The first thing that ever felt holy to me wasn’t a ritual or a rabbi – it was a footnote.
If you’ve ever felt like religion was a perfection contest you were destined to fail, this story might change that. It’s about the moment I realized Judaism didn’t need me to be flawless – just honest, human, and still trying. And it all started with one line in a prayer book.
See transcript below.
Transcript:
I didn’t know Judaism was for me until this moment.
The first thing that ever felt holy to me was a footnote in a prayer book.
Because Judaism didn’t expect me to be perfect.
If you’ve ever felt like religion only has room for perfect people, th is story is for you. I was in college.
It was my first time stepping into a synagogue. An Orthodox Jewish one, because I don’t do anything halfway.
It was a little chapel
in a Southern Bible belt town on a Friday night.
I sat in the women’s section alone with a bunch of men in their seventies.
I couldn’t follow the prayers. They were all in Hebrew.
But someone kindly called out the page numbers just for me.
So I stood and sat when everyone else did, but I didn’t really know what was going on.
But mostly I read the siddur, the prayer book.
It was an Artscroll full of detailed instructions.
And then this one line stopped me dead in my tracks.
It said something like, ” if you forgot to say X, do Y.”
Just like that. No guilt trip. No shame spiral.
Just a solution, a gentle nudge to keep going.
And I remember thinking, wait, what?
A religion that expects people to mess up
and then just tells them how to keep going?? That was not my experience in the Bible Belt.
I was raised in an atheist family.
But completely surrounded by Southern Bible Belt Christianity.
The shame, the fear, the pressure to be perfect.
Even if I didn’t believe it, I absorbed it.
And now I know that I’m ADHD and autistic, messing up is kind of my thing.
That line in the siddur felt like it was written for me.
That’s when I knew Judaism could make space for someone like me.
Someone imperfect, someone human, someone trying.
And I’ve been trying ever since.
