Introduction

I suppose it would be a good idea to start with who I am and why I'm here.  My name is Larisa.  I was born in Oregon but moved when very young to a suburb of Washington, D.C. and only recently moved back to Oregon.  I grew up in an unusually non-religious environment and still do not entirely understand the reason for this; I suspect there is a story I've never heard.  My next door neighbor first described angels to me while we were sitting in the dirt, playing with little erasers shaped like animals.  I went inside and asked my mother if angels were real.  Her answer, "Angels are real if you believe they are!" 

I was sent off to a Mormon summer camp when I was eleven, probably because it was inexpensive and fairly close by.  On the second night, while we were all clustered around the campfire, the camp leader asked if I would read from the Scriptures. I was totally mystified.  "What are Scriptures?"  I asked.  To the leader's credit, she quickly stopped the giggling and whispering by telling the other girls that it was a good deed to be kind to outsiders.  The other girls were nice to me the entire six weeks. 

I really started asking questions in junior high and high school and tagged along with neighbors to their various places of worship.  I caught my father (may his memory be a blessing) watching tv specials about the life of Jesus a couple of times and confronted him:  "I thought you didn't believe."  He told me Mom didn't believe.  She told me he didn't believe.  I didn't know what to believe.

I visited a Catholic church first and hated it.  It was stuffy.  I thought it was silly that  people had to confess their sins to another person who wasn't their parent.  I knew people who put statues on their lawns when they wanted to sell their houses, had rosaries and velvet paintings and statuettes of Mary.  (If you haven't guessed by now, I'm middle-aged... younger readers probably haven't seen a real velvet painting ever...) I was favorably impressed by the architecture, but negatively by the hurdles one had to jump to get to God... there were all these saints and religious officials in the way, and then Mary and Jesus and finally there was God. 

Seeking a new perspective as an adult, I visited the National Cathedral twice as an adult.  I lingered long in the gilded and marbeled rooms, taking photographs and longing to touch.  I hurt my neck looking up at the ceiling.  I loved the stained glass.  Hoping to understand, I searched the faces of other women present.  I was clearly a tourist, in sensible slacks and shoes, with a camera.  On the faces of the more reverantly dressed,  I saw thoughtfulness, concentration, irritation with the wrigglings of children and even dewy transcendance.  I, however, felt nothing other than curiosity over the human effort and expense involved in the creation of this building.  I wanted to belt out the tune from Porgy and Bess:   "It ain't necessarily so... the things that they're liable to tell in the Bible... it ain't necessarily so."  I figured if God was present in the Cathedral, He would rattle those magnificent stained glass windows in answer.  Instead, I simply left. 

I visited several Methodist, Mormon and Presbytarian Churches and felt like Huckleberry Finn, longing to be outside.

When I was out in the country, away from the light pollution that stretched 20 miles beyond DC (probably farther now!), I would look at the stars and feel God.  I also felt God in the wind, in thunderstorms, in meadows and rivers and lakes and the ocean... in other words, I felt God whenever other humans were not involved.

I began to pray in thanks, but never for assistance.  I began to believe as a Deist does, that there is a God, but He is very far removed from the daily existence of mere mortals like us. 

As a teenager and young adult, I had a fascination with children of religious workers.  I dated several sons of preachers.  This made it easy to visit other churches.  I felt nothing until I went to a revival at a black Baptist church in Vienna, Virginia.  Here was part of what I longed for:  active participation on the part of the community.  People sang, swayed, laughed, got up from their pews to shout out and offered themselves for salvation.  These people weren't in church because their mothers or wives or community thought they should be.  They were there because they loved it and they lived it. 

I considered offering myself to be saved.  The problem?  I had read in the Bible that Jesus said "I came not to change the law."  So I wondered why a whole new religion was based around him.  Jesus disagreed with certain sects of Judaism, but he lived as a Jew, keeping kosher until the end.  Peter, his disciple, kept kosher for years after the crucifixion.  Jesus taught people to be better people and better Jews during a time it seemed very likely that the world would end. 

