What do you think of when you think about religion? Specifically your own religion, the one you grew up in, and/or your cultural “default” religion. For me, my thoughts on religion have changed significantly over the years and ranged wildly. Within the last few years, I was deeply connected enough to religion to go to rabbinical school. A couple of years after that, I was disillusioned enough to drop out and distance myself entirely. Since then, my association with religion, Judaism in particular, has been with pain, whether it be an acute stabbing pain or a dull ache.

The dominance of that pain drowned out the more nuanced ways my relationship to Judaism changed. It’s difficult, after all, to ask yourself how you feel about Jewish food when you actively have a thorn in your side about the ways in which parts of the Jewish community wounded you deeply. Asking yourself if there’s a way you can celebrate holidays is impossible to do when you find yourself terrified to open religious texts out of fear that something you once loved will now mean nothing.

It’s understandable that what gets the most attention is what hurts the most. It has a way of blocking everything else out. But the pain is too much to resolve effectively. Treating that pain feels more like an if than a when for me and I’m not optimistic that it’ll ever fully go away. What lies beneath may be a different story, though, but until now it’s been hard to access that underlying source of pain.

I recently moved to my own apartment from living in SS/SK apartment with roommates. I’m still processing the emotional intensity of the situation after looking for a new place for years, but so far I’ve been cooking almost constantly and exclusively items I couldn’t cook in the old kitchen for one reason or another. Until this morning, all of these cooking choices were intentionally made to be something I couldn’t have made in the old apartment (ie sausage gravy, items without kosher certification), but today I went shopping for general food (without that in mind) for the first time.

As I unpacked my groceries, I realized that at no point did I have to check the kosher status of anything I was buying and, in fact, could have bought and prepared whatever I wanted. This helped me realize one of the main associations I had with Judaism: restriction. Restriction is not limited to food, but its ever presence loomed over my life as someone who hasn’t kept kosher for over 2 years. Checking labels for certification. Finding a substitute or, often, making a substitute from scratch. Not preparing meat at home because of the price of kosher meat. The difficulty of bringing food to work and heating it up. The pain of throwing out food because I had no way to refrigerate the leftovers. Relying heavily on takeout and delivery because who the fuck wants to deal with the rest of that constantly.

Every day, several times a day, I was confronted with restrictions related to Judaism. It’s easy to write it off as being because I don’t keep kosher anymore, but it was a burden even when I didn’t keep kosher, although one I at times took on happily. So many times I found myself lacking an appetite or deeply craving something I grew up with (that was most certainly not kosher) or wanting to try some of the new exciting foods around me, but unable to do so. All of this got worse when I lost my sense of taste/smell from COVID that has never fully returned. More than a few times my therapist expressed concern about how difficult keeping kosher was making it for me to eat, let alone eat healthfully. He was justifiably relieved when I finally decided to stop keeping kosher because I was to the point of struggling to eat at all. Restriction was always a force looming in the background.

But it’s not anymore. I am in the process of trying to rebuild my relationship to Judaism, or at least to see if that’s possible. Restriction can be completely unrelated to Judaism (or a distant memory) if I so choose. At the end of the day, I’m still Jewish whether I keep kosher or not and regardless of who I date and regardless of any number of restrictions I could choose to take on or not. I don’t think I felt that way until recently (more on that another time), but it allows for a freedom I’m not sure I’ve ever felt with Judaism. And that freedom is what I’m hoping to use as the foundation for a form of Judaism that works for me.