I think it’s official — I am now a real Californian. I recycle even the tiniest of yellow sticky notes, I can no longer swallow chunks of delicious, fatty foie gras (the image of force-fed geese pops up every time I try) and I have to remind myself that — in most other places in the world — smoking cigarettes in public isn’t considered a crime.
It’s only natural that the California spirit has spilled over to my religious life as well. Here in the Bay Area, I’ve been exposed to a variety of ways of practicing Judaism, and to a variety of different religions in general. I’ve been to synagogues where congregants — some donning brightly colored, embroidered yarmulkes — groove to guitar-accompanied psalms. I’ve attended services led entirely by women and been to Jewish holiday events where interfaith couples and their families come to celebrate.
Recently, I even went to church.
Not just any church, but — in true Bay Area style — a progressive house of worship devoted to serving the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender community, appropriately located in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood.
The only past churchgoing experience I had was years ago, when I attended a high school rendition of “Jesus Christ Superstar” in a Lutheran church.
So there I was, probably the only straight Jew in the room, flipping through the pages of the New Testament in that Sunday morning Bible study group at the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco.
So what’s the point of a straight Jew going to a predominantly gay church, you might ask, and rightly so. Well, it wasn’t to convert, for pure fun or out of curiosity of the unknown.
It was for the sake of research — an article I was writing about gay and gay-friendly religious organizations in the Bay Area. I had already talked to the editor of a Muslim magazine, a leader of a Buddhist meditation group for gay men and a member of a gay/lesbian group in a local synagogue.
It was only natural I seek Jesus as well.
The Bible study group I attended was called “Taking the Bash out of the Bible.” About 10 people filled the dimly lit room and, led by one of the church’s pastors, analyzed and contextualized those passages of the Bible (both old and new) that made reference to homosexuality.
Here was a whole group of people — not just different from me in religion, but also in sexual preference — who were both troubled and encouraged by the different interpretations of the Bible, just as I often am.
I’m not really sure how this exposure to other religions and to other ways of practicing my own religion enhances me as a Jewish person, but I think it does.
To be honest, the way that I choose to express myself religiously has stayed more or less consistent: theologically and politically liberal, somewhat secular, but with a nostalgic magnetism toward the culturally traditional.
That description might not make any sense to anyone else, but to me, it does. Just as a gay man attending a Christian church — where, for years, homosexuality was a crime considered punishable by death — makes sense to him.
This ability to see my religious self in someone that is completely different from me is what enhances me as a Jewish person. I now know that there are others who experience the contradictions and doubts that I have in my religious life. That knowledge ensures me that I can still be “religious,” even with these uncertainties.
Sitting in the church room that Sunday morning, I realized that the stereotypical “California spirit” — liberal, open-minded and easygoing — could reach far beyond neurotic recycling habits and an herbivorous diet.
As I left the Bible study group that foggy morning and began to walk home, my cell phone rang.
It was my mother.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I just left a Bible study group at a gay church in the Castro,” I answered.
For a brief moment, there was silence on the other end of the line, and I knew the words were sinking in.
“I think you’ve been living in San Francisco too long,” she finally said, laughing.
Michal Lev-Ram, born in Israel, is a journalism major at SFSU who can be reached at [email protected].