The Wolf Runs Through Sacred Wilderness: My Journey To Judaism
I knew two things when I was four years old: I wanted to be a boy, and I wanted to be a Jew.
Everything else in my life was a long detour back to that truth. I took the scenic route, through hell and horror, but I got here. I’m home now. I’m Zev, a Jewish man. And this is how I returned.
I was born into a family that felt like a patchwork quilt stitched with mismatched squares and then thrown in a dumpster fire.
My mother was raised Pentecostal, brilliant and rebellious. Valedictorian of her high school, she made it to Wellesley on a scholarship—and then dropped out after two years when she got pregnant with my half-brother. His father? A man she met at Woodstock. Yeah, really.
She gave my brother to his father to raise and spent the next few years following the Grateful Dead, doing acid, and searching for something—God, meaning, freedom, love. Eventually, she landed in a religious cult called the Worldwide Church of God, which she joined while managing a Sunoco gas station during the Carter administration. That’s where she met my father: he was an abusive alcoholic on a motorcycle, and she was dressed as a clown to keep customers entertained during gas shortages.
My father beat her. Sometimes he beat me. My mother—bless her, curse her—was a contradiction. After the divorce, she spiraled between strict religious rules and reckless behavior. She’d bar-hop and bring men home, some of whom were inappropriate with me. But I wasn’t allowed to wear tank tops or shorts in the summer because that would be “immodest.”
Puberty was hell. I tried to kill myself for the first time when I was twelve. I dressed as masculine as I could, cut my hair short at eighteen (I was forced to grow it long as a teenager), and tried to start over. But the trauma was layered like sediment.
It wasn't just that I felt trapped in the wrong body, but after declaring when I was four that I was a boy and wanted to be Jewish, a few years later when I was six or seven years old, I became obsessed with Israel. Not in a vague, Sunday-school way—I wanted maps, books, pictures, history. I read everything I could get my hands on, long before I had the language to explain why. I remember pointing at the map and telling my mother, with the absolute certainty only a child can have, “This is where I died.” She laughed it off, of course. But I wasn’t joking. It wasn’t dramatic or morbid. It felt factual, like stating my eye color or my name.
Around that same age, after my Israel obsession started, I saw Yentl for the first time. A lot of it went over my head, being so young, but some things landed with bone-deep clarity. Here was someone assigned female who put on men’s clothes, lived as a man, studied Torah, and loved another man. I didn’t have the words for transness yet, or queerness, or gender dysphoria, but I recognized myself immediately. I felt seen in a way I didn’t know was possible.
My desperate longing to be Jewish was quickly suppressed. When I was six, my mother sent me to Catholic school for first grade, despite not being Catholic herself, because at the time it was her only option for religious schooling and to "Jesus away" the wanting-to-be-Jewish urges. I did not thrive. I spent a lot of time on what they called “the thinking bench” for asking too many questions about Jesus and pointing out that things didn’t make sense. When asked, “Who are the Apostles?” I answered, with complete sincerity, “John, Paul, George, and Ringo.” I wasn’t trying to be funny. I just genuinely thought that was the answer. I was branded a smartass anyway.
The final straw came when I performed “Like a Virgin” by Madonna in front of my class. I literally believed it was a song about the Virgin Mary. I was promptly expelled. After that, I was placed into public school and sent to special education for second and third grade, where my autism was forcibly erased through ABA. By the end of third grade I was mainstreamed, but the lesson was already learned: curiosity was dangerous, difference was punished, and asking the wrong questions would cost you.
Despite my experiences with the nuns—especially Sister Louise—I still went faithfully to Mass every week. There were no Worldwide Church of God temples nearby, and my mother decided this was better than nothing. I was eventually confirmed Catholic and took the name Antonia, which feels particularly funny in hindsight given that my guardian angel later made himself known as Anthony. Even then, even bruised and confused, I was trying to reach something holy. I just didn’t know where I was allowed to belong.
