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judío por elección (part 1)

(TW: aging, death, brief description of dead body and the effects of death)

We were stopped on the street two years ago by a small gray-haired lady who was thrilled to hear us speaking English. She herself was a Londoner who transplanted to our small Andalusian village with her husband almost twenty years ago. She was thrilled to hear people speaking in her mother tongue and invited my wife and I in for coffee anytime.

We started taking her up on it. The pandemic was still On, but not Lockdown On. We wore masks, sat on their broad terrace over six feet apart, and shouted conversation at each other. She always gave us tons of cookies and coffee from her once-white, now-brown-from-use plastic electric kettle. I get nervous about plastic kettles, but drank it anyway. And here was where we met her husband, E.

E was stooped and frail where his wife, S, was merely beginning to run down a little. When you get to E's age, the skeleton starts to come out in your features. Even then, we had no idea how old E really was until he casually mentioned that he remembered his father coming back from the war.

The War, he said, and I told my wife afterwards this must be WW2, and later, we asked enough questions to validate that guess. So in his 80s.

E forgot a lot of things. He acting like being Jewish was a secret because he'd forgotten how he'd hung up a Passover plate on one wall, and how he'd marked the eastern wall of the house with a plaque of the Tablets of the Law. We decided to make him feel safer by talking about my Jewish stepfamily and my wife's experiences of being mistaken for Jewish. He talked about learning Hebrew before he learned English, a little about growing up Orthodox in England in the fifties. Then he made us swear we'd never tell anyone in the village that he was Jewish.

We swore.

He wasn't an easy person to be around. Part of aging sometimes is feeling the weight of all your seemingly-innocent choices along the way dragging your body down into oblivion. Throughout his life, E smoked and E was a jeweler who did woodworking and home repair and almost never wore a mask. E when I knew him was tied to an oxygen tank and sounded like he breathed underwater. Throughout his life, E was strong and able to exert gentle control over others; when I knew him, his reedy voice rose to sharply criticize anyone around him.

He complained of how things were different now in the village; I saw his fear of the last great big change behind his words.

That was how my wife and I treated these visits: we were seeing an old man at the end of his life far away from his family trying to cope. He told the same set of stories over and over again; we took it as him needing certainty that somebody would know and tell those stories. (One of them: E worked on set design for the show "Merlin", kept the molds, and utilized them in his home design... so some of his walls had little archways with Merlin's star or the throne's symbol impressed upon them.) He went back and forth between taxing S with unreasonable requests and trying to ratchet them back when he saw he went too far.

Early in the summer of 2023, E started repainting and cleaning off his terrace and rooftop. S would cry and beg and plead for him not to, it was too hot, he'd go without oxygen too long (she was right). E ignored her. I drank my coffee and thought about how he must know the end was near and how he wanted to leave the house in a nice condition for S to live in, or sell, afterward.

The last thing he tried to do was repaint part of the ceiling which had collapsed and decorate it with stars, galaxies, and black holes. "It takes a great deal of time to reproduce the universe," he'd say, and my wife would laugh and say "Of course, it took G-d six days but we're not G-d", and then E'd laugh, every time.

Toward the end of an obscenely hot June, S called me in shrieking tears and told me "I think E has died!"

I was in the middle of six chores when I got that phone call, none of which were done that day. My wife and I ran for S's house. E had been mostly bed-bound for the past two weeks. He had gotten out of bed, walked into the foyer, and collapsed. He was almost certainly dead immediately. S had to do CPR on him while weeping and talking to the emergency workers in broken Spanish.

Never seen a dead body before.

After the workers finally arrived, it went more quickly. They picked his body up and wrapped him in a sheet and laid him on the marital bed. My wife, who speaks Spanish natively, spoke to all the different workers. I didn't, so I ended up finding a mop and cleaning up the urine that coated the entire foyer. (The next day I'd bring by a steam cleaner, run it through the whole foyer, and then I steam cleaned her kitchen so we could all pretend I hadn't brought it over to cleanse the last of E from the house.)

(When I learned that you kasher a microwave by steaming water in it, I immediately thought of that day.)

I led S into the room where E's body lay. I pulled out my phone while she cried. I didn't yet understand how an ethnoreligion worked, but I still had a sense that while E wasn't passionately religious, he would want certain things for himself. If he didn't, then S needed something that would help her move into grief. And I knew that it'd help me. So I pulled up an English language version of a mourning prayer and guided S through it.

