been showing me exactly who he was since approximately the first week I knew him. The Orthodox synagogue was not the revelation. It was merely the confirmation -- clearly labeled, impossible to misread, delivered in his own voice, in a building that deserved better.
To be clear, I was not about to convert to Orthodox Judaism. I love being a Reform Jew. I love it the way I love a good pair of jeans -- broken in, comfortable, and mine. I love that our rabbi gets us home by eight so that I can watch Noah Wyle save some lives on The Pitt. I love that our machzor has English translations so that I can fully comprehend what exactly I am singing in Hebrew. And I love that someone brings in the black and white cookies after Shabbat service from Zabar’s.
What I did recognize, standing in that anteroom watching Patrick sink into a K-hole on his phone, was that my own Reform practice had gone somewhat dormant, and that this was a problem I had the power to fix. After all, I had memorized the entire Shabbat service at age nine. I had a Bat Mitzvah. I had done the work, and then I had quietly stopped showing up for it, which is the religious equivalent of getting a gym membership but then never exercising your use of it. The least I could do, at this point in my life, was show up on a Friday night if I had nothing else going on.
And if I can’t make it to the sanctuary on Friday nights, I’d spend that time with my friends -- the very thing I used to pray for back in Sunday school while my classmates were busy ostracizing me and kicking the shit out of my shins under the table.
Spending Friday night with people who genuinely enjoyed my company, and who didn’t feel the need to dismantle my self-esteem feels like its own form of worship. It’s my way of thanking the universe for finally delivering on a decade-old request.
I know I still have a ways to go, but for a moment in that Orthodox synagogue -- standing in that warm, crowded room, being shown exactly where to put my feet and being handed more food than I could possibly finish by strangers who assumed, without verification, that I was one of them -- I felt something I didn’t quite have a name for. It was the sensation of being included without having to argue for it. It was the rare, quiet grace of belonging without a footnote.
Back at Tot Shabbat, the final commandments were coming in: No homework, more screen time, bedtime abolished entirely, etc..
I had been sitting in the back for the better part of an hour and I had been thinking -- as one does, in synagogues, in the quiet space between someone else’s prayer -- about what I would put on as an eleventh commandment, if God had somehow left it blank and handed me the chisel.
Something simple. Something that would have fit on a Post-it note. Something Patrick, with all his education and his strong opinions had somehow never managed to empathize.
The absolute barest minimum:
Don’t be a dick.
This would have been fine, had I possessed one quality that every other adult in the room had: A child.
Without one, I was simply a thirty-something woman sitting alone in a synagogue while parents bounced infants on their knees and regarded me with the particular wariness one reserves for people who linger near playgrounds without explanation. I considered leaving. But anyone who has ever tried to exit a quiet room mid-ceremony knows that staying put (and dying slowly) is always the more dignified option.
So I stayed. Far from the epicenter of sticky fingers, desperately hoping I didn’t look like a predator who had wandered in off the street for the free challah.
I had shown up expecting a regular Friday night Shabbat service -- the kind my Reform synagogue does well, which is to say meaningful, but brief. One of the perks of being a Reform Jew is that the clergy understands modern priorities. Yes, God is important. But so is television. The rabbis and cantors operate with the quiet wisdom of people who know that faith competes directly with HBO, and Tony Soprano is winning.
And depending on the rabbi, a merciful early dismissal that allowed congregants to sprint home and watch whatever prestige television drama currently held emotional custody of their Friday nights. These days, it’s Outlander. Back when I was a kid, it was Friday Night Lights, which, frankly, felt just as sacred.
But this week, I had simply shown up on the wrong Friday.
The third-graders from Sunday school were up on the bimah, presenting what they’d learned that week: The Ten Commandments. Their teachers, apparently in a moment of inspired pedagogy, had asked each child to propose an Eleventh Commandment. If God had somehow found the energy for one more commandment, what would it be?
The answers were what you’d expect from people who have not yet had to file taxes.
