It was the summer of 1989. I was 23 years old, living in Berkeley Calif., and sharing a home with two friends. I worked at the UC Berkeley library during the week, and biked through the beautiful wooded hills to get there and back. On Friday nights, I would travel across the Bay Bridge in my old green Toyota stick shift to volunteer rehabbing seals at the Marine Mammal Center. Through the night, I would sleep on a cot, waking up every few hours to make fish smoothies to feed the baby seals that had been beached and brought in for recovery.

On the weekends, my friends and I traveled up and down the gorgeous coastline, hiking and picnicking by the ocean. It was the ideal life for my very secular New York hippie self—traveling, exploring and preparing for my future life working with animals.

One day after work, I went to the mailbox and noticed a super-thick envelope addressed to me. I looked at the return address, and it was from David, my ex-boyfriend from college. My heart soared!

David and I had met each other at Grinnell, a small liberal-arts college in the middle of Iowa’s cornfields. Think walking to classes barefoot, anti-establishment and anti-authority.

One afternoon as we left the dining hall, we bumped into each other and had our very first conversation, chatting about our travels. David mostly traveled back and forth to Israel because his mother was Israeli. I had been there once, visiting a Zionist cousin. I laughed and said that I hadn’t even heard of the Kotel until I went there. As an exchange student to Germany I knew all about the Berlin Wall, but nothing about the Western Wall.

When I shared this, he stopped in his tracks and his mouth hung open. “You’re Jewish, though, right?”

“Yeah, I’m Jewish—I mean my parents are, but I don’t believe in religion, so whatever.”

“Well, do you fast on Yom Kippur?” he asked.

“No, why would I do that?” I answered him.

“Well, then you’re not Jewish,” he declared.

Now, it was my turn to stop in my tracks. “You can’t kick me out of the tribe!”

“Well, what kind of a Jew are you?” he asked. “You don’t fast on Yom Kippur, and you didn’t even know about the Kotel.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Well, even so ... you can’t kick me out of the tribe.”

That was the beginning of our budding romance. But like many college relationships, it was a bit on and off. I was a year older, and when I graduated, he was leaving for a college year abroad in Yugoslavia. I wanted to maintain our relationship; he wanted to remain “just friends.” My heart was broken.

That’s why I was so happy and surprised to receive his letter—even though we had written back and forth a bit, I hadn’t heard from him for six months. Surprisingly, it was addressed from Israel, not Yugoslavia.

I eagerly opened the envelope, taking out the thick folded letter. It was 13 pages long! In it, he was talking about learning at a school in Israel. He wrote about G‑d, miracles, keeping kosher, white strings and a yarmulke, and Sabbath. I was shocked. What had happened to him?

At the end of the letter, he said I should come to visit him in Israel, and he left a number for me to call. I was very confused. Something was wrong. David had never sounded like this before. We used to talk about communism, feminism and so many other things, but never G‑d.

After talking with an advisor (who told me that my boyfriend was in a cult!), getting on the phone with David (he sounded like he was in a cult!) and pow-wowing with my roommates about what my head was saying (forget David—he had rejected me, so why should I care about him anyway!) and my heart (still in love with him), I jumped on a plane to Israel.

I landed in the Holy Land and began my spiritual journey. I spent months in different programs learning all about Judaism with the intention of rescuing David with my inside knowledge of what he was learning.

Over time, I came to realize that the Orthodox Judaism that David was studying was not a cult. I knew, however, that if I wanted to marry him, then I would need to believe what he believed and practice what he practiced.

Eventually, David’s father came to Israel to encourage him to return to the States to finish college. And David left, but he left as a practicing Jew.

I stayed to try to become a believer, but I was facing a huge obstacle. And that was secularism. In school, I had learned science, history and math, which was fine. But everything was devoid of G‑d and the soul. At home, my parents identified as Jews, but had little knowledge of what being a Jew meant.

My grandmother had come to America with Shabbat candles and kosher observance. She had grown up on a farm in Czechoslovakia with very religious parents who had received their knowledge of the Torah for generations back. But for me, with that one-generation separation, it took a lot to convince me of our very rich Jewish heritage. I thought David was being brainwashed, when it was I who needed to wash my brain from a lot of the falsities I had been taught.

But my brain was hard to wash out, and my heart felt resistant to change. And no matter how much I tried to absorb, nothing really hit home on a spiritual level. After a few months of learning, I returned to California. But not as a believer nor as a practicer of the faith. I had too many doubts and too many obstacles. Nothing I learned really touched my heart. And because it didn’t touch my heart, it also didn’t touch my soul.

And then I started learning Chassidic teachings, and that did touch my heart and soul.

You see, as Jews we are “believers, the children of believers.” Our souls are deeply connected with G‑d. But for me, my innate belief was buried underneath my secular upbringing. Chassidic teachings brought my soul-connection with G‑d to the surface.

And if you are curious about what happened with David, we did reconnect, but that's the subject for a different article.

I searched and discovered that my Jewish soul wasn’t just a part of who I am, but rather the definition of who I am. I began to understand that as Jews, we don’t observe G‑d’s mitzvot because they feel good or make sense or even lead to an easier life. Rather, it’s because our Jewish soul makes us what we are and mitzvot connect us to our essence. Our soul is literally a piece of G‑d.

I realized that no matter where I went—Guatemala, California, Brazil or Germany—and no matter what I did, that I was a Jew with a piece of G‑d in me. I was born to observe the mitzvot. I was born to eat kosher, to keep Shabbat and to practice family purity as a married woman. It wasn’t really a choice but a decision; a decision to connect with the soul that I was given.

I came to recognize the power in that. In my youth, I had wanted to save the world, to rescue seals and refugees, and make the world a better place. And all that was fantastic. But I had so much more power if I did those things as a Jew who lived from that soul connection.