The Skeptic's KaddishA bigger Jewish world
The journey
Washington, DC
In 2006, I completed my master’s degree in public policy at Rutgers University and accepted a position as a government contractor at the Department of Energy in Washington, DC.
The job came through connections I had developed while working at a research center during graduate school. Yet if professional considerations had been my only concern, I could have pursued opportunities in many different places.
I specifically wanted to move to DC.
Part of the appeal was obvious. DC was a major American city filled with ambitious young professionals. It offered opportunities that simply did not exist in suburban New Jersey.
There was another reason as well.
One of my closest friends from Case Western, a fraternity brother named Gabe, had already moved there. Like me, Gabe cared deeply about Jewish life. He had been active in the Jewish community at Case Western, taught Hebrew school alongside me during our junior and senior years, and remained heavily involved in Jewish life after graduation.
Long before I arrived, Gabe told me about the Jewish community he had found in DC. He described a world of synagogues, study groups, Shabbat meals, and young Jews who took Judaism seriously.
That mattered to me.
By the time I left New Jersey, the question that had emerged after my summer at the Ohr Somayach yeshiva in Jerusalem remained unresolved. I still did not know what kind of Jewish life I ultimately wanted to build. What I did know was that I wanted the freedom to continue searching.
For four years, I had largely kept that question on hold. I had deliberately stepped back from religious observance while I tried to determine whether my earlier trajectory toward Orthodoxy reflected my own convictions or the expectations that had accumulated around me. The question remained unanswered, but I no longer felt stuck. For the first time since college, I would be living independently and making decisions entirely on my own terms.
DC seemed like the right place to do that.
My Kosher Kitchen
Before moving to DC, I had made a decision. I would not wear a kippah again until I was certain that I genuinely wanted to live an observant Jewish life.
When I stopped wearing a kippah during college, I did so because I had become uncomfortable with the possibility that I was moving toward Orthodoxy because of momentum and expectation rather than conviction. The kippah had catalyzed that process. People saw it and assumed I was Orthodox. In some cases, I wondered whether I was beginning to make the same assumption about myself.
I wanted to start over. If I was going to become religious, I wanted it to be because I had reached that conclusion honestly.
As a result, when I arrived in DC, I did not wear a kippah. Yet the question of religion remained very much alive. In fact, one of the first decisions I made after moving into my apartment was that I wanted my kitchen to be kosher.
This may seem contradictory. I was not publicly presenting myself as religious. I did not yet know what kind of Jewish life I ultimately wanted to build. Yet I knew that if I was going to have my own apartment for the first time in my life, I wanted it to have a kosher kitchen.
I had never koshered a kitchen before.
To figure out how, I visited a local Chabad1 rabbi and asked for guidance. Following his instructions, I went to a hardware store and purchased a small blowtorch. Then I returned to my apartment and used it to kosher the oven.
Looking back, I think that scene captures my state of mind better than anything else. I had stepped back from religious certainty, but I had not stepped back from taking Judaism seriously.
Shavuot ‘06
Before I arrived in DC, Gabe told me about a Shavuot2 retreat organized by DC Minyan, a traditional egalitarian Jewish community that had been founded only a few years earlier.
I was hesitant. At that point, most of the serious Jewish communities I had encountered were Orthodox. Although I had spent four years questioning whether Orthodoxy was actually true, I still largely assumed that the most serious forms of Judaism were Orthodox. DC Minyan was not.
Gabe understood my concern. He assured me that although the community was egalitarian, I could be fully observant there. If I wanted to keep Shabbat, keep kosher, and participate within the framework of Jewish law as I understood it, I could do so. That was enough to convince me to give it a chance.
The retreat took place as I was arriving in DC. Shavuot began on Thursday evening and continued through Friday, flowing directly into Shabbat. For nearly two days, we prayed, ate, talked, and studied together.
One of the central customs of Shavuot is Tikkun Leil Shavuot, an all-night study session. Throughout the night, members of the community taught classes on Jewish texts, ideas, and traditions. What struck me was not the content of any particular class. It was the people.
The teachers were not rabbis. They were lawyers, policy professionals, nonprofit workers, graduate students, and young professionals. Yet they possessed a level of Jewish knowledge and intellectual sophistication that I had rarely encountered before. They knew an enormous amount.
Most importantly, they were not Orthodox.