This calmed her a little, and after touching his outline, she left the room. Alone, not sure if he said it or if I believed it, I recited the Shema on his behalf. (Which I had learned, to my goyim embarrassment, from "The Sandman".)

After E's passing, none of his remaining family were Jewish, and nobody wanted his Judaica. Once S started cleaning all the remnants out of her house, she went hard on purging the Judaica. I don't blame her for this, exactly. She was grieving and she had no concept of how important some of those objects could be. My wife told her to give us any books or items that were about Judaism instead of throwing them away. When she did, S lit up and immediately gave us his mezuzahs. One was empty. One had a tatty old prayer sheet inside it.

My wife and I looked for hours on how to dispose of the prayer (we still haven't, we're working on it). I looked up whether or not it was okay for non-Jews to hang mezuzah. As I shared the results, my wife laughed and said they'd feel weird about it, like they were cosplaying Judaism.

"I'd like to be Jewish," they said, as they had for the past fifteen years on and off, "only I can't."

This time, for the first time, I said: "Why not?"

Your conversion story is fascinating, unique, precious, and holy. When you become a member of the Jewish people, your story enriches the heritage of the Jewish people [...] which will be forever changed by your presence.

 —Anita Diamant, Choosing a Jewish Life

judío por elección (part 2)

(part 1.)

My wife and I started searching for a community after a lot of talking. But, technically, we were already looking.

After E died, S gave us charge over a specific set of books. He had told her that it was vital these books go to a synagogue. He preferred it to be a London synagogue. We had no clue which one.

Shoved in with all the different books he had, and we inherited, was ephemera from different synagogues--pamphlets from the 1980s and 1990s, booklets from the '40s and '50s. We started calling and emailing them about these books, because they were pretty important.

They're chumash with a publication date of 1898.

Problem was, we couldn't get any synagogues to respond. The one who finally did said that they had too many books and could not accept any more. They suggested that E might still be honored if the chumash went to a Spanish synagogue.

The community here, as you can imagine, is struggling. Spain has done a real good job at keeping Jews out since the expulsion of 1492. Most groups operate in half-secret: no website, or a website that hasn't been updated in years; no phone numbers. Half of the people we tried to contact never responded. Most of the rest couldn't support our conversion.

One rabbi from Madrid answered us. She made it clear that we'd have to move if we wanted to attend her group. This was expected and crushing. We're poor, disabled, and pretty well stuck where we are. But then she said that there was a brand-new community in a city closer to us, one we visit with some frequency. She introduced us to their leader.

I have the impression that A would be considered a cantor. He is not a rabbi, but he can lead services. He had a few questions about my wife and I's histories and experiences with Judaism. (Those experiences I'll talk about somewhat, but it's difficult to talk about meaningfully while also maintaining privacy, so it'll have to wait.) He wanted to know if and what we were reading. Then he invited us to Shabbat, which they conduct through videocalls.

This group does not have a rabbi, much less a synagogue. Several of the folks who call in for our Shabbat meeting live in a different city entirely. That person talks about experiences with Mossad. I want to get better at Spanish so that I can learn from her.

There's singing (as someone who's seen Ashkenazi services, the Sephardi tradition sounds amazing), of course, and because there's so few of us, A has my wife and I read sometimes for services. The very first thing I got to read was Psalm 23, which has always been one of my favorite works of art... which A couldn't know when he asked me to read it.

I said I'd stumble at lot. He told me to read it slowly in Spanish, that it's better to read slow and correctly than quickly and clumsily. He seemed pleased with my effort.

I was raised Mormon, and the entire approach to worship was very different, in a way I found appealing. My wife said it wasn't that different for them--they were raised mainstream Protestant, so singing and standing/sitting a lot were normal for them.

When we were asked to raise a glass of alcohol, we asked if it had to be wine. (We're bad Spaniards. Neither of us likes the stuff.) A said that as long as it was fermented, it was fine. One attendant had a gin and tonic.

The last time we celebrated Shabbat, we used gay-pride themed glasses and filled them with beer. "¿Qué tenéis?" we were asked.

"¡Cerveza!", which cracked them all up, and the ex-Mossad member talked about how the Orthodox she used to worship with would drink whiskey.

Setting aside the Shabbat has been, overall, easier than I thought it would be. I check HebCal to make sure when the candles should be lit. I do all my household chores throughout Thursday and Friday-daytime. My wife tries to cook as much as possible before the candles are lit, and we eat, talk, and do our video-call service with the community.

