My story really starts with my parents, who came from very different backgrounds.
Mom is the youngest of 6 kids - Pentecostal preacher's daughter - and was raised in Wenatchee, WA. My grandmother was 45 when mom was born and there is a vast age difference between my mom and her oldest sister who basically raised her. This aunt of mine left home in her early 20's and moved to Taiwan to start an orphanage and work as a missionary. She married a British man and raised 7 kids in Taiwan.
Mom's upbringing was strict. She wasn't allowed to wear sleeveless dress for reasons of modesty, movies and card playing were considered immoral/evil and frowned upon. She was very involved and immersed in the church and took what she read in her Bible as not just a friendly suggestion. She says she gave up eating pork in high school because she read in her Bible that it wasn't to be eaten. Period.
After high school she left Washington state to move to California to attend Pentecostal Bible College (seminary?). While there, she was introduced to my Dad by the pastor of the church they were both attending.
Dad wasn't raised with much religion. His father was rabidly anti-religious although Dad's mother did take him and his siblings to church on occasion. I don't know many details but have the general impression that Dad sort of raised himself, dabbled in some things he maybe shouldn't have, ran with a rough crowd and in general didn't have much moral direction. He was very good-looking and married at the age of 18 (the Friday night after high school graduation) because his girlfriend was pregnant. The marriage lasted a week and in the divorce/annulment he gave up all rights to the baby who he never saw.
Dad married again and had a son. The marriage lasted about 3 1/2 years I believe.
Then Dad moved to California because he got a job working for United Airlines as a mechanic. Through a co-worker he became a born again Christian.
He and my Mom met and married and they continued to be very involved in their church. Dad led the youth service, they both sang, Dad played the drums, mom played the piano, organ and accordion.
My brother and I were raised in the church for O.....I dunno.......I'm guessing until I was around 8 or so. Then we stopped going and I'm not sure why. Dad mentioned recently that we were asked to leave but again.....I'm not sure why. I should ask but I keep forgetting.
Anyway, from that point on, my Dad would lead the four of us in a small, private church service at home. He'd teach from the Bible, we'd sing hymns, my brother and I would be given 3 Bible verses a week to memorize and we'd have to stand up and recite them the following week. Sometimes the four of us would brainstorm together and set the verses to music of our own composition just to make them easier to remember. To this day, I can still remember some of them. We never left the dining table after a meal without reading from the Bible (HATED that!).
My parents also made the decision that Mom would homeschool both of us which she did through (for me) 11th grade. We used correspondence courses and were close with a number of other Christian families who were doing the same.
After we'd been having "church at home" for some time, my Mom started seeing things in what she was reading and being taught that didn't make sense and being the truth-seeker that she is, she had to find out what was up with that. Mom researches everything to within an inch of it's life and this was no different. Just a lot more was at stake than usual.
She started reading up on the history of the early church, books written by Christian authors, and was stunned when she came to the realization that Catholicism was the original Christianity. (Protestants tend to look upon Catholics as mistaken and, sadly, idolatrous brothers who have strayed from the One True Path.)
She carried on reading the history of the church in chronological order. Now we're up to the 1500s, Martin Luther and reading about the Protestant Reformation. She had always held him in high esteem as being the father of her brand of Christianity. And at the same time she had always strongly believed that the Jews were The Chosen People. But when she read (excerpted in these books she was reading from) what Martin Luther had to say about the Jews (likening them to what comes out of the backside of a pig.....nice huh?), that REALLY pulled the rug out from under her. How
could he? How
dare he? She assumed these excerpts were taken out of context. He
couldn't have said
that! So she called the Berkeley Theological Library and had them send her the complete works of Martin Luther - very large tomes - so she could read these citations along with both the before and the after and get the context and lo and behold......
nothing had been misquoted or taken out of context. Martin Luther started out his career with lots of warm, fuzzy feelings towards the Jews because he was sure they were going to buy his theology and when they didn't, he turned on them.
