Born Into a Coven of Hippie Witches, I Discovered I’m Jewish…and I Deeply Love God

From love child to Jewish attorney ...

Oh My Goddess! Josh continues: I know now that my family tree is adorned with Rabbis and Hebrew novelists, Yiddish auctioneers and shtetl folk healers. But, as a kid, I didn't know a thing about it. I didn't even know I was Jewish. My mother, Claudia, pulled up her roots as a teenager and came west to San Francisco in the "summer of love," trying to find a new family – one based on a shared vision of pagan spirituality and communitarian love, not tribal bloodlines or ancient texts. I only sensed that my mother hadn't been born a Wiccan ... when she was truly alarmed she would exclaim "Oh my God!" forgetting the preferred term "Oh my Goddess!"

From love child to Jewish attorney ...

No Atheists in the Apocalypse – When the Three Mile Island reactor melted down in 1979, Claudia was convinced that a nuclear apocalypse was on its way. She spent much of the next year organizing a massive anti-nukes protest parade. My first memory of prayer begins as I am sliding around the back of an open truck with failing brakes on the parade route. I was bargaining in my mind: “If you let this truck get to the end of the parade without me falling out and dying, I won’t even complain once if a nuclear winter comes.” I didn't hear a reply but my prayer was answered, I felt, by an unseen force, deep and close to me – something unitary and all-powerful.

From love child to Jewish attorney ...

Two Eyes Are Better Than Three – We took to the road after that, and the next few years were spent wandering the American West in search of an elusive utopia. On Mount Lassen, California, my mother began training me to be a warlock. Other kids had kindergarten teachers showing them how to pledge allegiance to a flag and recite the alphabet. I had my mother, and she was teaching me about my chakras, the I Ching, and Kundalini yoga. But most importantly for her, she was teaching me about extrasensory perception. My psychic powers. How to harness my sixth sense. How to clear the film away from my third eye, the one that Society didn’t want me to use (or know about). I preferred to look around with my two regular eyes and catch the little details that Claudia didn’t. I noticed the tremors in the puddle that heralded rain and the distinctive face like contours of the burnt tree that marked the turnoff toward the half-built cabin where we were staying.

From love child to Jewish attorney ...

When God Calls – Over the next couple of years I enjoyed unprecedented freedom for a child, but limited supervision also found me struggling alone against the Pacific Ocean to breathe, flying off a cliff in a car with no brakes, and falling from the canopy of a massive cedar tree. These near-death experiences awoke something within me. Each time I felt a deep and commanding spirit suddenly take hold of my body. Some powerful, fatherly force had inhabited me. I was sure of it. It had calmly ordered me to do what I needed to do to survive. It whispered a low guttural breath of confidence into my ear and filled my chest with courage. It infused my arms with strength and pumped my legs with purposeful strides away from oblivion. I didn't have a name yet for the powerful arm shielding me about the shoulders and comforting me.

From love child to Jewish attorney ...

Out of Many, One – The only man that ever treated me like a father was a commune-mate from the San Francisco days named Antonio. I called him Uncle Tony, and he began visiting us once a year wherever we were. Tony was deeply spiritual and practiced a form of self-taught Hinduism. He put me to sleep by chanting the Gayatri Mantra by my bedside. He pronounced the Vedic Sanskrit with a soft Spanish accent that made the mantra sound like gently bubbling water. I could feel myself beginning to drift into the dream world, gliding on the currents of his prayers. “Why do you say that mantra over me?” I mumbled. He answered: “I have to say it every night to keep you safe, to make your dreams come true.” I asked: “But what if I don’t see you again?” He assured me: “I’ll say the mantra for you every night whether we’re together or not. Wherever you are in the world, you’ll be able to hear my voice when you go to sleep.” Uncle Tony's faith inspired me deeply, but something about the way he'd loosely adopted someone else's tradition rang hollow for me. And the cosmos of various Indian deities seemed inaccessible and confusing.

^{photo credit: Daniel Kim}

From love child to Jewish attorney ...

The Stone that the Builder Refused – One year at a Rainbow Gathering in rural Idaho, I met up with a group of Rastafarian holy men who taught me about the Biblical Joshua. They sang and chanted verses from the Old Testament and these resonated with me in a way that no other spiritual tradition had. Claudia later dating a Rastafarian Mennonite who introduced me to Reggae music. The confident longing in Bob Marley's voice and the poetry of his words ignited something within me, particularly the phrase: "the stone that the builder refuse will always be the head cornerstone." In a world of square stones, I felt very much out of place and this gave me comfort. My mother heard me singing and told me the words were from Psalms. I didn't believe her and sat down to read the entire book just to disprove her. She was right, of course, and in the process King David reached across the void of time and space to fill me with ethereal poetry.

^{photo credit: Jaime Lastimosa}

From love child to Jewish attorney ...

In Egypt Land – By the time I was ten years old my mother and I had hitchhiked for thousands of miles and befriended hundreds of exceptionally strange people. We had danced around bonfires and lived in vans, buses, and an ice cream truck. Some nights we slumbered blissfully under the stars, others I lay awake paralyzed by the howling of wolves. Our quest for utopia stalled out in rural Washington State when Claudia married Leopoldo, a former Salvadoran guerrilla fighter who brought with him demons from the civil war in Central America and a serious drinking problem. My mother was convinced that he was a messianic revolutionary hero she had foretold in clairvoyant visions. I was pretty sure Leopoldo was going to kill us. He was an occultist and believed in alchemy and the dark arts of ancient Egypt. He also believed in beating my mother whenever the mood struck him. Our time with him was deeply trying, and I began to question my blossoming faith. Why would God allow this man to treat us this way?

From love child to Jewish attorney ...

Earthly Rites – Around this time, I discovered that I was Jewish by birth and took refuge in the library to hide from my stepfather and to learn about my heritage. Investigating and researching, I rode the reading room through space and time, discovering that I was part of something. Something profound. I was the descendant of an ancient tribe that had emerged from the mists of prehistory to introduce the world to God, to write the Bible, and to shine unto the nations like a beacon of righteousness. We had been scattered to the wind, driven to the four corners of the Earth. Oppressed and demeaned time and time again, yet we wandered on, excelling in isolation wherever we went. This was powerful stuff, and it helped give me the strength to stand up to my stepfather. Claudia and I moved on to a commune near the Canadian border where they observed some of the pagan holidays. Watching the Maypole celebration with incredulity, it struck me that what bothered me most was not the paganism or idol worship of the adults around me, but of its total contrivance. They were making it up as they went along and their ethics and morals eroded as a consequence.

From love child to Jewish attorney ...

Homecoming – So Judaism became my rebellion. I had come to believe that everything that animated my mother was painfully contrived. Her 1970s Wiccan spirituality, her Marxist political perspective, her anarchist Utopia. These were all fabricated fads as outdated as their human creators. I craved authenticity. A tradition with roots that sunk all the way back into the mists of prehistory. I found what I was looking for in the ancient spirituality of the Land of Israel. It was the one and only original, and I would accept no imitations, additions, or substitutions. As my mother began to anticipate my theological progression into Orthodoxy, she cautioned me: “You realize that you’re subscribing to a rule based, patriarchal religion?” I hadn’t thought about it that way before, but it made perfect sense. For a kid who grew up without rules and without a father, could there be anything better?