Rachel Marcus

I came to Berkeley thinking I had Judaism pretty well figured out.

I grew up deeply involved in Jewish institutions.

I was raised in the Conservative movement in Los Angeles.

I went to Jewish day school.

I went to Jewish camp.

I had already been to Israel multiple times before college.

Jewish community wasn't unfamiliar to me.

It was where I had always found my people.

So getting involved in Hillel felt like a no-brainer.

Of course I was going to go to Hillel.

That's where my community would be.

What I didn't expect was that college would become the time when I actually started figuring out what Judaism meant to me.

Not what I had been taught it meant.

Not how I had always practiced because that's what my family or school did.

What it meant to me personally.

I didn't know I needed that.

I remember almost having this attitude of:

I'm Jewish. I know how to be Jewish. I've got this figured out.

But I didn't.

And that turned out to be one of the most valuable parts of my Berkeley Hillel experience.

Being in Berkeley itself played a role.

The city and the Hillel community helped me connect to parts of Judaism that I hadn't thought much about before.

I became much more interested in the natural rhythms of Jewish life.

The lunar and solar calendars.

The cycles of the year.

Harvest holidays.

The ways Judaism is connected to seasons, land, and time.

I had grown up with all of these holidays, but at Berkeley I began relating to them differently.

There were also so many opportunities to learn.

I honestly thought I was done with Jewish text study.

I had gone to Jewish school.

I'd learned plenty.

But Hillel made learning fun again.

Part of that was because I was learning alongside friends whose backgrounds were completely different from mine.

Some had done very little Jewish text study.

Some came in with entirely different questions.

Some were curious about parts of Judaism that I had always taken for granted.

And suddenly familiar material could feel new again.

I wasn't learning because it was on the curriculum.

I was learning because I wanted to.

I was learning with people I cared about.

That changed the experience.

Hillel gave me the freedom to ask a question that I don't think I had really needed to ask before college:

How do I want to be Jewish?

That is different from asking:

How was I taught to be Jewish?

And once I started asking that question, I never really stopped.

Since graduating, my Jewish life has continued to grow in ways that feel very much like an extension of what began at Hillel.

I seek out organizations and communities that align with the Judaism that feels meaningful to me.

I work for a Jewish theater company.

Before that, I ran a mikvah.

I'm studying for a master's degree in Jewish nonprofit management.

I live in a Moishe House.

Jewish community is still a huge part of my life.

But now it feels chosen.

It's mine.

And a lot of the work I do today is about helping other people do the same thing.

Helping people figure out their version of Judaism.

Creating programming that gives people different ways in.

Making sure there's room for someone whose Jewish life doesn't look like mine.

That comes directly from what I experienced at Hillel.

I arrived thinking I already knew the answer.

Hillel gave me permission to ask the question anyway.

And that question—

How do I want to be Jewish?—

has shaped my life ever since.