“The Eleventh Commandment should be that I get to play with my trucks before bedtime.” A boy delivered directly into the microphone at maximum volume, because children have no concept of acoustics.
“Everyone gets ice cream on Wednesdays.” A girl who clearly did not want to be up there whispered, and who, I thought, had a real future in labor organizing.
“Recess should last an extra hour!” Moses would have been proud with that answer.
But then a few of them actually thought about it.
“We should be kind to animals, recycle, compost, and plant seeds.”
“We should be vegetarians once a week to lower our carbon footprint.”
“We should share our lunches if someone forgets theirs.”
These kids were going places -- most likely Oberlin College.
For a demographic not widely known for ethical restraint, some of these eight-year-olds spoke with the earnest confidence of kids who purely wanted to do some good.
For the most part at least.
The day Zayde died, my mom, my dad and I drove down to San Diego in the late evening to check in on my Bubbie. My aunt and my uncle were already down there and I started going through Zayde’s closet, thoroughly cleaning it out. My father had warned me that there was a chance I’d uncover a poorly maintained secret porn collection, which (thankfully) I did not. Though my dad and I did find a small stash of sultry perfume ads tucked near the bottom of a desk drawer, so the instinct had not been entirely wrong.
In the back of Zayde’s closet, stuffed into a velvet bag, I found his tallit -- a prayer shawl, yellowed with age, very clearly untouched in years. I brought it to Bubbie and asked if she would like Zayde to be cremated in it.
“No,” she said.
“But why?” Cremation, which Zayde had requested, was already technically forbidden under Jewish law -- the body is considered on loan from God, to be returned to the earth with dignity. Like leasing a phone. You try not to run it into the ground, and when your time is up, you hand it back in more or less the condition you received it. God, in this scenario, is T-Mobile. Omnipresent, tracking everything, and deeply unamused by the damage you claim you didn’t cause.
But it was Zayde’s wish to be cremated, so I didn’t question it. I assumed there was a specific, private reason why he preferred a fiery exit over the traditional burial our customs so strongly suggested.
But Bubbie looked at me with the patience of someone explaining something they’d assumed was common knowledge.
“Jacqueline,” she said. “Your grandfather and I stopped believing in God.”
I waited for the rest of the sentence. There was none.
“What do you mean you stopped believing in God?”
“We stopped believing in Him in 1994,” she said, calmly. “After Schindler’s List came out.”
“You stopped believing in God because of… Schindler’s List?”
“It had more to do with the Holocaust, Jacqueline.” A pause. “How could God allow six million of His own people to die like that? His chosen people?”
In the doorway, my Roman Catholic mother’s spine went rigid. She believed in God the same way she believed in Drew Bledsoe as a quarterback -- absolute, unwavering, not subject to review. But her father-in-law had died that morning, and she kept her mouth shut, and I could tell it cost her.
You see, in traditional Jewish law, Judaism is passed down through the mother -- a biological inheritance more binding than eye color and apparently just as permanent. But because my mom was Catholic, it meant that according to certain interpretations, I was Jewish the same way almond milk is milk. Technically similar, widely accepted in some places, but deeply controversial in others.
So when I was born, Bubbie and Zayde had one request: Convert me. I was not to be raised half-Jewish. I was to go all the way, properly Juda-tized, a whole Jew. It was important to them. It was important to God.
And then, in 1994 -- one year after my conversion had been finalized, the ink barely dry on whatever paperwork the universe keeps -- they saw Schindler’s List and stopped believing in God entirely.
I have thought about this sequence of events many times. Which raised a question I have never fully resolved: Was I converted to Judaism as an act of faith, or as a numbers correction? Six million lost, one gained. Were my Bubbie and Zayde just trying to close the gap and making up the difference after six million losses? I could live with that. I have lived with that. I simply would have appreciated knowing that the theological foundation of my entire upbringing had about a twelve-month shelf life. Meanwhile, my mom’s own faith had no such expiration problems.
