A Sign Upon Your Arm

A Jewish odyssey of the heart

Story by Finn Kurtz

“You have been told, O mortal, what is good…to do justice, and to love goodness, and to walk modestly with your God.”

— The Book of Micah

Birkot hashachar

(Blessing the Morning) — Luck

Rays of sun bounce around the room, a reminder that despite where I sit, I have not truly separated from the world beyond. Though I am really nowhere, some things are familiar — the soft carpet, the high ceiling, the brown ark — every synagogue I’ve been to has the same almost-sterile feeling despite the wood panels. Discomfort is part of the routine by now. I still feel out of place in Jewish spaces, from the concerns I have to the activities I participate in. Even my kippah fits awkwardly.

Really, my very presence feels accidental. Scars around my stomach and on my throat remind me of how close I have come to leaving this world. Yet, instead of knowing God in death, medical miracles ensured that I searched for him (them?) in life. Grabbing hold of my Jewishness, then, feels less like an embrace and more like an awkward partner dance to which I do not know the steps. I have always been aware of my Jewish lineage — but the active Jews of my family are long dead — and the awkwardness feels like an accusation that I have attended a ball to which I do not have an invitation. I am there only by the grace of my own extroversion, having met a few right people at the right time. I entered college pursuing a degree in history, open to interpretation yet grounded in truth, but the Jewish world I also entered felt all ambiguity and little certainty. Perhaps one embarrassing interaction at a community event in my early college years — or one wrong stroke in a surgery in 2003 — may have severed the connection to Jewishness — or to existence. The breaking of the dawn, this Shabbat morning, would continue without me. But, stubbornly, I live, and time marches forward, and the symphony begins, and somewhere I play a small part. With blessing the morning, we begin shacharit, the morning prayer — and with each stage, I address myself.

Korbanot

(Sacrifices) — Historicism

The Temple of Jerusalem — once the great center of the Jewish religion — is gone, but Jewish memory remains. Integrated into prayer are echoes of a grounded relationship with God that feels much more physical. As the laws around sacrifices at the great Temple in Jerusalem — according to the Torah, first built by King Solomon — are recited as they are always in this daily prayer, I wonder not only about the Temple but Solomon himself. Solomon’s existence is only mentioned in the Torah, and yet it is difficult for me to view the Torah as historical. It is a book containing events with little factual basis, which doesn’t stop me from reciting the words I do not believe, but it does rob me of security. Some hints to the concerns, dreams and agendas of Jews past remain in the pages of the Torah — but both my inner historian and my inner empiricist can’t be silenced. Yet, the ghosts of the past swirl around me, whispering of the days of the Temple when God kissed the earth, and I feel its loss.

I turn back inward, however, as the prayer continues. Why do I search for hard evidence when trying to connect with the great beyond? The stories of Moses and David cannot be verified and witnessed, nor can evidence be recovered. Yet the imagery of the revelation at Mount Sinai, or the defeat of Goliath, holds such weight — they have transitioned from the imagination into cultural reality. That which has been transcribed over millennia has sustained Jewish identity, hope and life. If I can stretch my arm across time and receive these traditions, empiricism feels like a fair sacrifice.

Pesukei dezimra

(Verses of Praise) — God

Once, God spoke to me as I was looking across the bay to the lands beyond. When I was young and did not believe in God in any form, I thought Bellingham Bay was the whole ocean, and the beaches and trees on the other side were Japan. I marveled at how good my eyesight must be to see Asia. When I was a little older, I looked across time and space, and I saw the beauty of God’s creation, the firmament binding galaxies and worlds and atoms together, and I became even more sure of my atheism. What I had understood to be the idea of “God” — a singular being — was impossible to square with what I saw to be creation as an infinite multitude. An individual mind is dependent and tangible — nothing of the sort appeared when I gazed out to the ghosts of stars. Like Giordano Bruno, I found that God was too small.

As I grew up I understood that I could not see the whole world from the shores of Boulevard Park. My childhood Japan turned out to be Lummi Island. My eyesight was not as good as I thought — but how much bigger was the world.

