I won’t bury the lede: I’m a pagan Jew. In addition to other topics, I’ll be using my blog to explain that in more detail. Here I’ll just begin by saying that I’m a Jew whose identity includes and celebrates Canaanite origins, and broader historical and ongoing interactions from the ancient through the mediaeval to tomorrow. I’m a Jew outside the walls, but who nevertheless recognizes and cherishes the essential interdependence of walls and doors and roads.

I’m not sure when or in what order I first started contemplating this. This being a blog through which I piecemeal explain my religion to myself and anyone else interested. I’m not sure, especially, when I decided that I would title such a blog (or tag relevant posts inside a broader blog) “my own private Judaeo-”.

I never meant the phrase to describe keeping the subject private — that would preclude it being discussed on a blog. I meant it to describe the subject, accurately, as idiosyncratic to myself while being, accurately, Judaic. And the allusion, once it occurred to me, was irresistible.

To a great extent, however, I have kept the subject private. I haven’t hidden it, but neither have I proclaimed it forthrightly, sharing instead in dribbles with people I trust when it seemed appropriate.

A number of things have happened recently that have pushed me to be more forthright, and to reconsider the tag — not with an eye to abandoning the phrase but to find more nuance and irony in it, which will permit more exploration.

First, my wife decided to undertake becoming Jewish, and I’ve been auditing a class she’s taking as part of that. While she and I have been building a “family practice” so to speak over the whole course of our relationship, we’d been doing so to that point as a mixed couple  — I an unusual sort of Jew and she an atheist naturalist — but jointly being humanist aesthetes.

And while I don’t expect her to adopt wholesale my attitude or approach to Judaism, those have informed what we’ve been doing. Likewise she’s contributed to what we’ve been doing; her contributions are increasingly (and, at some point I don’t need to pin down, simply will be) Jewish. So while she and I won’t be indistinguishable, some of what I’ll be tagging won’t be “my own”.

Second, she and I have discovered and joined a Jewish congregation. I’d been unaffiliated for all of my adult life, never having felt the pull of any of the local congregations strongly enough to participate or join. In the course of getting to know this congregation and its rabbi (and also as part of the class), it’s been communicated explicitly and implicitly, deliberately and by example, that one can of course be Jewish in isolation. But it’s very difficult to do Jewish without other Jews.

This isn’t news to me: it’s just something that I’ve been avoiding, relying on family for. So while I don’t anticipate becoming any less idiosyncratic in my Judaism, this is another sense in which it’s going to stop being “private”.

Third, and on the same note, it’s Ḥanukah. Ḥanukah is a holiday about which Jews are and have been ambivalent in different ways. Growing up I was taught that while it celebrated important events it was nevertheless a minor holiday, especially as compared to Pesaḥ (Passover) and Yom Kipur (Atonement Day): in key ways it ranks even below the weekly Sabbath. Perhaps because of this ambivalence a critical aspect of the candle-lighting associated with the holiday, that of “publicizing the miracle,” wasn’t emphasized enough to me that it stuck.

But I’ve been hearing about it again this year from various sources, and it strikes me as one of the few communications in Jewish tradition which are explicitly outward, not aimed at other Jews. That dovetails with the commitment of our new congregation to play an outsize role in the pursuit and organization of social justice in Kansas City. To the extent I can be part of that, it’s the most public turn of all.

In addition to being Ḥanukah, the new moon it surrounds every year coincided neatly this year with the southern solstice, an auspicious time for beginnings. I was turning all this over in my mind anyway, and then I happened to be driving alone briefly this past Sunday morning, during which short time the radio not only played the B-52s’ song but XTC’s “Dear God”.

So, no longer purely my own, no longer private. That leaves “Judaeo-”. Why keep it, other than the rhyme, rather than render it a whole word? One small reason: it alludes to my peevish dislike of the term “Judeo-Christian” (and of “Abrahamic”). But mostly, it says three important things. One, I don’t idealize purity: my Judaism is comfortable with its mixtures and admixtures, doesn’t see those as at all incompatible with setting and maintaining boundaries. Two, there is no second combining source that holds such status it can be readily specified, so that whatever being mixed in becomes — for me — Jewish in the process, while the process itself is unfinished and unfinishable. Three, this is the base from which I approach everything else, including things that might not be typically seen as religious.

Ultimately, as mentioned above, some of this remains unique to me. But my door is open, or I wouldn’t be writing it at all; and if anyone finds anything of mine here worth sharing as yours too, that’s a pleasure. So this is all by way of welcome, to my own private Judaeo-.