Our People/Nancy Wingerson's Story
Cowan, Paul and Rachel
OUR PEOPLE NANCY WINGERSON'S STORY "When I was 11, my family moved into a neighborhood where there were a lot of Jewish kids. Their God seemed nicer than mine." PAUL Last month, when we...
...Wherever she teaches, she will be at a cultural crossroads, at a place where only Jews by choice can stand...
...It was a beautiful experience of becoming a new person, a new me...
...I needed to feel authentic...
...She thinks that the fact that she's a convert might have given her a fresh way of looking at texts...
...I kept taking Zionist positions in arguments with my friends...
...When Nancy was in high school, (after the family had moved from Highland Park), the changes of Vatican II swept the Church...
...I'd come from a working-class family, and had never been in a setting where the life of the mind was so important...
...She was always badgering me to say what I thought...
...Converting was easy," she recalls, but that first year at JTS was rough: "In Pittsburgh, I was in an ordinary congregation...
...1 quit going to Confession...
...It was at about this time that she read Exodus...
...I was very fond of my community of friends at the Seminary and, even though they'd occasionally joke that I didn't look Jewish, they were very supportive...
...Saints—including St...
...The transition from Pittsburgh to New York was difficult...
...That was my first real exposure to the Holocaust...
...The first time she attended Friday night services she was the only woman with a group of elderly men...
...No one ever invited her home for a Shabbat meal...
...But he did arrange for her to take courses with the shammas of the synagogue, a Dutch Jew who had survived the Holotaust...
...I felt guilty about deceiving them, but no guilt about giving up the Church...
...It took me a very long time to possess a constant, inward feeling that I was Jewish...
...Afterwards, she told me she found it quite foreign...
...In other words, the nuns and priests who had taught me all my life were wrong about some very important things...
...I saw Shabbat as a religious time and, back then, I didn't see any relationship between a religious occasion and a social one...
...I felt at home...
...I loved English novels...
...But whether Nancy Wingerson, former Catholic, now a Bible student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, teaches at a secular university or in a more parochial setting, it is clear that her convert's passion and her love of scholarship will be the foundation for the mission she has chosen...
...But as soon as that subsided I realized that 1 wanted to commit myself as fully as possible to Judaism...
...I had a period of wanting to be a nun or a martyr, so I'd test myself by giving up something I loved on Lent, like candy or the movies...
...I felt a hunger to learn more about Judaism...
...I did, though...
...I Paul Cowan, author of An Orphan in History, and Rachel Cowan, program director at New York City's Ansche Chesed, are moment contributing editors for this monthly feature...
...She wanted to observe kashrut, but because she was living with non-Jewish women who didn't understand her attraction for the religion, she became a vegetarian instead...
...I know where most non-Jews are coming from...
...They took Nancy, her brother and two sisters to Mass every Sunday and on Holy Days...
...She moved back to Highland Park and began attending services at B'nai Israel, a Conservative synagogue...
...He talked about how much he loved to walk by the river on Shabbat afternoon...
...Most couldn't understand why I wanted to become a Jew...
...You can imagine how that shook my faith...
...Still, for a while, she was reluctant to go through with formal conversion service...
...I was sure they would go to hell...
...What about all those people who had gone to hell because they ate meat before the Pope said it was all right...
...She decided to become a Jew during the High Holidays in 1978...
...A few would say, 'Wow...
...It was nice that someone understood why I wanted to convert...
...You're so great!'" Both those responses made her feel singled out and embarrassed...
...Now in addition to being a Revson fellow, she teaches at New York's 92nd Street YM-YWHA...
...I felt that same sense, of being in one place but belonging to another...
...In 1978, as a student at the University of Pittsburgh, she took a course in Zionist writings...
...I studied Torah and learned some Hebrew," she says...
...It became a theological battle...
...As it was, her growing involvement in Judaism provoked one of her roommates: "She believed that Jesus was the Messiah...
...They think the God of the Hebrew Bible is a jealous God...
...I had no idea of how to do that, though...
...Nancy Wingerson, 37, born into a working-class Roman Catholic family in Pittsburgh, once a nurse in Vietnam, now an observant Jew who holds a prestigious Revson Fellowship to study Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary, is such a person...
...I guess I used to think about marrying a Jew and entering the religion that way...
...But it took a decade for the notion to crystallize into anything more firm than a drifting fantasy...
...In 1968 and 1969, when Nancy was in Vietnam, she sometimes felt a desire to be Jewish...
...And, of course, I had just become a Jew...
...Why go to the mikvehP...
...I guess I never expected to be invited anywhere," she says wryly...
...But what I really learned from him was Yiddishkeit...
