Melissa F. Bullins, CPC

Due to my cupital tunnel syndrome and everything else going on with my "right upper extremity" plus being 40 days out from moving to New York, I made the mistake of taking a tramadol for the inflammation, pain and stress. Tramadol does strange things to me. Mostly nausea and insomnia. So tonight I put that insomnia to work with a quench for some light Torah study. That was almost 2 hours ago. Torah goes deep and then if you decide to read all of the viewpoints on Miriam for this week's Parsha you will find lots of anti feminist comments which will make you angry and for some reason that makes me read more. I then started to think about interfaith life what with the story of Ruth last week. Stumbled onto the Reform movement's site and discovered a link for PunkTorah, which stuck me as a shock.

I began practicing Judaism at 16, boyfriend had me over for Jewish holidays and at the time I was very angry with G-d and everyone because I was 16. I felt accepted and safe in his dad's girlfriends very Jewish home. In my own home I did not feel safe. I had a little brother convinced if he slept in his bed the angel of death would take him and a mother who replaced the love of her life with a 12 pack of beer a night. Anyway after years of practicing Judaism and studying Jewish life on my own, going in and out of meetings with Rabbis, I found PunkTorah. I found OneShul. They happened to be based in Atlanta and now when I think of how awkward I acted when I first hung out with the lovely couple  now consider to be good friends, I get embarrassed, However  am very thankful, for they gave me community. 

Community never meant much to me until I felt like I belonged with them. All of the temples I had gone to I felt like a total outsider, but with them I felt like just another friend.It inspired me to be myself and come out of my shell a little. It made me go to new places and be more outgoing. Some of those places ended up being temples that I really enjoyed and that allowed me to share my passion of food and gardening. It allowed me the courage to finally go to a Mikvah to become an official member of the tribe.  Shabbat Atlanta, PunkTorah and later Synagogue without walls, made me feel like I had a family, which means so much for someone who has lost both her parents and more. It gave me community and made me feel like I had a place in Jewish Atlanta. This community means so much to me.

It makes me so happy to know that the Union for the Reform movement is directing people to PunkTorah, I hope it will help more people find their community which is my community, and I hope i can help them feel welcomed to it.

My heritage is Northern Irish (although my great grandmother would tell you it was just Ireland when she left Belfast) English, French and a splash of Choctaw nation. If you were to look at me you would assume I'm Irish American if not just Irish (as I was assumed to be when in Europe). I suppose because of this I shouldn't of been surprised when a co worker told me it was impossible for me to be Jew that I had to be a Catholic because ya know I'm Irish. While this is stereotyping Irish (great grandmother was not Catholic by the way) I feel like it was also stereotyping not just what a Jew must look like but Americans too. We all know America is a hodgepodge of ethnicity and culture so why are we still making assumptions based on physical appearances. I suppose this got me to thinking though, what are the traditions of the American Jew.

I would never call myself Ashkenazi and although I love the food traditions of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews I don't really feel like I eat in either style when it comes to day to day meals. My typical week  long meal plan consists of curry salmon belly and jasmine rice, pot roast, chilli, bulgogi, quinoa chowder, burritos, teriyaki chicken and at some point probably a salad and leftovers from a previous dinner. When my friend asked what's the difference between boxty and latkes I didn't have a clear answer. I compared both to Waffle House hash browns. I then told her it depended if I had mashed potatoes left over.

The truth is I am a convert which sometimes just lumps me in with this idea of not having a connection to the Jewish people. I think that's ridiculous too though. I go to Shul or Shul based activities on the regular. I am happily married to a a non Jewish man and our Ketubah is in English because I can't read Hebrew, however isn't it saying something that we have a Ketubah? I often read things questioning how interfaith families raise their children and how can a marriage last if two people are of different faiths, but if we are going to say all that then shouldn't we be questioning how America can even last?