Well, by the Gregorian calendar, we have officially lived in the year 2014 for a week. For one thing, this means I will spend about three more weeks dating assignments “2013,” only to see autocorrect bluntly demonstrate the error of my ways. For another, this means that both the Jewish and secular seasonal winter holidays are over, and I no longer have them to buffer the bitter Chicago cold as I return for my second quarter as a college student. Beyond its hopeful prospects, the new year also presents the perfect opportunity to reflect on the year left behind. Certainly I’ve grown a tremendous amount in 2013 in almost all aspects of my life, particularly since Rosh Hashana, during the few months 2013 overlapped with 5774. One of the most drastic, and most unexpected, changes has been my growth as a Jew.
If I’m to discuss this at all, I necessarily must begin with the extent of my interest in Jewish life before I started at Chicago. At the beginning of 2013, I fully identified as Jewish, having already overcome a period of religious doubt. I was content with where I was Jewishly then, and did not feel an urge to get more involved. When my parents and I discussed my impending transition to college, they asked me several times whether I intended to become involved with campus Jewish life. I told them I was considering it, but that was mostly to placate their desires; in actuality I saw myself perhaps using Hillel as a place to go for Seders and High Holiday services, but certainly not as a center of my social life. After all, though I’ve always had acquaintances who have shared my faith and culture, my close friends had never been Jewish, and so explicitly making Jewish friends was not a priority coming to college. When I considered Thanksgivukah, the impossibility of separating my religious and secular identities became obvious. Before a desire for community pushed me to it, however, I hadn’t considered that I could find the people who are rapidly becoming some of my closest friends on campus—religious or secular—through Hillel. Certainly, then, one of the ways I’ve grown Jewishly in 2013 is that the barriers between my so-called “Jewish social-life” and any other social lives have crumbled. Though not all my friends are Jewish, since I now have many more Jewish friends than ever, I no longer feel a need to compartmentalize specific aspects of my identity depending on who I am with. This, I think, has been a major step in my finding a renewed sense of pride in my Jewishness.
Similarly, in 2013 I began to value prayer in a way I never had before. While I had always enjoyed the liturgy, I never felt connected to any of the services at my family’s Conservative shul. Going to Shabbat services felt like a chore at the beginning of the year and was not something I did regularly. When I did go, generally it was for a friend or family member’s bar or bat mitzvah, and in that case, only for the honoree’s sake. I started going to Kabbalat Shabbat services on campus because I was still looking for community and it was how the friends I had already made tended to spend their Friday nights. In the services themselves, however, I found one of the friendliest environments I’ve ever experienced. I have since attended these services every Friday night since coming to Chicago. (Kudos on that front to minyan leader and fellow New Voices contributor Jonathan P. Katz!) I looked forward to the minyan’s welcome every week. Over time, I came to see the value in prayer for its own sake, for the calming effect it has on me, for the opportunity it provides to reflect on myself at the end of every week, and for how it continually reminds me of what is really important in life just when I might have started to forget. Services became a highlight of my week, and, in fact, when I was away for winter break, I missed it dearly. If you’d have told me a year ago that I’d look forward to Kabblat Shabbat as much as I do, I wouldn’t have believed you. But, as I said, I’ve grown.
If I’m discussing Jewish growth, I would be remiss not to mention New Voices itself. Perhaps more than anything else, beginning to write regularly for this magazine has encouraged me to think about being Jewish more than I had before, on a day-to-day basis. At first, this was a practice born solely out of a necessity for blog post material, but habit built upon habit, and now I think about Jewish aspects of my life so regularly, that I hardly remember a time when I didn’t. This, too, has been a fundamental part of my Jewish growth, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity. I look forward to another great year of it!
Dani Plung is a student at the University of Chicago.