I feel like I’m tempting fate in searching for words to describe this pantheistic experience when I dare to even begin to learn about kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. Yet even classical Judaism in its most conceptual is monotheistic, and when in prayer, I find it odd to praise something that is represented as an individual being when it is infinite and without true mind. But what should I call something that connects us and speaks to me, ever so briefly, through the breeze on a day in early March, a smile from a stranger, a kitten’s purr or the glimmer of a neighboring planet? Theism and I do not mix, but I need a name, and Hashem — “God,” if you like — will do for now, I suppose. Whatever I call it — it is that it is.

“If I can stretch my arm across time and receive these traditions, empiricism feels like a fair sacrifice”

Shema Yisrael

(Hear, O Israel) — Zion

Once, I sat alone on a ferry, and while watching the water, I found myself walking along the Green Line, and walking with me was Rachel, and through her eyes I glimpsed Israel. Her grave was empty, and she no longer wept bitterly as she had in the Book of Jeremiah. She looked different now as she stood beside me as a tall, serious woman — a modern Jew — and as she walked beside me, her hair flowing with the wind, she told me that Israel had fulfilled her most desperate dreams of a Jewish home. She told me to fulfill Hativkah, to fulfill my values and to tie my destiny further than I had before, not just to the Jewish people, but to Israel, as they are dimensions of the same prism.

“Israel” is a complicated word. It refers to the Jewish people, as it does in the Shema which we now recite. But it also refers to an ancient kingdom, and a modern nation-state, and a name of Rachel’s husband — these other connotations spring to mind, uninvited. For our Rachel — and for many Jews — the State of Israel is closely tied to their self-identification as Jews. Israel’s official ideology, Zionism, is about as definitionally problematic as you can get. At its most base, its proponents describe it as the simple idea that the Jewish people, indigenous to the Land, have a right to self-determination via an independent nation-state. Setting aside one’s qualms about even the idea of a nation-state, the conceptual right of an indigenous people’s self-determination can be hard to protest — especially if one is Jewish.

Yet, the painful reality that surrounds the path I walk with Rachel, whose tears have dried now, is that as the claimed manifestation of Jewish self-determination, today’s Israel operates at the direct expense of others’ indigeneity, crystallized in institutions like the 2018 Nation-State Basic Law, or the intransigent system of occupation in the West Bank. I can’t reject the historical ties between the Jewish people and the land where they originate, but as the Palestinian scholar Edward Said pointed out, the land that was once Mandatory Palestine was also home to Canaanites, Philistines and Edomites — other indigenous peoples of years past. And, of course, the Palestinians, who are also indigenous, are themselves directly dispossessed as a result of Israel’s success — in territories occupied by Israel since 1967, contravention of international law is the day-to-day status quo for the occupying forces. In Gaza, the violence and starvation perpetuated is a crime against humanity itself. If one’s quest for indigenous sovereignty has so totally and systematically trampled on another’s, something has gone horribly wrong.

Facing Rachel, I tell her how hard it is for me to view Zionism — perhaps, to tie myself to Israel — outside of the consequences of its modern manifestation. My values reject even a soft exclusivism that seems to come with any form of nationalism, even Jewish nationalism — and what is more exclusivist than the apartheid conditions perpetuated in the West Bank? This was the case even before the events of Oct. 7, 2023, and all that has come since, and it now feels impossible to view my own Jewishness without re-litigating my own internal relationship to Israel.

Rachel’s voice carries through the air, but I don’t know what the air of the Land tastes like. I wish I could experience it. Rachel is inviting me to naturalize, though I have never been to this country. I wish I could go to it. Israel’s self-appointed nature as the representative of Jewry on the international stage unilaterally connects our destinies. I wish I could comfortably appoint it. Rachel doesn’t understand — where I see division, she sees inherent and indivisible unity. Her Israel is the center of the Jewish constellation — for me, it demands a connection, yet acts in ways that make the connection impossible. We will not end this discourse with an embrace.

Flowing out of my argumentative thought process, I’m back on the ferry. I consider whether others have been watching with raised eyebrows at my sighing and eye-rolling as Rachel and I continue our dialogue, where we understand one another but do not feel one another. I am not truly one of her children, and I cannot hold her hand as we walk through the land of our ancestors.

