Ger v’toshav anochi—“I am both an outsider and at home.” –Genesis
23:4
(translation
following Ibn Ezra)
To be Jewish is to live within contradiction.
I was born and raised in the small-but-mighty Jewish
community of Tallahassee, FL.
As one of only four Jewish students in my high school
graduating class of 450, I frequently felt that anything that made me unique or
different was somehow related to being Jewish. My success in school, my loving
family—and equally, my awkwardness, and my difficulty making friends—felt as if
they stemmed from being part of a people who is at once chosen for greatness,
and at the same time destined to live on the margins. To be Jewish was to be other,
an outsider—different.
But in my family’s circle of Jewish friends, I always felt
at home. I have a vivid memory of being five or six years old and celebrating Simchat Torah at our synagogue. I was
marching around the sanctuary, waving an Israeli flag with glee. I had never
felt so happy or carefree. I remember feeling then: “The rest of the world has
red and green as Christmas colors. But I have blue and white—Jewish colors, my
colors.”
And so, I grew up inside of that contradiction: feeling more
ger (“outsider”) than toshav (“at home”)—an
outsider in my own hometown.
Over time, I sought environments in which I could live more
fully as a Jew. I longed, in the words of Samson Raphael Hirsch, to have
Judaism be “not a mere part, but the sum total of our task in life—to live as a
Jew in the synagogue and the kitchen, in the field and the warehouse.” In
search of that fuller realization of my Jewish identity, I spent my summers at
Jewish overnight camp, studied Jewish history and literature in Prague, worked
to engage college students in Jewish life through Hillel, and eventually found
my way to rabbinical school.
I came to rabbinical school with high expectations. I had
imagined that if I immersed myself in our tradition—if “I went through the
Torah and let the Torah go through me”—then
I would become permanently self-actualized. I would never again feel ger, only toshav.
Five years later, I’ve come to realize that my expectations
did not correspond to reality. Perhaps the most important—and most
painful—thing I’ve learned is that there’s no such thing as permanent
self-actualization. I came to rabbinical school in order to become something. I’m leaving more
comfortable with exactly who I am: simultaneously ger and toshav—never finished,
always in process, as we all are. To be human is to live within contradiction.
To be Jewish is to wrestle with that contradiction.
These are the contradictions with which I wrestle nearly
every day: Humans both love and lose. God is both knowable and unknowable. Bad
things do happen to good people. “Jewish” is both a religion and a people. The
State of Israel is both Jewish and democratic. The Diaspora is both flourishing
and unstable. Judaism is obligated to both the past and the future. Jewish life
requires both learning and doing.
Wrestling with contradiction is often painful. Sometimes, it
is beautiful. One of those beautiful days happened this past Simchat Torah, twenty-something years
since that Simchat Torah of my
childhood. I stood next to Lee, a third-grader whose family I have grown close with
at my student pulpit, as we unrolled the Torah around the circumference of the
synagogue. He asked me why the paper was so yellow. I told him that a Torah
scroll is written on ram skin.
I wanted to tell him more: that the shofar is also made from
a ram; that, according to the story, the Jewish people are descended from
shepherds; that shepherding is the art of purposeful wandering, of living as
both ger and toshav.
God willing, Lee and I will have that conversation another
time. Because this time, the doing was the learning. The shameses were handing out little blue and white paper flags. For
now, it was time to march, and sing, and dance.