Looking back, I think that retreat challenged an assumption I had been carrying for years. The lesson was not that Orthodoxy was wrong. The lesson was that seriousness was not exclusive to Orthodoxy.
For the first time, I encountered a community that embodied many of the qualities that had attracted me to Orthodoxy in the first place. The Shavuot retreat convinced me that the Jewish world was much larger than I had imagined.
A bigger Jewish world
That Shavuot retreat was only the beginning.
One of the things that made DC unique was that it occupied a middle ground between a college campus and a city like New York. It was large enough to support multiple Jewish communities, yet small enough that those communities remained deeply interconnected.
There was DC Minyan. There was Kesher Israel, the Modern Orthodox synagogue in Georgetown. There was Chabad. There was Tikkun Leil Shabbat, a new pluralistic community that emerged while I was living in DC. Later, there was also Rosh Pina, an Orthodox partnership minyan inspired by similar communities in Israel. There were other communities as well, but these were the ones that most shaped my experience.
What made DC particularly interesting was not simply the number of communities but the extent to which they overlapped. The same people often appeared in multiple places. Someone I met at DC Minyan might also attend a lecture at Kesher Israel. Someone I knew from DC Beit Midrash might occasionally show up at Tikkun Leil Shabbat. Although the communities differed in important ways, they were all part of the same broader Jewish ecosystem.
That ecosystem exposed me to a much wider range of Jewish life than I had previously encountered. Before moving to DC, my understanding of the Jewish world had been relatively narrow. I had grown up in a secular Jewish family, attended a Conservative3 Hebrew school, become fascinated by Orthodoxy, studied at Ohr Somayach, and spent several years assuming that Orthodoxy was probably correct. DC complicated that picture. I found myself moving among communities with different approaches to Judaism, different assumptions, and different visions of what a serious Jewish life could look like. The more time I spent there, the more I realized that the Jewish world was far more diverse than I had imagined.
DC Beit Midrash
Of all the Jewish communities I encountered in DC, none shaped me more than DC Beit Midrash.
DC Beit Midrash was a weekly lay-led learning community. There was no rabbi. Each week, a member of the community would teach a class, after which participants would divide into chavrutot—traditional Jewish study partnerships—and spend the evening learning together.
The structure itself was unusual. In many of the Jewish environments I had previously encountered, knowledge flowed primarily from rabbis to students. DC Beit Midrash felt different. People learned from one another. Some participants arrived with very little Jewish educational background. Others had attended Jewish day schools, spent years studying Jewish texts, or learned at institutions such as the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem. The result was a community in which people with very different levels of knowledge could learn together.
For me, that experience was transformative.
I had always been hungry for Jewish learning. Yet despite years of involvement in Jewish life, my formal Jewish education remained relatively limited. I had attended Hebrew school, spent a summer at Ohr Somayach in Jerusalem, taken a few classes, and read books. Nevertheless, I was constantly aware of how much I did not know.
DC Beit Midrash exposed me to people who possessed a kind of Jewish literacy that I lacked. They could move comfortably between biblical texts, rabbinic literature, Jewish history, and contemporary Jewish thought. They referenced books I had never heard of and ideas I had never encountered. Many were neither rabbis nor professional Jewish educators. They worked in government, law, nonprofits, journalism, and other fields, yet had devoted years to Jewish study, often through institutions such as Pardes4. Rather than making Jewish learning feel inaccessible, they had the opposite effect.
What I admired was not simply their knowledge but their relationship to it. They seemed to inhabit the Jewish tradition from the inside. The Jewish library was not something distant or mysterious to them. It belonged to them. They could enter into conversation with it, challenge it, learn from it, and draw upon it as a living inheritance.
Just as importantly, many of my closest friendships in DC emerged from DC Beit Midrash. Week after week, I found myself surrounded by thoughtful, intellectually curious people who were actively wrestling with many of the same questions that mattered to me.
DC Beit Midrash did more than expand my Jewish knowledge. It changed my understanding of who could become knowledgeable. For the first time, I saw that deep engagement with Jewish texts was not reserved for rabbis or scholars. It was something ordinary people could cultivate through years of study, curiosity, and commitment.
That realization would eventually shape one of the most important decisions of my life.
Kesher Israel
If DC Beit Midrash expanded my understanding of Judaism beyond Orthodoxy, Kesher Israel expanded my understanding of Orthodoxy itself.