That night, we took Bubbie out for Chinese food at her favorite restaurant, and while waiting for her to get ready, my Uncle Chris and my dad stood outside in front of Bubbie’s car conversing over their mutual fear of going to the dentist.
“You know when the dentist says you need a root canal?” Uncle Chris said. “They numb the whole area but you believe they didn’t numb you enough. And then you hear the whirl of the drill, and there’s that one moment, right before it touches your teeth,” he paused. “Atheist or not, that’s the moment you believe in God.”
So do I believe in God?
I believe in God the same way my Uncle Chris believes -- usually when something bad is about to happen to my teeth. Beyond that, I do believe in something. But I suppose it just depends on my mood that day. If I’m feeling religious or spiritual.
Some days if I’m feeling religious, I believe in the traditional version -- the long bearded man who sits upon a celestial throne. And if some days I’m feeling spiritual, I’ll think that there is some entity that exists entirely outside our human comprehension that is the one pulling all of the cosmic strings. And some days when I’m neither in a religious nor spiritual mood, I believe what Stephen Hawking had argued: That there’s nothing at all.
Hawking believed death was exactly what it looked like: The end. The brain runs, the brain fails, the brain stops, same as any machine. No afterlife, no continuity of consciousness, no you persisting somewhere in a different form. Just the screen going dark and staying dark.
Hawking’s position made a lot of people furious. Maybe people were mad at him for the simplicity of it all. Maybe people just like complex answers when you find yourself living in a complex world.
When I heard it, I felt relief.
You just stop.
There was something clean about it. No divine server maintaining a backup copy of you somewhere. The screen just goes dark. Just done.
Fun fact: Jews don’t believe in Hell. We find the concept of eternal damnation, frankly, a bit dramatic. What we believe in instead is Gehinnom -- a temporary purgatorial state, lasting at most twelve months, in which the soul reflects on its transgressions before ascending to whatever comes next. Not fire and brimstone. Not Dante’s Inferno with the inverted popes and the nine concentric circles and the whole baroque production. More like court-ordered therapy for the soul. Twelve months of sitting with what you did, really looking at it, and feeling, genuinely, bad about it.
It’s kinda like the journey Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol encountered. We all remember the Scrooge of the early chapters. The miserly, joyless recluse. But through the visits of the three ghosts, he is forced into a state of deep remorse and shame that mirrors the work of Gehinnom.
The point isn’t to burn; the point is to transform. And Scrooge by the end emerges as a generous, joyful, benevolent man. He raises Cratchit’s salary, becomes a second father to Tiny Tim, and buys a massive turkey in the adrenaline rush of his newfound appreciation for life. That is the purpose of Gehinnom. A total recalibration of the spirit. One year of intense self-reflection, a sincere apologies tour for the soul, and then you’re clear for whatever happens in the Great Beyond.
I find myself thinking about this in relation to certain historical figures. The orthodox answer regarding Hitler is that the irredeemably wicked may simply be annihilated -- no Heaven, no Gehinnom, just nothing. But I prefer to imagine him stuck in Gehinnom indefinitely, reliving on an infinite loop the day the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna told him he lacked the talent to be an artist.
It’s morbid, I know. But it’s also worth noting that six million lives might have been saved if one admissions committee had made a different call.
Zayde might also have gone to his grave believing in God.
My dad, being a lawyer, required tangible evidence for anything more complex than a parking ticket. God, who has never once produced documentation to him, didn’t stand a chance. This made my dad a functional atheist which, (unlike my grandparents’ dramatic 1994 resignation) had always been simply a fact of life in my household. Like his love for the Peanuts comics and his collection of signed first edition Dr. Seuss children’s books. He didn’t believe in God, but he didn’t do much to fill the void in our household with Jewish culture either.
My father’s Jewish practice was less a religious commitment and more a series of brief, seasonal cameos. For Hanukkah, he would retrieve the bronze menorah from its hiding spot beneath the kitchen sink for eight nights. Rosh Hashanah consisting of us snacking on apple slices and honey after dinner. And Passover was similarly streamlined. My dad would eat buttered matzah not because it was the bread of affliction, but because he’d convinced himself it was a weight-loss tool.
