Now the ink is smudging because I can’t stop pressing my palm against the page, a habit I picked up when I’m trying to ground myself in a reality that feels increasingly like a mist. It is 3:03 AM. I am sitting at my kitchen table, the one with the scratch on the left corner that looks vaguely like the map of an island nobody wants to visit. Before me lies my journal, and the question I’ve written there is so sharp it feels like it might cut the paper: Am I being called by the Divine, or am I just desperately, agonizingly lonely?

The Purity Paradox: Dead Water vs. Living Thirst

I spent the afternoon tasting a flight of waters from the northern volcanic regions of Italy. As a water sommelier, my job is to detect the unseen. I look for the ‘Total Dissolved Solids’-the minerals, the salts, the tiny ‘impurities’ that give water its soul. A water with a TDS of 0 is distilled; it is pure, and it is also utterly dead. It has no character, no story, no grip on the palate. It is a vacuum in a bottle.

Yet, when it comes to our spiritual lives, we have this bizarre, masochistic obsession with ‘purity.’ We think that if our desire to convert or to return to faith is ‘contaminated’ by a need for community, for a Friday night meal, or for the sound of 23 voices singing in unison, then the calling isn’t real. We treat our social hunger as if it’s a glitch in the software of our souls, rather than the hardware itself.

The Burning Bush vs. The Crowded Mountain

Yesterday, I cried during a commercial for a long-distance phone company. An old man was teaching his grandson how to tie a tie over a video call. It was manipulative, sentimental, and I knew exactly what the advertisers were doing, yet I was a mess for 13 minutes afterward. That vulnerability is embarrassing to admit, but it’s relevant here.

We are social animals designed for the pack, and yet we’ve been sold this lie that the only ‘authentic’ spiritual experience is the one that happens in total isolation, unpolluted by the human need for belonging. We want the burning bush, but we don’t want the 73 other people standing at the foot of the mountain with us, mostly because we’re afraid we’re only there for the company.

Let’s talk about Rio J.D.-that’s me, by the way, the guy who gets paid to tell people why their $43 bottle of glacier water tastes like ‘blue’ rather than ‘wet.’ I once spent an entire month in a mountain retreat, searching for what I called ‘the source.’ Instead, all I heard was the sound of my own blood pumping in my ears, a rhythmic reminder that I was alive and deeply, profoundly alone. I realized then that my thirst wasn’t just for water, or even for God in the abstract. It was for a context. It was for a well where others also came to drink.

The Geometry of Belonging

We live in a culture that prizes the individual ‘journey.’ We talk about ‘finding our truth’ as if it’s a shell we pick up on a private beach. But Judaism, the path I’ve been circling like a moth around a 103-watt bulb, doesn’t really believe in the private beach. It’s a team sport. You need a minyan to say certain prayers. You need a community to mourn. You need a table to celebrate. So, when someone asks me, ‘Rio, am I converting for the right reasons, or am I just lonely?’ I want to grab them by the shoulders and ask why they think those are two different things.

Why would the Creator of the universe design you with a desperate need for connection and then demand that you ignore that need to find Him? Maybe the loneliness isn’t the distraction. Maybe the loneliness is the GPS coordinate. If you feel a pull toward a tradition because the thought of sitting at a Shabbat table makes you want to weep with relief, that isn’t ‘faking it.’ That’s your soul recognizing a nutrient it’s been deprived of for decades.

In my world, if water lacks magnesium, it tastes flat. If it lacks calcium, it lacks structure. If a spiritual path lacks the ‘impurity’ of human connection, it isn’t a path; it’s just a hallucination. I once made the mistake of buying a $533 filtration system that stripped everything out of my tap water. It was the most ‘pure’ substance I’d ever tasted, and I couldn’t drink more than a glass of it without feeling nauseous. It was too much of nothing.

The Medium of the Divine

I think about the 83 days I spent wondering if I was ‘Jewish enough’ to even ask the questions I’m asking now. I was worried that my interest was purely sociological, a reaction to the atomization of modern life. I’d look at the resources on studyjudaism.net and feel like an interloper, a thief trying to steal a sense of home that I hadn’t earned through some agonizing, solitary epiphany.

But the more I read, and the more I talk to people who have actually walked this road, the more I realize that the ‘home’ is the epiphany. The community isn’t the reward for finding God; the community is the medium through which the Divine becomes visible.

It’s like the ‘mouthfeel’ of a high-alkaline water. You can’t describe it without talking about how it interacts with your tongue. You can’t talk about a calling without talking about how it interacts with your life. If your life is a desert, and you find a spring, do you spend three hours questioning if you’re ‘truly’ thirsty or if you’re just reacting to the heat? No, you drink. You drink until your cells stop screaming.

The Reason You Drink

I remember a specific tasting event I hosted for 63 tech executives in San Francisco. They were all looking for the ‘best’ water, the most exclusive, the most ‘transformative.’ I gave them a sample of ordinary tap water from a small town in Maine, but I told them it was sourced from a hidden spring in the Andes. They raved about its ‘spiritual clarity.’

She wasn’t looking for the Andes; she was looking for a reason to be present. Your ‘loneliness’ might just be your soul’s way of forcing you to be present, to finally pay attention to the hunger that’s been there all along.

The Love That Underpins Theology

We often mistake the ‘social’ for the ‘superficial.’ We think that because we want the songs and the jokes and the sense of being ‘one of us,’ we are failing the ‘intellectual’ or ‘theological’ test of faith. But look at the history of the Jewish people. It’s a history of a family, an extended, argumentative, beautiful, 3003-year-old family. You don’t join a family because you’ve passed a chemistry exam; you join it because you belong there. The theology is the language the family speaks, but the love is why they’re speaking in the first place.

I’m looking at the clock again. 3:23 AM. The smudge on my journal has dried. I realize now that I’ve been holding my breath, waiting for a sign that I’m ‘pure’ enough to move forward. But I’m a water sommelier. I know better than anyone that purity is a laboratory construct. In the real world, the most refreshing water is the one that has traveled through the earth, picking up bits of rock and salt and ancient history along the way. My loneliness is part of my TDS. It’s the mineral content of my calling. It gives my search its ‘grip,’ its texture, its reality.

If you are sitting where I am, wondering if you’re a fraud because you want a community as much as you want a Creator, stop. The thirst is real, regardless of what triggered it. Whether it was a loss, a commercial that made you cry for 13 minutes, or just the slow, steady erosion of your spirit by the modern world, the reason you are at the well doesn’t change the quality of the water. You are allowed to be hungry. You are allowed to want to sit at a table where you are known. In fact, that might be the most ‘religious’ thing about you.

Faith shouldn’t be an empty room. It should be a crowded kitchen, smelling of onions and old books, where 43 different conversations are happening at once and someone is always handing you a plate. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re not ‘just lonely.’ You’re human. And you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be, right here at the edge of the water, ready to finally take a sip.