“I just like people.”
I’m trying to explain to Brown Hillel Rabbi Dardashti what I want to do with the internship she’s offering me. She wants me to take charge of a project, ideally something Jewish that feels unique to me. But I keep coming back to the idea that doing a project only for Jewish people or about Judaism feels incomplete and disconnected from my passions. I care about whole people and stories, I try to explain.
“How about interfaith work?” Dardashti suggests.
This idea feels closer but still not quite right. Interfaith work felt tangential compared to the identities like gender, sexuality and socio-economic status that I’d grappled with since growing up and understood as meaningful parts of how I and others interact with the world.
“Of course, part of this work would be exploring your Judaism,” she elaborates.
My heart drops. While I was restless to learn about other people’s experiences and faiths, I had not taken the time to examine my own.
Rabbi Dardashti introduced me to the idea that interfaith work is most powerful when each member of the community holds a strong sense of their own identity. In her article “Redeeming Particularity,” Dardashti references two biblical questions—“where are you?” and “where is your brother?”—and argues that we must grapple with the first question in order to answer the second.
Dardashti writes, “I cannot be my brother’s keeper in any authentic or sustainable way without knowing who and where I am and what it is that I especially keep.”
Reading this article convinced me that if I wanted to interact with interfaith spaces, I needed to better understand the Jewish identity I bring.
Before college, my Judaism had largely been about community, family and spirituality. When I think of feeling most at peace in Judaism, I think of heated Seder discussions at my grandma’s house in Ohio or sitting next to my dad during High Holiday services, somewhat listening but mostly getting lost in years of written tradition.
These last few semesters, having left my synagogue and family, I tried to find the entities I associated with Judaism and that sense of peace. I attended reform and conservative services, alternative Shabbat singing circles, Rosh Chodesh and women’s community spaces, LGBTQ Jewish text study, non-Hillel dinners, Hillel dinners, anti-Zionist dinners and Zionist dinners. I explored how Judaism intersects with music, politics, womanhood, sexuality and Friday night college life.
I tried on different spaces, attempting to find a spot I felt was comfortable yet challenged my views and expectations. Though I didn’t find a spot, I found a vastness of Jewish identities and experiences which helped me understand politics, gender, sexuality and race from a different perspective. I began the process of placing Judaism within my other identities and seeing how it might fit into my story.
I also started studying Jewish texts for the first time. During weekly dinners at Hillel’s Jewish Learning Fellowship, we read biblical passages and their rabbinical, academic and contemporary responses. In our group discussions, I found a community with whom to work through some of the hesitations, questions and appreciations I had been accumulating after years of skimming the high holiday prayer book. I began to see myself as an author of my own Jewish experience, able to enter ancient and ongoing Jewish debates.
Even as I could see myself learning throughout the semester, I continued to wonder why I was spending so much time thinking about my Judaism instead of seeking a better understanding of humanity overall.
Just as learning about Judaism and interfaith simultaneously helped me see how both inform human experiences, learning about myself while learning about others helps me be a better community member and builder.
I found an answer from one of our recent panelists for the Building Interfaith Leadership Initiative (BILI), Dr. Je Hooper, an interdisciplinary artist, academic and humanist clergy.
Hooper told us, “I am my greatest asset.”
My goals in life look outwards, but my path—no matter how uncomfortable—has to start with “where am I?” I hope to learn as many human stories as possible and support the creation of opportunities for diverse experiences to be amplified. I hope in doing so to help create diverse and inclusive communities and, by extent, a more just world.
In reaching this goal, I am often tempted to focus on others and their stories, ignoring, avoiding or perhaps fearing grappling with my own identity. But if I am my greatest asset, I must understand my own traditions, experiences and privileges so that I can use my greatest tool, myself, to help build loving and inclusive communities.
Just as learning about Judaism and interfaith simultaneously helped me see how both inform human experiences, learning about myself while learning about others helps me be a better community member and builder.
BILI has been essential to this process by giving me a community of dialogue partners with whom I can discuss and share this journey.
One of our BILI readings explained this process. Dr. Leonard Swidler’s “Understanding Dialogue” defines a dialogue partner as “something of a mirror in which we perceive ourselves in new ways.”1
In the next year, I hope to construct a two-way mirror, one that allows me to see myself in new ways but also serves as a window for me to see the world beyond myself. My self-awareness and vulnerability is just as essential as looking outward toward others. BILI gave me the gift of this mirror by creating opportunities for faith-based discussion with dialogue partners. I am increasingly realizing that our discussions ripple far beyond faith and encompass the stories of humanity and “whole personhood” that I told Rabbi Dardashti I wanted to explore.
By the end of the year, I don’t expect to be able to answer where I am or where my brother might be. But I think I’m well on my way to understanding why it’s worth asking, and how to look.