Beyond the Hanukkah candles, there were no prayers. For the major holidays, there were no parties, no big dinners, and certainly no organized Seders. In the Abelson household, the most sacred days on our calendar were just Mondays when dad would cook my brother and I pasta for dinner.
Meanwhile, my mom, for all her Catholicism, knew almost nothing about Judaism when she married my dad. What she did know was that she wanted me to have some spiritual structure -- something to help me navigate the larger questions life would eventually end up throwing at me. She consulted a neighbor up the road from us named Dana. She was so Jewish, in fact, that her non-Jewish husband had converted for her, which my mother regarded with the same awe usually reserved for Olympic athletes or men who assemble IKEA furniture without swearing.
“Thank God for Dana,” my mother told me once. “I wouldn’t have known what to do with you without her.”
Thanks to Dana’s guidance, my mom enrolled me at Temple Sinai in Glendale. But we didn’t talk much at home about what I was learning at Temple Sinai. In truth, I wasn’t entirely sure why I’d been enrolled in the first place. The working theory, as best I could reconstruct it, was that whatever Jewishness my parents couldn’t produce between them -- the culture, the traditions, the language -- the teachers and children at Temple Sinai would pick up the slack and supply it to me. A kind of religious outsourcing. They would get me up to speed, and I would arrive home already assembled. What nobody mentioned was that this placed the entire weight of our household’s Jewish identity squarely on me -- a nine-year-old who was still unclear on the difference between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and had recently eaten pork chops without guilt.
I did not always enjoy going to Temple Sinai. The girls in my Sunday school class were, with a few exceptions, a specific kind of mean -- friendly during carpool pickups and drop offs, arctic upon arrival. There was a girl named Ramona who kicked me under the table. A girl named Monica who pretended not to know me in front of her cooler friends. And then there was Sora.
Sora would invite me over to her house after Sunday school with the warm hospitality of someone who genuinely enjoyed my company, and then proceed to destroy me at Kingdom of Hearts with the focused efficiency of someone who had been waiting all week for the opportunity. Every time. Without mercy. With visible enjoyment -- which was somehow worse. Her father, a chiropractor, watched one of these massacres from the doorway and offered, completely unprompted: “Well, of course she beat you. She’s better than you.” He said it the way you’d tell someone it was raining. Factual. Helpful, almost. He went back to whatever he was doing, and I sat there holding my controller, newly acquainted with what it felt like to be assessed by a man whose entire career was based on telling people their bodies were wrong.
Father of the Year.
The boys, meanwhile, were absorbed in Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and unavailable for comment. Yet, they apparently had a lot of opinions to share with me about my “so-called” Jewish background.
“You’re not actually Jewish,” one kid informed me, with the authority of someone who had clearly consulted no one but himself on this matter.
“Yes I am,” I said. “I could have a Bat Mitzvah if I wanted one.”
He scoffed. “During the ceremony, both parents have to hold the Torah. And you have to be Jewish to hold the Torah. If your mom can’t touch the Torah, you can’t have a Bat Mitzvah.”
This was complete and utter bullshit. My mom couldn’t hold the Torah, true. But she could bow to it, stand beside it, acknowledge it respectfully from a tasteful distance.
By my twelfth birthday, I had been treated as a second-class citizen at my Sunday school long enough that my family sat down to discuss the obvious question: Did I actually want to do this? Did I want to go through with a Bat Mitzvah? To spend a year learning Hebrew, to stand on the bimah in front of everyone, to claim, publicly and formally, a community that had spent the better part of four years debating whether I qualified for it?
My father assumed the answer was no. The evidence suggested I had not enjoyed a single moment of Sunday school. He was, by his own admission, shocked when I told him I wanted to do it.
Hebrew is not a Romance language, the alphabet goes the wrong direction, and there are rules governing pronunciation that seemed designed to defeat me personally. But I found a workaround: I memorized everything. All of it. If I treated my Torah portion and haftarah as songs and committed the lyrics to memory, I could get through the ceremony with something resembling competence.
