On Being Jewish Right Now: How it Looks in My Mind's Eye

In Between & Up Above

Hello My Friends,

As I’ve written in earlier posts, one of the many reasons why Judaism appeals to me is that inquiry and questioning and curiosity form the very core of Jewish tradition. I also love that Jewish identity precedes Revelation—to be a Jew is to be a member of the tribe even before said tribe entered into a covenant with G-d.

I felt a part of the tribe before I decided to pursue conversion. I’m married to a Jewish man, and I’m held in love and friendship by many additional Jewish persons.

The current climate of toxic polarization and spiking antisemitism didn’t make me want to run away from Judaism. It only made me want to run straight into the Mikvah and never look back.

After October 7th, I witnessed not only a lack of empathy for the Israeli victims, but actual celebration of barbarism. I felt totally abandoned by the world—it seemed as if mass movements of evil had overtaken the collective globe. I wept continuously.

I also felt politically homeless. No, it was more lethal than that. I felt visceral terror, as if the deepest parts of myself were being crushed by America’s toxic polarization.

If it’s a quirk of neurodivergence, I’m not sure, but my mind often presents fully formed ideas as mental images. My unconscious grasps the entirety of an idea before I become consciously aware of its smaller components.

Images arrive spontaneously.

Sometimes, I see metaphorical imagery. Other times, my mind concocts something more “structural” than an elaborate metaphor. I’ll “see” an underlying geometric construct as representative of some bigger picture. Oftentimes, literal shapes appear in my mind, ones whose arrangement depict relational paradigms or systemic function between parts of a greater whole.

I had assumed that everyone thought like this—it was shocking to learn (back in my mid-40s) that this was not the case.

I want to share what this image—of being Jewish right now—looks like from my internal perspective. Although my mind paints masterful internal pictures, I can barely manage to draw a stick figure, so I relied on AI for help getting the following graphic out of my mind and onto the page.

Here’s what I kept seeing in my mind’s eye after October 7th:

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I saw both the far right and the far left as sending swirling toxic energy toward me. I felt suffocated and threatened by both sides of the political spectrum and imagined a third point overhead, one that would force more dimensionality into the world by generating a triangle as opposed to a straight line.

I wanted to ascend & project myself up over the flat line of toxic polarization toward the Star of David. I felt as if moving my consciousness upward would help me obtain more perspective.

Moreover, I felt as if I continuously zoomed in and out. My mind would look straight at the worst horrors in the world, and then, in an effort to grasp the big picture, I kept finding myself zooming back out again.

Perhaps I was caught inside of my own ambivalence: I wanted to escape the world, but at the same time, I kept returning to study its horrors more closely.

Note that the image of a triangle, I now realize, is even shaped like a mountain (think Revelation at Mount Sinai):

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Recently, Elissa Wald described being Jewish in the following way:

As I experience it, to wake up in America today is to continually find ourselves in the grip of an ever-tightening vise. Intifadists to the left of us, fascists to the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle: a Jew. It’s no wonder our ancestors described our path in the world as a narrow bridge.

When I read the above paragraph, it resonated immediately. This is precisely how I’ve been feeling since October 7th.

At first, I felt alone. Then, I looked up and noticed that I wasn’t. I was in some new liminal space, but so were many of my Jewish friends.

Something clicked inside—call it a moment of recognition—and I realized: I need to convert to Judaism.

Thanks for reading. If anyone has a mind that thinks in ways similar to mine, please share in the comments.

xoxo Jen xoxo