Last week, I attended a fantastic Shabbat service and dinner with dozens of students from all around Manhattan, through NYU’s Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life, which I cannot gush about enough. (They’re fabulous.) It was a wonderful experience and full of people from all different backgrounds and every possible kind of observance. But in the midst of all the wonderfulness, I heard something that really irked me.
A girl beside me began talking about Chabad on campus. She said, “I love Chabad. I grew up with Chabad, because I came from an area where there are no synagogues.” I was intrigued, wondering if she came from a really rural area in the Bible Belt. She continued, “I mean, there are reform and conservative congregations, but there are no religious Jews in Orange County, California.”
Even though I don’t necessarily identify with a particular denomination and definitely don’t do all the “right things” all the time (pass the fried shrimp), I was outright offended by this declaration. Since when are reform and conservative Jews separate from religious Jews? I’m sure there’s a reform rabbi somewhere who takes her religion a hell of a lot more seriously than a disenfranchised young Orthodox Jew. A person’s affiliation with a particular denomination says absolutely nothing about his or her affinity toward the religion; it speaks only to the way he or she expresses it.
In fact, I fully believe it is possible to be a strongly religious person with no loyalty to a synagogue at all. Especially in Judaism. Don’t we teach about the importance of things that are deeply personal, like building your own Jewish home, praying silently, and acting out the mitzvot, among many other things? Being a good Jew isn’t about which seminary the rabbi you most respect attended. It’s not about the siddur that you read from on the High Holidays. You can be a religious Jew no matter what variation of Judaism you subscribe to–that’s one of the most beautiful things about Judaism. It’s about taking what matters most to you and making it part of your life.
Judaism is a journey, not a destination. So Whether a Jew begins his religiousness in Orthodoxy and becomes more Reform in his ways, or a Conservative Jew spends her whole life adhering to the same sets of rules, regulations, and beliefs, or a Christian converts and finds a home in a Reconstructionist synagogue, the religion is about the journey and about what each Jew makes of it. Don’t ever try to define levels of religiosity based on denominational subscription. We as Jews should know, nothing should ever be that simple.
Shabbat Shalom to all the Jews out there, no matter how you identify.
