I hope I am always open to spiritual opportunities. I know I am always searching for them.

One has strangely come to me via an organic farm that sends young people who summer in Vermont to our Farmer’s Market every Sunday to sell bread, croissants, and baba genoush.

I met a young Jewish man I liked very much last week at the market. I feel as if we became friends almost instantly.

His name is Yaakov, and he is a devout Jew, perhaps the first one I’ve met in the years I’ve been up here in the country. There was something strangely powerful about my meeting him and connecting with him.  It felt good to me.

Yaakov saw my tattoo honoring Moses Hernandez, the first and only Jewish Pirate Captain in history, and asked me about it. Moses Hernandez famously captured a Spanish galleon loaded with gold without a shot or drop of blood, talked the captain into surrendering, took the gold on board, retired, and started a Pirate consulting service in the Caribbean.

I would love to have joined Hernandez’s crew, although I doubt I would have lasted an hour.

I seek a spiritual life and have for years. I’m a religious cherry picker and parasite; I take something from Quakerism (I converted to Quakerism when I was 14), from the teachings of  Christ and Buddha and St. Augustine and various spiritual authors and monks.

I love religion but don’t care to join any single one.

I am at ease in Quaker Meetings and genuinely Christian churches, but not in synagogues.

I learned from every faith except the one I was born into, which was Judaism. I could never connect to the Jewish faith or relate to what I considered its intense ritual and angry and merciless God. I feel no connection to Israel at all.

There are very few Jews up here where I live, and I am close to none of them.

My problems began when I was 10 and 11. I went to our rabbi to ask for help for my sister, who was breaking down.  My parents refused to get her help, so I went around them and asked for some.

The rabbi said rabbis don’t do that sort of thing; I would have to find a social worker. I found a priest and a Quaker Meeting who both rushed to help. I never went back to my own faith.

I’ve periodically tried attending Temple services, but it never worked. But the idea of sitting down regularly with Jews to talk about what it means to be Jewish and what I might learn from that is very appealing. It would be nice to know some Jews and speak with them. I don’t ever expect to be devout, nor, says Yaakov, will anyone pressure me to do that.

I’ve never encountered a shred of conscious anti-antisemitism up here; I know many good people who have never seen a Jew.

If I can learn from Jesus’s writings and Thomas Merton and the Buddha and St. Augustine and Henri Nouwen, there is much to learn from people in my faith. I am serious about my spiritual life and can always learn from exploring it. There is a reason organized religion changed the world, and we are worse off losing touch with it. For most of my life, no politician would dare to lie and cheat; the Christian faith alone would turn on him with a vengeance.

Now, much of the church supports lying and cruelty. The Jewish faith hasn’t done much to stop this decline in morality either.

But there is a lot there. For years, I’ve been reading the Kabbalah, the excellent writing of the anonymous Jewish mystics. There is a lot to learn in those books.

I instantly felt close to Yaakov when we started talking last week, and we talked some more about the death of Queen Elizabeth (he is touched by it also, which surprised me), and he told me he was thinking about the difference between kings and rulers.

It’s creepy to generalize, but Jews, like many gays, can sometimes recognize one another.

Rulers said Yaakov often makes people do things they don’t wish to do. Kings and Queens, he said, often try to do what is right for the people they rule and get them what they want.

He said it was a generalization, but it made a lot of sense to me. Elizabeth thought her role was to help her people, and Putin thought his rule was about making them do what he wanted. I don’t know a thing about the Jewish Kings.

Yaakov said that Judaism has a history of kings like David, considered a generous and giving King, and wise ones like Solomon.

That, suggested Jaakov,  is one reason people in England love her so much, and people worldwide admire her. They know she wanted the best for her people rather than only herself. Many Americans have lost faith in their leaders, who have to lie and obsess about money to survive.

There is something to it. Elizabeth will be loved for decades; I doubt Putin is loved much, even when he is admired and obeyed.

Yaakov said he belongs to a Jewish Group in nearby Manchester, Vt. that has no synagogues but meets regularly in Jewish homes based on how Quaker meetings are run. Even though an Orthodox Jew founded it, there are no rules, proclamations, dogma, or dense rituals to follow. People are free to be what they want to be, even if they don’t accept the faith.

You don’t have to know Hebrew, which I don’t, or love rituals, which I don’t, or worship the Old  Testament, which I don’t. You just have to be Jewish, willing to talk about it, and perhaps learn from it.

He said I would be welcome to come to the next meeting; he has my e-mail and contact information.

My life with Judaism is a blank and empty spot for me; I pushed all of it away. I’d like to know if there is something for me to take away. I know Judaism has many warm and generous beliefs, and I’d like to learn more about them.

Judaism is, of course, in my blood, and I would never deny that. My grandparents were devout, and I  loved them very much and often went to synagogue with them.  I was drawn to Yaakov, his gentleness, thoughtfulness, and warmth.

I want to invite him to the farm, and I plan to accept his invitation to attend his group’s meeting.