By Elisa Novick
I often tell people that my mother was a strict Jewish atheist. She was the power in the family as far as I knew, and my father wasn’t talking. In consequence, I was afraid to believe in God. The first time my parents let me go all the way from the Bronx to Manhattan without grownup accompaniment, my friend, Sarah Davidson, took me into St. John the Divine, a grand cathedral in New York.
I was a classical violinist and she a cellist, and here was a free performance of Bach’s Mass in B minor. I should have been in bliss. It was, I’m sure, magnificent, but I was so terrified that my mother would be angry that I was in a church, I forced her to get me out of there.
Another time, in school, I wrote a prayer in a poem, which I hid under the mess of shoes and stuff at the bottom of my closet. Months later, I looked and the poem wasn’t there and once again I felt the terror of my mother’s disapproval.
Years later, one day in my first Saturn return, my therapist, with whom I’d done years of Primal Therapy and other forms of family healing, said she had no more to offer me. My first response was that I still had an empty hole inside, to which she responded, “Maybe that is your spirituality.” Again, my first thought, even after all those years of bashing pillows and crying deeply to release my childhood feelings, was, “My mother would kill me.”
Given this background, you can imagine that my introduction to spirituality, which began the day after my therapist released me, was exciting and scary. I had been taught that religion was a crutch used to enslave people, that the Germans — Christians all — persecuted and slaughtered the Jews. My birthday on Christmas Eve was made an especially big deal so I wouldn’t envy my friends with their Christmas trees and sparkly lights. I didn’t find out until my mother was dying, years later, that the real reason she hated religion was that they wouldn’t let her sit next to her papa in the synagogue, where men and women sat in separate sections.