Anna Redsand

XIV. GER TOSHAV

Something unexpected happened when, preparing for Torah study, I read the parasha about the original Passover. I had always found it easy to imagine that I was an Israelite, preparing the lamb in a mud hut, sprinkling the doorposts with blood, eating on my feet, dressed for a journey. Reading the story this time was different. I didn't imagine being an Israelite; I was one. The story was about me. I told Lakme, "This week I read Torah as a Jew. It meant something completely different to me. I can't describe it."

Lakme was delighted. "That's because when you read it as a Jew, you know that God is protecting you."

I hadn't analyzed the meaning, and I still haven't. It was something I experienced, that I felt rather than thought about. The next week I called Lakme to say I needed some distance from the process. I put away everything Jewish and stopped thinking about religious community. For a few weeks. Then books on Jewish spirituality fell off shelves into my hands again. Jewish magazines found their way to my mailbox.

My thoughts had taken a turn, though. I was disturbed to think that possibly I wanted to become a Jew in the same way I'd wanted to be other things I wasn't. I recalled a conversation years earlier with Lily Roanhorse. I'd said, "I'm always careful when I'm with Diné friends because I don't want them to think that I think I know it all, all about Diné life, that is. Sometimes I hide what I know."

Lily looked straight at me. "You have an identity crisis, just like we do."

Gratitude spread through me, and I nodded. But I felt guilty accepting her recognition. She was too gracious. We in her statement referred to college-educated Diné. It wasn't just college that had separated them from their people and ways. The alienation started way back in childhood when they were sent to boarding school. Today mainstream American culture still batters away at Indigenous identity.

"You don't know who you are," Lily said, "and neither do we."

I was so hungry to be seen, to belong, that I didn't argue. But I felt like I was cheating. I knew it was different to be White, wanting to be Brown, even feeling sometimes like I was Brown, and to know acutely that there was no way I ever would be. I knew I benefited from all the privileges our society grants to Whites.

Now, as I considered converting, I had to ask myself if something was missing in me that made me want to be other than self. At this time in the evolution of Earth's peoples, it may be important to cross these distinctions, to become other and self, thus one. Today there is a polar pull between distinctness and unity. Maybe the drive toward distinctness comes from frailty of identity, the deep need to assert who we are. Paradoxically, if we are to cross the lines and create oneness, not out of neurotic need but from a place of strength, it is necessary to first have a strong sense of self.

Despite my curiosity, my feelings for the mystery of my summer lullabies, of the magic circles of the Yé'iibicheii, I have not been drawn to explore Native spirituality. Maybe it's because I had to struggle so hard to establish an identity apart from the Diné world. And in the end, it was the struggle for selfhood that informed my decision about converting to Judaism.

Over the millennia since Abraham and Sarah walked the Middle East, countless people who were not born Jewish have become Jews. I wanted my roots to be Jewish. The late Renewal rabbi, Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, looks at the big picture and says that more people want to convert to Judaism today than have in a long time. He believes it's because the world needs more Jews after the great losses of the Holocaust. For a time, I grasped at that belief to justify my desire.

But I kept returning to the fact that I was not born a Jew. I went back to Lakme and asked her to tell me again about a concept she had mentioned in passing at our first dinner. I thought I remembered an approximate definition, friend to Jews, but I couldn't recall the Hebrew phrase. At the time, I had thought the designation was a pallid substitute for conversion, probably why I forgot the words.

Lakme told me the phrase, ger toshav. Its literal meaning, she said, is good stranger. It refers to a non-Jew who has the knowledge of what it means to be a Jew. That person would support rather than disrupt Jewish life. A non-Jew who is married to a Jew and is raising his or her children Jewish, without converting, is ger toshav. There is no ceremony for becoming ger toshav; it is something you are, something you can declare yourself to be. I am ger toshav. Some of my deepest spiritual learning comes from Judaism. I celebrate holy days and times with my Jewish friends as often as I am invited.

