During my time at an all-girls Catholic high school in America, I would often find myself wondering how on earth I’d ended up there. I was the only Jewish girl in a conservative Catholic school, feeling isolated and alone amongst a sea of unfamilarness. My home state of Delaware leaves a lot to be desired in the way of schools. Many students who can afford it go to private schools for the quality of the education, most of which are Catholic.
That was where I ended up. In my final year, I was asked to read a Hebrew prayer at Mass. Having dropped out of Hebrew school, I didn’t feel like the most qualified person to be the sole speaker for my faith to 700 or so students and faculty. Yes, I’m Jewish, but I’m what many people call Jew-ish. I love my faith and I love learning about it, but I am not actively engaging in prayers. I didn’t have a Bat Mitzvah. I don’t have a Jewish last name. Could I possibly be qualified to speak about Judaism? How could I represent something so much bigger than myself when I had so little authority over it? I had faced microaggressions before that I felt like I could handle. “It must be so sad not celebrating Christmas!” was a common one that I’d often tackle. I sometimes found myself defending my faith, but what troubled me more was the expectation that I should be an ambassador for it. I learned extensively about the Catholic faith, which I found fascinating and important.
I experienced viewpoints that differed from my own, which undoubtedly helped me to develop my own stances. But what I was most unprepared for was having to be a representative for my faith. Somehow, simply because I was Jewish, I felt that I was expected to know everything about it. No one expected my Catholic peers to be experts on Catholicism. Not only was I an exception, but I was made to feel exceptional when I wasn’t.
I found myself becoming more Jewish as a self-defense mechanism. When we covered the Old Testament in my mandatory religion classes, eyes immediately turned to me, expecting answers, insight, all the things I could not give. I was not raised on scripture. I was raised on matzo and bagels, yes, but I couldn’t tell you much more than anyone else. To compensate, I pretended to be more Jewish than I ever had been before. I wanted to be that representative, that source of knowledge from which my peers could learn. But in truth, I was never the person they should have been learning from. I knew that, and it made me feel a deep sense of otherness I could never shake.
There were upsides, however. In my third year, I invited my closest friends to my house for a Passover seder. I never would’ve done this otherwise; it was sparked by a desire to be more Jewish than I was. However, I ended up experiencing on a much deeper level what I had always felt Judaism was about: a sense of community and genuine goodness.
I will probably never know the names of all the Jewish holidays, nor will I be able to read Hebrew. I am for all intents and purposes a secular Jew (explaining this was often a headache). But going to a Catholic school did make me own my Judaism in a way I never had before. It made me realise that it was okay to not know everything about my faith and still call it my own. It made me realise that I could embrace my Jewishness, I could live my faith without being an expert on it, and that I could be an important part of any community.