What I ended up with, inadvertently, was two hours of liturgy I could reproduce from memory for years afterward. I believe this is also why I remember, in cinematic detail, every humiliating thing that has ever happened to me. Train your brain to hold Hebrew liturgy and it will not stop there.
But hey, I got a great Bat Mitzvah out of it.
The one thing I remember clearly about those years -- the thing that felt genuinely right and, more than anything, was the reason I loved being Jewish -- was the hour my Sunday school class spent inside the sanctuary itself. Outside those doors, the world was a minefield of social friction. The sharp kicks under the table, the cold shoulders, and the exhausting, constant relitigating of whether I was really Jewish or just Jewish-adjacent. But inside the sanctuary, the noise of the playground politics was replaced by singing. And when we sang, the air changed; I felt safe.
By that point, I had done so much rote memorization that the prayers weren’t just lines in a book; they were etched into my brain. I knew the exact cadence of the words, the precise moment to bow, and the perfect timing to lean in and kiss the Torah as it was paraded through the aisles. In those moments, I didn’t need to explain my lineage or defend my credentials. Because I knew the choreography of the faith by heart, I felt a profound, unshakeable sense of belonging. How could I ever doubt that I was Jewish enough when, in the middle of a spoken prayer, I felt more authentically chosen than ever? It felt like I was exactly where I was destined to be.
During my first year in New York, I was on the hunt for a Reform synagogue near my place on the Upper East Side; a spiritual home base that didn’t require a cross-town trek. Looking for a lead, I reached out to a former professor of mine from Boston -- I’ll call him Patrick -- who connected me with his friend Reba. Reba also lived on the Upper East Side, but at some point between when Patrick had last seen her and my arrival in the city, she had converted to Orthodox Judaism. A detail Patrick either forgot or didn’t think was relevant because Orthodox Judaism and Reform Judaism were vastly different from each other. When I finally got in touch with her and mentioned that Patrick would be in town, she invited us both to her synagogue Saturday morning service. I said yes, and so did Patrick.
I should tell you a little about Patrick before we go any further, because Patrick matters to this story in the way that a slow leak matters to a tire. You don’t notice the damage until the whole thing is flat.
Patrick considered himself progressive in the way that certain people consider themselves good drivers. As a fixed personal quality, requiring no ongoing evidence. He had the politics, the vocabulary, the tote bag -- three of them, actually, each from a different independent bookstore, rotated strategically so no one would think he had a favorite. He used words like intersectional and hegemonic with the fluid confidence of a man who knew that, in his social circle, being asked to define them was considered a microaggression.
In practice, Patrick had confused having a Twitter feed with having a character. He spent his adult life performing his values for an audience that had never requested the show, turning every happy hour into a seminar on “decentering the self” while remaining the most central, loudest person in the room.
He once refused to stand for the national anthem at Fenway Park to protest the latest Trump-era atrocity -- a stance he announced at a volume intended for the three rows behind us while holding a sixteen-dollar Fenway Frank. When I gently pointed out the irony of a “solidarity protest” funded by a multinational stadium corporation, he explained, with a completely straight face, that supporting the stadium’s unionized mustard-pump operators was actually a localized act of community resistance.
And that was the thing about Patrick -- he always said bullshit like it with a straight face.
He drank with the joyless, dedicated efficiency of a man trying to outrun his own shadow. Between sips of beer he name-dropped famous actors and screenwriters he’d “consulted for” with the casual frequency of a man who believed proximity to fame was a transferable skill. He didn’t just tip twenty percent; he laid the receipt flat on the table, face up, and lingered over the total as if he were signing a peace treaty. He had a way of paying for dinner -- slowly, theatrically, with a heavy, martyr-like sigh -- that made you feel as though you had personally extracted a pint of his blood and would be expected to provide a formal thank-you note by morning.