Ger means stranger, outsider. Since my early days in the Navajo Nation, I have worn the identity of an outsider. I have wondered if being ger toshav may not only entail living on the edge of the Jewish community. Maybe claiming to be ger toshav means claiming the religious identity of an outsider, taking on marginality as my spiritual identity. Outsiders have, from time immemorial, served as seers, storytellers, prophets, artists, writers, gadflies, healers, voices crying in the wilderness. If I accept the identity of an outsider, I will not be alone; I will join a great cloud of witnesses, scattered throughout society, who willingly, reluctantly or joyfully live with ambiguity and mystery. It seems that when I ran away from the church in my dream and toward religious identity, the journey took me to where I was all along, back to myself, the destination of all mystical journeys. Happily, it has given me acceptance of myself as an outsider. And it has given me a name for who I am, A Good Stranger.

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

 

This is the final installment of "A Good Stranger," which was first published in Isthmus.

On Friday, Chapter VIII, "Tongues," a short, experimental essay will post in its entirety.

If you are just joining the serialization of Fissure: A Life Between Cultures, you can use the Table of Contents to go to the beginning and read in order.

 

IX. TO DANCE WITH OTHERS

I left our church when I was twenty-five. I don't remember any pangs of conscience, and in the beginning I felt little grief. There was no joy, either. There was only dying. My soul was like Ezekiel's valley of dry bones, picked clean by vultures and hyenas, bleached white. Then, after seven years of baking in the sun, the dry bones of my soul, took on new flesh through meditation practice. My spirit breathed once more. My connection with God, tenuous at first, grew deeper and more alive than before, unbound by the rules of orthodoxy.

In Ezekiel, after being revived, the valley of bones becomes a great liberation army. In my imagination, the throng danced with the joy of breath blown back into it. Either way, new people came together for a common purpose. As with Ezekiel's bones, reconnecting with God on my own wasn't enough for me; I wanted to join with others. I began to grieve the loss of religious community, the feeling of belonging. The summer I dreamed of running from the church, I set out to recreate what I had lost.
 
X. WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?

The first time I had other White kids as classmates was at the mission boarding school, when I was eight. I spent most of my time during recess and after school behind the big gray Navajo girls' dorm. In the classroom I used Standard English, but on the playground I automatically switched to Dummitawry English. Playing marbles one day, I called out, "Hey you kits, dit chew saw my rat marvel?"

Katie Van Boven, who had never lived in the Navajo Nation itself, pointed at me, laughing and shouting, "Hey, who do you think you are? You think you're a Navajo or something? You're White, you know. Don't you know that?"

My stomach tightened. Tears threatened to spill. I turned without saying anything, leapt up to the monkey bars and crossed them, three bars at a time, back and forth, back and forth.
 
XI. AT TEMPLE EMMANUEL

Once in a while, when I lived with Sylvia and Abe, I went to Shabbat services at Temple Emmanuel. The first time, I sat next to Sylvia's mother, a diminutive silver-haired immigrant from Russia. There came a point in the service when everyone turned to greet a neighbor. Ruth turned to me and said, "Good Shabbos," her eyes twinkling. I hesitated and she said, "Come on, you can say it. Good Shabbos."

It wasn't that I couldn't. I was "good" at languages, after all, but I was afraid it might be presumptuous, as if I thought I could be one with them. All I needed was Ruth's encouragement. When I said the words, I was filled with the blessed feeling of belonging.
 
XII. YÉ'IIBICHEII

Under a blue autumn sky in Shiprock, when it was time for the Northern Navajo Fair, my father prayed, "We ask for rain, Father, that the Yé'iibicheii dances may not be performed, that the people may turn from their heathen practices to serve thee, the only true God." The sky looked nothing like rain, but I knew, of course, that God could work a miracle if he wanted to.

