Jordan Rosenbloom

If you ask me for a fun memory of Berkeley Hillel, I keep coming back to the same thing: Wednesday barbecue.

The barbecue is a Berkeley Hillel tradition, and somewhere early in college, it became my job.

Every Wednesday, a good friend of mine and I would grill.

Sure, it was a college job.

I was a student, and having a little extra income was useful.

But it never really felt like going to work.

We looked forward to Wednesdays.

We'd spend hours preparing food, running around in aprons, getting everything ready.

Then people would start showing up.

Friends.

People we knew from Hillel.

People we didn't know yet.

Jewish students.

Non-Jewish students.

Sometimes I'd bring friends who had never been to Hillel before.

For a broke college student, the pitch wasn't exactly difficult: "Wait, there's free food?"

They'd come.

And suddenly they were part of it too.

That's one of the things I loved about the barbecue.

It brought everyone together.

You could walk into Hillel, get a meal, sit down with people, and be part of the community whether you were deeply involved in Jewish life or simply showed up because a friend told you there was food.

And I got to help make that happen.

That's probably what I remember most.

We weren't just attending an event.

We were putting it on.

We would work for hours preparing everything, and then suddenly you'd look up and see this line of people waiting for the food you had made.

It was work.

But it was also incredibly fun.

My friend Sean and I worked together in the kitchen, and we had a blast.

Every Wednesday was something we genuinely looked forward to.

It was the best of both worlds.

We had a job, but we were hanging out with each other.

We were working, but we were surrounded by our community.

And at the end of it, we had created something that brought people together.

By my senior year, I started doing more work in the kitchen as well.

I also served as a student member of the Hillel board and had the opportunity to sit in meetings with board members, faculty, and alumni.

But when I think about how Hillel shaped me, I still come back to those hours spent making food.

There's something very tangible about service when you're feeding people.

You're not talking abstractly about building community.

You're chopping.

You're grilling.

You're preparing.

You're carrying things back and forth.

And then people arrive.

You can actually see the community you're serving standing in front of you.

I think that experience influenced how I think about giving back even now.

It wasn't necessarily a professional lesson.

It was more personal than that.

It taught me that being part of a community isn't only about what you receive from it.

It's also about what you're willing to contribute.

Your time.

Your work.

Your energy.

Whatever you have to offer.

For me at Berkeley Hillel, a lot of the time what I had to offer was several hours on a Wednesday, an apron, and a grill.

And that was enough to create something meaningful.