I don't see my older sister, Andrea, as often as I'd like, so when I do, I memorize things that happen. I keep parts of our conversations in my head for extended periods of time, and I keep her smiles filed in the back of my mind.

I saw her recently for lunch, and took her to her first kosher Chinese meal. While we were sitting there, the conversation inevitably turned to religion.

"Do you feel Jewish?" Andrea asked me.

I have a habit of raising my left eyebrow when I can tell things are getting interesting. My eyebrow went up. "Do you?"

Despite the fact that she's approaching 30, she stuck her tongue out at me. "No," she said, "I don't. But I'm not the one going through all of this stuff that you are."

Technically, my sister is just as Jewish as I am; our great-grandmother was Jewish, we have the same genes. But she was always fine with Christianity. She never refused to go to church, like I did, or to get confirmed, like I did. Now, though, religion for Andrea is restricted to Christmas and Easter.

I thought about it. "Yeah," I said. "I do."

"When did that start?"

Andrea always was good with the tough questions. She giggled at me while my eyebrows furrowed and I thought about it.

I didn't just wake up one morning and decide hey, being Jewish would be cool. And "feeling Jewish" isn't like feeling happy, or sad, or anxious, or anything else. You don't take this off like a jacket when you're done with it. If it's not innate, then it runs deep.

If "feeling Jewish" traces back to any one event, I think I know what it is. I've said before that deep down, I always had a feeling; I always at least identified with Jews, before I knew that I had Jewish roots. But there was something that stood out.

I lost a friend because I decided to pursue Judaism.

We had been on the outs already, growing apart, and she came from a very Christian family. When she discovered that I was pursuing conversion, she told me in no uncertain terms that she could not continue to be my friend, that she could not identify with me anymore, and she could not "condone" what I was doing because she firmly believed it was wrong.

I wished her well, told her she should have all good things in life, and that was that. But I was floored.

This was someone I thought I knew, someone I had been friends with all through college. And yet the simple fact that I was different was enough to push her over the edge.

I'm still not 100 percent okay with that.

While looking for a rabbi to work with, and this is almost two years ago now, I came across a book of interviews with famous Jews, asking all about what their religion meant to them, and how it affected their lives. I don't remember specifically who said it, but there was a quote in there that seemed to lift a veil from my eyes: "There are people in this world who will kill you for being Jewish. You need to know what you're dying for."

It occurred to me then, and again sitting with my sister, eating lunch, that this was something that important to me, something I would fight for that hard. So that's what I told Andrea, all of that. I cannot impart things to her that she doesn't feel; I can't explain to her that hearing Kaddish for the first time made me cry, or that sometimes when I daven, I cry because I believe what I'm saying so much. Or that going to shul on Shabbos is uplifting for me, and so are my classes.

But I can explain the importance. That's what I did. And really, that's what I've been doing for a while now.

She nodded, and smiled. Andrea gets what I'm doing, even if she can't really identify with it. That makes all the difference in the world to me.