The fair's parade introduced a panoply of color into my black-and-white Dutch Reformed world. Turquoise, gold, scarlet, maroon, hunter green, plum, royal and navy blues, tangerine—satin, velvet or corduroy—shirts, blouses and long gathered skirts. Layers of turquoise and silver—hat bands, squash blossom necklaces, earrings, bolos, bracelets, rings, bow guards, belts and buckles, spurs, trim on bridles and saddles. There were hand-woven saddle rugs, striped Pendleton blankets, green and orange wagons decorated with blankets and juniper greens.

After the parade, we went to the fairgrounds. I smelled mutton ribs, fry bread, and mutton stew. My father bought us kneel-down bread, and I peeled away the rough, damp cornhusks to get to the compact, moist Indian-corn cake. I savored the mild nutty sweetness, rolling each dense bite over my tongue before swallowing. I picked and licked the last crumbs from the narrow crevices of the husk.

To the south of the booths lay the forbidden. I kept looking, knowing it was where the Yé'iibicheii dance would be held. I took on faith my parents' assertion that the ceremony was of the Evil One, but still I wanted to see and hear, to feel the mystery my summer lullabies tendered.

I only saw that place afterwards, when the fair was over. The booths and corrals were empty, the earth packed hard again, and at the south end of the grounds stood rounds of tall juniper branches stuck in the soil, their tips leaning in toward the centers of the circles. Beside them were great orbs of black ash. The green and black rings slipped their magic into my imagination. I closed my eyes and saw a starry sky lit orange by huge leaping bonfires. I saw a crowd of people, wrapped in Pendletons, the ladies with scarves on their heads and men wearing tall black hats, their backs to me, hiding the dancers from my view. I couldn't push through to see, and I heard only silence. I opened my eyes and saw just the wheels of green and black on the hard cream-colored earth.
 
XIII. ROOTS

Lakme and I began Torah study at my request. I stopped often, needing to talk about my process. Lakme listened, salting her responses with midrash and with the deeper meaning of the original Hebrew.

I talked with her about my efforts to return to my own religious roots and how I'd been unsuccessful. Every time someone mentioned Christ, my reaction told me that the flesh had not returned to my spiritual bones with the same hollows and curves as before. I couldn't go back to believing that Jesus was the awaited Maschiach, the Messiah. I saw him now as a gifted rabbi who brought with him the message, "You are all Maschiach. You all have an obligation to redeem the world from destruction, to perform Tikkun Olam." I felt that Christianity was a mistake, that it had departed on an unintended two-thousand-year detour. And there were so many Christian travesties—the Crusades, the Inquisition, pogroms, cultural genocide through worldwide missionary activity—that I abhorred the idea of calling myself Christian.

"Maybe you have to go further back to claim your roots," Lakme suggested.

"You mean to Judaism?"

"Yes."

"I've thought of that," I said.

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved

 

To be continued on Monday, 4/8/24

If you're just joining, you can use the Table of Contents to find your way from the beginning.

V. MY DINNER WITH THE REBBETZIN

I asked my friend Lakme if she would come for dinner and if we could talk about how it had been for her to convert to Judaism. I'd waited a long time to ask, afraid she might be offended, afraid of what it could mean in my life. She was delighted, and I was nervous.

I'd met Lakme and Gershon, her rabbi husband whose profession made her the rebbetzin, in rural New Mexico, where they were starting a retreat center. Living in a collection of villages and rural stretches with a population of 3,000 at the outside, I had laughed when the postmistress first mentioned "our rabbi." I thought she was joking. Not too long afterwards I met them at a New Year's Eve dinner.

That spring Lakme and Gershon invited my daughter and me to Seder in their old adobe house, nestled in a rinconcito of pink, gray and yellow walls that led to rocky mesa tops. It seemed an unlikely spot to be celebrating Passover, and in the home of a rabbi, no less. It was the place where the tiny mud-and-stone El Oratorio de Jesus Nazareno had lately been home to cross-bearing, self-flagellating Catholic Penitentes. Close by, Native American Church members planted their tipis and awaited sacred visions.