Saturday I set aside. I have to keep reminding myself not to work, to consider things done even if they look like they're not.

But onward.

Our little community is fantastic, particularly A. He found out I'm having problems with some of my IDs. He told us not to worry. He knows a lot of people who work immigration and he can help us go to the right office and navigate the Spanish bureaucracy. ("Byzantine" should be replaced with "Spanish".) He's answered all our questions and invited us to events about the Shoah and personally introduced us to people.

They were so welcoming, so open, so not-rejecting-us-three-times (but if you count all the rabbis who told us no, technically, that's more than three) that it shocked my wife and I. We talked beforehand about how the community might want to withdraw, and not trust new converts, given October 7. We found the opposite. Our local Jews seem to feel that our willingness to look at how the world is behaving right now and still say "Your people will be my people" demonstrates our sincerity in and of itself.

On the other hand, when we first met A in person, my wife made a comment regarding his personal safety. He admitted that there was a man in the room with us who's his armed bodyguard. He and his wife do not leave home on business related to the community without their bodyguard.

My wife felt a cold hand creep up their back when they heard that. I was not nearby--I was checking all the exits of the auditorium and calculating where we'd need to sit if we had to flee. There were "pro-Palestinian" protests going on that day and the odds were there wouldn't be any danger near us, but... but...

Several of A's family members are also converting. We will have to travel halfway across the country to a mikveh. There are many medieval mikvehs in Spain, but to my knowledge, there are only two which are actually in use. My wife says we'll have to do a road trip. I immediately think about how "one Sephardi and four converts go road tripping across a country where one of its favorite dishes was designed as a Fuck You to Jews and Muslims" would be a fucking great novel.

Would be? Will be. And completing this branch of the journey with a journey feels right.

Oh, and my favorite A story: he invited us to spend some time with him and his wife after a community meal. We agreed to attend the meal, but had to leave after. "We have a lot of dogs and cats," my wife said, "we have to return and care for them."

"We'd love to have you," he said, "but it's a mitzvah, taking care of animals. Do that instead."

Afterward, my wife stared at me in wonderment and said: "I don't think I ever heard that once in church."

Shabbat shalom, y'all

And in case you're busy tomorrow night, shavua tov!

judío por elección (part 2.5)

(part 1. part 2.)

We got ourselves a rabbi!

Most in our community are Sephardim, except for an Ashkenazim family who just joined us, and the new Rabbi is also Ashkenazi. That's how it is in most of Spain, though. Newer Jewish communities have folks from all types of practices. The struggle to rebuild what was destroyed in Sepharad is real, ongoing, and valuable.

Dunno when, but he wants to interview the wife and I over the phone. I could be mistaken, but I think he's Conservative, which is way closer to how we wanted to practice Judaism than I'd expected when we started this journey.

Not a giant essay this time; just some Good News.

I wish it were better known and appreciated that the majority of non-Mediterranean European ancestry in Ashkenazim mostly comes from people who willingly converted to Judaism, even despite great personal risk. As we've learned from genetic studies, most of these people were women; over 90% of male Y-chromosomal lines are from the Middle East and Mediterranean while about 60% of female mtDNA lineages are.

These European women and men knowingly chose to become Jewish despite the fact that they would be persecuted for it, that they and their children would be subjugated to exclusionary laws, and that they could lose their reputations and standing with their former communities. They could and were at certain times even executed for becoming Jewish or having romantic relationships with Jews, and would be murdered in pogroms like the 1096 Rhineland massacres because they were Jews.

This man's name is lost to us today, but he became Jewish and remained Jewish in a hostile environment where there were zero benefits in wider society for doing so. With the recent massacres looming over his head, he was even anxiously considering the possibility that he might someday kill himself rather than give up his identity as a Jew should a mob come for him and demand he convert to Christianity.

Of course at times they weren't even given the option to convert/be baptized into Christianity. They were massacred along with the other Jews of the community.

When it was discovered that Marina Davidovna Surawicza had converted to Judaism in the 18th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, she was arrested, tortured, and eventually executed.

The same thing happened to Maryna Wojciechówna and Paraska Daniłowna, both of whom were executed during the same time period because they converted and married Jewish men. They arrested Maryna at her own wedding.

