|
My Journey to Judaism by Ralph García From HaLapid, Spring 2006 As a youngster, I grew up in a very good, Roman Catholic home. I went to Catholic parochial school in El Paso, TX. The Irish nuns that taught me always told their students that what they taught in religion class had to be believed by us. They told us on the one hand that we all had free will, but on the other hand took away that free will by saying that if we didn’t believe the truths as taught to us in religion class, then we would be in a state of mortal sin and headed directly to the eternal fires of hell. That was pretty heavy stuff for a young, impressionable and naive young man. I swallowed hook, line and sinker what these “representatives of God on earth” told me. That means that I learned from the very first day of kindergarten that the Jews had crucified Jesus. THEY KILLED MY SAVIOR: bad people. We used to pray for the conversion of the Jews at Mass. Even so, from a very young age, I have had a fascination for Jewish authors, and things Jewish in general. I’ve read novels, history, both ancient and modern. I think I have always had a genetic predisposition to my Jewish faith. My reading has gone from the stories of the Bible and their meaning to stories of Jesus of Nazareth with a Jewish slant. Of course, I have read a whole slew of novels concerning World War Two and the creation of the modern State of Israel. During college, I began to have grave doubts about my faith. I guess school helped in this. The Spanish literature of the Golden Age of Spain especially made me come to the conclusion that truth is relative. Truth, I came to believe, is a concept that changes according to the mind of the beholder. It’s easy to come to this conclusion after reading Don Quixote de La Mancha by Cervantes or writers of that era such as Lazarillo de Tormes . I won’t go into a dissertation, but I concluded that truth did not exist. Also, I took some religion classes which caused me to really doubt. I was taught by fundamentalist preachers, and I could not swallow their line. I still practiced my faith, but not with the enthusiasm as before. While I was stationed in Viet Nam in the Army, I read quite a bit of literature such as The Jesus Party, The Last Temptation of Christ and histories of the Holocaust and of the Jews. Good reading, but leading me to pretty contrary opinions than what I was supposed to believe as a Catholic. Anyway, my doubting of the faith got worse. During a three- or four-year period, I went through life with a pain in my gut. My head told me that the nuns and the priests had taught me a faith that I could not accept intellectually. But my heart was still not letting go. Ergo, pain in the stomach. During my first semester of law school, I stopped going to Mass altogether. The last straw was when a gentleman (some would say a derelict) was at Sunday Mass at St. Ignatius. He began to cry out for help. I honestly felt sorry for this fellow. The priest made a motion to the ushers and these two big galoots picked him up and threw him out. I was outraged that the priest had “muscle” at the church. I didn’t go back to church again . For a time I felt like I wanted to go back. I truly tried to believe, I just couldn’t. After my first wife and I divorced, I went through the motions of getting an annulment from the Catholic Church. My wife asked me to do so, so I did. I have a certain God-given ability to write in the English Language, so I wrote a pretty good petition and I got the annulment. After , it just didn’t have any importance to me. My beliefs have changed with my growing awareness of my unhappiness with Roman Catholicism. The position of the Church regarding such questions as abortion, birth control, the divinity of Jesus, Jesus the Savior, Holy Mary ever Virgin, the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the saints (i.e. minor gods), etc., have made me stop believing entirely. About 1980, I began to study my genealogy. It was my idea that my children were growing up as “Gringos.” I didn’t want them to lose their Mexican identity, so I thought that I’d do a study to show them where they came from. In my study I also included a lot of Mexican History. The results of my study didn’t do much for my children, but it changed my life. The study of my ancestry has led me to believe that my interest in the Jews must be somehow genetic. I think that my reading from the time I was a youngster was an unknowing seeking after my roots. As my need for spirituality and ritual increased, I began to study the religion of my ancestors. I finally found a belief system that fit me. After almost five years of study, I reached my first ancestors in the New World. It was in 1579 that Luís de Carvajal sailed from Spain for a second