Welcome Janice to the SHJ family! Janice has recently adopted Judaism and has chosen the Hebrew name Mora Teva! Read below to learn more about Janice’s journey to Humanistic Judaism.
I was born into a Protestant family of mainly English, Scottish, and Scots-Irish heritage. My parents were not very religious but still claimed to believe in God; however, throughout my life I have become progressively less convinced in the existence of a God, mainly because I don’t see any physical or logical evidence for such an entity. For example, I learned as a child at school that different cultures at different times believed in different gods; and it occurred to me that not only could they not all be correct, it was quite possible that none of them were correct. In addition, when I was 13, my 19-year-old cousin was killed in an automobile accident, and the devastation this caused my family further strengthened my doubt as to the existence of a God. Finally, my learning more and more about the Holocaust while in high school confirmed for me that there simply couldn’t be a God, or at least not one that I could worship.
By the time I entered college, I had decided to become a scientist, and I accordingly majored in biology. I also met a young man who was a year older than I, Jewish, and a chemistry major. He and I married after I graduated from college, and I automatically became a member of a large Jewish family. I quickly grew very fond of my mother-in-law, who treated me with warmth and kindness, whereas my own mother was highly critical and often verbally abusive towards me. My father-in-law, unfortunately, was a little less accepting of me, and even expressed at one of our family dinners his displeasure with Jews marrying non-Jews. As the years went by, however, and I celebrated more Jewish holidays than Christian as well as participated in various Shabbat services, weddings, and Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, my father-in-law seemed to mellow towards me; and one afternoon as we were exiting a synagogue, he tapped me on the shoulder. When I turned around, he smiled at me and dubbed me an “honorary Jew,” and I knew that he had finally accepted me. A few years later, my mother-in-law asked me why I had never formally converted to Judaism, and I replied that I found the idea of converting to any religion somewhat hypocritical as I was an atheist and therefore couldn’t declare any particular allegiance to a God. She nodded as if she understood and never brought up the subject again.
A few years ago, I submitted my DNA for analysis and was surprised to be informed that I was 1% Ashkenazi Jew. (When I told my rabbinical assistant sister-in-law of this development, I
thought that she’d laugh, but instead she seemed quite excited that even a tiny part of me was ethnically Jewish.) Tracing back my mother’s ancestry six or seven generations, I found a
couple of German ancestors who might very well have been Jewish; and this discovery, combined with my immersion in Jewish culture over the past 50 years, my great respect for
Jewish values and scholarship, and my two adult sons identifying as Jewish, resulted in my beginning to seek out some way that I could more definitively declare my solidarity with the
Jewish people. As we believe in the tenants of humanism far more than we do in any religion, my husband and I had already joined the American Humanist Association; however, this didn’t
reflect my identification with the Jewish culture. But then I discovered the Society for Humanistic Judaism! Yes! I thought. I can now be officially recognized as Jewish without being forced to
declare a belief in a supernatural being – perfect!
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