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September
/ october 2006:
The
Six Who Matter: Gavriel Garrard
A Lutheran becomes a Jew, and a new life begins.
Words by Benyamin Cohen | Photograph by Christopher T. Martin
It’s a recent Friday night and Gavriel Garrard is chowing down on sushi and won tons with some friends, not so out of the ordinary for the 23-year-old vegetarian. Except, the meal he’s at is a Shabbat dinner and Garrard is still drying off from the mikvah waters, having only converted to Judaism just prior to Passover of this year.
“I’ve always been a spiritual person,” he admits between bites. “I’ve always been a seeker.” His sentences come out structured, soft-spoken, deliberate and mellow. This is no wide-eyed religious zealot who made a knee-jerk decision to switch teams. This is someone who’s taken careful stock of his life and decided the only way to go was Jewish.
As with most converts, most Jews-from-birth all ask him the same question: Why? Raised Lutheran in name only, monotheism was not a foreign concept to him. And then one day, while still in high school, he had an epiphany. “I woke up one morning with a burning desire to seek truth with a capital ‘T’,” he explains. “I wanted to find God.”
Growing up in sparsely Semitic Gwinnett County, Georgia, Garrard wasn’t really exposed to many members of the tribe. “I thought Jews were just museum artifacts.” So he finished off high school with conversion merely a distant thought in his youthful psyche. As an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, he popped in to some Hillel events, but it wasn’t until he moved to Atlanta to attend pharmacy school at Mercer University, that he started studying to convert. Eventually, he admits, he reached a point of no return. “I knew too much not to convert.” So six years after that original morning revelation, Garrard made a literal leap of faith.
While he had already been observing many of the aspects of Judaism in anticipation of his conversion, it wasn’t until he started wearing a yarmulke everyday to school that people took notice. “That was a real shocker for everyone at school,” he recalls. “They asked if I had become a rabbi over spring break.”
Garrard laughs as he retells the story and shakes his head as he remembers those first few days and weeks as a Jew. “In some ways, I felt like an imposter,” he admits. “When you convert, you’re spiritually an infant. You’re going to make mistakes and you learn.”
Although his family is respectful of his newfound religion, Garrard admits “they feel like I’ve gone off the deep end. They just have to see that this isn’t just a passing fad.” His grandmother is laying on the Lutheran guilt. “Maybe it’s just Jewish guilt in disguise,” Garrard jokes. His twin sister, an atheist, is actually very supportive. “She sees how much this has enriched my life.”
When asked what’s been the biggest challenge since becoming a member of the tribe, Garrard pauses for a moment to consider. He says it’s hard finding the right social groups of Jews his age who are, as he puts it, “hip” and “cool”. He says this in half-jest, smiling as he adjusts his artsy funky glasses.
He has no need to worry. Where Garrard will end up, there’ll be plenty of like-minded people. After making his inaugural pilgrimage to Israel this summer, he plans on moving to the holy land in a few years. “It was a really profound experience,” he says of his 10-day trip. “This is where I belong. This is where my Jewish destiny will play out. I realized that I would give my life to defend the land of Israel.”
While moving halfway around the world is an ultimate goal down the road, Garrard is taking his new life one day at a time. “I see myself growing. The honeymoon of being newly Jewish has certainly ended. And now comes the hard part, the daily challenges, and trying to find meaning in the everyday routine.”
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