       
During the Seder Gershon departed from the Haggadah to offer additional teachings. One of them struck home. "The Hebrew name for Egypt is Mitzrayim, the Land of Narrows," he said, "When the children of Israel left The Land of Narrows, they entered The Wilderness. The Wilderness belongs to no one; hence, it is a place for everyone. This is to show us that spiritual teachings do not belong to anyone. No one group can lay claim to them."

I savored those words. More shared Seders and other Jewish family rituals passed before I invited Lakme to dinner. Only later did I realize that my invitation contrasted with what Gershon had said about spiritual teachings belonging to no one. I had asked Lakme because I wanted to lay claim to something, to be part of a faith community, to belong.
 
VI. THE TIE THAT BINDS

There is a place in New Mexico where the red rocks flow like great splendorous waves, a red sea on the high desert. The waves move in and out, in and out, different shades in varied light—red-gold at sundown with a tinge of melancholy at the edges, wine red after rain, soft pink at dawn.

Just before my senior year of high school the alumni of the Reformed Bible Institute gathered with their spouses and children for a picnic beneath those massive waves, salmon in color on that particular day. We ate food that people eat in Michigan—Jell-O salad, baked beans, potato salad. And we ate foods that most folk in the Midwest had never seen or tasted—Navajo fry bread, mutton ribs and mutton stew. Some of the Institute's alumni were Diné. The rest were Dutch American and Dutch Canadian.

As always, Ella Descheenee whispered my secret Diné name in my ear and giggled and hugged me. Ella had known me since I was a baby because her husband Ed was my father's mentor at the Bible Institute. In Diné bizaad, you are not supposed to say your secret name to anyone else, but I can say the English meaning, "Girl Who Reaches After Things." Growing up I thought it was about being a grabby toddler, but maybe it is also about curiosity, desire and will. What I know for sure is that Ella loved me.

At the end of our picnic, we stood together in a small knot at the edge of an arroyo that cut into the earth between the waves. The leftover food had been packed into pickup truck beds and station wagons. We sang, and our voices echoed off the rocks:
           
Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in Christian love;
The fellowship of kindred minds
Is like to that above.
 
There are ways in which, like it or not, I will always be bound by that tie.
 
VII. ENOUGH CHUTZPAH

After my dinner with Lakme, she told me her conversion story. It began with a dream that, like mine, took place in a church basement. Unlike mine, hers was a vision of knowing without a doubt who she is and always has been—a Jew. Certain in that knowledge, she began the formal conversion process.

When Lakme had finished, I took a deep breath and told her that I had been thinking for years of converting. I tried to convey my motivation, starting with the similarities between my upbringing and my perception of Orthodox Judaism. I talked about the stories from the Old Testament that had nourished me in childhood. We had identified with the Israelites of those stories; they were God's Chosen People, and so were we. I was taught that the Jews who were maligned in the New Testament were not the everyday people, but the politicians, who had acted as politicians ever have. I talked about how Jewish teachings from Lakme and Gershon had opened my heart and returned the Book to me in a way that I loved. I told her about living with Sylvia and Abe, about my first Seder and how important ritual is to my soul. I also told her about a deep-seated fear that I could never truly belong.

Lakme agreed that it took chutzpah to convert. Laughing, she told me that a potential convert to Judaism must be asked three times why they are converting. "It's just supposed to be three times total," she said. "But it seemed like every Jew I knew had to ask me three times." My heart sank; I didn't know if I could muster the requisite chutzpah.

Lakme is a maggid, a teacher of the sacred. Over dessert and tea, she offered to spend Tuesday evenings with me, exploring the five areas of study required for conversion. I accepted.

Lakme and I met over dinner every other week for five months, and those meals seem now to have coalesced into one long, soul-satisfying dinner with the rebbetzin. Our second meeting stands out because Lakme arrived that night with an armload of books, mostly about Jewish history, and a box of Shabbat candles. History is one of the five areas a person studies in preparation for conversion, and I had asked to start there.

The candles were a pure gift, an invitation, a welcome. Maybe I romanticize Shabbat, remembering the lovely golden glow during candle lighting in the film version of Fiddler. But it seems fitting to end the workweek in a spirit of gratitude, of intentional community, in communion over a meal.
 
