By Sarah Leiter
Note from Daneel Schaechter, Kulanu’s regional coordinator for Latin America and board member: Nearly four years ago, I had my first contact with Kehilat Ahavat HaTorah, a small yet growing community in Brazil’s capital city, Brasilia. Since then, we have sent a Brazilian rabbinical student, Natan Freller, to serve as a teacher and most recently, Sarah Leiter, a PhD student of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico who researches how people make sense of their changing religious identities. This is a brief description of her experience during Summer 2018.
Over the past decade, a growing number of Brazilians have been turning toward Judaism from various denominations of Christianity. Hoping to find out why, I traveled to Brazil this past May to meet some of these new Jews. After failing to secure visits to two emerging Jewish communities that are crumbling without the support of more established Jewish institutions in Brazil, I went to Brasília, the capital of the country. There, a community of about twenty people practicing Judaism immediately welcomed me as a member of their extended family. For several weeks, members hosted me in their synagogue, a converted three-story townhome in the center of the city. They treated me to countless meals, all vegetarian both because of my own dietary preferences and because kosher meat, the only kind they’ll touch, is rarely available. I heard them replace the occasional Portuguese “obrigado” with a Hebrew “todah,” picked up from the native Israeli they employ to teach them conversational Hebrew each week. I watched as they looked up rabbinical interpretations on their smartphones and listened as they played liturgical melodies through their cars’ audio systems. I sang with them each Shabbat as they filled their synagogue building with Hebrew harmonies reminiscent of my childhood in a California Jewish community. Together, we celebrated the holiday of Shavuot, recalling the biblical story of Ruth and her famous conversion to Judaism.
I came to this community as a doctoral student in anthropology, a discipline that seeks to add nuance and understanding to the plethora of ways we go about being human. It is a discipline that tries to let more voices be heard; its goal is to listen. Over a lakeside lunch one day in Brasília, I asked one of the community members what he thought an article about them should include. His answer: “Just tell our stories.”
Rodrigo and Sophia
The first time I met 34-year-old Rodrigo and 30-year-old Sophia, they were taking off their motorcycle helmets and waiting for an Uber to a vegan restaurant. The married couple were relatively new to the community; they had met on a dating app just one year earlier and celebrated their wedding five months after that. Sophia, a pharmacist by training, taught herself English and travels often. Rodrigo, who works in Information Technology, has a particular affinity for Jewish mysticism and the intersections between Jewish and Brazilian histories.
Though the newlyweds came from Christian and Spiritualist backgrounds, they had turned toward Judaism by the time they married. They have not yet been able to convert, but their wedding ceremony included several symbolic elements that celebrated their Judaism.
Since the wedding, they have been participating in Shabbat services at the synagogue every week, taking conversational Hebrew classes with the rest of the community, and learning to lead Havdallah with a candle brought back from a trip to Tsfat. If you listen closely, you may even hear Rodrigo say “Baruch Hashem” a few times during conversations.
Despite their limited access to mainstream Jewish institutions in Brazil, Rodrigo in particular remains eager to undergo the process of conversion. He asked if I might be able to introduce him to American rabbis willing to help foreigners, as he had little hope that his conversion would be supported by rabbis in Brazil. The story of how he and his wife became Jewish, like the stories of everyone else in the community, is to be continued.
Isaac
Sixteen-year-old Isaac was first introduced to the community by his older brother when the family was still Christian. A young teenager at that point, Isaac began to research Judaism on his own. Soon, he was hooked. He began studying Hebrew because, as he told me, “Judaism doesn’t exist without Hebrew—the Torah is in Hebrew.” In another conversation, when I asked him for the meaning of a Portuguese word, he translated it into Hebrew because it was easier to remember than the English.
One afternoon, while waiting together for his retired police officer father to arrive, Isaac told me that his classmates all thought he was strange. It wasn’t cool, he confessed through laughter, to be constantly reading about Judaism and history and world politics, but he enjoyed doing it anyway—even if becoming the only Jewish person in his school meant dealing with his new nickname, “Jew.”
These days, Isaac is usually the only member of his family at the synagogue each Shabbat. He’ll even spend Friday nights on an extra mattress in the building so that he doesn’t need to find a ride home and back between Friday Ma’ariv and Saturday Shacharit.
Though he’s never been on an airplane, Isaac dreams of one day boarding a flight to Israel and serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. He’d like to participate in a Birthright trip when he’s older too. But first, he hopes to convert.
Alice and Sean
One Sunday in a Brazilian church, Sean, the son of an evangelical pastor, noticed a girl with wild curly blond hair. He approached her with a bold pick-up line: “When are we getting married?” That Sunday was over 25 years ago. Today, Sean and Alice, the girl with the wild blond curls, are married and have three teenage daughters. Sean is the president of the synagogue I visited in Brasília.
Their journey to Judaism, they explained to me, involved several cycles of questioning, of learning, of deconstructing, and of rebuilding. It began about a decade ago in a Protestant Christian church, where Alice would often turn to her husband in disbelief at what the pastor was preaching; it clashed with how they saw the world. Soon, the family stopped attending their church and distanced themselves from Christianity altogether. For about five years, they remained unaffiliated with any religion. Then, through what Alice’s sister found on the internet, they discovered Judaism. To them, what they learned just made sense. The Jewish emphasis on studying, on being kind to others, and on following commandments that provide practical structure for a good manner of living drew them in. So, they began to look for local synagogues to visit.
Visiting synagogues proved more difficult than they had anticipated; most were simply closed to non-Jewish visitors. Finally, Alice and Sean found an unusually welcoming one—which they soon realized was a messianic congregation.
