Rona Shapiro

There is a metaphor I've used with students for years.

Imagine you've been handed a backpack.

You've been carrying it for a long time.

It's heavy.

It's making you walk funny.

And you don't even know what's inside.

That's how Jewish identity can feel when you're young.

You inherit all of these things.

Your parents' synagogue.

Your grandparents' traditions.

Things your family believes.

Things your family doesn't believe.

Ideas about Israel.

Religious practices.

Memories.

Obligations.

Expectations.

Maybe guilt.

Maybe joy.

Maybe things you don't even understand yet.

You arrive at college carrying the whole backpack.

My goal at Hillel was never to tell students that they had to keep everything inside it.

My goal was to say:

Take it off.

Open it.

Look inside.

See what you want.

See what you don't want.

And then pack your own backpack.

To me, that is one of the great possibilities of Hillel.

College students are at this extraordinary moment in their lives when they're separating from the world in which they grew up and figuring out what they actually believe.

Hillel gives them freedom to do that while also giving them support.

You're not simply recreating your parents' synagogue.

You're not being told that there is one correct way to be Jewish.

Hillel isn't only a Zionist organization.

It isn't a Reform synagogue.

It isn't a Conservative synagogue.

It isn't a federation or the ADL.

In some ways, it is all of those things and none of them.

That means there is room to recombine things.

To discover.

To experiment.

And students don't have to make that journey alone.

There are staff members who have experience and wisdom.

There are older students who are only a few years ahead but can still serve as guides.

If a student thinks, "Israel sounds interesting," there is somewhere to go with that.

If they want Jewish learning, there is somewhere to go.

If they want religious practice, community, politics, social justice, culture, or simply other Jewish people in their lives, there are paths available.

That pluralism was one of the things I loved most about Berkeley Hillel.

In fact, it's one of the things I have missed most since leaving.

During my years there, we had multiple Israel groups operating under the same roof.

There was a right-wing group.

There was a centrist group.

There was a left-of-center group.

And there was a group much farther to the left.

Sometimes people on the board would push back.

Why should that group have access to the copy machine?

Why should Hillel let them hold programs?

And my answer was essentially: because they're part of this Jewish student community too.

We support different Jewish student groups.

That was the point.

Then Friday night would come.

And everybody came to Shabbat dinner.

They might have spent the week disagreeing with one another intensely.

They might disagree about Israel.

They might disagree about Jewish practice.

They might disagree about nearly everything.

But they were still a community.

They were still a family.

And those disagreements didn't have to destroy the relationship.

They could lead to greater understanding.

That idea has shaped my rabbinate ever since.

I've spent many years in synagogue life now, and synagogue communities can be much more siloed.

A Conservative synagogue follows Conservative norms.

An Orthodox synagogue follows Orthodox norms.

People sometimes grow up inside one movement without ever really understanding the others.

Berkeley Hillel taught me to see that differently.

Each movement has something essential it can teach the others.

In my own community, I've helped create partnerships between synagogues of different denominations.

We've studied together.

We've celebrated Shabbat in one another's synagogue homes.

I've helped create community-wide Jewish learning and refugee resettlement efforts.

That instinct toward collaboration comes directly from the way I learned to see Jewish community at Hillel.

We don't grow by avoiding everything controversial.

We don't grow by saying, "Let's never talk about that because someone might be upset."

We grow by learning how to talk about difficult things without screaming at each other.

In some ways, that's one of the most Jewish things we can do.

Disagree productively.

Keep talking.

Stay at the table.

And recognize that the person across from you can carry different things in their Jewish backpack than you carry in yours.

That's what I hope Berkeley Hillel can continue giving students.

Especially now.

I want students to have the freedom to ask, "What does being Jewish mean to me?"

Not, "What do I have to defend?"

Not, "What am I afraid to say?"

Not, "What do other people expect me to be?"

But simply:

What have I inherited?

What are the treasures inside it?

What matters to me?

What do I want to carry forward?

Every student's backpack will look different.

That's exactly the point.

Berkeley Hillel gave students the space to unpack it.

And then it trusted them to make Judaism their own.