VIII. WHO AM I?

When I was small, living in the Navajo Nation in the tiny village of Shiprock, I played in the blazing summer sun with Rudy and Bobby Yellowhair. Every day we made miniature Diné sheep camps in the dirt. Every day we began anew, brushing our palms over the camps we had made the day before. I always started with a little rounded hogan, poking a stub of elm twig into the top for a stovepipe and embedding four short twigs on the east side to make a door. Then I broke a bunch of twigs into short, even lengths to make a sheep corral, pushing them into the softened earth we'd stolen from the edges of my father's squash hills.

I imagined tiny people coming in and out of the hogan to chop wood and cook fry bread. I talked for them, speaking the creole that linguists call Dummitawry English, the language Bobby and Rudy and I used with each other. When Bobby and Rudy switched to Diné bizaad, I recited the Apostles Creed in Diné bizaad. It was the longest piece of spoken Navajo I could manage, and I spoke softly, embarrassed to have Rudy and Bobby hear what I was really saying, but it had to be Diné. I felt poverty-stricken in the language that I needed in order to belong.

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

 

To be continued on Friday, 4/5/24.

If you are just joining, you can find your way to the beginning of the series using the Table of Contents.

I. SUMMER LULLABY

On summer evenings I lay in bed and looked out at the massive heap of boulders across from the mission. My eyes touched certain rocks each night, always coming to rest on the huge flat block that had tumbled down eons before, like Lucifer from heaven, separated from the gigantic guardians at the top of the mound. It lay on its side, glowing the color of a ripe apricot in the last light, then turning a dark purple-brown. I held that rock in my vision until my eyes grew heavy. Drowsing, I listened to the opening strains of the lullaby on the hilltop.

The song began with drums booming a deep solemn cadence, followed by chanting, slow and low in the beginning, becoming high-pitched, wild and insistent. I drifted off. When I woke in the middle of the night, the ululations still beat the air, and I wondered if I had slept at all. I felt a fierce surge in my chest, accompanied by guilt, because my parents wanted this summer song, this Diné ceremony, to end. The people my parents hoped to convert were the ones who offered me the first inkling that there could be more than one pathway to the Infinite.
 
II. SABBATH

Strict Calvinists, Dutch Reformed missionaries in the Navajo Nation, raised me. In many ways, as I would later try to explain, it was like growing up Orthodox Jewish with Christ thrown in. Being Dutch was part of being Christian, just as ethnicity is part of being Jewish. Of my seven brothers, the third generation born in this country, only one has married a woman who isn't Dutch American. Of course, the part about Christ being thrown in isn't quite right, because Christ was not a minor figure. Also, we were missionaries, and Judaism is not a proselytizing religion.

In our own way, we kept the Sabbath as Orthodox Jews do. My mother peeled potatoes for Sunday dinner on Saturday nights to avoid working on the Sabbath. On Sundays we weren't allowed to ride bikes. Recently I learned of a public figure whose Orthodox rabbi father destroyed her brother's bicycle because he rode it on the Sabbath. We couldn't play with the neighbor kids, read comics, or play baseball on the Sabbath. We did not buy things, because it would be wrong to cause anyone else to work. We went to church at least twice, sometimes three times, on Sundays and once during the week.

We breathed the Bible, memorized verses and chapters, often by default just because we heard them so often. While we ate, we parsed and analyzed scripture to ensure that we obeyed every commandment exactly as God intended. Then after every meal we read scripture, too.

 

Childhood dinner conversations with my father remind me today of Chaim Potok's characters dissecting Torah and Talmud over a meal. Like us, they tried to determine how the law must be observed.

My paternal grandfather belonged to the Nederduitsers, an even stricter, more cheerless Calvinist sect than ours. I recall a meal where my father and I discussed one of Grandpa's arcane beliefs.

"We got a letter from Grandpa today. He's saying it's a sin for us to have a cross hanging in the chapel. Why would he say that?" my father asked.