Feeling “tricked,” as they put it, they quickly left the messianic group and dove into a strict practice of Orthodox Judaism. They found others like them, others who wanted to be Jewish but had no congregation with which to learn, and hired an Orthodox rabbi as their teacher. They did everything just as the rabbi taught them; Alice began dressing modestly in long skirts, and Sean began preparing for the hatafat dam brit.
Eventually, the couple decided that Jewish learning was more important to them than following traditions “correctly.” Alongside the rest of their community, they turned toward Reform Judaism. Their eldest daughter became the congregation’s chazzan.
I asked Alice if she thought their religious practice might change again in the future, since her family has moved through so many iterations of both Christianity and Judaism. She told me that it was possible, of course, because a willingness to learn meant a willingness to change. But it is clear that in their Judaism, they have finally found what makes sense for them.
Betsalel
Betsalel, the community’s resident artist, made Brasília his home in part because of its sky. As a professor of architecture and urban planning with a particular penchant for open spaces, he moved to the city to take in its openness. Betsalel’s life changed on a 2005 trip to the city of Salvador, where, in his mother’s home, he found a Hebrew bible. He started reading. And he kept reading. He read everything he could find about Judaism. It was the translated works of the noted rabbi and author Aryeh Kaplan that catapulted him into Jewish life.
I happened to be in a car with Betsalel—who was wearing a kippah and playing Israeli music—at the beginning of a truckers’ union strike, a national crisis that cut off gasoline, jet fuel, and food deliveries to much of the country for about a week. In the car, we passed a long line of honking trucks inching toward the government’s most important buildings. Before I could ask him about the trucks, Betsalel veered toward a side street and said, “Let’s talk about higher things,” specifically, about the world’s creation as it is written in the Torah. With Betsalel, mundane conversational topics like Brazilian politics could wait.
Katy
Fifty-eight-year-old Katy from Rio de Janeiro has African ancestry on her mother’s side and descends from indigenous Amazonians on her father’s side. Taking after her ballerina mother, Katy did gymnastics for four decades. Today, her feet still move constantly—through the city in political protest marches, around the park while chatting with everyone she meets, and in the synagogue as she cleans before Shabbat. Katy was not raised in any particular religion, but she attended a Christian church for some time in her adulthood until she realized that what they were preaching did not quite align with what she was reading. Over a period of three years, she questioned and she researched. Then, she came across an online video of a man speaking about Judaism. As Katy described it, it was as if she had suddenly stepped into reality.
Transitioning into life as a Jew was not easy. On a practical level, it demanded a radical change in diet, which often meant giving up the convenience and enjoyment of buying food wherever it was available. On an intellectual level, it necessitated a realization that, as Katy put it, she had been “deceived” by other religions whose leaders insisted that they were teaching absolute reality.
At the same time, turning to Judaism felt like coming home in big and small ways. As she learned more about the religion, she discovered that many of her own family’s traditions had Jewish roots, even if they were never framed in that way. Katy’s mother, for example, had always taught her that pork was a rancid meat that was not to be eaten. For Katy, the emergent community in Brasília is the bedrock and heart of her Jewish practice. While she is the only member of her biological family who practices Judaism, she speaks of the synagogue community as a family. When they first learned about Judaism, the group did not know how to take a single step into their chosen religion, so they found educators who would teach them how to walk. Since then, each little step forward has been together.
Lynnclaire
Lynnclaire, daughter of Alice and Sean, is a twenty-year-old statistics major at the local university and the oldest of three sisters. She taught herself Hebrew and now serves as the community’s chazzan. She hopes to move to Israel because, she told me, being Jewish and observing Jewish laws would be easier there.
Lynnclaire keeps Shabbat by refraining from writing and using electronic devices. Her Shabbat observance, in fact, sparked the community’s establishment as a locally-registered organization, as she needed institutional documentation in order to reschedule her Saturday university exams. While she holds an astonishing amount of knowledge about Jewish traditions and rabbinical interpretations, it is in her practice of Judaism that she feels most alive. One day, while reflecting on the difference between her life now and her life before she found Judaism, she remarked to me, “I feel like I hadn’t been living before.”
I once asked Lynnclaire if she thought her community was different from other Jewish communities in Brazil or around the world. She thought a moment, and then, as any Jew might, responded with another question: “Na verdade, todas as comunidades têm suas diferenças, né? Don’t all [Jewish] communities have their differences?”
Lynnclaire’s wisdom echoed what anthropologists have been re-discovering since the birth of the discipline about a century ago: it is in our differences that we often find similarities.
One might see difference in Aberto, a Brazilian who proudly declares that he is as old as the state of Israel. But as he helps build a community of people who have uprooted and replanted their religious lives, he exposes a recognizable desire to be grounded in a sense of heritage.
One might see difference in Davison, an Afro-Brazilian who leads Hebrew prayers. But in his self-conscious concerns about identifying as Jewish while appearing not to be Jewish, he reflects a familiar human anxiety about belonging.
While speaking with each community member, I was struck by how much laughter decorated their stories. It was a laughter that echoed the joy with which they live their lives, the deliberate happiness they bring into their practice of Judaism, and the genuine delight that has come along with it. Their laughter was the preface to the stories they are just beginning to tell.
The names included in this article are pseudonyms, most of which were chosen by the real people whose stories are told here. Thanks is due to the wonderful community that hosted me, to Kulanu board member Daneel Schaechter, and to a Field Research Grant from the Tinker Foundation and the University of New Mexico Latin American and Iberian Institute. The visit to Brazil—and this article—would not have been possible without them.