The way Kylie Ora Lobell writes about her childhood in Baltimore, Maryland, in her book Choosing to Be Chosen: From Being an Atheist Non-Jew to Becoming an Orthodox Jew could initially describe the childhood of countless Americans.
There was sadness and bewilderment over her parents’ divorce, bullying at school, confusion about her Catholic maternal grandmother’s fire-and-brimstone beliefs, grief over her loving paternal grandmother’s death, poor family communication, and teen years scarred by loneliness, anxiety, insecurity, suicidal thoughts, and giving up on a God she never felt was looking out for her.
However, though the circumstances are all too typical, the resolution is unusual. She finds the God she didn’t know she was searching for within a Judaism she didn’t know existed.
Using a frank conversational style that keeps the reader turning the pages, Lobell outlines her failed early relationships – always with Jewish boys – and her transfer from the Catholic La Salle College in Philadelphia to the arts-oriented State University of New York at Purchase.
A fateful meeting
There, while pursuing her interest in journalism and doing drudge work as an unpaid intern at The Daily Show TV program, she meets recent college grad Danny Lobell, an aspiring stand-up comedian who gives her an internship on his pioneering Comical Radio talk show.
Danny’s story also is typical. Raised in a Modern Orthodox home on Long Island, he has rejected that lifestyle after negative experiences in the Orthodox day school system. When he brings Kylie home the first time, for a Memorial Day barbecue, she likes his family but wonders aloud afterward why his parents seemed standoffish.
“Look, you don’t understand, because you’re not Jewish,” Danny explains. “My mom’s mom is a Holocaust survivor. She lost her family. My parents spent thousands of dollars sending me to a Jewish school. They’re probably disappointed that I would bring home a non-Jewish girl after all that.”
“So why did you do it?” Kylie asks.
“Because I like you. I don’t want to upset my parents, but I also want to be with you.”
The one Jewish event that Danny can bear attending is Shabbat dinner. And it is at a lively Friday night Chabad-sponsored meal in Brooklyn that Kylie recognizes she’s not really an atheist; she just never before felt God present in her life.
“I felt a warmth inside of me that started in my chest and washed over my entire body. I didn’t know if it was the challah, the speech, or the sense of community, but I felt euphoric,” she writes.
Later, she reflects, “Being an atheist was bleak. Sometimes, I couldn’t sleep because I’d stay up trying to imagine eternal blackness and nothingness. Our suffering and struggling were for nothing. We lived, it was tough, and then we died. But Judaism was totally different. I saw that being Jewish was a joyous way to live, and I wanted in on it.”
As she and Danny fall in love, and as she falls in love with Judaism simultaneously, this leads to a conflict that, again, is not atypical in the American Jewish world: The non-Jewish partner is drawn to the Orthodox Judaism from which her Jewish partner felt rejected and estranged. Danny is fine with Kylie converting – he wouldn’t marry her otherwise – but demands that she avoid Orthodoxy.
Over time, Kylie’s positive encounters with rabbis and Jewish experiences draw Danny back and force him to reevaluate his choice of a career that seemingly cannot coexist with Sabbath observance. After scraping up a few dollars, they move to Los Angeles, where Danny descends into depression, and their future together is uncertain.
The five years that Kylie and Danny spend living together before their eventual (Orthodox, of course) marriage are marked by doubt, disagreement, financial struggle, and other difficulties that the author is honest in relating. However, the couple seek the help they need to stay together and find a common road toward a more stable and more spiritual future... which includes Kylie’s Orthodox conversion in 2015 and Danny’s reemergence as a Jew of faith.
The Hebrew name Kylie chooses, Ronit Ora, encapsulates the joy and light she describes finding in Judaism. “My husband’s longtime friend, a musician named Seth Glass, suggested I go with Ora, which meant ‘light.’ I loved it. I thought it was perfect because I aspired to be a light in this world. I wanted to bring happiness to people however I could.”
As actress Mayim Bialik writes in her introduction to Lobell’s conversion memoir: “Choosing to Be Chosen is an inspiring exploration of what we can become when we listen to the divine rhythm all around us, and how beautiful and satisfying an adventure figuring it out can be.”
Lobell runs a digital marketing firm in Los Angeles, where she and her husband are raising three children. She’s an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Time Out, Aish, Jew in the City, Chabad.org, and Tablet magazine. Her previous book, Jewish Just Like You, is billed as the first children’s book for kids of Jewish converts.
CHOOSING TO BE CHOSEN:
FROM BEING AN ATHEIST NON-JEW
TO BECOMING AN ORTHODOX JEW
By Kylie Ora Lobell
Wicked Son/Post Hill Press
320 pages; $20