Even if my reactions were muted and unnoticed by others, the inescapable trap is that the deeply personal, if-only-internal intra-Jewish discourse is hashed out publicly, as though it were a funeral procession. My grief is the devastating reality that an ideal I desperately want to love — Jewish independence and self-determination — represents itself today as an ethnocratic reality of occupation. I almost scold myself for having the dialogue, knowing that I live in safety — a world away, fearing neither war nor occupation — holding neither an Israeli or Palestinian identity, those which are intimately and inherently tied to the issue. Yet every day, when I step into the Jewish world, I find myself secretly wanting to be welcomed by Rachel, but ready to reject her. Along the Green Line, my feet have ground to a halt, and Rachel has continued walking upright — her illusion shimmers as the “New Jew,” whose national aspirations are fulfilled, leaving me adrift in my chosen diaspora and exile — and for me, she weeps no more.

Amidah

(The Standing Prayer) — Stamina

If Shabbat is a day of rest, why am I standing so much? Oftentimes in services, especially during the Amidah, I consider my own muscular disability and wonder how bad it really would be if, when the rabbi asked me to rise, I quietly remained sitting. This said, if I fail to stand, I feel like I abdicate not only religious responsibility, but my position in the community, though even under the most stringent interpretations of Jewish law, disability is a legitimate reason to sit out a prayer. Yet as I opt out, I immediately stick out as someone perhaps inexperienced, or not connecting to the importance of the Amidah.

So, I stand, and as I lean forward on the table or chair in front of me, preventing my knees from buckling, I try to whisper the words of the Amidah, relying on the crutch of the transliteration. This is an assistive device compensating for my newness to Jewish community life. It seems like 22 years of knowledge, pressure and involvement in Jewishness have been compressed into the three years I have stepped into Am Yisrael, and as I play catch-up, I not only struggle with staying on the same page, but wonder if I should even be trying to stay afloat. The rabbi has circumspectly finished his Amidah as I realize I was looking at the wrong section of the siddur this whole time.

Tachanun

(Supplication) — Guilt

The doubt in finishing the Amidah, let alone the other aspects of Jewishness to which I am still constructing my emotional connection, leave me with such intense distrust in myself I marvel that I have not yet retreated. I proclaim my identity and access community spaces, yet I’ll open up my computer on Shabbat or enjoy non-kosher meat. I’m not unique by any stretch of the imagination, but every declined opportunity to engage in mitzvot feels like a vulnerability. Despite the fact that I hold no automatic loyalty to the more stringent traditions of Jewish law, especially those in the Orthodox world, pangs of inauthenticity arise periodically, even if I consciously reject an affiliation with more conservative communities.

“There is the spark of the divine that creates an indelible connection”

Ashrei

(Praiseworthy) — Ethics

Even the mitzvot themselves feel unnatural to me. Two years ago, I would have had no qualms about my lack of observance — perhaps simply musing that it is, say, Yom Kippur — and then returning to whatever egoistic activity catches my fancy. Try as I may, internalizing the good of some arbitrary commandment extrapolated in the Talmud is difficult. Of course, integrating the numerous horrors described in Torah — as historically fictitious as they may be — is an insurmountable challenge. Psalm 145, the basis of Ashrei, is concerned with the good works favored by God. In theory, great reward awaits those committed to good. As I try to work out what “good” is, perhaps the reward is the challenge of pursuing righteousness itself, rather than having secure answers.

Aleinu

(Upon Us) — Duty

Aleinu, what I feel is the most musical of the prayers, signals that my journey is nearing an end, but it serves as the ultimate reminder of the continuing story, a contradiction that disorients and frustrates my previous introspection into philosophical and theological meaning. The world begins to dissolve as walls fall away, glass disappears and the carpet unfurls. Left with nothing, I close my eyes as an ancient melody swirls through existence. When I entered this synagogue that is beyond reality, I secretly walked in to talk with God. Sat across from each other as I entered the motions, I contended with all that broke me — my inexperiences, my glimpse at Israel, my iniquities, my loss of the things that never were. And above all, I silently mourned the end of my own life. And I mourned that I believed I would not see the redemption and the World to Come, and all that I dreamed for humanity as a whole — a world made one, with swords beaten into plowshares, where we dare to feel one another rather than study war, for as it is said, what a piece of work is man.