I continued to visit churches as a young adult.  I toured the part of the Mormon Tabernacle in Maryland open to visitors.  I gasped at the golden dome of the Buddhist Temple in northern Virginia.  I enjoyed the gardens and the red candles in the Franciscan Monestary in DC.  I noticed, however, that the monks were wearing very fashionable shoes under their plain brown robes.  I wondered:  were they rebelling quietly or had there been an actual decision to allow this small luxury in a life of ascetism? 

I dabbled in Buddhism, Shintoism and studied Native American beliefs.  I read about Pagans and became friends with Rastafarians in Richmond, even visiting their makeshift church and playing much of their music on a radio show I hosted, but never partaking of that stinky stuff. 

One thing I realized early was that I was insecure about many aspects of myself, but my intelligence was not one of them.  I never once got drunk or stoned and lost control of what sometimes seemed my only asset.  Always physically and socially clumsy, never quite healthy, I was the brunt of jokes throughout school.

At 20 I married a Japanese citizen who owned a DC sushi bar.  We accidentally got pregnant almost immediately and that strained what was probably an illogical marriage, anyway.  We divorced shortly after our son's birth. 

At 21 I walked into the first synagogue I had ever visited and announced to the office staff I wanted to join.  I had never attended a single service.  I looked extremely young at the time, maybe 15, and very blonde.  They viewed me with what appeared to be disdain.  Embarrassed, I left and didn't set foot in a synagogue again for 23 years! 

Over the years, however, I occasionally felt secretly Jewish.  After I moved to Oregon I started having these thoughts more often.  A few times I identified myself as Jewish when asked.  I began having dreams, many of them in the summer of 2009.  After a major health scare in September, these dreams became relentless, as if I was being told it was long past time to do something about it.  In one of these dreams I was lobbying on behalf of Jewish interests in Congress.  (I told this to students in and Introduction to Torah class and they laughed, but this was really not very far fetched for me, since I began lobbying Congress for environmental causes when I was 8 and still actively pester Congress to uphold Constitutional privacy and property rights, especially when they affect farmers.)  In another dream a major public figure I have admired for 10 years divorced his wife and asked me to marry him; I surprised myself even in the dream by saying I could not because he was Christian and I was Jewish!  I told him my religion was as important to me as his was to him and I knew we'd never be happy.

During my rather painful and public (in a small town) recovery, I was visited by people of multiple religions, trying to convert me and save me before I possibly took a turn for the worse.  I was visited by folks from a branch of an East Indian religion and from numerous denominations of Christians.  I, of course, told them I was Jewish, which hardly stemmed the tide of prosyletizers; it may have even increased it.  One afternoon a lady was sitting in a chair near me, watching three people come in.  She said, "Wow, God must really want you!"  I smiled at that; I was starting to believe it as well, although I told her I wasn't a "very good Jew". 

By Hannukah, I was trolling online, researching.  I bought the CD "Songs in the Key of Hannukah" and played the songs that included rap (!) over and over so I could sing along!  I started raiding the library and shortly exhausted their Jewish books.  Like many others, the economy had a devastating effect on my personal finances, but I started buying books whenever I found them inexpensively on Amazon.  Books or groceries?  Books. 

During Christmas, I was visited by a Jehovah's Witness at work.  I've had pleasant conversations with several women from the local church.  They were nice ladies, whether we disagreed or not.  This fellow, however, would not leave.  He talked my ear off and since it was slow at work, I couldn't get away from him.  The following day he was back, so I told him that I was happy with my Judaism, thank you very much, and didn't want to endure another three hours of his prosyletizing.  I thought he would say excuse me and leave, but he unleashed a violent torrent of "Jesus killer" type comments at me and wrote a very long, unflattering letter to my employer about me.  I made a copy just in case he turned out to be a dangerous stalker and I needed court evidence later.  Thankfully, I haven't seen him since. 

I enrolled in the above mentioned Intro to Torah class at Temple Beth Israel, which was an hour and 15 minute drive away.  Despite my constant exhaustion from working two dead end jobs, I was alert and an active participant, often seeming to know more than the born Jews in the class.  I cornered the charming Rabbi Maurice after the third class and told him I wanted to convert.

We met a few weeks later and I was disappointed to hear I'd have to wait a year! 

In this blog I will share my thoughts as I discover wonderous, puzzling, difficult and humorous things along my conversion journey.