...So I had to make up for glaring deficiencies in my secular education as well as my Jewish one...
...More than most people, I think, I could convince them to see the Hebrew Bible as a thing in itself, not as a foreshadowing of Christianity...
...But we didn't say much about the converts whose creativity and energy will help revitalize Jewish life...
...1 could help non-Jews get rid of their horrid misconceptions, and begin to appreciate our religion...
...I kept reading and reading about it...
...Ideally, I would like to teach Bible at a secular university...
...She knew that Judaism, in contrast to the proselytizing religion of her youth, discourages potential converts unless they are unusually persisent in their interest...
...had more trouble with the fact that I'd converted than my Jewish friends did...
...They realize that jealous really means zealous—and that the zealotry is really aimed against things like paganism, idolatry, human sacrifices...
...Within a week, she contacted the synagogue's rabbi...
...1 think I had an overburdened conscience...
...Everything was so new...
...After a while, I quit being obsessed with my level of observance...
...used to walk around town when my parents thought I was in Mass...
...As a child, she was obedient to a God whom she regarded as quite punitive...
...Nevertheless, Nancy was too excited about Judaism to worry about household squabbles or problems with feeling a part of the community...
...Perhaps if her parents had been alive she'd have remained a fellow traveller, a nominal Catholic whose heart was really in the Torah...
...When I was 11, my family moved into Highland Park, a Pittsburgh neighborhood where there were a lot of Jewish kids...
...He used to tell me about Shavuos in Holland, about staying up all night studying, then walking through the forest with his father just at daybreak...
...Soon I found I was very pro-Israel...
...She loved berShabbatot, spent alone, reading Jewish books until it was time to return to shul for seudah shlishit and Havdalah...
...Suddenly, Roman Catholics were allowed to eat meat on Fridays...
...I remember noticing when people who broke some law— who ate meat on Fridays, for example—died...
...He told her that most people in the congregation would be extremely reserved in her presence...
...Still, she often felt lonely...
...PAUL Last month, when we inaugurated this column, we focussed on some of the problems that Jews by choice face...
...They never seemed to •worry about sin or hell...
...Philomena, the patron saint of the order where Nancy had gone to school—were decanonized...
...Many of the congregants who had been bom Jewish thought I was strange...
...1 tried to maintain peace by steering clear of the subject, but she felt quite threatened...
...She felt an immediate connection to the texts, especially to Yehuda Halevi, the medieval Sephardic poet who once wrote, "My heart is in the East, but I am in the farthest West...
...But soon I decided 1 could do more for myself and for other people by leaching the Hebrew Bible than 1 could by teaching D. H. Lawrence...
...So many of the people I teach have a distorted idea about Judaism...
...My parents had never had guests for Christmas or Easter...
...In doing that, she'll be talking to people like those in her congregation in Pittsburgh who wondered why she was converting, and to non-Jews, like her one-time roommates, who saw her conversion as a bizarre and alien process...
...Once she converted, she decided to study it at the Jewish Theological Seminary, one of the most prestigious centers of Jewish learning in America...
...At synagogue, she faced the problems the rabbi had predicted...
...So I'd try to prove the depths of my faith by following the most rigorous forms of observance-— I'd worry about eating hechsher cheese or drinking kosher wine or using electricity on Shabbat...
...It haunted me...
...Certainly I lived like a Jew...
...They were memories of peace, and 1 made them my own...
...So she wasn't surprised when the rabbi told her about the difficulty of being part of a minority group and stressed the dangers of anti-Semitism...
...But they had died a decade earlier...
...But a voice inside me said I could never get inside the religion...
...There was a black man in our synagogue who was in the process of converting, too," she says, "and we became very good friends...
...I want to open up biblical religion as a way of opening up Judaism," she says...
...So I hung back...
...The first time, I went with a roommate who wasn't Jewish...
...I could never have imagined the environment I would encounter at the Seminary...
...I can't really describe the feeling, except to say it grew out of a certainty that this was where 1 belonged...
...What happened to them...
...Nancy's father, a train dispatcher, and her mother, a housewife, were relatively devout Catholics...
...Nancy had fallen in love with what she calls the Hebrew Bible...
...Nancy felt free to continue her search...
...When she first came to New York she expected to get a degree in Bible and then teach English literature...
...During that time, she realized that she was facing two different problems: accepting the Jewish religion, which was relatively easy, and feeling like a Jew, which was quite a bit hWder...
...Before she converted, she went to Israel, where she experienced firsthand many of the spiritual passions she had read about in books or felt, vicariously, through her Dutch-born teacher...
...I tell them that the interpretation is wrong, that we should look at the tradition...
...1 thought I was a Jew...
Vol. 8 • April 1983 • No. 4