I kept him around because he knew people in the publishing world and in Hollywood, and because after my mentor Jeff died, Patrick was essentially all that was left of that world. I am not proud of this calculation, but I am committed to the honesty of it all.
I arrived at the address Reba had texted me wearing a blazer and dress pants -- modest, neutral. Patrick arrived in jeans, and a printed T-shirt advertising a band I had never heard of and suspected he hadn’t either.
“I just hope it’s not one of those ones places where they won’t let you ask questions.” He muttered, as we reached the door, as if we’d agreed to donate a kidney -- his kidney, specifically, under duress.
“It’s a prayer service, not a deposition, Patrick.” I said. But he didn’t seem to hear me.
I had never been to an Orthodox service. The differences from Reform Judaism are significant. In my Reform world, Hebrew was a melodic suggestion -- softly sung, accompanied by a guitar, and paced for those of us who still needed the phonetic transliteration to keep up. But for the Orthodox religion, Hebrew was a high-speed rail. It was read with a rapid, rhythmic fluency by people who had clearly been speaking to God in the original text since they were in diapers.
And in Reform Judaism synagogues, families sit together. Here, at the Orthodox synagogues, the genders were strictly segregated, just like at a typical prayer room in a mosque. But the most striking difference was the motion.
This rocking is called shuckling, from the Yiddish word, “to shake.” It is a traditional practice of swaying back and forth during prayer, meant to engage the entire body in worship -- to become, symbolically, a flickering flame reaching toward God.
A kind woman appeared at my elbow within minutes of my arrival. She took one look at my face -- which I can only imagine read as, “Help Me!” -- and appointed herself my guide.
“Come stand with me,” she said. “I’ll show you what to do.”
We went to the women’s side of the partition and I watched her feet and mirrored them. I had no idea what I was saying, but I said it with conviction, which I have found is approximately sixty percent of what any religious service requires. My companion was patient and warm, correcting me with the gentle efficiency of someone who had guided many bewildered guests before me and harbored no judgment about any of them.
But Patrick lasted ten minutes.
I know this because I noticed, during a moment of communal prayer, that the men’s section had developed a Patrick-shaped gap. I found him in a small anteroom at the back of the prayer room, sprawled across an armchair with the defeated posture of a man who had been personally wronged by the architecture. He was scrolling on his phone in one hand and scrunching up the yarmulke in the other hand that one of the men had offered him to wear on his head before entering the synagogue.
“Can you believe this?” Patrick said, not in a whisper, but in the full-throated roar he usually reserved for winning arguments at brunch. He was a guest in a house of worship, yet he was conducting a performance review of a two-thousand-year-old tradition as if it were a poorly managed Starbucks.
“The separation is completely regressive,” he announced, waving a hand at the prayer room with the dismissiveness of an uninvited building inspector. “The shuckling is weird. And I’m sorry, but when the rabbi or whatever finally spoke English, the first thing that comes out of his mouth is remembering the Holocaust? The Holocaust, the Holocaust, the Holocaust. Six million, six million. We get it. Do you really have to keep reminding us?”
There is a specific, clarifying sting in watching a person finally reveal the exact brand of rot you’ve suspected was there all along. It takes a monumental, almost breathtaking lack of empathy to stand in a synagogue and complain that the Jews are being too “repetitive” about their own genocide. Patrick wasn’t even trying to be respectful; he was simply annoyed that the persistence of historical grief was an inconvenience to his afternoon. He said it with the serene confidence of a man who mistakes his own bigotry for “intellectual rigor,” entirely unaware that he had just crossed the line from guest to absolute ghoul.
I said nothing. I had learned, by then, that some responses need to marinate.
After the service, a reception materialized with the synchronized efficiency of a high-end catering operation, overseen by people whose primary spiritual mission was to ensure that no one left the building with an empty stomach. Almost immediately, I was flanked by a trio of young Orthodox men. Their intentions were, I suspected, mostly evangelical -- the religious equivalent of a very polite high-pressure sales pitch to convert me to the Orthodox religion.