Before moving to DC, most of my exposure to Orthodox Judaism had come through Yeshivish5 institutions and rabbis. Ohr Somayach had been deeply influential. The Orthodox rabbis I encountered at Case Western were generally shaped by similar traditions. Even the rabbi at the Young Israel synagogue in East Brunswick, NJ, despite serving a Modern Orthodox congregation, came from a Yeshivish background. As a result, I had unconsciously come to think of Orthodoxy as a fairly narrow world.
Kesher Israel challenged that assumption. There, I encountered rabbis and lay leaders shaped by the intellectual tradition associated with Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik6 and Yeshiva University. They were deeply committed to halakha7 and traditional Jewish learning, yet they were also highly educated, intellectually engaged with the modern world, and comfortable participating in broader society.
I had spent years trying to determine whether Orthodoxy was true. Yet I was increasingly discovering that Orthodoxy itself contained multiple approaches, multiple philosophies, and multiple visions of what a serious Jewish life could look like. The closer I came to Orthodoxy, the less monolithic it appeared.
The discovery complicated matters further. The issue was no longer simply whether I should be Orthodox. It was what kind of Orthodox Jew I might become.
Building Jewish life
As my years in DC progressed, I gradually became more religiously observant.
The process unfolded very differently from my experience in college. At Case Western, I had begun by wearing a kippah8 and only later started asking deeper questions about what kind of Jewish life I wanted to lead. In DC, the sequence was reversed.
I had promised myself that I would not wear a kippah again until I was confident that I genuinely wanted to live an observant Jewish life. As a result, my religious commitments developed privately before they became visible to anyone else.
First came the kosher kitchen. Then came greater commitment to Shabbat observance. At some point, I also began wearing tzitzit, the ritual fringes attached to a small undergarment worn by many observant Jewish men. Unlike a kippah, however, the tzitzit could remain hidden beneath my clothing. Nobody knew I was wearing them unless I chose to tell them.
That mattered to me. Wearing tzitzit allowed me to experiment with greater observance without making any public statement about who I was or who I might eventually become.
Only later, after observance had become a stable part of my life, did I begin wearing a kippah again. By that point, it felt less like a declaration and more like a reflection of a reality that already existed. For the first time, the outside felt consistent with the inside.
At the same time, I found myself becoming increasingly involved in the practical work of Jewish community.
At DC Minyan, I eventually became hospitality chair. Because relatively few members maintained kosher homes suitable for hosting Shabbat meals, there was a constant need for places where people could eat, gather, and connect. Despite living in a studio apartment, I hosted regularly. Each Friday afternoon, I would rearrange the entire room, folding up my bed and pulling out a table so that ten or twelve people could fit inside for Shabbat dinner.
I also became involved in a variety of volunteer initiatives. Through DC Minyan, I volunteered monthly at a soup kitchen in one of DC’s poorer neighborhoods. I participated in a program that paired volunteers with children whose parents had little time to read with them, spending time each month reading together in an apartment complex serving low-income families.
At Kesher Israel, I took responsibility for coordinating volunteer efforts within the congregation. One of my primary projects involved organizing synagogue members to participate in an interfaith network serving homeless individuals in the Georgetown area.
The work mattered to me. Part of that came from my two years in AmeriCorps after college. Volunteer service had become an important part of how I understood civic responsibility. Yet I was also discovering that I enjoyed building the kinds of structures that allowed communities to function. Organizing volunteers, connecting people, hosting meals, and helping projects succeed gave me a sense of purpose that extended beyond the projects themselves.
Looking back, I can see that my growing observance and my growing investment in community were deeply connected. The more seriously I took Judaism, the more responsibility I felt for helping create places where other Jews could belong.
Hospitality, volunteering, organizing, and community-building no longer felt like separate activities. They were becoming part of the same vision of what Jewish life could be.
A pattern was already beginning to emerge. Whenever I joined a community, I instinctively looked for places where help was needed and tried to fill the gap. I did not realize it at the time, but that impulse would shape much of the rest of my life.
A different kind of commitment
As I became more involved in Jewish life, I began to notice something about the people around me.
Many of the Jews I most admired were deeply committed to Judaism. They studied Torah regularly. They attended services. They hosted Shabbat meals. They volunteered. They cared about Israel. They invested enormous amounts of time and energy in building Jewish community. Yet for most of them, Judaism existed alongside other commitments. They were lawyers, journalists, policy analysts, nonprofit professionals, academics, and entrepreneurs. Judaism was an important part of their lives—sometimes a very important part—but it was not the sole organizing principle around which everything else revolved.
