I pledged to be a halachic Jew in time for my son's bar mitzvah 

As told to Rivka Streicher by Moshe Murray

Prologue

Back in the 1980s, I was 35 years old, non-Jewish, and a member of a Protestant Episcopalian church. My wife Marcie was Jewish and interested in learning about her roots, and we joined Congregation Ohr Shalom, a Conservative synagogue in Summit, New Jersey.

It was a wintry February evening, and the rabbi at Ohr Shalom was hosting his Jewish-themed “book club,” when the subject of Miriam’s Well came up. I’d never heard of it before.

At some point, the rabbi said, “The chassidim believe that Miriam’s Well followed the Jews around the desert for 40 years.”

Everybody in the group laughed at those foolish chassidim, until I raised my hand and said, “Rabbi, how do you know it didn’t?”

They all looked at me like I had two heads.

The rabbi chuckled and said, “You’d make a good chassid, George.”

He didn’t realize he was giving me a brachah.

1

I

grew up in Williamsville, New York, just outside of Buffalo, and as a kid, life revolved around Calvary Episcopal Church, five minutes away.

Many classmates and neighbors attended this church and the minister was a family friend. At one point or another, my brothers and I were altar boys, assisting the minister during services. We also sang in the church choir.

The church was in my blood. My great-grandfather, George Mosley Murray, was an Episcopal minister in Baltimore, Maryland. My uncle, George Mosley Murray II, was an Episcopal bishop of Alabama and the Gulf Coast. My brother would later become an Episcopalian minister.

I was George Mosley Murray III, but who was I really?

The church loomed large from whichever way I looked — but I looked away, I looked inward.

I was a voracious reader from as young as age seven. I read classical literature and science fiction with strong philosophical undertones, and I loved history and historical fiction.

“Read this,” Dad would say, handing me the poem Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Tennyson, his idea of a “time-out punishment” for when my brother and I fought.

I absorbed ideas about identity, society, and the world in the books I read; the classic poetry my dad would regularly give us; and from the plays we attended often with my mother, who was involved with the Buffalo Studio Arena.

I continued to read philosophical and spiritual books, including Jewish writings, and my mind swirled with all these concepts. I wanted to try everything, to weed out the wildflowers in my mind from the truth. By the time I was 14, I was a hippie, a searcher.

The song, “Where Do I Go?” from a popular musical was my song, describing a journey that began when I was a mere teen.

“Where do I go? Follow the river
Where do I go? Follow the gulls…

Where do I go? Follow my heartbeat

Where do I go? Follow my hand…

Why do I live, why do I die?
Where do I go?

Tell my why, tell me where?

Tell me why?”

Into late adolescence, the world beckoned — and I searched on. My mind was quick, my spirit unsatiable. I devoured books, classical philosophers and “New Age” authors alike. I read of controversies and myths such as the lost continent of Mu (Atlantis), pondered fables, and questioned society and my place in it.