Rona Shapiro

One of the most formative moments of my years at Berkeley Hillel happened almost immediately.

It was the winter of 1990, not long after I arrived.

The first Gulf War had begun.

On the first night of the war, there were large anti-war protests in Berkeley.

That itself wasn't surprising.

Berkeley was Berkeley.

I considered myself part of the political left, and being around people who were protesting war was familiar territory.

Then word came during the protest that Scud missiles were falling on Tel Aviv.

And the crowd cheered.

I remember that moment very clearly.

There was this sudden realization:

I thought these were my people.

And then something happened that made the Jewish students on campus realize that our experience was different.

It was shocking.

By the next day—or very soon afterward—we began organizing a regular vigil on campus.

I don't remember anymore whether we held it every day or once a week.

It's been a long time.

But I remember the students.

At the beginning, something like two hundred students would come.

That experience brought Jewish students out in a way I hadn't seen before.

I sometimes describe it as bringing "the Jews out of the closet."

Students who may not have been thinking very much about their Jewish identity suddenly found themselves confronting the fact that something happening thousands of miles away could affect the way they felt standing on their own college campus.

And Hillel had to respond.

That moment was formative for me as a young rabbi.

I had gone into Hillel work because my own college Hillel experience had been so important to me.

I had grown tremendously during those years.

I wanted to work with young people at that same incredibly formative stage of life and give them the freedom and support to figure out who they were.

I imagined that work primarily as exploration.

Jewish learning.

Community.

Shabbat.

Israel.

Relationships.

Helping students try things and decide what mattered to them.

But suddenly there was another dimension.

Hillel also had to be there when something outside the Jewish community made students feel that their Jewishness mattered in a way they hadn't chosen.

Those two things are very different.

There is a huge difference between a student saying, "I'm curious about Israel, and I want to learn more," and a student feeling forced to confront Israel or Judaism because of hostility around them.

My hope has always been that Hillel can give students the first experience.

Freedom.

Curiosity.

Exploration.

During the years I was at Berkeley, there were other moments that made that role especially important.

Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated while I was there.

There were increasingly ugly demonstrations on campus.

A Holocaust denier attempted to speak at Berkeley, and the student newspaper ran a full-page Holocaust denial advertisement. That pulled me deeply into questions about the university, free speech, the First Amendment, and what responsibility institutions have when hateful ideas enter public spaces.

Those weren't the things I expected to be learning about when I became a Hillel rabbi.

But Hillel exists on a college campus.

And college campuses are places where some of society's hardest questions show up early.

Sometimes years before those same debates reach the rest of the country.

Looking back now, I can see some of what we experienced in the 1990s as the beginning of conversations that have become much more intense for Jewish students today.

I don't want that to be the defining experience of Jewish life on campus.

I don't want students to become more Jewish simply because someone has made them feel threatened for being Jewish.

I want them to walk into Hillel because they're curious.

Because they want community.

Because they want Shabbat dinner.

Because they want to argue about a text.

Because they want to learn about Israel.

Because they want to figure out who they are.

But when the outside world makes that exploration more difficult, Hillel has to be there too.

That night in 1990 changed something for me.

A crowd cheered when missiles were falling on Tel Aviv.

The next thing I remember is Jewish students gathering together.

In that moment, Berkeley Hillel became more than a place where students could explore Jewish life.

It became the place they knew they could come when being Jewish suddenly felt much more complicated.