Not feeling "Jewish" enough

[Glides]

So as I was on my way to type this up, I spotted the post from almost two years ago where I went to my first pride and completely distorted the actual experience in my head. I ended up going the next day and had a really good time, but also I was crossfaded like a motherfucker and that really did help with things. Also had a really delicious rice dish. God I miss being outside.

So, I'm gonna be intentionally vague, but one of the thingies I'm now doing is a fellowship for Jewish people from pretty much any walk of life. That being said, now that it's begun via Zoom calls instead of a paid retreat in person we were supposed to go to, I 100% seem to be the most secular person there by a metric fuckton and it's dragging me down, as most of my inadequacies tend to do. I know the drill by now: I perceive everyone as being more of the thing I want to be than I am and I beat myself up about it till I either quit out of shame or lash out. Haven't seen to have done either so far so that's something.

My relationship to my ethnic background (I'm barely faithful save keeping kosher for the most part) has been, like most other things about me, unbelievably complicated and impossible to quantify. I jumped from synagogue to synagogue as a kid much like I jumped between everything else, and they ranged from really secular to even spending the most amount of time (six years) at a Chabad (which, for those non-Jews out there, is a sect of Orthodox Jews who are devout but not Hasidic-devout, so you're not required to wear the traditional dress but do everything else).

There's some people in this group from Chabad (not the exact one I went to, that would've been a nightmare), and the one I had gone to for that long as a kid (from ages 6-11) literally worshipped a guy called Menachem Schneerson as the Messiah, and it's all very inconsistent between branches and I think I got stuck with a particularly nutty one. To clarify, it's considered to be blasphemous for the majority of Jews to declare a Messiah (though it's definitely happened in some of the...nuttier...sects), and no one from this group have made reference to him, so this seems to be the less nutty ones.

That being said, most of the group is multilingual, most of them know all the prayers and practices, most of them have been deeply devout their whole lives and I feel completely out of my element. No one has been rude about how clearly behind I am with all of this (nor do I have much of a desire to catch up), no one has said anything mean, everyone's been nice enough. But even so, I know there's this thing where more devout Jews will simply say that mostly secular Jews such as myself aren't actually real Jews. And nobody has done that. But I've been through that shit as a kid and so I'm afraid it'll happen as an adult, and that I'll never feel spiritually connected to my own background, on top of everything else that's wrong with me. Inadequacy about romance, about careers, about family, and now this. Plus trauma.

I'm also the only person out of the entire group that I know of (like 60-80 people I think) who has never gone to Israel before, because I don't want to get bombed in the fucking desert. So a lot of it is people chattering about what they did on their trips and me staring off into the distance like an idiot because I never bothered going on Birthright. Now granted, not a single person in my family has ever done Birthright themselves, it's not a requirement like I think the Hajj is for Muslims, it's just one of those things some of the more devout ones do and then lord over everyone else. And to clarify, no one has been mean about discovering I never did it, just confused.

So I dunno how to manage this. I got the fellowship entirely by accident, I have no experience in theology or whatever you call this, and it's not for rabbis, just Jewish people, that's it. I'm not saying more lest I accidentally reveal the name or too much personal info. But even so, I don't know how to reconcile the feeling that I'm Jewish enough, just like I feel like I'm not queer enough or that there's a quota of romantic relationships I'm supposed to have. All of the things I feel behind at compared to everyone else.

[Hielario]

An idea that might help you: treat it as an educational opportunity, a way to see for yourself what a more intense jewishness is like (without the incoherence and cult-like behaviour you experienced from your parents ), and whether it is something that you would actually like for yourself. Ask lots of questions instead of staying silent, maybe throw your parents under the bus a little to justify why you don't know or practice things that they consider common (if you're sure they can't hear you, that is. Does Zoom have a text entry you can use instead of talking out loud?).