Three Years After October 7: A Jewish Re-Education
Reconstructing a Jewish identity three years on.
I had always figured that my proper Jewish education had ended when I was 13. After hours of poring over my parsha, practicing cantillation marks until my throat was dry, I assumed that my Jewish identity reached its culmination on the day of my bat mitzvah. Seeing as Judaism has never particularly been interested in leaving questions settled, I should’ve known better.
It was fall of my freshman year. I could count on one hand the peers from my graduating high school class who dared venture west of the Mississippi River. My first weeks were lonely, as I figured out the spaces I wanted to occupy during my college career. I attended Shabbat dinners, but amid all the novelty of college, being Jewish felt settled. I was not lying awake wondering whether Jewish life would become a pillar of my college identity. Why would I when I had a Gov20 midterm to study for and inner tube water polo matches to attend?
This assumption did not change on October 7, 2023, even after I had heard the news of the attack in Israel. As I put on my makeup and packed my bag for the day, I scrolled through videos of the Nova massacre, of terrorists openly firing on family homes, of bloodied and bruised women forced into vans and kidnapped. This is not to say I wasn’t immediately deeply impacted — there was just no way to comprehend what any of it would mean for me, a girl from Connecticut. An identity that I had never struggled to inhabit was about to become something impossible to ignore.
The 7,500-mile distance between the war and my own life began to shrink. At the Motley, I was told that hate symbols weren’t allowed in their “safe and inclusive environment.” The barista was pointing to the yellow hostage ribbon pinned on my bag. While in the bao bun line at McConnell, I was interrogated as to why I would ever wear a “star of Israel” around my neck. When an interview I gave about student protest circulated on Fizz, my peers decided to let me know that I deserved to be sexually violated for my opinions, along with their less creative verdicts that I was ugly, fat, and stupid.
As the war intensified, the divide within the student body grew. Students took it upon themselves to crusade around campus, their activism involving public humiliation and the doxing of peers and professors who knew them personally. I stopped going to the handful of Jewish spaces I had begun to frequent — not because I was ashamed, but because I was overwhelmed and confused. I thought detachment could lead to some peace of mind.
It did not work. Outwardly, I succeeded in distancing myself from the arguments hurled across campus, but internally I bombarded myself with questions. I began to wonder where my own Judaism ended and everyone else’s assumptions about it began — was the star that I wore around my neck now an accidental political endorsement? I became estranged from a piece of myself that had never previously felt uncomfortable. After making a point of not wanting my Jewish identity to totally consume my college experience, I had now allowed everyone else’s conception of it to eclipse my own.
Eventually, I figured that if I was going to keep thinking about being Jewish, I might as well start doing something Jewish. I returned to Shabbat dinners, where for a few hours each week, Judaism was something practiced together rather than something I was expected to explain or consider as the subject of a geopolitical debate. I’d love to say that these were spaces where differing opinions about the war were held, but like many, I first needed to feel secure in my convictions before I could engage with those who thought differently.
Without constantly feeling the need to defend my Judaism to others, I felt comfortable enough to deconstruct the definitions I knew and begin rebuilding them. For the first time since I was 13, Judaism was no longer ritualistic. Instead, it evolved with me.
Three years later, I look at the corner of Jewish life that I now help shape. I needed this community at my lowest, and it will be here to help Jewish students wrestling with similar questions, long after I graduate. Since becoming secure in my own Judaism, I’ve begun to understand why some Jewish students have found comfort in movements that I haven’t joined — in movements that express the relationship between culture, religion, and politics differently. I did not need to comprehend someone’s answer in order to empathize with the need to find one. Although we might have landed at radically different destinations, many of us asked ourselves similar questions. What does my Judaism ask of me? What do I owe my community? What have I inherited?
Ironically, the most Jewish thing we have all done these past years is disagree about what being Jewish is supposed to mean. Very Talmud of us.
I wish that it had not taken October 7 to force this self-examination, but this is the catalyst that I was given. I can mourn what dropped these questions into my life while being immensely grateful that I chose to wrestle with them. At 13, I celebrated the culmination of my Jewish education. At 18, I learned just how wrong I was. Now, as I am about to turn 22, I am finally comfortable knowing that I will be a student of myself for the rest of my life.
