Roxy Honowitz

When I think about where I felt most at home at Berkeley Hillel, I think about the kitchen.

I worked there as the kitchen manager.

Every week, there was dinner to prepare. Then there was Shabbat.

There was always food to make and something that needed to get done.

And I loved it.

I remember having my hands busy cooking while talking with the other kitchen staff and volunteers.

There is something so simple about that memory.

We were just making food.

But there's also something deeply Jewish about gathering around food.

Really, it's deeply human.

You work together.

You cook.

People start arriving.

And suddenly what you've been preparing turns into a community.

That transition was one of my favorite parts.

I could spend the first part of the evening working—getting everything together, cooking, coordinating with people—and then the doors would open and there were my friends.

There was my community.

And that community was incredibly open.

I had friends who weren't Jewish come to dinner.

I'd bring my cousin.

My cousin would bring friends.

I never had this feeling that Hillel was a closed space where I had to decide who was allowed to come inside.

It was the opposite.

Come eat.

Come meet people.

Come experience this with us.

I think that spirit made the meals feel particularly special.

Jewish culture wasn't something that needed to be protected behind a wall. We could be proud of it and invite people into it.

We could sit around a table together.

We could share food.

We could learn about each other simply by being together.

Working in the kitchen also gave me one of my first real spaces to explore leadership.

I was the kitchen manager, so I wasn't only showing up and participating. I had responsibility.

I had people to work with.

I had to figure things out.

I had the opportunity to develop leadership skills by actually leading.

Hillel was really good at creating that kind of space.

There was this underlying sense that if you had an interest or an idea, you could do something with it.

You didn't have to wait for someone else to create the experience for you.

There might be a book club.

There might be a class.

There might be a program someone wanted to try.

You could come into the community and help shape it around the things you cared about.

That was very different from being part of an organization where programming simply gets handed down to you and you're expected to attend.

At Hillel, I felt like I was part of the conversation.

I could help mold the space.

I think that's what made the kitchen meaningful to me beyond the actual cooking.

It wasn't simply a job.

It gave me a role within a community.

I was helping create something other people could walk into.

A dinner.

A Shabbat.

A place where someone could invite a friend.

A place where people could sit down together after a long week at Berkeley.

And I knew from my own experience how much those places mattered.

Berkeley could feel enormous and intense.

Hillel could feel like home.

The kitchen let me help make that home possible for somebody else.

Some of my closest friendships came out of Hillel. Years later, when I lived in Israel, I would even run into people I knew from Berkeley Hillel there.

Those relationships spread far beyond the building.

But when I picture the community in my mind, I still picture the kitchen.

I picture people cooking.

I picture talking while our hands were busy.

I picture friends coming through the door.

I picture setting out food and eventually sitting down together.

There are bigger ways to talk about leadership and community building.

But sometimes community building really does look exactly like that.

You make the food.

You open the doors.

And everybody comes to the table.