This past Shabbat at PSJC, I found myself during kiddush sitting with a lovely group of ladies and one gentleman talking about the week’s parsha. As things were breaking up one of the women began to ask me about myself. I started to talk a little about my synagogue trilemma (that I have three synagogues to which I am connected, and each has a different essential element of what I want in a shul and each has a different serious flaw) and how I love PSJC but I have philosophical and aesthetic objections to the triennial Torah-reading cycle employed there. The woman seemed somewhat taken aback. “Oh,” she said, “so you’re, like, really more Conservative, not Renewal.”

My turn to be a little taken aback, but I tried not to show it. We were in a Conservative shul, after all… why should I be Renewal and not Conservative? “Yeah, I’m Conservative. I’m pretty traditionalist.” Reflecting on that statement, I thought of Flatbush Jewish Center, the shul closest to my home, which is Conservative and non-egalitarian. They certainly do not consider me to be “traditionalist.”

I often find myself confronted with people who have seen one or two aspects of my personality and build from that a gestalt of Gella that may go in almost any direction… but in the Jewish world most often suggests that I fit within a Renewal framework. It is not entirely unreasonable that one would get this impression. I am socially extremely liberal, I have appreciation for eastern philosophy and practice, my theology might be described as “non-traditional,” I advocate for gender and orientation equality and am myself bisexual, I go to the woods, I sing, I read Sufi poetry, I see a chiropractor, I meditate in the morning. Taken together and exclusively, these are all elements that, common wisdom suggests, would point toward a left-leaning non-traditional or neo-traditional Jewish practice that might include introductory meditation, chanting, ecstatic dance, hugging and laying of hands, etc.

But that is not where I fall or where I fit. The Renewal movement is comprised in large part of people who have found the existing streams of Judaism in some way dissatisfying, not enough, moribund, as the wikipedia article on Jewish Renewal puts it. While there have certainly been times in my life when I felt somewhat dissatisfied with my Jewish practice, felt lonely in my philosophical and theological understanding of Judaism, I never felt that the Judaism that I was practicing was in itself lacking in what I felt a need for, what I felt stirring inside me. I stuck with my Movement, and have become an advocate for it.

One need not, I find, go outside of the tradition, or drastically revamp the tradition, in order to find spiritual satisfaction. While there is plenty of wisdom to be gained from studying and even adopting elements of eastern philosophy, I have never found these to be external to Judaism in the first place. In my post on Buddhism and Judaism I talk about how the concept of Buddha is not incompatible with, nor a replacement for, nor really external to the concept of God in Judaism. My understanding of this does not necessitate declaring myself a JuBu. The fact of my understanding of Buddhist philosophy as being at the core of my Jewish philosophy doesn’t qualify my Judaism. It doesn’t instill in my a need to go running and looking for ways to visibly incorporate non-traditional or non-Jewish elements into my religious practice.

My religious practice is pretty traditionalist Conservative. I have no problem with the creation of new rituals where there is a genuine need, such as for baby namings, batot mitzvah, and committment ceremonies. I rarely see a need for radical revamping of liturgy (adding imahot is not a radical departure in my opinion). I can find what I need within the Conservative framework because I know how to look, because I have learned enough about it to know that what I need is already there, whether everyone recognizes it or not. Others have not been as fortunate as I have been in their educational and shul experiences and I can understand the place from which people can feel that they have no recourse except to something self-consciously and unabashedly eclectic and non-traditional. But I also think that The Conservative Movement loses more members than we have to because we don’t know how to look in our own backyard, because new and different names for God are exciting and alluring and seem fresh and juicy compared with the stale old God you think you grew up with.

You can meditate in the morning and then daven shacharit. You can read the Tao Te Ching and understand it as underlying Derech Eretz. You don’t have to skip Musaf or abbreviate the Torah reading to have a spiritually fulfilling experience in shul. What makes Judaism come to life is always, and always has been, study and understanding our tradition… taking the practice as it is and reading it as it fits. That’s why I’m happy as a Conservative Jew. That’s why I don’t have to be renewal. Turn it over and over… Fihi Ma Fihi… everything is in it.