I had my script ready. I was going to be the diplomat of the Diaspora. I was going to say, “Thank you, but I’m Reform. I’m just visiting, and I truly appreciate the hospitality.” But before I could launch my pre-recorded message, one of them, Herschel, began a relentless but charming campaign for my attendance at his family’s Shabbat dinner. He spoke of his family’s Rosh Hashanah table with the kind of reverence usually reserved for championship sports teams, suggesting that spending the High Holy Holiday anywhere else would be a theological error of the highest magnitude.
It was, improbably, the most welcomed I had felt in a Jewish space since I started going back to the synagogue right after the pandemic. It was a stark, refreshing contrast to the years I’d spent at Temple Sinai, essentially acting as my own defense attorney against the skepticism of eight-year-olds.
But that was when Patrick materialized at my elbow with the energy of a man who had spotted a situation he’d decided required management. He stepped directly between me and the three Orthodox men -- physically, bodily, like a human traffic cone -- and announced to the general vicinity: “She’s not interested.” Then he gripped my arm, just above the elbow, and steered me toward where Reba and her family were standing on the other side of the room at a pace that did not invite discussion.
“Glad I got there when I did,” he said in the satisfied tone of someone who has just performed an extraction and expects to be thanked for it. “Another five minutes and Herschel would have tried to convert you to be his wife.” He laughed at his own joke. He often did. It was one of his more cringeworthy qualities.
I looked back at the three men. Herschel gave a small shrug, which I interpreted as: It happens.
I am no longer friends with Patrick. I wish I could say the Orthodox synagogue was the thing that finally did it, but the truth is it took me another year and a half to stop making allowances for someone who had been showing me exactly who he was since approximately the first week I knew him. The Orthodox synagogue was not the revelation. It was merely the confirmation -- clearly labeled, impossible to misread, delivered in his own voice, in a building that deserved better.
To be clear, I was not about to convert to Orthodox Judaism. I love being a Reform Jew. I love it the way I love a good pair of jeans -- broken in, comfortable, and mine. I love that our rabbi gets us home by eight so that I can watch Noah Wyle save some lives on The Pitt. I love that our machzor has English translations so that I can fully comprehend what exactly I am singing in Hebrew. And I love that someone brings in the black and white cookies after Shabbat service from Zabar’s.
What I did recognize, standing in that anteroom watching Patrick sink into a K-hole on his phone, was that my own Reform practice had gone somewhat dormant, and that this was a problem I had the power to fix. After all, I had memorized the entire Shabbat service at age nine. I had a Bat Mitzvah. I had done the work, and then I had quietly stopped showing up for it, which is the religious equivalent of getting a gym membership but then never exercising your use of it. The least I could do, at this point in my life, was show up on a Friday night if I had nothing else going on.
And if I can’t make it to the sanctuary on Friday nights, I’d spend that time with my friends -- the very thing I used to pray for back in Sunday school while my classmates were busy ostracizing me and kicking the shit out of my shins under the table.
Spending Friday night with people who genuinely enjoyed my company, and who didn’t feel the need to dismantle my self-esteem feels like its own form of worship. It’s my way of thanking the universe for finally delivering on a decade-old request.
I know I still have a ways to go, but for a moment in that Orthodox synagogue -- standing in that warm, crowded room, being shown exactly where to put my feet and being handed more food than I could possibly finish by strangers who assumed, without verification, that I was one of them -- I felt something I didn’t quite have a name for. It was the sensation of being included without having to argue for it. It was the rare, quiet grace of belonging without a footnote.
Back at Tot Shabbat, the final commandments were coming in: No homework, more screen time, bedtime abolished entirely, etc..
I had been sitting in the back for the better part of an hour and I had been thinking -- as one does, in synagogues, in the quiet space between someone else’s prayer -- about what I would put on as an eleventh commandment, if God had somehow left it blank and handed me the chisel.
Something simple. Something that would have fit on a Post-it note. Something Patrick, with all his education and his strong opinions had somehow never managed to empathize.
The absolute barest minimum:
Don’t be a dick.
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