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Growing up, Hardison knows, abstractly, that his birth parents were Jewish, but he’s lost all connection to it by the time he ends up with Nana and her multi-denominational household. It doesn’t matter much to him. He’s occupied with computers and games and the thrill of a good hack, and who needs religion, anyway? But he still thinks about it sometimes.
He jokes about it, at first. “This is about my ethniticity, ain’t it? Uh huh. It’s cause I’m Jewish.” Everyone laughs. He brushes it off. Society doesn’t think people who look like him can be Jewish; they think it’s a joke. It isn’t important enough to him right now for him to care. He lets it be a joke.
He’s not especially religious. He says as much, in the job with the church and the faked miracle. His moral line is that he never does anything his nana said don’t do. So far, that’s been good enough for him.
And then Moreau comes along. Hardison gets thrown in a pool and almost drowns and Eliot doesn’t confess the worst thing he’s ever done but Hardison can see something on his face. And he’s working with a man who’s done really terrible things, awful horrible things, things Hardison knows he probably can’t even imagine. He goes looking. He’s too curious for his own good. He stops himself before he gets too deep in the dark web but he goes further than he should.
Hardison is trying to grapple with how he feels about the man he works with—the man he loves—having done horrible, awful, irredeemable things. He knows Eliot regrets it; Eliot has said as much. He knows Eliot is working every day to make up for the things he’s done in the past, that he doesn’t do that anymore, that he does truly want to be a better person.
And yet. Hardison doesn’t have the moral baseline to think about this. He doesn’t know how to wrap his head around this and he doesn’t know how to make sense of it and it goes beyond anything he’s had to really ethically consider before. It’s not exactly something he can ask his Nana about, but he thinks about what she would say.
She said something to him, once. He was having an angsty teenager phase, questioning why anyone was religious anyway, and she told him some people find meaning in religion because it helps them figure out how to understand the world. Hardison thinks about that.
Sometime after Eliot and Moreau, and before Harry, Hardison starts going to services. He starts small: a Friday night here, a Saturday morning there, whichever holidays align with when he’s available. He bounces around synagogues with open guest policies in whatever cities they happen to be in. He tells the team he’s going to a nerd thing; he doesn’t feel ready to share this with them yet.
He’s hoping something will happen. He’ll go to services, and he’ll discover something about himself, and everything will change. He’s hoping it’ll be magic. He hopes he’ll just understand, and everything will feel right. It’s not that easy. He feels lost, at first. He doesn’t know the Hebrew or the tunes or the people, and no matter how the kind people near him try to point out the right pages and nudge him when to stand up, he feels like he’s missing out.
He never had a bar mitzvah. He didn’t go to Hebrew school. The rabbi says, sometimes, “rise if it’s your custom,” and he doesn’t have a custom. He feels how he does when he thinks about not going to prom, not going to college, not having the shared childhood experiences it seems like everyone else had.
When he goes to the oneg and doesn’t just sneak out the back, they ask him questions, and he doesn’t want to grift, not here. He makes things up. I grew up Jewish, he says, but I lost connection. I’m just curious, he says. I’m just in town for the week, he says. It’s never really untrue, but it’s not the truth either.
He keeps hoping something will click, and it doesn’t. But he keeps coming back anyway.
Eventually, he gets up the courage to talk to a rabbi. There are several at the big Reform congregation in Portland he’s been going to, and he picks the younger woman rabbi who he thinks is gay. He thinks she’s less likely to judge.
“Rabbi Abrams,” he says, “could I talk to you about a moral dilemma I’m having?”
He goes to her office, and he tells her. “I grew up in the system,” he says, and it takes everything in his power not to bluster and joke and fill the air the way he usually does. He forces himself to be vulnerable. “My birth parents were Jewish, but I never really had a connection to it growing up. But lately I’ve been feeling like I’m missing something, you know? So I’ve been trying to maybe reconnect?” She’s nodding along. He keeps going.
“Um. I found out, somewhat recently, that someone who… matters a lot to me did some things in the past that were really bad. And he’s trying to make up for it now but he. I don’t know. Nothing has ever told me how to deal with that. I. I love him.” He watches her face to make sure she isn’t going to flip out on the gay part but she’s still nodding kindly and patiently.
“And I don’t know if it’s wrong to love someone who’s done. Things. Like that.” He’s babbling now, he knows. “And someone told me once that religion can help with things like that. And. I was hoping. That maybe Judaism had something that could help.”
She holds his hands and tells him that she can definitely help and she’s proud of him for asking. She tells him about teshuvah.
“The Jewish faith teaches,” she says, “that teshuvah, redemption, is a process. We talk about this a lot on Yom Kippur- are you familiar?” He nods. “We teach that you can return to the path of righteousness if you’ve gone astray, but it takes work. You have to make amends for what you’ve done wrong. But we teach that it is possible. Just because someone has done terrible things does not mean that they are forever a terrible person. And loving someone who’s done bad things, especially if now they’re working toward that path to repentance? That doesn’t make you a bad person either.”
She tells him about her theory that Judaism can be like a toolbox, with a lot of teachings and traditions and ways of looking at the world that can be brought into your life even if you’re not that observant. She talks to him about what education resources are available for him if he does want to become more observant or just learn more about Judaism, or if he wants to have an adult bar mitzvah. They talk for a long time about teshuvah.
Hardison leaves feeling better than he has in a long time.
He signs up for an adult education class.
He asks Eliot to bake him challah.
And by the time he meets Harry Wilson, he knows enough about teshuvah to pass the teachings on to someone else.