After I received confirmation, my mother’s Pentecostal parents and her youngest sibling—who was closer to my brother’s age than mine—decided they needed to save my soul. My teenage years were spent as a fundamentalist Christian, albeit a very bad one. I listened to secular rock music, including Marilyn Manson. I famously snuck out to see Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson in concert while claiming I was going to Bible study. My high school best friend was a gay guy, and I was the first person he came out to. I couldn’t understand why Christians hated gay people so much—something that hit a little too close to home, because even then, buried under layers of fear and doctrine, I desperately wanted to be a gay man.
I ended up in a Vineyard church, where Rick, the 31-year-old drummer, groomed me. I was 17 when we met, and we had sex on my 18th birthday and for a few months thereafter. When the church found out we were sleeping together, he said “I’m sorry, Jesus” and got a slap on the wrist. I, on the other hand, was told I had a Jezebel spirit. They laid hands on me to cast out demons and told me I’d have to be celibate for the rest of my life. I was “damaged goods.”
I left Christianity and became a Wiccan at 20, finally finding community among people who saw the divine in nature and didn’t call me broken. But my road still wasn’t smooth. At 26, I married an Asatruar who started out centrist libertarian and got sucked into Tea Party conspiracy theory hell during the Obama years. He became the racist kind of Heathen. I left him in July 2013.
After some nasty “Witch War” drama in the Pagan community in 2015 spilling into 2016, I lost all belief. I figured if any higher powers existed, they hated me.
I moved back in with my toxic mother and tried to bury my soul. Religion, I decided, was poison.
In January 2020, I moved in with my best friend. A little breath of air. Then in February 2021, I got COVID before the vaccine was available. I got very sick. High fever, barely conscious, severe diarrhea, walking pneumonia, lungs on fire. And then the dreams started.
Dead friends appeared. Pat and Jay invited me to Disneyworld, but told me I couldn’t come. Jesse was grilling at a cookout. I tried to enter his house, and he said, “You can’t.”
Then came the one I still struggle to explain: a figure like the Grim Reaper, cloaked in intensely purple robes, but with flowers embroidered along the robe and the scythe. Not terrifying. Just… inevitable. Sacred. I survived, barely. And when I came back to the world of the living, I remembered that dream and asked for help. I thought, maybe it was Santa Muerte.
Eventually, I came to believe that Santa Muerte and Azrael are the same entity, seen through different cultural lenses. That’s why, I think, Santa Muerte tells people not to worship her but to worship G-d instead—because she’s a servant of Hashem, not a deity. She is holy, yes. Sacred. But she is not the Source. She is the gatekeeper, the guide, the one who holds your hand as you cross over and whispers, “Not yet,” when it’s not your time.
That encounter changed everything. I asked her—for I still use “her” when I picture the flower-cloaked Reaper—for help. And she didn’t bring me back to Wicca or Paganism, or to Catholicism. She nudged me towards Judaism.
After I began a devotional practice to Santa Muerte, I made Jewish friends—accidentally, at first. I wasn’t seeking anything yet. But the more I listened to them talk about things like their holidays and Shabbat, their communities and what Judaism meant to them, the more I felt that ache inside me, the one of the child who wanted to be Jewish.
I talked to Santa Muerte about it and felt this still small voice in the back of my head: this is where you belong.
So in 2023, I decided I was going to convert. This is a long, complicated process: it usually takes at least a year, sometimes two, before a Beit Din will meet with you and approve your conversion—and you are expected during that time to study and live Jewishly, to keep what observances you can. People who are born Jewish get the option of how much lore they do or don't know and how observant they are or aren't. But if you want to be adopted into the Jewish people, it's like learning to become a citizen of another country, including assimilating into its culture.
The more I studied, and each time I lit the candles on Shabbat, the more I felt like I wasn’t learning something new—I was remembering. I began dreaming things from a past life. I was a gay Jewish man in Germany. Dachau. I didn’t just learn about the camps in school—I fixated on Dachau. It haunted me.
In my dreams, I survived the camp, moved to Israel, and died in the Six-Day War.
