The passion of a Jew by choice

By AVIGAYIL LOBATO
How it feels to be in a process of conversion to Judaism? It feels like a limbo. You’re the absolutely nothingness, doesn’t matter how much you read or how hard you try, you’re nothing. The only way out is: leave behind who you are in order to become who you wanna be. What makes you who you are? I have to leave behind my small town, my family, the food they eat, my old dreams and the good memories…  the Christmas songs.
 
How do you survive that? Your dream makes you strong or a medicine allows you to survive. Talking to others helps. I love the other, the guy in front of you in the line, the old woman on the bus, the other student, the tourist on a high way to a stupid place. They can tell you a history, I’m eager to tell mine and to hear, to hear something, perhaps that person or the next is going to guide me through the awful sadness, desperate, passion and angry that I find myself in.  
 
I have met many fascinating people during this year, probably because I have traveled a lot and because I have discovered the Jewish world. I’ll take the stories of their lives through every place I walk, I’ll look at them every time I see myself in the mirror and I’ll take them to everyone I meet in the future. The meaning of their words have changed, is going to change while I live. Words are especially dangerous things.
 
I have a passion inside of me that I barely have words to describe. It’s strong, it wants to speak but it has chains around its pulse and I’m sure that I can let it all out. Sometimes that passion frees itself and I become something so different from what I think I am. The passion makes me a honest person. Is that good or bad? I’ll let you decide on that matter. I want to write about the world in front of my eyes and about passion. That kind of passion that changes your life and make you something else. Passion reveals your inner self, a small part of you gets out there, naked, immodest.
 
One way to reveal my inner self, with absolute lack of modesty, is writing. I write because I need to put my thoughts outside, not because I think they are more important than yours, but because it allows me to live better, I breath, when I can read them, understand them and how they influence me. I write to be able to speak things that I want to say, but I just can't imagine others saying. I write to be someone that I don’t have the courage to be, a Passionate Weirdo. One of my passions is Judaism. The Jewish world, how and where I fit in this world, if I’ll ever be capable to be fully Jewish… Those are the questions and thoughts that are in my mind, so I write about them.