The Neverending Story 💥❤️🔥💫
Do you remember? 🤗
https://youtu.be/lHytjEj7B9g?si=ar__ReG5k38P2E9C
Happy Sunday! 🌻☀️
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From Bridgewater to Rikers, being on the move defined my childhood. The reason? My walls barely stood a chance—I seem to have a habit of tearing them down.
#childhood #movingaround #resilience #personalstory #overcoming #becomingfriendswith #bfw #movieswithfriends #AIcaptionsnailedit #EatTheRich #fearmovie #infowars
Raised to not belong
Looking back, I realize I was raised to not quite belong anywhere.
My parents did not intend that outcome. They loved me, sacrificed for me, and wanted me to succeed. Yet because of who they were and the unusual path that brought our family to the United States, I often felt out of step with the people around me.
For most of my childhood, this was simply my normal.
Because so much else about my identity felt uncertain, being Jewish became central to my sense of self.
Unlike the other immigrant kids
I grew up in central New Jersey among many other immigrant children. I had classmates from Korea, Bangladesh, India, Poland, Taiwan, England, and many other countries. Looking back, I realize there was an important difference between my family and almost every other immigrant family I knew.
Those families had come to America to build a life in America. Their parents wanted their children to succeed as Americans. They might preserve traditions, foods, languages, and customs from their countries of origin, but the underlying assumption was that America was home.
My parents’ story was different. They had already completed their immigration journey once. They left the Soviet Union and settled in Israel as young adults. They learned Hebrew, built lives there, and became Israelis. America was supposed to be temporary. They never intended to stay.
Although my parents lived in the United States for decades, Israel remained the psychological center of gravity of our family. It was where my parents talked about returning. It was where our extended family lived. It was where we visited. It was where we expected to be someday.
Most other immigrant children were being raised to belong where they lived.
I was being raised to belong somewhere else.
Unlike the other Israeli kids
That should have made me feel Israeli.
In some ways, it did.
I was born in Jerusalem. I was an Israeli citizen. My mother’s entire family lived in Israel. We visited regularly. Israel was not an abstraction to me. It was family.
Yet I did not fully fit among the Israeli children I met in America either.
Most of them spoke Hebrew. Their parents had brought Israel with them in a way that I had not experienced. Hebrew was the language through which they joked, argued, and recognized one another.
My family spoke Russian at home. Years later, my mother explained that this was partly because my parents never really accepted that they had left Israel. In Israel, they spoke Russian at home and Hebrew everywhere else. After moving to America, the outside language changed from Hebrew to English, but the inside language remained Russian.
Had we stayed in Israel, I would have grown up speaking Hebrew naturally outside the home. Instead, I inherited an Israeli identity without inheriting Hebrew fluency.
As a result, I occupied an odd position. I thought of myself as Israeli, yet lacked one of the most important ways Israelis recognized one another.
Jewish without a community
There was another important difference between my family and many of the Jewish families around me.
My parents were not religious, yet Jewishness was never optional in our home.
Part of this reflected their background as Soviet Jews. In the Soviet Union, Jewishness functioned less as a religion than as an ethnic or national identity. Ukrainians were Ukrainian. Armenians were Armenian. Jews were Jewish. A person could be an atheist and still be unmistakably Jewish.
My parents carried that understanding with them first to Israel and then to the United States. As a result, I grew up with a strong sense that I was Jewish. Israel mattered. The Jewish people mattered. Jewish history mattered. None of these things were ever presented as optional.
When I was growing up, I did not fully appreciate how unusual this was.
For many American Jews, Jewish life is organized around communal institutions. Synagogues often function as gathering places where Jews meet one another, build friendships, celebrate life-cycle events, educate their children, and participate in communal life.
My family related to Jewishness differently. My parents had been Soviet Jews and then Israeli Jews before they ever arrived in America. They did not need American Jewish institutions to tell them who they were.
As a result, we remained largely outside the communal networks that many American Jewish families take for granted. I went to Hebrew school, but we were not part of a Jewish social network. We had Israeli friends, but no Jewish family friends who were not Israeli. We were not deeply involved in synagogue life or Jewish communal institutions.
The result was something both valuable and incomplete.
My parents gave me a strong Jewish identity, but they did not give me a Jewish community. I knew I was Jewish. I knew that being Jewish mattered. I did not yet know what it felt like to live that identity as part of the larger Jewish people.
The one stable thing
By the time I was a teenager, many aspects of my identity felt complicated. I lived in America but was raised to think of Israel as home. I thought of myself as Israeli but did not speak Hebrew. I came from a Russian-speaking family but had never been to Russia. I often felt out of step with the groups around me.