time with a ship full of wine for sale to the thirsty population of New Spain, and traveling with him were many of his relatives. Though he himself was the child of new converts to Roman Catholicism, many of his relatives were practicing Jews. My ancestors were among those that came to Mexico at that time. In 1582, he, along with Gaspar Castaño de Sosa, his brother Baltazar de Castaño de Sosa and others, established a settlement at a site then known as Los Ojos de San Luís. Here the settlers openly practiced their Jewish religion. In the words of the Mexican Historian Vito Alesio "... the inhabitants of San Luís piously and rigidly kept the Law of Moses and waited for the promised Messiah. They kept the Sabbath. Using strange and solemn rites they extracted the glands of the lamb. They absolutely proscribed swine meat, all kinds of grease and the meat of fish that did not have scales. In commemoration of the children of Israel crossing the Red Sea and their return from Egypt, they celebrated the Pascal Lamb. This lasted seven days, during which they baked bread from fermented rye without leaven and bitter herbs. They cut the throat of a tender white lamb and the lintels of all the doors were anointed with its blood. Afterwards, the people all congregated around a bonfire; the men and women, while standing and provided with staffs, with their waists girded, intoned songs and praises to Moses [and Adonai]. They extended their arms to the east; toward the bizarre and mysterious Cerro de La Silla [the mountain that dominates Monterrey, Mexico] while in the fire the Pascal lamb slowly roasted." [translation by the author] On my mother’s side, my research revealed that the first Acosta in my line was in fact a Jew named Diego Perez de Acosta who was in on the discovery of silver at Parral, Chihuahua, in 1631. He was originally from Oporto, in Portugal. His children dropped the “Perez” surname for political and social reasons. With my knowledge of the faith of my ancestors, I began to take certain things personally. I take it personally what the Inquisition in Mexico did to my ancestors. When I think of Luís de Carvajal dying in the prison of the Holy Inquisition in Mexico City, I tend to become angry with the Catholic Church for doing him in for the dastardly crime he committed of not turning in his relatives who practiced their Jewish faith. His nephew Luís de Carvajal, el Mozo (a cousin of the first García in my line), was burned at the stake for being a Jewish Rabbi. El Mozo and his whole immediate family were imprisoned and tortured; some were burned at the stake. I take this personally, but more so, I take personally the fact that Lucas Rodriguez Castaño de Sosa (son of Baltazar Castaño de Sosa and Inez Rodriguez) had to change his surname to García (that why I’m García and not Rodriguez) and take his religion underground because not to do so would have been detrimental to him politically and socially and even probably would have caused him problems with the Inquisition. I have come to the conclusion that the surname taken by my ancestor is a diminutive of Garza (heron) because a family crest I’ve found has a small heron on it. More than anything else ,I have a deep and abiding resentment of the Roman Catholic Church for denying me my rich heritage. This is something that I do not believe I will ever be able to get over. I now read Spanish Jewish literature and history with a new pleasure. Ladino music is a joy to listen to. I’ve been telling my spouse and children since 1990 that I am a Jew. I thought of myself as a Jew, but never took any formal steps in that direction. That is, I didn’t until one Sunday in July, 2000. My brother John gave me the phone number of Rabbi Larry Bach at Temple Mount Sinai. I called him. Since that time both my brother and myself have formally converted (John says we reverted) to the religion of our forefathers. Our brother David had converted to Judaism in the 1970’s. I’m happy. I have the spiritualism in my life that has been lacking. I am more comfortable with myself than I have been in a long time. I keep finding out the rich history and culture that the Roman Catholic Church cut me off from, and essentially robbed me of, when they forced my ancestors to convert. I feel like my life has been a long journey regarding my seeking of my roots and religious feeling. I am now an active member of Temple Mount Sinai, a Reform Jewish Temple. I am a member of Shir Haddash, the choir; I am on the Board of Trustees and a member of the Social Action Committee. I think that attending the Temple assuages my contradictory spirit regarding the Catholic Church. I’m home with my faith. The chain of Catholicism is finally and unalterably broken. |
Society For Crypto Judaic Studies
|
