Compiled by Kathryn Black, ‘11, The Lens Section Editor, and Kate Taylor, ‘11, The Lens Editor.

This year’s seniors have chosen their college destinations, which consist of a prestigious list of colleges and universities from every part of the country. While the list mirrors the ability of the Class of 2010, it is only one of their many achievements. From Academic Team and Science Olympiad successes to excellence on the playing field to their long history of community service projects, this class will be remembered for many things, not to mention their impressive writing skills. This is the college essay of senior Allison Lazarus, who has chosen to attend Yale University this fall.

Allison Lazarus’s essay:

Sitting on a rickety plastic chair in the basement of our dormitory, I was close to tears as I listened to the other Bronfman Fellows argue passionately about whether or not to allow music to be played in common areas.  It was our first day in Jerusalem, where we would stay for five weeks, and we had been deliberating for over an hour on the specific restrictions that we, as a community of twenty-six, would set on activities during Shabbat.   Some of the more traditionally religious Fellows were insistent upon adhering to halacha, or Jewish law, in every possible way, disavowing the use of electricity and prohibiting writing and the reading of non-Jewish books, attitudes distinctly unfamiliar to me because of my less observant background.

My upbringing, in terms of Judaism, was decidedly unconventional.  Though I enjoyed a classically liberal Jewish childhood—attending a weekly religious school and occasional services, thanks to my Jewish father—halacha asserts that one must have a Jewish mother to be considered a Jew. My mother is Presbyterian.  However, because all of my Jewish activities have been confined to a Reform environment, I have never encountered anyone who would actually identify me as a non-Jew. Yet,as I boarded the El Al flight, I told one of the boys on the trip that my mother was Christian and was immediately asked when she had converted to Judaism, as he was unable to imagine that I considered myself to be Jewish without having a Jewish mother.  I was shocked, both at his question and at the flippancy with which he (and others, I would come to find), were able to so easily distill Jewish identity into a prescribed heritage.  Early in the trip, though, I knew only that these comments would immediately cause me to flush in anger and frustrated confusion.                                                                   

I continued to encounter this disbelief during the Shabbat meeting, which was supposed to emphasize the sacrifices that each member made for the good of the group.  Instead, the small, seemingly pointless arguments over the finer points of halacha struck me as trifling, as the more religious members of the group didn’t seem to realize that their insistence on following these rules constituted an implicit rejection of my right to call myself Jewish.   The more specific and arcane their pronouncements, the more I shrank back into myself and into my uncomfortable chair, profoundly affected by their contrastingly easy characterization of me as belonging outside of the community.  

Later that night, I sought out one of the rabbis and lamented my lack of choice—my mother’s religion wasn’t something that I could change.  The rabbi, after listening patiently, suggested that I formally convert.  Certainly, the solution was pragmatic, but internally, I raged because it seemed so unfair.  I had spent years of my life at religious school, the very archetype of the wide-eyed student, impressed at every mention of what I took to be my cultural and theological heritage, and it seemed unconscionable that no one on the trip recognized my right to this same legacy.  At this moment, I recognized that my active identification of myself as Jewish was, in the simplest sense, what mattered.  All those hours, that certainty which I had held so innocently, was what made me Jewish—all of the active choices which I’d made during my life up until that point and planned to make in the future.  Instead of basing my identity upon what others delineated, I was free to mold an identity for myself, free to tie all of my actions together into an affirmation of what I believed—I know myself to be Jewish because I identify myself as such.  Personally, this continuous revelation is what sustains my enthusiasm for my religion—instead of being bound to Judaism because of birth, I actively choose it every day.

Photo by Kathryn Black,  ’11, The Lens Editor