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november / december 2006:
Saved
Angela Himsel grew up as part of a fringe Christian cult that demonized doctors, makeup, feminists, the Magic-8 ball, and even Christmas. Instead they worshipped Jesus and, quite oddly, celebrated the Jewish holidays. Flash forward a few decades. She's now a convert to Judaism (married to a rabbi's son no less), has three children, and is wrestling with the demons of her past.
Story by Esther D. Kustanowitz | Photo by Sam Norval
Angela Himsel doesn't look like your average former cult member. The redheaded Manhattan mother of three is unquestionably attractive, even without the makeup that she wears. She wears her openness in her smile and her confidence sparkles in her eyes, which seem to flash both blue and gray, conveying a vision that parallels the clarity she has spent a good portion of her life seeking. But there are moments during our conversation when Angela’s eyes widen, and I see the eternally curious child within, still asking “Why?” and still involved in the ongoing process of self-discovery.
As a child, Angela and her nine siblings were part of a Christian sect known as the Worldwide Church of God (WCG). Not a typical cult in the Jonestown or Branch Davidian sense, the church still certainly fit the major criteria: it was led by a charismatic leader (in the WCG’s case, a man by the name of Herbert Armstrong) and required families in the church to give significant portions of their income — framed as “tithes” — to charity.
Despite the lack of poisoned Kool-Aid, Angela is certain that the WCG faithful would have done anything for their leader. Because Armstrong preached that modern medicine was the tool of Satan, she explains, “People died of ruptured appendixes, curable illnesses. If someone was depressed or mentally ill ... anything wrong with you was probably Satan, or a demon doing Satan’s bidding. If Armstrong had asked people to sacrifice their lives for him, I actually believe they would have,” Angela says, shaking her head.
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The morning that Angela and I meet at an Upper West Side coffee shop, it’s the day after Yom Kippur. According to tradition, the mere fact that we lived through another year of life-and-death deliberations by the deity means that we’re theoretically pure now, free from the previous year’s accumulation of sin. We’re both overflowing with thoughts on repentance, on the relationship between human beings and God, and about whether or not people can really change. By ordering toast, I’d already gone back on a Rosh Hashanah resolution to eat less bread, so I wasn’t sure. But Angela was proof-positive that you can change your circumstances; Angela’s intensive theological inquiry, exploration of self and analysis of faith — all in the name of becoming a better Christian — had brought her here, to New York City and to Judaism.
Until she was a teenager, Angela followed the doctrines of the WCG, because it was the life that her parents — a mixed marriage of a Catholic and a Lutheran — had chosen. While Catholicism posits that Jewish law was “nailed to the cross,” meaning that it ceased to be relevant when Christ was crucified, the WCG maintained that it wasn’t. Armstrong’s adherents therefore stayed oddly connected to some Old Testament laws: they kept kosher, abstaining from pork or unclean fish; Sabbath was on Saturday; and holidays ran from sunset to sunset.
Because there were no church-owned buildings, the congregation rented what Angela describes as “dinky places in the middle of nowhere,” requiring congregants to travel great distances before arriving at the place of worship on a Saturday morning. Angela recalls driving an hour and a half from their rural home in Jasper, Indiana to one of these rented spaces in Hendersonville, Kentucky. “You had to get there 30 minutes beforehand, stay for a two-hour service, schmooze afterwards” — I smile, noting her natural injection of a Yiddishism — “and leave.” The process of churchgoing ran from about 8:30 AM to about 3:00 PM, which, I note, doesn’t sound that much longer than many synagogues’ High Holiday services. But the sermons were very different, Angela explains. “In synagogue, you repeat the same prayers every week and the rabbi’s sermon is fifteen minutes long. At church, the sermon was preceded by songs, lasted an hour and a half, and contained a hell of a lot of fire and brimstone about how bad the world was. Jesus would be coming back any second, because he’s the only one who can save the world. And it was up to us to give more money so the church could do the work of God. Therefore, if you weren’t giving, you were hindering Jesus’ return.”
