Choosing Covenant Without Certainty

​There’s a Jewish joke I love that feels a little too on the nose for my life.

A convert is called up to the bimah to read from the Torah. As he’s standing there, visibly nervous but glowing, an old Jewish man leans over to the person next to him and mutters, “People think I’m crazy for wearing my Star of David in public when there’s so much antisemitism these days—but that guy up there? He’s crazy. He actually believes this stuff.”

I live at the intersection of skepticism and faith. I don’t believe because I was raised to. I don’t believe because the mythology lines up neatly with history. I believe because too many things have happened in my life that feel like interaction—like taps on the shoulder, or moments when the veil thinned just enough for something to get through.

I believe in Hashem. Not in a naïve, literalist way. Not in a way that requires me to swallow every story whole. But in a way that says: there is something there, something that responds, something that nudges, something that cares—however vast, strange, or ultimately unknowable it may be.

When I was nine years old, in 1989, I was watching television when Donald Trump appeared on screen. I don’t remember the context. I don’t remember what he was talking about. I remember blurting out, without thinking, “That man is going to be president someday, and he is evil.” My mother stared at me like I’d lost my mind. I had no framework for politics, no understanding of power, no reason to say it. It just came out of me fully formed.

Years later, on the night before September 11, 2001, I dreamed of planes hitting buildings. I woke up uneasy, disoriented, with that peculiar sense that a dream hadn’t ended when I opened my eyes. When I turned on the news the next morning, it felt less like shock and more like recognition—as if the world had decided to continue where my mind had left off. I remember pinching myself, trying to anchor myself in my body, trying to convince myself I was awake.

I don’t bring these things up to claim special powers or prophetic status. I don’t walk around thinking I’m psychic. Most of the time, I’m deeply rational, borderline allergic to magical thinking. But I also can’t pretend these moments didn’t happen—or that they didn’t shape how I understand reality. There are experiences that don’t submit neatly to skepticism, no matter how much you want them to.

There are other things, quieter but just as insistent. When I was independently researching the Holocaust, long before conversion was on my horizon, I found myself repeatedly drawn to Dachau. Not Auschwitz, not Treblinka—Dachau. I didn’t know why. I just kept circling back to it, reading survivor accounts, staring at photographs, feeling a strange, hollow ache that didn’t feel like abstract grief.

I believe I was a gay Jewish man in a previous life. I believe I was imprisoned at Dachau, survived, moved to Israel, and later died in the Six-Day War. I can’t prove this. I don’t expect anyone else to believe it. But it fits into me like a key in a lock—like something that was already waiting for language.

Decades before we met, my partner Andy—who is a Gentile—visited Germany in 1999. He went to Dachau. He wept uncontrollably and didn’t understand why. He had no personal connection, no family history there. He just knew something was wrong, something was heavy, something was his to feel. When he told me this years later, something in me went very still.

My background as a Pagan taught me something crucial that I carried with me into Judaism: myths are not instruction manuals. They are not journalism. They are stories shaped by culture, time, and human hands. The Powers—the divine, the sacred, whatever name you give them—exist outside of myth, not trapped inside it.

Because of that, I don’t need to believe that Avraham Avinu or Moshe Rabbeinu literally existed as described. Historically, we don’t have proof. There is evidence that the deity we now call Hashem was once understood as part of a regional pantheon, and that over time a radical idea emerged: to worship this deity alone. That doesn’t trouble me. If anything, it fascinates me.

What we do have proof of is endurance. We have proof of a tradition that has survived exile, genocide, forced conversion, erasure, and reinvention—for thousands of years. We have proof of a people who wrestle with G-d and with themselves and keep showing up anyway. We have proof of a covenant that persists, even when belief wavers.

I believe G-d is bigger than Judaism. Bigger than any religion. Judaism doesn’t contain Hashem; it is one way--our way—of understanding and relating to Him. One specific covenant. One particular language of obligation, ethics, and relationship. And it’s the one that speaks to me. Whether or not Hashem literally exists in a way that could be measured or proven—and I don’t think that’s something we can ever know—Judaism has changed my life in concrete, measurable ways.

It helped me get sober.

It helped me start caring for my body, not as an afterthought or an enemy, but as something entrusted to me.

It pushed me to start working on my trauma history, slowly and imperfectly, instead of burying it and self-medicating with substance abuse and calling that strength.

It gave me a framework in which my trans identity is not a mistake or a rebellion, but a truth—one that honors b’tzelem Elohim, the radical idea that human beings are made in the image of the Divine, in all our complexity.

I didn’t convert because I stopped questioning. I converted because I couldn’t stop showing up. Because lighting candles, saying blessings, wrestling with text, and living inside Jewish time made me more whole. Because skepticism didn’t drive me away—it sharpened my devotion.

So maybe the old man in the joke is right. Maybe it is a little crazy to believe. But Judaism has never been about certainty. It’s about commitment. It’s about choosing to bind yourself to a people, a practice, and a set of obligations, even when you don’t have all the answers.