Jordan Rosenbloom

I came to Berkeley from a very different kind of environment.

I grew up in the Jewish community in Los Angeles and went to Jewish day school from elementary school all the way through high school.

For most of my childhood, school was small.

The community was familiar.

Judaism was simply part of the environment around me every day.

Then I arrived at Berkeley.

Berkeley is an enormous public university. It's diverse in almost every possible way, and for me, that was a big adjustment.

I think I probably walked into Berkeley Hillel sometime pretty early in my freshman year, maybe around orientation or during my first semester.

What I found there was the place that would become my Jewish hub on campus.

At first, I think Hillel's value was simply that it made Berkeley feel a little smaller.

When you come from a small private Jewish school and suddenly find yourself surrounded by tens of thousands of students, having somewhere familiar to go matters.

Hillel gave me that.

But as I spent more time there, it became about more than finding something familiar.

Growing up, I had been part of a very specific Jewish community in Los Angeles. I knew what Judaism looked like in that community because it was the version I had been surrounded by my entire life.

At Berkeley Hillel, I started meeting Jewish students who had grown up completely differently.

They came from different parts of the country.

They had different backgrounds.

They had different levels of observance and different relationships with Judaism.

That expanded my understanding of what being Jewish could look like.

I hadn't necessarily been exposed to that growing up.

In some ways, Berkeley itself made that experience even more important.

Cal is so large and so diverse that if you didn't actively seek out Jewish life, you could probably go through much of your college experience without encountering very much of it at all.

Judaism wasn't woven into the campus in the way it had been woven into my schools growing up.

You had to find it.

For me, Hillel became the nucleus.

It was the place I could go when I wanted that connection.

And over time, it became a place that felt genuinely homey.

Wednesday barbecues were a big part of that.

Everyone would come together, there would be food, and it had almost the feeling of a home-cooked meal.

There were also smaller, more intimate experiences.

During my senior year, I participated in what Rabbi Adam called "Booze and Schmooze."

We would sit together in a smaller group and talk about Jewish ideas and how they connected to our actual lives.

It reminded me a little of the Jewish studies classes I had grown up with, where the group was small enough that you could have real conversations.

At least once, Rabbi Adam even hosted us at his home.

There's something meaningful about that.

At a university as big as Berkeley, suddenly you're sitting in someone's living room talking about Judaism and life.

It couldn't have felt more different from sitting anonymously in a giant lecture hall.

Those experiences helped recreate something I hadn't necessarily realized I would miss when I left Jewish day school.

There was intimacy.

There was conversation.

There were people who knew you.

There was a place to come back to.

But Hillel also gave me something my childhood Jewish community couldn't have given me.

It broadened my perspective.

Instead of showing me only the Jewish life I already knew, it introduced me to the many different ways other people had grown up Jewish and the many ways they carried Judaism into adulthood.

That's part of what college is supposed to do.

You leave the world you grew up in.

You meet people who are different from you.

Your understanding of the world gets bigger.

For me, Hillel allowed that to happen within my Jewish identity, too.

It gave me something familiar enough to feel like home while introducing me to something much larger than the Jewish world I had known.

Berkeley suddenly felt a little smaller.

And my understanding of Jewish community became a lot bigger.