She turned away from her childhood religious roots. Middle East holds clues as to why

When I met my husband 45 years ago this summer, we talked about a lot of things before we became a couple. Once we began discussing our different religious backgrounds, he said other people thought about his being Jewish a lot more than he did.

It reminded me of all the people who, upon hearing my last name, determined that I was Catholic and from a huge family. Well, true.

He doesn’t remember, as a child, being specifically subjected to anti-Semitic remarks or actions. After he was born in Texas, his parents settled in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was raised along with his younger sister.

When my Roman Catholic parents moved to Tulsa from New York in the early 1950s, they became aware that the Ku Klux Klan targeted Catholics and Jews as well as Black people, and they didn’t keep this information from their kids.

They talked about everything. In our home, the friends who dropped by or came to parties included a wide mix of people. Priests stopped by, as did people who were Democrats and Republicans.

The parents of seven girls eventually belonged to a parish and made sure we all got the sacraments in order and in the right clothes. Then we peeled off one by one, as social policies and political life of the 1960s intervened. Our parents didn’t shrink from any of that ruckus, and probably couldn’t have, anyway, because so much was going on and seemed relevant.

Once my husband and I had kids, we agreed to raise them as Jewish as possible until further notice, which is how I could best define my Catholic experience. Once I got to be a teenager, none of that spaghetti stuck to me, so I announced that I was a free spirit, and I wanted to investigate other religions.

In public school in the 10th grade, I made friends with classmates who were Protestant, as well as some Jewish kids. We were all mixed in together, so my being Catholic was just as foreign to some of them as they were to me. I participated in a block schedule free-time elective called “fellowship” — or something like that. We discussed and explained our religions, or, this being Tulsa, listened as the evangelicals who “spread their Christian love,” came to “testify.”

A public school classroom to meet and discuss religious differences calmly and with tolerance. Wait, what?

I didn’t pick up any new religion, but I’d been raised to respect others, observant or not, and to know right from wrong. When it was absolutely clear that the problematic structure of Catholicism didn’t fit me, I never found formal religious guidance necessary to follow my own heart.

My husband grew up with a Holocaust camp-survivor mother and a New York City-born father. My husband somehow found a way to fall in love with a random fallen-away Catholic in a forsaken land called Oklahoma.

There’s a reason a weathered heathen like me suspects religion, on which I blame most tragic sorrow in this world.

I agreed to parent two children who identify as Jews. When Israel’s world-backed military responded to the bloody Hamas invasion of Oct. 7 last year with fury and widespread destruction, I was shocked that a religious-based country — with a centuries-long history of receiving abuse — would so indiscriminately kill innocent people alongside the criminals it seeks.

It’s time to stop aiding Israel, a country with identical origins in and claim to the land and people it is eliminating. Neither side in this war deserves the parcel of land between the river and the sea as long as they each justify their misguided actions on religion.

Contact Ellen Murphy at murphysister@gmail.com.