Other Jewish festival observances were similarly Jesus-infused. For example, Angela explains, Rosh Hashanah was the Feast of Trumpets, but the trumpet was a call for believers to come to Jesus. Yom Kippur was still about fasting and repentance from sin, but all in the name of trying to gain access into the kingdom. Sukkot was supposed to be the second harvest of the year, but also a “spiritual harvest,” which Angela was taught was “a second resurrection of the people who had died without knowing Jesus.” And of course, in the WCG’s version of Passover, the Paschal Lamb was a metaphor for the martyred Jesus.
As Angela entered her teens, she began to question. It was the 1970s, and the Equal Rights Amendment was under discussion. “Women were coming into their own and beginning to rethink who they were and imagine that they had options.” But within the WCG, Angela says, there was never such a process of questioning. “The church determined behavior,” she recalls. “Just like any number of Christian sects that thought the past was better than the present, the Church of God had the right to tell a woman what to do with her body — if you could wear makeup, and if so, how much; you had to have hair that went past your middle collarbone vertebra and weren’t allowed to wear pants. The chauvinistic, reactionary views of women as subservient to their husbands bothered me.”
Try as she might, Angela just couldn’t embrace WCG doctrine. Her faith hung the fates of individuals on a hook beyond anyone’s control — even repentance didn’t necessarily mean salvation. “‘The world is coming to an end,’ Armstrong would say, ‘but if you’re going to be saved, the world is going to be wonderful.’ The problem was, you never quite knew where you were in terms of being saved. He wasn’t the decisor of that, but he sort of thought he was. An estimated two-thirds of the congregation would make it, but you had no idea which third you were in. His sermons would ask, ‘Are you really converted?’ And that would arouse my inner suspicion: maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I thought I was doing the right thing, but maybe God and the church knew somehow that I’m not.”
She decided that before she was baptized into the church — an event which happened to WCG members as adults — she needed to come to terms with the faith she’d be embracing. “I assumed that if I had a better understanding and if I had ‘gotten the Holy Spirit,’ I would ‘get it.’ I thought Israel was the authentic place for Old and New Testament. If I were to go physically to the land, then that would bring me to resolve the spiritual journey.”
Israel was a revelation, but not of the precise sort she’d sought. The first thing that she learned was that Jews were actually still around today and believed in God and the Old Testament, an awareness she’d never really had growing up in Jasper. “I thought that Jews weren’t necessarily connected to God. Many brands of Christianity believe that if you don’t believe in Jesus, you don’t believe in God. I realized that Jesus was a problem for me. If there’s one God and there’s Jesus, then that’s two gods. The Holy Spirit was a whole other thing. The numbers needed to add up, and this was something I couldn’t resolve.”
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Angela’s a redhead now — brazen and defiant in a way that seems to illustrate the strength and confidence that she has found through her years of spiritual searching. We discuss the new hair color, and the impact it has had on how she believes others see her. The transition, from blonde to red, has been interesting, she says. It makes her feel more visible, and that people take her more seriously. I lament my own mousy hair coloring and my inability to commit to a bold new hair color for a bold new me.
And although anyone can see that Angela is living a typical observant Jewish life —married to the son of a rabbi, mother of three Jewishly engaged kids, and involved in the synagogue she attends — her looks always give her away. And she knows it. “I’ve been Jewish and living in New York for a long time; I feel pretty integrated,” she asserts. “But everyone always assumes that I’m not Jewish.”
If you don’t have dark hair and skin, it’s possible that you’ve been told you don’t look Jewish. But Angela’s face — with its perfectly delicate features, high cheekbones, and eyelashes which, under mascara, are so lightly pigmented they’re white — is not merely striking, but strikingly un-Jewish looking. I remember how I jumped to judgment when I first encountered her photo and byline, my visceral and communally cultivated reaction of “great, another intermarriage, another potential Jewish soulmate lost.” (Never mind that I was about fifteen when Angela met and married her husband, which means her husband was never really in my dating pool. But if we’re talking honestly about my Pavlovian stimulus-response reaction, then that was it.)
