Posting this here because I have no idea where else to post it, but sometimes I have this weird ambivalence about how I process my experiences and feelings that led me to realizing that I'm Jewish and coming home.
To be clear: my point of connection is (in terms of tangible, concrete, provable connections) strictly religious. I don't know 3/4 of my ancestry for a number of reasons (adoption, divorce, estrangement, etc.), but what I do know is (ironically) my matrilineal line, which is primarily German protestant. My adoptive patrilineal side is Danish. No known Jewish ancestry or Jewish relatives.
So I have no idea how to talk about the experiences I had growing up that in hindsight show that I have always had a Jewish soul in search of my people. My relentless questions directed at my Christian leadership that they could not answer and did not understand, but that was, in its own way, a form of love. The fact that my given name is a biblical name very common to born Jews and between that and certain physical features, people throughout my childhood asked me if I was Jewish to my confusion and fear (but also weirdly pride.) This feeling of belonging nowhere and diaspora and huntedness that never made any sense until I began to assimilate into Jewish culture. The fact that in learning history, I always identified with the Jews fleeing persecution rather than the usual childhood imagining that you would be the hero going against your own people; that you would be one of the few "good ones." This, despite my known blood heritage being literally from the people doing the persecution. (And to clarify, this was not just an empathy reaction to any/all historical victims; just Jews.) And so then when I finally did find my people, when I finally stopped fighting this deep sense of connection and approached the community to convert, all of these things both made more and less sense. I leaned into the religious and spiritual side of it because that, at least, parses for other people. But there's this other layer; a layer that feels much more like my transition than something that makes sense as a rational part of my spiritual life.
And I never know how to talk about it. Because it's all very loaded, and I never want to talk over people whose families actually *do* have this known history, who know names and sometimes faces of people they lost or never got to meet. Who have whole phantom limbs of a family tree that never came to be. Whose names are the only memorial possible for their ancestors. That is all brutally real and tangible, and so I end up never talking about my deep but utterly intangible connection because it always feels disrespectful, even if it is part of a separate conversation.
I don't know. I don't have any answers for this. But as always, with Tisha b'Av coming up, I am thinking about it. Trying to understand it. Trying, and mostly failing, to put words to it.
I learned recently, that there is a strong mystical tradition of Jewish souls being reincarnated and living new lives, sometimes in very different circumstances (different minhag, location, era, gender, etc.) I'm not sure I believe that literally. But it certainly makes sense to me as someone who grew up in the shadow of searching for my people, even if I ultimately found them.
