A Messianic Jewish poet's journey in the Holy Land

 

In 1987, Betsy Ramsay decided to fulfil a dream. As a Jewish American journalist and aspiring poet who had been living in Sweden for more than 30 years after marrying into an aristocratic European family, Ramsay, then in her fifties, packed her things and moved to Israel.

Relocating her life was no trivial task, but one with which she had been acquainted. She grew up in a small neighborhood in the outskirts of Detroit and received her bachelor’s degree in English literature from Wellesley College. Shortly after, in 1955, Ramsay got married and moved to southern Sweden to live at an estate purchased by her father in law.

The transition was not smooth. Ramsay remembers feeling uncomfortable, out of place almost. “I was American, which didn’t coincide with their lifestyle, and worse than that – I was Jewish,” she says, explaining that while they wouldn’t openly express it, her husband’s Protestant family never really accepted her. “They were gracious, but they didn’t feel happy about it.”

Ramsay and her husband were in love, but came from opposing worlds. “I from a Jewish family in the American middle upper class and he from the top ranks of the nobility in Finland, where the Victorian lifestyle of the aristocracy was more than a relic of the past” – and as if they were modern reincarnations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, they suffered because of it. 

However, Ramsay found some solace in living in the beautiful Swedish countryside, and remembers roaming the fields and talking to strangers, slowly creating her own sense of home – an ability that would serve her well, years later when making aliyah. 

A life-changing experience that Ramsay remembers from that time was organizing plays with children from the surrounding farms. “On the estate there was a schoolhouse, a one-room school for children coming from the farms around,” Ramsay remembers. She managed to get a group of curious students together and the OK from the only teacher there. She would then write plays and play them out with the group – tuning her writing abilities and improving her Swedish.     

It was around that time that Ramsay’s appreciation for words found its expression in her faith. In her personal memoir On The Wings of the Wind (2009) Ramsay refers to the complex relationship with her husband and writes: “Both of us were searching in our own ways for a faith that would hold firm both over high mountains and through the dark valleys.” 

Her first published work was a collection of poems titled Let us Put on the Armor of Light (1974). The collection includes early poems written during her adolescence and early years in Sweden, which Ramsay believes “capture some of the emotions, flounderings and longings of young people generally, particularly those who may be looking for God as I was.”

Perhaps, living in a world so different than the one she knew – within the confines of her “newly-painted fencepost” had opened Ramsay’s mind to new possibilities – both personal and religious. Having developed a curiosity for Messianic Judaism shortly before moving to Sweden, her time there strengthened her curiosity and eventually her belief, which became an integral part of her life from that point on.   

As a Messianic Jew, Ramsay firmly believes and follows both the Bible and the New Testament. Accordingly, her writing reflects both Jewish and Christian ideas. Her children’s book Footsteps (1995) explores the figure of Santa Claus, or rather, the legends surrounding the ancient Bishop Nicholas. Her children’s book The Burning Light (2002) on the other hand, is a creative interpretation to the battle fought between the Maccabees and the colossal armies of Antiochus Epiphanes.

Before pursuing her career as an author and poet, Ramsay had a passion for journalism, and that led to her first attempt of making a difference through her writing. She worked as a freelance journalist at the time, writing evangelic articles about current issues that would get published in local Swedish newspapers. Together with a group of close friends, Ramsay later established a political magazine oriented toward Messianic Jewish ideas and managed to reach out to decision-makers in the Swedish Parliament. “It was quite an experience,” Ramsay reminisces, and was the turning point that led her to take on writing as a lifestyle. 

Ramsay’s passion for words and her personal beliefs culminated in her decision to move to Israel, an idea that had been long in the making. Her latest book Let us go Up (2019) recounts her journey to becoming an Israeli citizen. Describing the decision to relocate her entire life, Ramsay writes: “It was the fruit of a plan maturing in my mind and heart for many years.”

But to truly understand what it meant for Ramsay to be able to come to Israel, we must go back.

“My father had immigrated to the US from Germany in 1923, a decade before Hitler’s ominous rise to power,” Ramsay writes in Let us go Up. “When Hitler came to power in 1933 and soon began herding Jews off to cruel imprisonment and death, my father decided our family needed to leave our Jewish identities behind.”  

For her father, she notes, the fact that her family was Jewish was “an accident of birth,” and as a protective measure, fearing that Hitler might extend his power to the US, had decided to hide his family’s Jewish identity. 

“So my sister and I, growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, obeyed his instructions and hid our Jewish identity at all costs,” she explains, immediately adding that “this wasn’t an altogether healthy measure psychologically for either of us.” 

Making aliyah about 50 years later, was the ultimate acknowledgment of Ramsay’s Jewish heritage and her way of reclaiming her own identity. “Today, living as I do as a citizen of Israel, I’m thankful not to have to hide from anyone the fact that I’m Jewish. I also believe now that being born Jewish is not an accident.”

Ramsay’s literary career began flourishing after making aliyah in 1987. In the following couple of decades, she would publish over a dozen of novels, poetry collections, children’s books and a detailed account of Jewish life in Nazi-Germany before and after Hitler came to power, based on manuscripts left by her grandfather. 

Her poetry collection Bells of the Valley (2012) partly records her experiences and feelings after moving to Israel. The collection’s opening poem is titled “Word Magic,” and perhaps best expresses the elaborate “dance” between cultural norms and religious ideas that has characterized Ramsay’s life.   

Today, Ramsay lives in Jerusalem. Her two daughters and three grandchildren live periodically in Stockholm, while her son lives in New York City.