On Being a Jewish Survivor of Abuse

I was harmed by people who were seen as good, faithful, and trustworthy. People who invoked G-d, scripture, and sacred duty while crossing every boundary I had. People who led prayers in one room and enacted violence in another. I grew up around multiple faiths, and the people who hurt me were considered “deep people of faith.” That language, for a long time, made me recoil.

When faith is used to justify or hide abuse, it becomes hard to trust anything associated with it. The rituals blur into the harm. The songs sound like cover stories. Even silence takes on a spiritual tone, a performance of stillness that benefits the powerful. I learned to be quiet. I learned to look the part. I learned that G-d, or at least the version I was shown, was someone else's excuse.

Faith didn’t save me. It didn’t give me clarity or healing or any kind of peace. And I’m not writing this to claim that it eventually did. I’m not interested in redemption stories.

As an adult, I’ve chosen to connect deeper with my Judaism, not because I think it’s pure or above the systems that hurt me, but because it’s a tradition that I’m willing to be in conflict with. Judaism, like every institution and religious community, is entangled with patriarchy, power, and hierarchy. It has been used to silence, to control, to preserve the status quo. I do not come to it for comfort. I come to it for confrontation.

There are parts of our tradition that I reject outright. There are texts that trigger the same instincts I developed in childhood– stay small, stay silent, stay good. And still, I study. Still, I wrestle. Because what I find, in that tension, is a kind of mirror. Judaism doesn't require agreement. It’s built on disagreement. On midrash, on rupture, on remembering and re-remembering. I don’t have to resolve anything to show up.

For me, faith is not a solution. It is a set of tools. It is a language. It is one of the ways I ask the questions that I will probably never fully answer. It gives form to grief. It gives structure to the endless turning I do toward meaning, not a meaning that justifies harm, but one that helps me stay rooted as I name it. I don’t want to be part of a religion that ignores the violence it has justified or the bodies it has excluded. I want to be part of a tradition that can look at itself honestly. That can be reshaped and reimagined. That can tell the truth.

When I think about olam haba, the world to come, I don’t think about heaven. I think about the world we’re trying to build here, among the living. A world where survivors are believed. Where power is accountable. Where no one is sacred just because they hold a title or say the right things. Where holiness is measured by how we care for one another.

There is no redemption for what happened to me. But there can be liberation. And that’s what I’m working toward. Not in spite of my trauma, but because of it. Not through faith as it was handed to me, but through the pieces I’ve picked up and reshaped into something I can use.

Not to be whole.

But to be free.