I feel a retroactive guilt almost as overpowering as my curiosity. But she’s used to it. “Since I’m hugely curious and like to ask nosy questions, I often offer the information immediately so that there’s no uncomfortable feeling,” she says. Looking at the confident woman across from me, who peppers her speech with Jewish terms like every other Jew I know, I’m not shocked when she asserts that people accept her as she is. “I’m Jewish and don’t think I’m less authentically Jewish because I converted. It was a serious search on my part, and I was answering really important questions. I took it seriously.”
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After her time in Israel, Angela finished her degree in religious studies at the University of Indiana and moved to New York City. All that time, even though she had been away from home, she had done her best to toe the line in terms of her relationship with Christian faith, going to church regularly. “But it wasn’t coming so easily. At the same time I was whoring after other Gods.” She smiles, and gives me a knowing half wink, explaining that she means she was taking classes at the 92nd Street Y.
“Judaism was a lot more fun than Christianity because it didn’t suppress questions. But it was also frustrating, because I had gone to Judaism for answers, but found more questions.” Angela explains that the WCG required adherents to “forego the intellectual — you couldn’t study except within the Scriptures.” So being in an environment like Manhattan, with its “smorgasbord of study,” helped Angela feel connected spiritually and intellectually, and taught her to see the world differently, but still didn’t sell her on Judaism. “The church gives you the answer, and there’s a certain comfort level in that. You may not like the answers, but they’re answers.”
Conversion wasn’t the initial goal. “I wasn’t too keen on committing to anybody or anything that was going to tell me what to do.” But when Angela met a Jewish man from an Orthodox family, and realized she wanted to make a future with him, that changed everything. “My having three kids, and raising them Jewish, in an anti-Semitic world, is a big commitment.”
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Even after her conversion, Angela felt that she had failed her parents’ faith. “At the time, I was still under the impression that I in some way did not have enough faith or didn’t understand. Even though I had converted to Judaism and was quite happy, I only had complete closure when I found out about Herbert Armstrong’s terrible behavior.”
Between Angela’s personal accounts and Internet sources, it’s clear that the WCG was a house of corruption. The WCG faithful, told that their donations were to help the poor, had gladly handed over one tithe after the other. But it was later discovered that, like many other cult leaders, Armstrong was pocketing the funds. “Renting those dinky places in the middle of nowhere meant more money for Armstrong,” a wiser Angela understands today.
The sexual corruption that sometimes accompanies charismatic leaders wasn’t absent when it came to Armstrong either. He had reportedly committed incest with his daughter in the 1930s, when the girl was only thirteen. Some online sources suspect that Armstrong might have also abused his son. Angela didn’t know about any of this until about a decade ago. “I never quite thought that he was the ‘prophet Elijah to come,’ as he called himself, but I still thought he was a holy man,” she says. “But he abused churchgoers’ beliefs, which is really unforgivable.”
Since Armstrong’s death in 1986, the WCG leadership has made a concerted effort to revisit its doctrines, bringing it in line with more mainstream modern Christianity: Sunday is now the day of rest and modern medicine is accepted as part of living a contemporary life. WCG adherents are also permitted to observe Christmas and Easter now, holidays that were previously denounced as pagan. But the subjugation of women hasn’t changed much, Angela reports. “Keeping women down is still a favorite activity in a lot of patriarchal religions; it’s amazing that women allow it,” she shakes her head.
Since Angela’s departure, her nine siblings also left the WCG, conducting their own searches for religious meaning, although none of them found Judaism. But her parents are still in it, with her father still “quite devout,” according to Angela. “He’s convinced, especially with what’s going on in Israel, that the world is coming to an end.”
As different as her life may be now, Angela’s beliefs haven’t changed all that much; but now, she was being encouraged to explore them. “I always believed in God’s presence in our lives, and I continue to believe in that,” she explains. “In the church they would tell you how God works in your life. I used to think you could get to know God through Jesus. But my view now is that God’s presence isn’t always discernible. Now I am willing to view God as a presence that is unknowable.”
