When is it enough?

A few months into this journey, I went home to Vancouver. I attended an Orthodox synagogue one Friday night, and I planned to return the next morning for Shabbat. When I got home, I suggested to my mother that she join me the next day. Her reaction caught me off guard: “Why would I go to a synagogue that doesn’t accept me as a Jew?”

She explained that because her mother—my grandmother—had converted under a conservative rabbi decades earlier, most Orthodox synagogues didn’t consider the conversion valid. Her Jewish life, effort, and devotion boiled down into a single judgment: not enough.

My maternal grandmother had studied for her conversion, immersed in the mikvah, embraced Jewish living, and raised two daughters who attended Jewish day school from kindergarten through graduation. She built a Jewish home and a Jewish family. But it still “wasn’t enough.”

And suddenly I felt I was being asked to decide how badly I wanted “in.” At the time, I viewed Orthodoxy as the truest expression of Judaism, the version where every law and commandment mattered and this is what God required from someone to be a Jew. If that was the truth, then I had to choose whether to undergo an Orthodox conversion myself or not be Jewish at all. Would doing so prove that I had what it took? Would it make me “enough”?

But the more I pushed toward Orthodoxy, the more I realized the driving force wasn’t spiritual longing—it was the pressure to satisfy an external standard. I was trying to climb a hierarchy where Orthodoxy sat at the top and I was at the bottom, hoping that if I worked hard enough, I could be seen as legitimate.

Yet the reality was simple: the rules felt overwhelming, and I didn’t actually feel connected to that path.

What ultimately brought me peace were three central figures in my life: my grandmother, my mother, and my sister. I challenged each of them with the Orthodox logic around legitimacy, and every time they listened, considered it, and then responded with quiet certainty: they knew who they were as Jews.

None of them keep Shabbat. None keep kashrut. But each has contributed in deep, meaningful ways to the continuation of Jewish life. Their Judaism is lived, steady, confident—not because anyone told them they were “enough,” but because they never believed otherwise. They continue the flame of the Jewish story, whether it is my grandma marching along Broadway Street in Nashville rallying to free the hostages, my sister working for the JCC in Warsaw, or my mom devoting the last 21 years of her life to the Jewish day school in Vancouver, Canada.

Their certainty unlocked something in me. I realized I didn’t need to be shomer Shabbat to count. I didn’t need to pray every day. I didn’t need to fit a checklist someone else created. Even doing Kiddush on Friday night, or putting on tefillin once a week, or simply showing up for the High Holidays—these are all threads in the tapestry of our people. They continue the Jewish story. The big realization was the choices had already been made. The Jewish story of continuation was alive and well.

I’m not against Orthodoxy. I’m against the idea that only one version of Jewish practice is valid, or that someone must prove their Jewishness to be worthy of belonging.

A friend of mine, Rabbi Susan Tendler, shared a teaching that stays with me. One of the names for God is Shaddai. Sh can mean “that” and dai means “enough.” As if God is saying: That is enough. You are enough. And once I felt enough, I could really feel the presence of the divine within myself.