I understand the frustration, grief, and anger in posts where people respond to the deep, longstanding mire of antisemitic rhetoric that people use to hurl primarily at Ashkenazim to delegitimize them and their heritage because of their history in Europe. I understand what it is to watch people spin narratives out of misapplied discourse about modern conceptions and racial politics in countries like the USA, especially when those narratives become the foundation for excusing or promoting dangerous misinformation, violence, and hate against Jews just because some of their recent ancestors lived in Europe and may have had on average lighter skin, hair, and eyes, (none of which are exclusive to Europeans or to America's present conception of "white people.") I understand what it's like facing an onslaught of ignorant and false statements designed to delegitimize, deny, and accuse Jews for Bullshit Reason #263434.

I just want you to know that you have ancestors like Marina and the man from 11th century Germany whose name we'll never know, people with an extraordinary amount of bravery and personal conviction who chose to be Jewish despite knowing that they would be oppressed and perhaps even killed for it.

Do not let antisemites make you feel ashamed that these people are part of Am Yisrael.

Every Jewish person is ethically jewish weather they are born from the waters of a womb or the waters of a mikvah

Joined the kabbalat shabbat service even though I didn't psychologically feel like it beforehand, and I'm glad I did.

There's a family with two kiddos who just joined us, and the younger one's in the "I'm gonna show off my toys and also the stars of David I made out of popsicle sticks" phase of life that's so cool to be around. The older kid speaks English fluently, so he and my wife had a good conversation while I was feeding the animals.

A added a bit about how hard my wife and I work at caring for stray animals in our village into his commentary.

My wife showed off the challah they baked before sundown, and the others showed off theirs, and everybody applauded each other's skills.

It's a good, chill way to welcome shabbat and not feel so isolated. Everybody works to make each other feel included and valued.

judío por elección (part 3)

(part 1. part 2. part 2.5.)

"I think," I told my wife the other day, "we're gonna have to use the mikvehs for women."

They made a face--a nose-wrinkly sneer, equal parts anger and tired.

"It's about what I expected," I said.

"Yeah," they said, "but still."

One of the reasons my wife and I chose to convert at this moment is because we want children, and we're about to take that step. As adults, we have both been far too smart for church. They were mainstream Protestant, I was Mormon. They stopped attending. I got my baptism revoked (a real thing that really happened, I have the paperwork and everything).

The one community we've had for the past couple of decades has been the LGBTQ community. We both assumed that queers meant it when they talked about protecting queer and trans children, as well as the children of queers and transes. So we ignored all the microaggressions, hints, signs and omens that we weren't welcome. We told people how impossible it was for us to have kids. They'd cluck their tongues and offer sympathy and support, but only so long as our problems were structured in a way they cared about. In a way that theoretically reflected their own oppression.

Our tales of how we couldn't adopt, do IVF, or "simply" have unprotected sex with a total stranger who wanted no parental rights were restructured as being about institutional homo/transphobia. A cautionary tale. Proof that the listener's antinatalism was justified, for see what befalls those foolish fags who actually, ew!, WANT to breed!

"You guys are dinks! That must be nice," said an asexual friend of mine. She had to explain to me what dink meant. I was privately appalled that someone who knew for a fact we desperately wanted children would talk about how great it was that we were double income... no kids.

No kids.

There's nothing you can tell me about human reproduction that I haven't thought of. My wife and I have put more thought into this than any hundred couples you can name. We have both done therapy, research, and soulful self-examination in the name of Not Passing On The Trauma. I was girled as a child, and so I know all the work necessary for being a parent. We've tested each other for years with "What if the kid's a jock? What if they really like Marvel movies? What if they want to go to church?" kind of questions, and all of the answers we give amount to something like this:

Parentage is the only relationship where the other person in the relationship is supposed to move away from you. Always, they're moving away, and that's how you know you've done it right. The child begins inside someone's body, and they end up their own human person, and that's as it should be. If you perceive being a parent as having a relationship with a really cool person, then you're going to have a good relationship with them. If you want an adorable creature to pour all your unmet needs into, get a fish tank.

Anyway. In the last year, my wife and I have started letting folks know we are taking serious steps to have a child. I'm not getting specific on the details online, because my child will deserve to have their privacy and I don't want to divulge their journey as though it's mine.

But slowly, one by one, as they were told of this intent, all the queer and trans folks we know withdrew from our social circle.

