Once I left my old life behind, I struggled to trust myself, I struggled against making decisions due to being so wrong in my past. I didn’t trust myself at all, and it took a good bit of time to build my confidence back up to be decisive once again. Then just one year ago, I made the decision to convert to Judaism, leaving behind an entire lifetime in the occult, but this didn’t have the same effect on me as leaving behind my life of hate. Leaving the occult behind was more along the lines of never having the experience or knowledge of the Jewish view of G-d, or the practices and beliefs, and finally learning them.

The occult always taught open-mindedness, so my transition to Judaism, while shocking to some, wasn’t viewed negatively by friends or most of my family. Most of my friends I’d made in the occult are still friends of mine, but now I have many more friends who are Jewish as well, it’s a very eclectic mix. 

So, where do my struggles come from at current, and what truth am I struggling to find?

Though I am converting, I am ethnically Jewish on my mother’s side, which means I am already a Jew as well, I just wasn’t raised in a Jewish household. I often tell people this in Jewish groups on social media and when I meet Jews for the first time, they often respond to me, “You’ve been Jewish this whole time,” and this is where I struggle. You see a Jew is entered into the covenant with Hashem, they are expected to uphold the Mitzvot and commandments, and in my past, I was a Jew and occultist, I lived anathema to those aspects and didn’t know them at all.

Now that I know, and during the last high holy days, I sought Teshuva, I have been working tirelessly to repair the world from my past, working counter-current to my past life of hate and teaching others how to combat it. This is my struggle, my fight, my war against who I was… and I will talk to whoever will listen about elements those groups thrive on, from first-hand knowledge. I use the insider knowledge of hate groups to help others combat them and to leave that life of hate behind, that too is my struggle.

So many “experts,” out there are misinformed, so many school-educated experts think they’ve got it all figured out, I lived it, I worked with some of the highest-profile extremists known in those movements. So my goal is to get the right information into the right hands to win this war against hate, division, and extremism, not get a job based around it. That’s why I wrote the documentary I am trying to have made…

My search for truth comes from exploring the whole of Jewish wisdom, from base Judaism to Kaballah to Mussar. This will be a lifelong experience of that I am aware of, but it will also be a quest for truth in a world full of lies. Truth fuels me, the search for it pulls me forward and upward, and each tidbit I gleam makes me yearn for more… and this too is a struggle at times.