That was completely normal. Looking back, I think many of them probably had a healthier relationship with Judaism than I did.
The unusual person was me.
The more time I spent in DC, the more I realized that Judaism occupied an outsized place in my imagination. It was not simply one interest among many. Whenever I found myself with free time, I gravitated toward Jewish books, Jewish communities, Jewish learning, and Jewish conversations. Increasingly, I found myself wondering whether the future I had been building and the future I actually wanted might not be the same thing.
Pardes
As I wrestled with these questions, I found myself increasingly drawn to people who had spent significant time studying Torah.
Many of them had passed through DC Beit Midrash. Others I encountered through DC Minyan, Kesher Israel, and the broader Jewish community in DC. Some had grown up attending Jewish day schools. Others had spent years studying in yeshivot or Jewish learning programs. Still others had taken time away from their careers to immerse themselves in Jewish texts.
What united them was not a particular denomination or ideology. What united them was that they had entered the Jewish conversation in a way that I had not.
They could navigate the Jewish library with confidence. They knew where ideas came from. They could move between biblical texts, rabbinic literature, medieval commentators, modern Jewish thought, and contemporary questions with a fluency that I aspired to. They were not necessarily rabbis. Most were not. Yet they possessed a level of Jewish literacy that made Jewish learning feel alive and accessible.
Many of the people I admired most had spent time studying at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem.
The contrast became especially apparent in my professional life. My job at the Department of Energy was stable and respectable, yet I found it deeply unsatisfying. The things that excited me were happening after work: at DC Beit Midrash, at DC Minyan, at Kesher Israel, and around countless Shabbat tables.
What if this was not merely a hobby?
The more I learned about Pardes, the more appealing it became. By that point, I was no longer looking for an institution that would tell me what to think. I was looking for an institution that would teach me how to learn. Pardes seemed to offer exactly that.
Its faculty embodied many of the qualities I had come to admire during my years in DC: intellectual rigor, deep Jewish knowledge, and a willingness to engage seriously with complexity and disagreement. I wanted to learn from them.
I applied for other jobs. I explored alternative career paths. Nothing felt right.
Eventually, I stopped asking what job I wanted and started asking a different question: What if I devoted myself fully to Jewish learning?
The answer terrified me.
I was approaching thirty years old. I had a stable job, a graduate degree, and a conventional professional future. My parents thought the idea was reckless. They believed I was throwing away the career I had spent years building. Perhaps they were right.
But by that point, I could no longer ignore what had become obvious to me. I wanted to help build Jewish communities, and before I could do that, I needed to become more deeply educated myself.
So I made a decision.
I would leave my job, spend my savings, move to Israel, and study at Pardes.
The Mailbox
In 2009, a few months before my thirtieth birthday, I left DC and moved to Jerusalem.
I did not know exactly what would happen after Pardes. My tentative plan was to spend a year or two studying Torah and then pursue a career as a rabbi or Jewish educator. Whether that would actually happen remained uncertain.
What was certain was that I could no longer pretend that Jewish learning occupied the same place in my life as everything else.
It did not.
By that point, I had spent years exploring different ways of being Jewish, looking for an approach that felt both intellectually serious and personally authentic. Along the way, I had discovered far more than I expected. DC had exposed me to a remarkable Jewish ecosystem. I had encountered serious Jews across multiple communities, developed close friendships, become increasingly observant, and found myself drawn ever more deeply into Jewish learning and Jewish community.
Eventually, the only question left was whether I was willing to act on what I had learned.
On my final day of work at the Department of Energy, I packed up my office and left the building carrying my government identification badge. Printed on the back were instructions explaining what to do if the badge was ever lost. It could be placed in a mailbox, and the postal service would return it to the government.
As I walked away from the building, I stopped at a mailbox and dropped the badge inside.
My parents thought I was making a great mistake. They believed I was abandoning a stable career for an uncertain future. They were not wrong.
At the time, however, I felt surprisingly calm.
For the first time in years, I knew exactly what I wanted to do next.
I was going to spend a year studying Torah at Pardes.
I thought I knew what I was going to find there.
Footnotes
The journey
#Judaism #JewishEducation #Introspection #Learning #Community #Israel #Exploration #Jewish #PersonalGrowth #Searching #Transformation
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