Without missing a beat, I answered, "Because to him it's a graven image. The First Commandment says, 'Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.'"

"Do you think he's right?"

"Well, Moses made the brass serpent so the Israelites who were bitten by snakes could look at it and be healed. The serpent was a graven image, and God was the one who told Moses to make it. I think the point of the commandment is that we shouldn't put any images above God in our hearts. So if the cross isn't more important to us than God, it's okay."

My father approved.
 
III. A CLOAK OF SUBSTANCE

I run naked in the early dawn light. The cool air rushes past my body, and I feel good, until I start to worry that people will see. Then I notice that an orange towel is wrapped around my hips, making me feel safer.

I come to a church whose floors glow a deep blood red. The orange towel now covers my breasts, too. I find myself in the church basement, where people are singing the old hymn, "Out of My Bondage," and I join in, my voice rich and sonorous.

Later, a young man gives us stacks of gospel pamphlets. He announces, "A neighborhood near the church is in trouble. We're going to distribute these to help them out."

Now I want to leave. My body has changed clothing again. I wear a navy skirt and white blouse. I'm hefting a Bible. I pretend I'm about to throw up by covering my mouth and retching, and I race up the stairs and out of the building. Once outside, I can barely move my legs, and I long for the joyous, powerful running from the beginning of my dream. I feel anxious, afraid the young man will follow me and see that I'm not really sick. I can hardly move at all.

***

A few weeks before this dream, I had decided to devote my summer writing to defining my religious identity. After leaving our church, I had spent twenty-seven years trying to avoid believing in anything. On the first page of my new journal I wrote, "I feel that I know less than I have ever known, that I am an untethered astronaut, adrift in the cosmos. I want to know, not an objective Truth, because I don't think one exists. But I want to know my own mind, my own experience. I want to leave behind the nebulous clouds in which I've clothed myself. I will instead take on a cloak of substance, one that I can feel and others can see."
 
IV. FIRST SEDER

My sophomore year of college, I lived with a Jewish family, and that spring I took part in my first Passover Seder with Sylvia and Abe. I knew the Passover story as told in the book of Exodus. I could name the ten plagues in order without hesitation. I had been taught that the moral of the story was twofold: failure to obey God's commands could result in severe, even fatal, consequences; and the Jews were God's special people.

While brisket bubbled in the oven, Sylvia chopped apples and walnuts to make haroset. I made a salad, and she arranged a shank bone, a hard-boiled egg, a dish of horseradish, saltwater, parsley, and the haroset on a platter. I placed matzah, the unleavened bread that I'd learned about in Exodus, into a basket lined with a napkin. Matzah ball soup simmered on the stove.

At the table I learned that haroset stood for the mortar the people of Israel had used as slaves in Egypt. Saltwater symbolized their tears, parsley the new life of spring. Abe and Sylvia's youngest niece read the four questions from the Haggadah. We drank sweet, dark Manischewitz and sang "Dayenu," the explosion of gratitude that says, "It would have been enough." Fifteen stanzas sing the joy of liberation—"If he had brought us out of Egypt, it would have been enough….If he had split the Red Sea, it would have been enough." When the meal and the questions and the wine and the singing were done, the children searched for the hidden afikoman, the matzah that had been broken in half to be found and eaten after dessert.

Ritual touches the imagination and the emotions, leading to a depth of spiritual experience that the intellect cannot provide. Throughout the meal and long afterwards I reflected on the significance of the food, the words, the music, and the people with whom I had joined. In church I had sung a hymn that went, "When I see the blood, I will pass, I will pass over you." I had been taught that this was the Christian extension of Passover—Jesus' blood causing the Angel of Death to pass over us believers. After my first Seder, Passover meant something deeper and older than that. It was as if the food and the wine, no longer mere symbols, had in some ineffable way become part of me.

 

© Anna Redsand, 2024. All Rights Reserved.

 

To be continued on Monday, 4/1/24

"A Good Stranger" was first published in slightly different form in Isthmus.