Yet one thing never seemed uncertain: I was Jewish.
That certainty did not come from religious belief. My parents were secular. Nor did it come from belonging to a Jewish community. Being Jewish was simply a fact about who I was.
Looking back, I think this explains much of what followed. I was not searching for a Jewish identity. I was searching for a way to inhabit that identity more deeply and completely.
As a result, I was drawn to Jewish learning from an early age—not because I knew much Judaism, but because I was curious. I remember this even during my bar mitzvah preparations. As part of my studies, I was learning Anim Zemirot, a traditional Hebrew hymn recited in many synagogues. The cantor intended to teach me only the lines I needed for the prayer service. Instead, I asked him to teach me the entire hymn.
Looking back, I recognize a pattern that would repeat itself many times over the years. I never wanted the minimum. I always wanted to know what came next.
That same impulse shaped my Jewish education after my bar mitzvah. While many Jewish teenagers leave Hebrew school as soon as they are able, I moved in the opposite direction. I continued into Hebrew High School, then Prozdor, an advanced Jewish studies program for high school students. During my senior year, I joined the rabbi’s class. These were not separate programs so much as successive stages of the same journey.
Most of the students in Prozdor came from much stronger Jewish educational backgrounds than I did. Many had attended Jewish day schools. I attended public school.
I cannot honestly claim that I learned an enormous amount during those years. Compared to what I would eventually encounter in college, yeshiva, and later Jewish study, my knowledge remained fairly limited. What those programs gave me was not knowledge so much as connection. They connected me to Jewish history, Jewish texts, Jewish questions, and Jewish continuity. Most importantly, they allowed me to engage with Judaism through learning rather than through socializing.
Jewish youth groups never appealed to me. Partly this was because I often felt awkward in large social settings. Partly it was because I wanted something that felt more substantively Jewish. Hebrew High School, Prozdor, and the rabbi’s class offered another path.
I did not need to be popular. I did not need to fit in. I only needed to be curious.
Being seen
One memory from those years has stayed with me.
During my senior year of high school, the rabbi of our Conservative synagogue entrusted me with helping oversee the synagogue’s kitchen and food preparation on Shabbat.
I remember sitting alone in the synagogue office, writing poetry between my responsibilities and wondering why he had chosen me. Why me? Why not one of the students who knew more than I did?
At the time, I never found an answer. Looking back, however, I wonder whether he saw something that I did not yet see in myself.
Throughout my teenage years, several Jewish educators seemed to recognize something I could not yet articulate: the cantor who taught me for my bar mitzvah, the teachers who welcomed me into Hebrew High School, Prozdor, and the rabbi’s class, and the rabbi who gave me responsibility when I felt unqualified for it.
None of them saw a scholar or an expert. What they saw was a teenager who kept showing up, wanted more than the minimum, and was trying to find his way into Jewish life.
I did not yet know where that curiosity would eventually lead. But perhaps they recognized that something had already taken root.
Looking back
Looking back, I think I understand why Jewish learning became so important to me.
My attraction to Judaism found its expression in learning. Hebrew High School, Prozdor, and the rabbi’s class were not merely educational programs. They were among the first places where I could explore what it meant to be Jewish on my own terms.
By the time I graduated high school, I still knew remarkably little Judaism compared to what I would later discover. I had never studied in a yeshiva, opened a page of Talmud, or grasped how vast the Jewish tradition truly was.
Yet something important had already happened.
I had fallen in love with being Jewish.
Not Jewish learning, theology, or observance.
Being Jewish.
The learning, the questions, and the arguments would come later.
For now, it was enough to know that I had found something that felt unquestionably mine. I just did not yet know how much more there was to discover.
#Belonging #Childhood #Citizenship #Family #Heritage #Identity #Israel #Jewish #Judaism #Languages #Peoplehood
When you were a child did your parents or siblings pull you and friends around in a wagon behind the lawn tractor?
How City Kids Used to Play on the Streets of New York
"oooo Shem has a girlfriend"
Adults would often say shit like that when I was a kid and would hang out with girls my age. Thinking back, I realise that probably caused a lot of issues.
It was embarrassing, and it stopped me from wanting to hang out with girls, they became "other" so even until recently, I wouldn't really be able to be friends with a woman without thinking about the possibility of romance 🤔
I wonder if that's a common thing.
Anyway just my thought of the day, as I self analyse my thoughts, opinions and trace them to their roots.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@stayforever/116673392805469421
Death match like it's 1996 #childhood #memories
Friday night was Youth Group night for the teenagers in our little country town. This meant makeshift soccer games by the church, torchlit 'chalk chases' around town after dark, and bonfires in the paddock next to our house. It was good fun and I miss those days.
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