"I'll just pick up a trans kid from the adoption agency if I want one." "I've always thought of fostering queer kids." "Why can't you just custom-build a child genetically with IVF?" "Won't you be angry if the child isn't really, y'know, YOURS?"

As though having a child is a matter of indulging my own selfish whims. As though any fostering or adoption agency has ever been open and happy to let queer or trans folks walk right in and customize who they're willing to foster or adopt. These reactions are, to be frank, cruel and brutal, and they center what should be good news on the recipient's own anger at their own parents. I don't mind providing you support, but it's fucked up how my sharing good news keeps turning into other people demanding support.

It leaves my wife and I feeling like maybe this whole Friendship and Community thing is actually one-way.

"Maybe you keep running into people who are toxic or self-centered," one might suggest, "and that's not the whole community!" And... sure, that's possible. It's possible that the dozens of queer and trans folks I've met are not representative of the community to which they belong. But it's also possible that this hypothetical one is demanding that I offer compassion and understanding to folks who completely refuse to offer it in return, who will argue that expecting them to be compassionate or kind makes relationships "transactional" and something-something capitalist pigs.

The only people we've met who were queers and who were also enthusiastic for us to have children are, like us, rural folks who are not exactly Part Of The Community. They don't go to clubs or surf the internet--there's no signal at their house, and anyway, they're too tired after breaking their backs doing farm labor (or being disabled) to drive for two hours to drink with strangers.

Anyhow. This response has thrown a lot of things in relief for me. I don't want to be around people who despise my child in advance, or me for having them, and I don't care if those who despise me are right or left, cishet or in the community. I don't have time for people who hate me.

I want my child to feel welcome among a community, a group who will embrace them and teach them and make them feel like they're a part of a greater story than one I can tell them by myself.

When we told A we would have to skip a Jewish community event because we were getting IVF, he called us almost in tears. He was happy. He talked about how a community without children is dead. He reassured us that while our children won't be born Jewish, given when we'll get dunked, they will be as soon as possible. That our children will be adored and taught to be sephardim from the beginning. And he insisted that he would pay for the bris, if the child needs one.

This guy I've known less than six months did more to make us feel welcome and safe than folks I've known for decades.

But. But.

The Spanish Jewish community has not recovered from the expulsion in 1492. Then, it's estimated that despite multiple massacres wrought by both Muslims and Christians, the Jewish population was at 100,000. Nowadays, it's somewhere between 13,000 to 50,000, depending on how you count. Accordingly, there are, to my knowledge, three mikvehs in the entirety of Spain.

The one we will have to use is operated by an Orthodox community. I am still pre-everything and my wife does not think medical transition will help them. Hence my telling my wife we'll have to use the women's mikveh. And I've come to slowly realize that in all likelihood no one will give me a bris or a substitute shedding of blood.

And... well. I get it. I'm coming into someone else's house. I need to follow their rules. I am not in a position to shop around. It's not like there's a surfeit of choice for either of us.

So I tell myself this is necessary as a sacrifice for the child. And I tell myself I won't ever tell them about this.

But it would be nice if there were a community where I could tell somebody.

Shabbat shalom, y'all

And in case you're busy tomorrow night, shavua tov!

I thought Jumblr would like to see some of the Jewish books I rescued last year, because books!

We used the Shabbat book tonight since we could not use our online resources, analogue wins again

In 1999, I made a pseudonym for writing fanfic because I knew everybody around me hated Queer Stuff and I also knew I needed to be able to talk about Queer Stuff online in a safe-ish space, not surrounded by people automatically revolted by Queer Stuff

In 2024, I made a pseudonym for writing about my Jewish conversion because I knew everybody in fandom spaces hates Jewish Stuff and I also knew I needed to be able to talk about Jewish Stuff online in a safe-ish space, not surrounded by people automatically revolted by Jewish Stuff

Here are the mezuzah cases that E's wife gave to us. One of them still has a very damaged scroll inside. We're consulting with the very small local Jewish community on how to properly dispose of it.

Eventually, these will go on our main doors.

"A young man studying for conversion turned to his teacher and said, 'But Rabbi Kushner, Fitzpatrick isn't a Jewish name.' To which Kushner replied, 'It will be.'"

— Choosing a Jewish Life, by Anita Diamant

judío por elección (part 4)

(part 1. part 2. part 2.5. part 3.)

I thought I was ready to meet the Rabbi, but I was wrong.

