The life I didn’t plan
The journey
I thought I knew
In 2009, a few months before my thirtieth birthday, I arrived in Jerusalem to begin studying at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.
I thought I knew what I was going to find there.
For several years, I had been moving steadily in this direction. My experiences at Case Western, Ohr Somayach1, DC Minyan2, Kesher Israel3, and DC Beit Midrash4 had all deepened my commitment to Jewish learning. By the time I left DC, I no longer viewed Judaism as one interest among many. It had become the central organizing passion of my life.
My plan seemed straightforward. I would spend a year or two studying Torah at Pardes and then pursue a career as a Jewish educator or rabbi. Whether that would ultimately happen remained uncertain. I knew that many people arrived in Jerusalem with ambitious plans that later changed. Still, I believed I understood the general direction of my life.
I had come to acquire the knowledge, skills, and confidence that I believed I would need in order to help build Jewish communities and teach Judaism professionally. What strikes me now is not how wrong I was, but how incomplete my understanding proved to be.
I expected to study Torah. I did not expect to remain at Pardes for five years, become a staff member, meet my future wife, or build a life in Israel. Most of all, I did not expect that the dream which had brought me to Jerusalem would become increasingly difficult to hold onto.
At the time, however, none of that was visible to me. I had come to Pardes because I wanted to become a Jewish educator.
The rest of my life in Israel had not yet begun.
A different Orthodoxy
When I arrived at Pardes, I was already religiously observant.
The years I spent in Washington had transformed my relationship with Judaism. I kept kosher. I observed Shabbat. I wore a kippah5 and tzitzit6. More importantly, I had become convinced that Jewish learning deserved a central place in my life.
Yet I was still figuring out exactly what sort of religious Jew I wanted to be, and Pardes played an important role in answering that question.
Although Pardes attracted students from across the Jewish world, much of the faculty consisted of Modern Orthodox rabbis and educators. They were deeply committed to traditional Jewish practice and serious Torah study. At the same time, they were intellectually curious, highly educated, and comfortable engaging with the modern world. They welcomed difficult questions and did not treat uncertainty as a threat.
That mattered to me. Until then, many of the Orthodox Jews I had encountered came from communities that placed greater emphasis on certainty and conformity. Pardes offered me a different model. The teachers I admired most were committed to halakha, yet willing to acknowledge complexity, disagreement, and ambiguity. They loved Judaism enough to wrestle with it.
I found that approach deeply compelling.
Over time, I came to see myself as part of that world. During my years at Pardes, I was a Modern Orthodox Jew in both practice and outlook. I prayed three times a day, observed Shabbat, kept kosher, and devoted countless hours to studying Torah. I was equally committed to asking questions, exploring competing interpretations, and taking ideas seriously.
What attracted me was not simply religious observance. It was the conviction that Judaism was a conversation worth joining.
Many of the assumptions I carried during those years were shaped by Pardes. The Judaism I hoped to teach, the communities I hoped to build, and even the educator I hoped to become all reflected the model I encountered there.
At the time, I assumed that version of Judaism would remain my religious home indefinitely.
Like many other things during those years, that assumption would eventually prove more complicated than I expected.
An okay student
I spent five years studying Torah at Pardes.
That was far longer than I intended when I arrived and roughly comparable to the time many rabbinical students spend preparing for ordination. Although I never became a rabbi, Torah study occupied much of my early thirties.
When I arrived at Pardes, I was neither among the strongest students nor the weakest. I had enough Hebrew and background knowledge to participate meaningfully, but I still had a great deal to learn.
Over time, I advanced through the various levels of study and eventually reached the highest levels Pardes offered. Even then, I would not have considered myself one of the strongest students. I studied alongside people with sharper analytical abilities, stronger textual skills, and more extensive backgrounds than my own.
That never bothered me. One of the things Pardes taught me was that dedication and talent are not the same thing. Some students possessed extraordinary gifts. My strength was persistence.
I kept showing up. I kept studying. I kept trying to understand, and for a long time, that was enough. As the years passed, however, Torah study became harder to separate from the practical realities of my life in Israel.
That changed the stakes. Questions about employment, money, relationships, and long-term direction increasingly competed for space in my mind. I wanted to immerse myself completely in Torah study, but I was also trying to build an adult life in a country where I was still finding my footing.
The more permanent Israel became, the harder it was to treat those questions as problems for another day.
Zina
One of the people I met during my first year at Pardes was a student named Zina. Like many Pardes students, she came from a very different background than my own. She was from Russia, and we became friends and would occasionally study Torah together.
Those study sessions were unusual. My Hebrew was stronger than hers, so I often helped her work through difficult passages. At the same time, she helped me improve my Russian. We discussed Jewish texts in Russian, the language I had spoken at home growing up but never used in a Jewish context.
That experience was surprisingly meaningful. My parents had emigrated from the Soviet Union, and Russian was the language of my childhood. Yet most of my Jewish education had taken place in English and Hebrew. For the first time, I was discussing Torah in Russian and discovering that I lacked much of the religious vocabulary I had spent years acquiring in other languages.