And while God sat across from me and listened to this poem I wrote in the temple of my heart, I began to notice that my voice was not alone. As shacharit, the spiritual beginning of the day, finally elapsed, I heard the harmony at the end of Aleinu. And as God revealed themselves to not just be listening, but speaking with me — God was the chorus — I remembered that I did not enter the cosmic dance that is Jewishness, that is existence, alone. With me are the hopes, fears, dreams and arguments of Jews — of people — across time, and in the eyes of friends and family, there is the spark of the divine that creates an indelible connection — and perhaps that is reason enough to keep tradition and connection alive, as though they are the fantastical tales told around ancient Israelite campfires. And though I may not get to experience a World to Come, dreaming the whispered, desperate dream may allow me to look over the mountain and see what can and will be. While life is a constant struggle, it is upon us to immerse ourselves in it — what else could we do?

Glossary:

Aleinu: Final prayer in a Jewish prayer service

Am Yisrael: Lit. “the people Israel,” the Jewish people

Amidah: Lit. “The Standing Prayer,” a thrice-daily prayer by observant Jews composed of praise, thanks, and requests of God

Canaanites: Catch-all term referring to an array of peoples who lived in the land of Canaan, which overlaps with modern-day Israel and Palestine

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600): Italian philosopher and friar who advocated pantheism and cosmic pluralism, executed by the Catholic Church for heresy

David: According to the Hebrew Bible, third king of the united monarchy of the Kingdom of Israel, considered the ancestor of the yet-to-come Messiah – who, according to traditional Jewish theology, will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem and usher in the World to Come

Edomites: Ethnic group who organized as the Kingdom of Edom, situated in what is today southern Israel and Jordan

Goliath: According to the Hebrew Bible, Philistine giant defeated by David in his youth

Green Line: The 1949 armistice lines between Israel and the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon and the Golan Heights

Hashem: Lit. “The Name,” common Jewish term for God

Hativkah: Lit. “The Hope,” a poem by Naftali Herz Imber that was later used as the national anthem of the State of Israel

Kabbalah: Esoteric tradition of Jewish mysticism

Kippah: Traditional head-covering worn by Jews, especially during prayer

Kosher: Food deemed in compliance with Jewish dietary laws

Mandatory Palestine: The British-controlled territory after World War I, now composed of Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip

Mitzvot: Jewish religious commandments

Moses: According to the Hebrew Bible, prophet who delivered the Torah from God to the Jewish people

Nation-State Basic Law: A semi-constitutional law passed by the Israeli legislature in 2018 that, among other things, deemed the Jewish people as having a “unique” right to self-determination in the State of Israel

“New Jew”: Paraphrase of an idea supported by some early Zionists that advocated the “negation” of a Jewish diaspora identity in favor of a new Zionist national identity

Philistines: Ancient ethnic group who lived along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in what is now the Gaza Strip and western Israel

Rachel: According to the Hebrew Bible, a Jewish matriarch, one of Jacob’s wives. According to the Book of Jeremiah, she bitterly wept for her children in exile (Jer: 31:14-16)

Revelation at Mount Sinai: According to the Hebrew Bible, referring to Moses delivering from Mount Sinai the Ten Commandments to the Jewish people — mystically, often considered an extremely high level of spiritual enlightenment

Shabbat (Sabbath): Jewish day of rest from Friday night to Saturday night

Shacharit: Jewish morning prayer

Siddur: Jewish prayer book

Solomon: According to the Hebrew Bible, the fourth king of the United Monarchy of Israel. Son of David and commissioner of the First Temple

Synagogue: Jewish center of communal worship

Talmud: Central compilation of rabbinic thought on Jewish religion composed from 200 CE-500 CE

The Temple: Center of Jewish worship in Jerusalem from ~1000 BCE-587 BCE and 516 BCE-70 CE

Torah: The first five books of the Hebrew Bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. In parlance, also can refer to the sum total of Jewish religious tradition and law

World to Come: In traditional Jewish theology, the ideal of a world made righteous and perfect by God after the coming of the Messiah

Yom Kippur: Jewish day of atonement — observant Jews fast for 25 hours on this day, if they are able to safely