0200 hrs
Thoughts From the Heart
by Joseph Smith
2012 November 24

The Long Journey Back Home - Part 1:

The journey that we all make through life is guided by forces far beyond our conscious knowledge. We are like travellers who innocently buy our ticket for a trip, never quite knowing where the journey will end or how. The destinations our lives and their meanings are revealed only later on. Only after we arrive at the stop, shake off the dust and look back at the distance may we say 'of course! This makes perfect sense!' Like all of us, I too began my travels through life unaware of the secret destinations at which I would arrive. Like most of us, I am wiser now than when I began. Where my journey will end, I cannot say. The final destination of our lives is determined by an inscrutable interweaving of the mysterious forces that guide us and the power of the choices we make, big and small, throughout our lives. One of the biggest choices for me cae in the years immediately following my returning home to my Jewish roots that didn't accept me. Being the mistake of a forbidden love or infatuation between my Orthodox Jewish mother and black Catholic raised father, whose both parents were finally fed up with the disillusion of both faiths, followed their hearts, thus Jessica and I were produced by this mixed faith & race marriage. Blessed fruits?? Or innocent pioneers into the vast experiment of mixing races and creeds?? In Jewish law, halacha, the child draws from the mother's lineage. It's called matrilinial descent. Which means that I and my twin sister are Jewish under Jewish law. That will never change when I had tried my hardest to put my Jewish roots aside, I had been signalled by my unconscious that it would not be done with me so easily. I had tried to cut myself off from my connection with Jews and the Jewish cycle of holidays, but for years I awoke on Yon Kippur or Passover morning with Hebrew prayers and melodies ringing in my head, when I would trouble to check the calendar, I would realise that inner clock of my being was still set on Judaism. I remember coming across old letters written to my mother from my grandmother in the attic, housed in an old locked chest along with other Jewish items. One letter I'll never forget. It simply read: Intermarriage is the one boundary which, when crossed, cuts a Jew off from the people of Israel "immediately" and with no recourse, especially an inter-racial marriage or relationship. The continuation of the Jewush people is simply not possible when intermarriages occur. You cannot live with a goy (non Jewish person) especially a schvartze (black person, often used derogatorily) and delude yourself into thinking that you are adhering to your people and remaining a link in the great chain of the Jewish generation. And we cannot accept him, nor you for marrying this goy. You are dead to us, we will say and sit shiva for you. (Shiva: seven days of Jewish ritual mourning prescribed to the next of kin of the deceased.)

I was ELEVEN when I came across this letter. I did not need much more proof that the Jewish world was uninviting. I registered this letter in my mind as emblematic of the giant obstacle that barred my way from reconnecting with the Jewish tribe. Baffled, I wondered at the nature of the strange letter - was it a tragedy or comedy? I figured that only time would determine that. I informed my mother that I would no longer be Jewish - she never knew that I had found the letter and more like them from members of my mother's tribe. The wrenching that follows a disappointed relationship, whether it be a betrayal, abandonment, or a simple parting of the ways, is one of the many times our egos will die as we travel through our lives. Each death seems to shatter us anew, but buries in our ego's wreckage lies the seeds of our next blossoming. If we can allow ourselves to be true to our pain, neither distracting ourselves from it nor ameliorating it with some new fancy, the pain can guide us back to ourselves and a higher voice of wisdom. The act of returning to ourselves and to the voice of our own Neshama Elohit, is known in the Jewish tradition as Joshuvah: the cycle of Jewish holidays particularly the high holidays in the autumn, are specifically designed to help us do the work of introspection and coming home to ourselves. But we don't have to wait for the holidays; life presents us with ample opportunities to return to the self all the time. The process of returning to this larger self is something like trying to see in one's own blindspot. It is ever so close yet inscrutable. In trying to know that which is us but is just our of our range of vision, it is very common to project the self onto the screen of others, as I had done with my other siblings, investing them with the wisdom and the answers that we have inside ourselves but cannot yet access on our own. The process of projecting self onto others is universal. It usually begins with our parents and continues with friends, lovers, and teachers throughout life. It is the ego's way of growing, modelling itself on those that reflect back its own dormant qualities. Problems occur only when we remain ignorant that the projection is going on and more importantly, we do not eventually "reclaim our projection". This means realising that the people upon whom we have projected our wisdom are mere mortals, making their own way through life in the best way possible for them. The growth and empowerment that occurs for us after we have reclaimed our projection comes by the way of loneliness with our self no longer projected outwardly, we are thrown back on our own resources, which are visually greater than we give ourselves credit for. Then we must realise that ultimately, there is no map to follow but the one we ourselves compose. So it was for me. My parents marriage had begun to fail, the strength and clarity I had projected upon them had shattered, and it was upon me to find these qualities within. But it was not only my parents, siblings that ceased to provide me with guidance and safe refuge. Judaism itself (at least my mother's family version of it) had sorely disappointed me too. I had seen how their Judaism had treated my mother and I. In god's book was it EVER correct to hurt outsiders, as my father had been hurt? I began to ask myself questions about my own allegiance to this heritage of mine.