The truth of the matter is, I have always, to some extent, wanted to be a Jew.
That idea in itself is odd to me, since I have never been one of those God-people. I seriously can only deal with so many capitalized pronouns - He, His, whatnot. I don't capitalize pronouns because I believe in grammar and because I believe that if there's a supreme being out there, he/she/it most likely has bigger and better things to care about than whether or not I capitalize pronouns when referring to him/her/it. It sounds obnoxious, maybe I am obnoxious, but it always sort of irked me. To each their own, etc etc - but that's a rule I follow pretty badly, as you can tell, since I am all: my judgement, let me tell you it.
My point is simply, though, that I am a little bit terrified of organized religion, which may be in part because I am a rational being and in part because I am a cynical bitch who likes to be contrary - and in all honestly, in part because I grew up in a country that is largely secular these days, but that used to be very strongly Catholic and still bears the scars. I don't think everyone who is Catholic is evil and all Opus Dei fifties-style brainwashey. I don't even think every Catholic priest is a crazed child molester. I do however think that when one religious organization becomes too powerful in a certain locale, it can do horrible things - and since religious organizations derive their power from something that is super-human (as in, above human understanding), they are extra dangerous in that regard, since they can easily terrify great numbers of people into obedience.
But anyway, so far for conspiracy-theory paranoia. I have always wanted to be a Jew, and that is odd for yet another reason: I didn't grow up around any Jews. At all. I am from a small, European country, and whereas the larger cities do have a number of Jews (many of them Chassidic, but there are Reform Jews around as well, and there's at least one temple), I'm from the countryside where there is little religious variety: everyone is technically a Catholic by birth, but people are largely secular and religion is not much of a blip on most people's radar. I went to Catholic schools and there, especially in high school, I was given some background on Judaism and its holidays (we had pretty in-depth classes on non-Christian religions, which I am grateful for), but it was all very theoretical, since there were no actual real-life Jews around to celebrate Sukkot, or Purim, or Rosh Hashana. I learned what these terms meant - I had to memorize them for an exam at some point in my highschool life, I'm sure - but I didn't know what they were like in practice.
And yet I've always been drawn to Judaism, even back when the only Jews I'd ever encountered were Anne Frank and some chassidim I saw, even if I didn't actually 'meet' them, on a train when I was little. I was fascinated by the holocaust, but not in a morbid sort of way - I wanted to know about these people's lives, not particularly about their deaths, because they were the only point of reference I had to Judaism, if that makes sense - I wanted to know about how they lived before the War, and afterward. When I was fifteen, I bought a book to learn Hebrew, and though I never quite got somewhere, I worked on the alphabet for a while. I have always been fascinated with the Bible, in an academic way, but it was always the Old Testament that fascinated me, rather than the New: a religion teacher I once had, a dear, dear religion teacher, once referred to it as a library of stories, and that's how I saw it and why I appreciated it.
I have a childhood, a youth, of being a little bit Jewish at heart in a variety of ways. I never thought actually converting was an option, maybe because I didn't realize people COULD convert to Judaism. But there you go, you live, you learn.