I have severe social anxiety. I believed I'd prepped to introduce myself on the Zoom call for our Intro to Judaism class. Turned out I kept turning the mic off when it should have been on, and vice versa. I stumbled my way through a basic intro in extremely broken Spanish.

I glanced at my wife, and they whispered: "You're way too loud on the mic, and you can speak in English. He speaks it."

Even thought that's my native language, I was now so discombobulated by having to reset my brain that I said some bullshit that probably didn't make sense, which is a great way of impressing the guy who's responsible for your conversion. It took me ten minutes of silently crying in front of my (thankfully, camera-less) computer to recover.

Fortunately, the Rabbi is extremely decent and has probably heard way worse than me. He politely switched between Spanish and English throughout the first class to make sure I understood certain points.

Our homework is to study some topics related to the biet dim's questions (monotheism and ethics) and present our findings to him next class. He says he wants to learn how each of us researches and records information, which is an excellent thing to learn. And he told us which portion of the Torah is being read.

We'll have to show him our scriptures next time to see if he thinks they're appropriate translations. We're converting Conservative and some of our books came from different practices. He's also made it clear that everybody converting will talk to the biet dim of Europe in their own native tongue, which is great for me, sure, but also important to my Spanish-speaking friends.

When my wife said that they were nonbinary and I was trans, the Rabbi didn't bat an eye, but we didn't get to talk much about it in detail. But, afterward, another person in the group hopped onto the shul's group chat to talk about being trans and Jewish and shared some English resources with us.

There was another trans person there the whole time!

I think the anxiety is down to a manageable level now. Homework, I can do. I'm looking forward to having coffee in the morning and reading and studying with my wife instead of doomscrolling.

It feels good to be able to do something instead of wallowing, or crying uncontrollably. (It's also morally neutral to cry uncontrollably. That's what the 'uncontrollable' part means.) To be able to know what kinds of things I'm looking for in my books instead of staring at the huge stack and not knowing where to start.

And I hope the Rabbi is as kind as he seems and that he won't hold my stumbling against me.

I finished my second Hebrew/Spanish course today and logged on to brag to Jumblr about it.

And I see that y'all are busy reaffirming and welcoming converts, and shutting down antisemites who are attacking folks like me.

This is why I got an account on here after being away for a decade. Moments like this.

I am a very small account but I do still check the history of new followers, and if I see you being the exact kind of person I habitually criticize, that’s an instant block.

You do not get to spam your Jew-hate and your misinformation on Hamas’s war and also get to look at my magpiecore and Judaica.

Hey Jumblr, got a question that's not at all about the Oscars

My Conservative rabbi gave me homework before my next intro to Judaism class. This homework includes talking about:

Jewish monotheism

Monotheistic ethics

Spiritual and religious ethics

I'm literally translating from the Spanish, here.

Do not give me any answers! I want to research this myself!

Bbbbbut I would like some ideas of where to start. I have a couple of Spanish Masorti sites, Chabad, and Exploring Judaism at the ready, and I also plan on diving into some of my books, but any guidance, PDFs, or links would be dandy.

(I have a copy of "G-d in Search of Man"--would it be worthwhile to use that as a resource?)

Again, not looking for cheat sheets, just resources so I can present my questions to him at our next class. Thanks, y'all! ✡️

Me when they bring up Haman

I'm adding aaall of these to the shopping list. I inherited a lot of books on Judaism, but they're pretty old, so being able to explore newer and different perspectives is going to be very fruitful. Thank you for the recommendations!

I'm also looking for websites I can use, and @azcrowleyfell (always very helpful) pointed me to several, along with more book. Do you have any suggestions for online resources? I know books are preferred, but I live in a rural part of Spain, so getting English-language books can be a trial.

Hey Jumblr, got a question that's not at all about the Oscars

My Conservative rabbi gave me homework before my next intro to Judaism class. This homework includes talking about:

Jewish monotheism

Monotheistic ethics

Spiritual and religious ethics

I'm literally translating from the Spanish, here.

Do not give me any answers! I want to research this myself!

Bbbbbut I would like some ideas of where to start. I have a couple of Spanish Masorti sites, Chabad, and Exploring Judaism at the ready, and I also plan on diving into some of my books, but any guidance, PDFs, or links would be dandy.

(I have a copy of "God in Search of Man"--would it be worthwhile to use that as a resource?)

Again, not looking for cheat sheets, just resources so I can present my questions to him at our next class. Thanks, y'all! ✡️