Later, I learned that many converts report similar dreams. Some rabbis say: your soul was Jewish before. Hashem is giving you the choice to come back. A tikkun hanefesh—a repair of the soul.
I chose yes.
Judaism honors complexity, tension, and mystery. It doesn’t erase the in-between—it sanctifies it.
The Talmud names six genders, not two. The story of Dinah, traditionally read as Jacob’s daughter, is interpreted by some sages as a soul that was meant to be male and ended up born female—a transmasc soul, like mine.
When the Torah talks about “sexual immorality,” it’s not talking about love between two men or sex outside of marriage. It’s talking about rape. Abuse. Infidelity. Coercion and betrayal—not consent.
Judaism sees me.
And Hashem—my G-d—is not the vengeful patriarch of my childhood. I see Hashem as both male and female, neither and both. Non-binary. Compassionate. Just. The Shekhinah shelters me. The fire of Sinai calls me forward. And I am no longer an abomination—I am beloved.
There’s a reason we’re called Yisrael—it means “one who wrestles with G-d.” That’s not metaphor. That’s the essence of being Jewish. We don’t blindly accept. We fight. We argue. We shout. And Hashem doesn’t strike us down for it. Hashem listens.
In May 2024, I got sober, after years of heavy cannabis abuse. I'd ended up with Cannabis Hyperemesis Syndrome—violent nausea and vomiting that landed me in the ER. After I was forced to quit weed, I couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t think straight. My body was in full withdrawal. It was terrifying.
I’d thought weed was helping me manage my PTSD, my dysphoria, my rage. But it turned on me. And in the wreckage of my nervous system, I turned to Hashem.
Every day for a month, I cried and screamed and sobbed:
“Hashem, I am a fucked up, broken mess.”
That was my prayer. Not a psalm. Not a neat little blessing. Just the truth.
And I believe He heard me.
I voluntarily checked myself into inpatient treatment for a week in June 2024. It was brutal, but necessary. And every day, I wrestled. Not just with addiction. With G-d. With everything I’d been through. And instead of being cast out for my anger, I felt held by it. Seen. Heard. Hashem is not fragile. Hashem can take it. Hashem wants the fight—because it means I’m still reaching.
And then there was Thumbs.
In September 2024, my cat Thumbs ran away. He was gone for seven agonizing weeks. My roommate and I put up flyers across town, chased every lead. People would call us with sightings—“I just saw a polydactyl orange cat in this housing addition”—but by the time we got there, he was gone.
Then came November. The election. And Trump won. And I lost it.
I spent the entire day after the election in a screaming match with Hashem.
“You had one fucking job! Why can’t something just fucking go right?”
I wasn’t polite. I wasn’t reverent. I was a Jew, doing what Jews have always done: yelling at the G-d I refuse to stop believing in.
And then—no joke—a few hours later, someone called. A Thumbs sighting.
At the farmhouse where we had early voted just one week earlier.
We set up a humane trap. That night, Thumbs came home.
Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t. But in that moment, it felt like Hashem grinned and said, “I hear you, Zev. I know you’re mad. Here—have your boy back.”
That’s the kind of relationship I have with the Divine. It’s not sanitized. It’s not easy. It’s full of yelling, weeping, gratitude, fury, hope.
It’s real.
It’s covenantal.
It’s Jewish.
What really cemented my belief? Love.
In 2022, I got my heart broken by a trans man who was deeply closeted and lied about everything, including stolen valor and being trans. I made a joke: “If the right guy is out there, he’s probably all the way in fucking New Zealand, which might as well be Narnia or some shit.”
Flash forward to February 2025. Enter Andy. From New Zealand. Blond. Blue-eyed. Queer. A Libra with heavy Sagittarius in his chart, including a Yod.
My friend Molly and I had written the bassist of our fictional glam rock band Silmarella as a blond named Andy, years before. I wrote an OC named Anthony who was a psych nurse. Andy is a nurse in a care home that has some psych patients. Andy is also a bass player.
Our connection was instant. Psychic. Holy. When he visited Dachau as a teenager, he cried and didn’t know why. I do.