In retrospect, “the idea of Jesus as your personal savior, sitting on your shoulder,” strikes her as somewhat arrogant. Judaism presents a distance between the person and the deity, which she finds more theologically comfortable. “The distance permits me to be human and God to be God. And it also has to do with free will. I like the idea that I’m God’s creation, but that I can also make my own choices and take responsibility for what I do right and wrong. I’m very suspicious when people feel as if God is our next door neighbor.” She cites the old joke about how God created man in God’s image, and then that man returned the favor. “I’m suspicious of a God who is that close to human. You begin to wonder how much of that God is our creation.”
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If you’re wondering why Angela hasn’t written a book about her experience, stop right there. She has, and is shopping the memoir — I Grew Up With Demons, which chronicles her life in the cult until her conversion to Judaism — around to agents and publishers.
As writers, we both look at the world with a questioning eye and see symbols in the everyday. And as observant Jews, we observe tradition similarly. But I was born into my Judaism, choosing only to continue on paths set by my family and education, while she chose in accordance with inner resonance and carefully considered theology. I didn’t think about it until later, but our orders reflect our differences. I ordered toast to her baguette, regular coffee to her latte. Opposite my colorful subject — who has been around the spiritual block and back again before choosing Judaism and motherhood — I’m feeling plain and unworldly. We seem equally well-versed in the language of repentance and of traditional Judaism, but I envy her commitment to her spiritual and personal truth.
Angela’s path is her own, and something she prizes; but she knows that she is different from all of her family members, even her children. “My kids can never understand, really, where I come from, who I was before I was their mother. I don’t regret that, but it’s a fact. And they are very different from their cousins, but are close to them too.” Angela relates that her kids once asked their cousins who Jesus was. The cousin explained that Jesus was God, and was nailed to the cross, died, and was resurrected. “My son asked, ‘If Jesus was God, why didn’t he just climb off the cross?’ Growing up, it never would have occurred to me to question in that way,” Angela reflects.
Navigating an extended family with such vast and varied beliefs can’t be easy, but Angela seems to be making it work. She prides herself on having respect for everyone and “looking for the best in one another, not being critical and judgmental.” She wants her kids to see their mother as someone who is accepting and sees the good in everyone. And what if one of her kids grew up and wanted to convert out of the faith? “I would like for them to remain Jewish, marry Jews, have a Jewish lifestyle, but they will have to figure out their own parameters. When they’re adults they’ll have that choice. If one of my kids wanted to convert, I would not be happy, but wouldn’t distance myself from them.”
Her life now is within the Orthodox movement — she belongs to a Modern Orthodox synagogue, her kids have had their bar and bat mitzvahs there, she’s active on the sisterhood board and spirituality committee, and sends her kids to Jewish day schools. Her in-laws have fully accepted her and her commitment to both faith and family. “They wouldn’t have been happy if I hadn’t converted,” she ventures, “but they were always great to me.” She reports that her mother-in-law was coming over later that day to help with preparations for the Sukkot festival.
As for her own parents, Angela has determined that there’s a “practical, legitimate reason” that her mother has been so accepting of her choices. “If I still lived in Jasper and was a practicing Jew in front of their faces, that’d be different, but [on a day to day basis] they don’t see my life.” Her parents’ attendance at her sons’ circumcisions, for example, illustrates the intersection between comedy and culture shock. “When we invited them to the bris, my parents said, ‘You mean we’re going to watch? And we’re going to eat?’ This was very big news in my extended family.”
Suddenly, I am inspired to ask what her Hebrew name is. Ruth, she tells me. I note that between the two of us, we’re Ruth and Esther, representing some major megillahs at the table. She laughs, and says that in addition to being the name of the first convert to Judaism, Ruth was always Angela’s middle name. And so, perhaps, her long and winding journey to a committed Jewish life was predestined after all.
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