I knew what a Torah scroll was. I knew what the tablets of the Ten Commandments were. I simply did not know how to say those things in Russian.
In a strange way, studying with Zina brought together two parts of my life that had previously remained separate. The Russian-speaking world of my family and the Jewish world I had spent years exploring suddenly met around the same table.
At the time, I did not realize how important that friendship would become. Not long after we became friends, Zina approached me with an unexpected opportunity. She was directing a Jewish summer camp in St. Petersburg through The Jewish Agency for Israel and thought I might be a good fit for the staff.
I had spoken Russian all my life, but I had never been to Russia.
I was thirty years old, and the idea immediately intrigued me.
Re-learning Russian
Working at the camp required more than simply accepting Zina’s invitation.
Before traveling to St. Petersburg, I completed an intensive training program in Jerusalem for Russian-speaking counselors who would be working in Jewish Agency camps throughout the former Soviet Union. I attended the training while continuing my Torah studies at Pardes.
I quickly discovered that my Russian was not as strong as I had imagined. Most of the other counselors had been born in Russia or other former Soviet republics and had spent much of their childhood there. By comparison, my Russian came only from home.
The gaps became especially noticeable when we discussed Judaism. Most of my Torah learning had taken place in Hebrew and English, and I suddenly found myself searching for Russian words I had never needed before.
As I spent more time with the other counselors, I began to imagine a future that had never previously occurred to me. Perhaps I could become a Russian-speaking Jewish educator. I had come to Israel hoping to build a career in Jewish education. Maybe this was a community where my background, language skills, and years of Torah study could come together in a meaningful way.
For a while, it seemed like a real possibility.
St. Petersburg
In the summer of 2010, I traveled to St. Petersburg to work as a counselor at a Jewish Agency summer camp.
Although my parents had emigrated from the Soviet Union and Russian had been the language of my childhood, Russia itself had always been more of an idea than a place. I knew it through family stories, language, and memory rather than personal experience.
The camp introduced me to a Jewish world very different from the one I knew. Most of the counselors and participants were secular, and many had little formal Jewish education. Some knew almost nothing about traditional Jewish texts or religious practice, yet they were deeply interested in being Jewish and curious about their connection to the Jewish people. I found that surprisingly moving.
By that point, I was a committed Modern Orthodox Jew. On paper, I had little in common with many of the people at the camp. Yet I felt an immediate sense of kinship with them.
Part of it came from my family background. My parents had come from the Soviet Union, and much of what I saw in St. Petersburg felt familiar. These were Jews whose families had lived through many of the same historical experiences as my own.
Part of it came from something else. For years, I had imagined that Jewish education would mean teaching people who already possessed a significant Jewish background. Instead, I found myself working with people who were still discovering what being Jewish meant to them. That process reminded me of my own journey.
The experience resonated with me more deeply than I expected. For reasons I could not fully explain, I felt connected both to the community and to the work. When the summer ended, I knew I wanted to return.
The other religious counselor
Most of the counselors at the camp were secular, which was part of what made the experience interesting to me. Although I was a committed Modern Orthodox Jew, I enjoyed working in an environment where Jewish identity was being explored from many different directions.
There were, however, practical challenges. My religious commitments made me something of an anomaly within the camp community, and there was only one other counselor who lived that way.
Her name was Margarita.
Like me, she kept kosher and observed Shabbat. Unlike me, she had grown up in Russia and had already worked at the camp for several years.
As the summer progressed, we spent more time together. Part of that was practical. We shared similar routines and concerns, and we understood one another’s religious commitments in a way that most of the other counselors did not.
Part of it was personal. We enjoyed each other’s company. I did not think of that friendship as the beginning of a major turning point in my life. It was simply one of many relationships that developed over the course of a busy summer.
Choosing Israel
When the summer ended, Margo and I returned to Jerusalem.
Our friendship gradually became something more. We spent more time together, continued getting to know one another, and eventually began dating.
At first, I did not think of the relationship primarily in terms of geography. Yet geography was always present in the background. Margo had made aliyah years earlier and built her life in Israel. Unlike many Pardes students, she was not spending a year or two in Jerusalem before returning home.
That reality forced me to confront a question I had been avoiding.
When I arrived at Pardes, I assumed I would eventually return to the United States. As my relationship with Margo deepened, however, that future became increasingly difficult to imagine.
I was a Zionist. More importantly, I loved someone who had chosen to build her life in Israel. I could not bring myself to ask a Jewish woman who had made aliyah to leave the country simply so that I could pursue my own professional ambitions elsewhere. That did not make the decision easy. In many ways, remaining in Israel meant letting go of the future I imagined for myself. Yet the alternative increasingly felt wrong.
We were married in August 2011. By then, I had chosen more than a spouse. I had chosen the country in which I would build my life.
