Love in the Time of Intolerance Part I

Love in the Time of Intolerance Part 1

“We took you on, lock, stock and barrel.”  To this family to whom I had traveled ten thousand miles from Los Angeles to Cape Town to meet, clearly, I was something to take on, a burden.  I was unworthy of their love and acceptance, and by extension, since they were my conduit for finding my way back to my religion, to Judaism, I was, even more devastatingly, unworthy of G-d’s love and acceptance.  I was a bad Jew.  Their statement was a damning sentence that would ring in my ears for close to a decade.

That judgement, that intolerance for ME, for who I was, lodged and festered in my already damaged psyche.  I’d already been infected by my family, by society, by stories.  San Francisco family trip, tomboy me just out of 4^th grade, touring Height Ashbury during the Sixties….A woman in jeans passes us.  Mom says to me, “you see that?  If you don’t stop playing with (cowboy) guns, that’s what you’re going to be.”  “What’s that?” I asked.  “A fate worse than death.” Mom answers.  I instinctively knew what she meant.

So…..I dated boys and fell in love all the while clamoring for an escape from who I was and at the same time, subconsciously, powerfully, insatiably drawn to discover what it meant to be a Jew. The idea of Tikkun Olam- repairing the world, runs SO DEEP in my DNA that I cannot see life as worth living unless I am bringing light unto the darkness.

 That longing for that Jewish connection and running away from being a lesbian is why I married Joey at twenty.  My parents were convinced it was to get out of the house. Fucking understatement but what drew me in even more was Joey’s widowed Dad and family were Jewish with a capital J.  Holocaust survival, escaping from a labor camp in Siberia to Palestine, building the newly declared State of Israel, emigrating to the US in search of a better life.  They were living the history I’d passionately studied.  I loved the holiday dinners. The food. The stories. English, Hebrew, Yiddish and a mix of Russian and Polish and German. The ritual of the Seder.  They called me the Shabbos Shiksa, my Reformed upbringing subject of scorn.  When the hypocrisy got to be too much – theirs’ and mine, Joey and I divorced.  He went on to marry his real Shiksa secretary and I came out of the closet.

My Yiddishkeit soul has been searching for my Neshama’s home here on earth.  Born in a Jewish into a mostly atheist family - Swerdlow’s after all, are infamous in Soviet circles) and an observant and terrified-of-G-d Grandmother on my Mom’s side, I was constantly searching for my own connection.  Getting confirmed at Wilshire Blvd Temple by the Father, Son and Holy Ghost Rabbis didn’t cut it.  They tried to amp up their attendance with electives so I learned photography which became my profession but that’s about it.

Just after getting divorced, I got Bat-mitzvah’ed at thirty-six at Beth Chayim Chadashim, one of the two LGBTQ synagogues in LA.  My Parsha was Bamidbar.  Building your tabernacle in the desert, and since I’d been wandering in the spiritual desert my entire life, I gave a great speech about finally finding myself.  I lied.  I was still lost. Coming out of the closet was only liberating this lifetime, and I was on a desperate search for the immortal.

A couple years later, I fell in love with the Shiksa Goddess down the street.  We were best friends and after one thing lead to another, I got my heart handed to me in a million pieces.  

Which brings me to the afore mentioned Chabad family I thought would welcome me with open arms.  A bit of backstory:

With my heart shattered in a million pieces by Lisa, after a particularly awful meltdown, I demanded of G-d the following: “Bring me, right now, my spiritual mentor, partner, and companion for I know what I’m meant to do in this life, but I’m lost as to the Path, and don’t mess around.”

The next day, I have an email in my Swerdlow@aol.com box.  From Nicole Green in Cape Town, South Africa.  An errant email meant for Miriam Swerdlov, the only living relative of the Rebbe, with one missed letter on the keyboard, and instead, the Chabad Shilach answers my prayer. This starts an almost daily (not on Shabbat) email conversation, meeting her LA mishpocha, and finally flying to Cape Town six months later.  Make no mistake, I’d come out in the second email.  Expecting to receive a “you’ll fry in hell” instead she asked if I have a proper mezuzah on my door.   I was floored.  Could this be the acceptance I’d longed for?

Not so much.  In between massive amounts of coffee, scotch and cigarettes they did their best to convince me I’m not really gay, that it’s the result of abuse, that I can marry some loser bachelor in the community for appearances (who the hell would I be fooling??), and all sorts of other conversion therapy attempts.  Their pressure worked…for around seven years.  I call it doing time with Chabad.

In 2009 I finally went to Israel.  In Jerusalem over Shabbat, my internalized homophobia reached its peak.  The next day, I went to the Kotel and put my scrawled prayer in the wall, begging to be relieved of this self-hate, this intolerance for my own being, for self-acceptance.

I also put a prayer in the wall “Paging Miss Israel….” And she showed up….but that’s another story.