In the fall of 2017, when I was filling out my college application, I wasn’t sure which box
to check off under the question that asked which religion I practiced. When I submitted my
Common App, I’d ended up checking the “Other” box, because I didn’t practice–and still
don’t–only one religion. It felt weird to do so, because both religions I practice were listened,
but I couldn’t check both of them.
I consider myself to be half-Jewish and half-Christian. My mother was raised
Presbyterian and my father was raised Ashkenazi Conservative Jewish. When I was born, I
didn’t have a baptism or a baby naming. I didn’t have a bat mitzvah when I turned thirteen. I’ve
only been to both a synagogue and a church twice in my entire life, and all four instances were to
attend other people’s events. (I attend Denison’s Hillel on Fridays, and I joke that going to
Shabbat is the most religious I’ve ever been.) I haven’t read the Bible or the Torah, but I have
read the Haggadah, because of the four holidays my family really “does”, Passover is one of
them, along with Hanukkah, Easter, and Christmas.
Technically, I shouldn’t “be” anything Jewish at all, because the religion is passed from
the mother to the child, and my mother was the Christian parent. But since I’ve been practicing
both religions my whole life, I can’t imagine myself without any sort of Jewish identity. My last
name does, after all, have “witz” at the end, which is typical of several traditional Jewish last
names. Before I went college, I learned that one could consider Jewishness not only as a religion,
but also as an ethnicity. I was baffled. I had always considered my ethnicity to be full Caucasian.
Did it make any sense to consider myself half an ethnicity now, too, even if my Jewishness
wasn’t fully valid? Was I now only half Caucasian? What did this mean for how I viewed and
defined myself, and for how others viewed and defined me?
Other subjects have created conflict for me as well. For instance: tattoos. I’ve always
wanted one. However, I’m hesitant to follow through with it, not just because of how my parents
would react, but because of the religious implications. From what I understand, most Jewish
people don’t get tattoos for two reasons: if you have one, the Torah says you can’t be buried in a
Jewish cemetery, and there were a large number of Holocaust victims that were tattooed against
their will, their numbers serving as labels for their prisoners and executioners. Thus, I’ve had
think about about whether a tattoo on my body would dishonor my religion, my ancestry, and the
Holocaust victims. But, at the same time, I’m technically not Jewish, which means I wouldn’t be
even be buried in a Jewish cemetary to begin with. Is it still dishonoring the Holocaust victims if
I get a non-numerical tattoo somewhere not on my arm? Who and what do I obey? Where are my
morals supposed to lie with this?