But I could not yet know what that life would look like.
The cost of staying
Choosing Israel did not solve the question that had brought me to Pardes. If anything, it made that question more urgent.
The goal that had brought me to Pardes was the reason I had moved to Washington and eventually come to Israel. Now I was married and committed to building my life in a country where that path seemed increasingly uncertain. I did not want to admit it. Each year, I found another reason to stay at Pardes. I continued studying Torah, continued working, and continued searching for ways to connect my learning to a meaningful career. Yet with each passing year, it became harder to ignore the possibility that the future I had imagined might never materialize.
The professional uncertainty was difficult enough. The social isolation was harder.
The people I had known in America were building careers, starting families, and moving forward with their lives. The friends I had made at Pardes returned to North America after a year or two. By the time Margo and I married in August 2011, most of the students with whom I had studied during my first years had already left Israel.
I often felt alone. In time, I drifted away from many of my American friendships. Partly that was practical; maintaining relationships across continents is difficult. Partly it was emotional. Watching people move forward in lives that no longer included me was painful.
There was also an element of shame. I was in my thirties. My peers had careers. They knew who they were professionally. Whether they worked as lawyers, teachers, social workers, or businesspeople, they had established themselves as adults. I felt as though I was still trying to figure out what my life was supposed to be.
I loved Israel. I loved Margo. I loved Torah study. I simply did not know how to turn those commitments into a future.
Staying at Pardes
One year at Pardes became two. Two became three. Eventually, I remained there for five years because I loved the institution.
My first year was devoted entirely to Torah study. During my second year, I became a fellow, which allowed me to continue studying while working on a special project. After that, I joined the staff in a part-time role while continuing my studies.
The work was not Jewish education in the way I had once imagined. I was not teaching or leading a congregation. Instead, I worked in communications and administration, serving as the assistant to the director, managing the website, producing electronic newsletters, and helping oversee Pardes’s growing online presence.
Yet the work still felt meaningful because it supported an institution I deeply believed in. Pardes was not simply my workplace. It was also the community in which I was learning, growing, and building a life.
Over time, I began taking initiative beyond my formal responsibilities. One project that mattered deeply to me was the student blog. Because so many students eventually returned to North America and elsewhere, I envisioned it as a way to sustain a broader Pardes community long after people left Jerusalem.
The project taught me skills that would remain with me for years. Running the blog required writing, editing, formatting, publishing, and thinking carefully about how communities communicate online. Looking back, many of the skills that later shaped my own blogging grew out of that experience.
As much as I loved Pardes, however, I could not ignore practical realities forever. I was no longer in my twenties exploring possibilities. I was a married man in his thirties trying to establish himself in Israel. At some point, I needed more than meaningful work and Torah study. I needed a sustainable future.
Part of me hoped that future might be at Pardes. Because I knew the institution as both a student and staff member, I could imagine spending many years there. Even if I never became the Jewish educator I had once envisioned, perhaps I could build a meaningful career supporting a mission I deeply admired.
Gradually, however, it became clear that Pardes and I had different ideas about what my future there would look like. No one had done anything wrong. Institutions have their own priorities, budgets, and constraints, and my interests were evolving as well. My work increasingly involved writing and communications, rather than the educational path I had originally imagined.
As difficult as it was to admit, I began to realize that I might eventually need to look elsewhere.
A new direction
Not long after I began considering the possibility of leaving Pardes, a coworker forwarded me a job posting.
The position was with Hiddush, an Israeli advocacy organization focused on religion and state. At first glance, the role seemed surprisingly well suited to my background, drawing on skills I had spent years developing at Pardes. Yet it also connected to questions that had interested me long before I arrived in Jerusalem.
Religion mattered to me because Judaism mattered to me. State mattered to me because I had studied public policy. Hiddush operated at the intersection of those two worlds. The more I learned about the organization, the more intrigued I became.
I was coming to realize there were other ways to contribute to Jewish and Israeli life. Teaching was not the only path. Writing, advocacy, communications, and public engagement mattered as well. I did not know whether Hiddush would become my next professional home. I only knew that, for the first time in a long while, I felt a sense of possibility.
The dream that had brought me to Pardes was changing. That realization was painful, but it was also the beginning of something new.
Footnotes
An Orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem that primarily serves students from non-Orthodox or secular backgrounds. ↩︎An independent, lay-led Jewish prayer community in Washington, DC that combines traditional egalitarian worship with grassroots community-building. ↩︎A Modern Orthodox synagogue in Washington, DC. ↩︎An independent Jewish learning community in Washington, DC focused on pluralistic, text-based study. ↩︎A small head covering traditionally worn by Jewish men as a sign of reverence and religious commitment. ↩︎Jewish ritual fringes attached to a four-cornered garment and worn as a reminder of the commandments in the Torah. ↩︎ The journey
#Belonging #Commitment #Identity #Israel #Jewish #JewishEducation #Judaism #Reinvention #Transition #Uncertainty #Vocation
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