For most of my life, I thought a “bad Jew” was someone like me.

I wasn’t Orthodox. I didn’t keep kosher. I’ve eaten more shrimp, lobster, and cheeseburgers than I can count. I worked for Bernie Sanders, though I later came to regret it. My wife is a convert, and I hope my daughter marries for love, not because someone approves of her choice.

Growing up in the Diaspora, “bad Jew” was almost a joke. It was what you called yourself when you felt you weren’t Jewish enough.

I didn’t become who I am on my own. Some of it was pushed into me from the outside. Some of it I had to find on my own, underneath everything the outside world told me to be.

The outside part is easy to point to. Working for Bernie taught me how easy it is to mistake belonging to a movement for standing on principle. Years of watching activists, politicians, and institutions redraw the lines of who gets to be a “good” Jew taught me what conformity costs. Then October 7 happened, and the people I thought were allies went quiet, or worse, and that taught me the fastest.

But the other part didn’t come from outside at all. It came from something already in me that I’d spent years ignoring.

At 50 years old, I decided to pray daily and put on tefillin every morning. Today, at 51, it’s part of my daily routine. Not because anyone guilted me into it. Not because I suddenly became more religious. Because I finally stopped drowning out something that had been calling to me for years. That one was mine. Nobody pushed me into it. Nobody gets credit for it but me.

That’s the difference between the two forces that made me who I am. One was the world trying to shape me into something convenient. The other was me finally listening to who I already was.

Today, a “bad Jew” isn’t the one who eats bacon or skips........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)