Mom carried on reading. She was asking questions like: If Jesus was a nice, mitzvah-observant Jewish boy who kept the kosher dietary laws and the holidays and I, as his follower, am supposed to be emulating him, then why don't
I keep kosher? Why don't
I keep the Jewish holidays? Why don't
I keep a Saturday Sabbath? Who changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday? Who gave them the right to? And how dare they? (See:
http://amightywind.com/wolves/sabbathchanged.htm and
http://www.sabbathfellowship.org/biblestudies/erwingane/biblestudy_gane_sabbathchng.htm) It was the early Christians (aka Catholics).
This brings us to Jesus and Paul.
Jesus and Paul weren't even contemporaries and never met. Like Martin Luther, Paul started out with warm fuzzies towards the Jews and when they didn't buy his theology, he, too, turned on them. He then changed his tactics and turned his attention to converting the pagans where he had much success. (Interestingly, sun worship was common among the pagans and very likely had something to do with changing the Sabbath day from the 7th day of the week to the 1st day since the 1st day of the week is named after the sun and would therefore have been considered by them to be of more importance. And we won't even touch on the pagan origins of Christmas!)
It got to the point where she'd read everything on the early church history, Judaism, comparative religions, etc. that the public libraries contained - and remember, everything she'd been reading until now was writting by Christian authors.
That left the Jewish perspective on all of this to explore but......having grown up in white, Christian America, there are widely-prevalent, deep-seated prejudices and stereotypes about Jews that one absorbs, one being that they are penny pinchers and dishonest in their business dealings.
A friend of my Mom's had recommended Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's book The Horeb. There was a Jewish bookstore within about a 45 minute drive from where we lived at the time and my Mom went there to buy this book (which I, myself, have not read). She was on an extremely limited budget at the time and the book was not cheap. She stood outside on the sidewalk shaking in her boots, working up the courage to go into the bookstore. She ran in, bought the book, and got out as fast as she could. She got it home and within days the binding started to fall apart. Here's a dilemma! What should she do? Keep the book and live with the defective binding? Not really the thing to do since she'd paid good money for it. Take it back and have her prejudices about Jews confirmed? She took the book back, walked up to the counter, showed the woman behind the counter the book and just started to explain what the problem was. She barely got 2 words out of her mouth before the woman took the book from her and said, "O of course. Here. Let me get you another one." End of story. My Mom was dumbfounded that it was so simple. What. You mean you're not going to accuse me of damaging the book myself? That woman's perfect response freed my Mom (and us) to go back and shop at that store on many other occasions and we got to know the mother-daughter owners of the store quite well. If that shop owner had had any other response, my Mom would have walked out and never looked back and we most probably would not be Jewish today. Which just goes to show you what a profound effect your actions can have in someone's life and you may never know.
Mom carried on reading about Judaism vs. Christianity, now from a Jewish perspective. She started sharing her findings with Dad who found the whole subject highly threatening and wanted no part of it. She also slowly started asking me and my brother to read certain, easy-read books on the subject. (All of this was going on when I was between the ages of 10-13 approximately.)
There was one small book that I read that made it "click" for me and with which there was no arguing - The Real Messiah.
Mom's research - start to finish - took her three years and over that time she slowly came to the decision that she wanted to convert to Judaism and she asked me and my brother if we also wanted to and we both said yes.
Dad had made some decisions with his life that precipitated their divorce and until my Mom saw that he was headed away from our family with his decisions, she did nothing about pursuing conversion or outward observance.
They separated which allowed her desire to convert to be put on the front burner. They weren't divorced yet so an Orthodox rabbi would not even speak to her so the three of us ended up taking a conversion class for a year that was given by a local Conservative rabbi and in 1986 we had a Conservative conversion because due to my parents still being legally married, that was all we could get at the time. Two years later, after their divorce became final, we learned for 3 more months with an Orthodox rabbi and went to L.A. for our Orthodox conversion.
Like I said......a veeeeery large nutshell.