Andy sees me as a man. He calls me his husband. After years of rejection—from cis gay men, from transmascs who policed my gender—I found someone who loves me, whole and holy.
Andy is Pagan. I’m Jewish. And it works.
I don’t believe Judaism is monotheism in the strictest sense. It’s henotheism. We worship one G-d, but acknowledge that others exist for other people. Hashem made a covenant with the Jewish people, not a monopoly on the divine. That’s Jewitchery: honoring G-d through Jewish practice, while respecting others’ paths. It’s not avodah zarah (idol worship). It’s not worshipping other gods. It’s honoring Hashem in a way that makes sense to my soul, after everything I’ve lived through.
I’ve seen too much magic and pain and holiness in this world to box G-d into a single shape. My G-d is wild, wise, and full of love.
And that connection, with a Pagan partner, helped me to find healing for the time of the 2015 Witch Wars when I had felt forsaken by the gods I once worshiped. What I began to realize—slowly, painfully, with that familiar mixture of awe and resistance—was that I had been pushed away by them as an act of tough love because it was through Hashem that I needed to do my healing. Growing up fundamentalist Christian, I had been afraid of the deity whose name had been twisted into a whip, into a curse, into fear.
But that was never who Hashem truly was.
It wasn’t enough for me to abandon the G-d of my childhood. I had to meet Him again, on different terms. I had to walk back through the fire and see that the fire itself was holy—that the G-d I had been taught to fear was actually a G-d of compassion, justice, and mercy. A G-d big enough to hold my trauma and not flinch. A G-d who knew what had been done to me and did not blame me for surviving it.
None of the gods I once honored had that specific shape in my life. They gave me power and connection, yes. But reconciliation? Redemption? A sense of being Seen by the very force I once believed had damned me? That was something only Hashem could give me.
My Hebrew name is Zev, which means “wolf.”
I've had a thing with wolves since I was a kid, in dreams, in stories, in art, in the way I move through the world. As a child, I never saw them as evil. I never believed the fairy tales that cast them as monsters lurking in the dark. I saw their sorrow. Their strength. Their loyalty to their own. I saw their wild beauty and the way they hold both stillness and ferocity in their bodies.
I saw myself.
Wolves don’t ask for approval. They don’t perform. They survive. They protect. They form tight-knit packs but also know what it means to be a lone wolf. They know exile. They know instinct. They howl to the moon not because they are lost—but because they are still here. Still alive. Still calling out across the dark for others who remember the sound.
That’s what my journey has felt like: a long, feral howl through years of silence. And now? I’m not howling alone anymore.
In Jewish mysticism, the wolf doesn’t have the same baggage it does in Christian allegory. It’s not a symbol of evil. In fact, in some kabbalistic traditions, the wolf represents the soul’s yearning for freedom and divine connection. The midbar—the wilderness—is sacred in Judaism. It’s where prophets go to hear G-d. It’s where wolves run.
When I say I’m a wolf, I mean that at the soul level, I am something untamed, something ancient, something meant to guard, to mourn, to sing. I don’t hunt—I witness. I don’t devour—I protect what is sacred. And when the world tells me I’m too much, too strange, too queer, too angry, too soft, too not-man-enough or too everything—I return to the forest of myself and remember that I was never made to live in a cage.
I don’t believe conversion is about becoming someone new. I believe it’s about becoming who you were always meant to be, with intention and consent. Judaism doesn’t promise me safety, certainty, or ease. What it promises is responsibility: to wrestle, to repair, to choose life again and again even when the world is on fire. It gives me a language for grief that doesn’t demand closure, a faith that makes room for anger, and a people who understand that survival itself can be a sacred act.
I knew when I was four. It took me four decades to walk the long way back. I don’t regret the path, even the parts that nearly killed me, because they taught me how to recognize truth when I finally stood inside it. I am Zev. I am a Jew by choice and by soul. I argue with G-d, I love fiercely, I guard what is precious, and I keep walking forward. The wolf has come home—but he still runs.
