This one is really personal. It’s about my identity

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself on a Teams call with dozens of my Jewish coworkers.

I had been on calls like this before; I’d find them through various groups, a local synagogue, on Facebook. The flow of these calls was usually similar: no agenda, just a space to be in community with one another. The mood could be somber, but just as often there were moments of levity. Hearing people sign off with “Shabbat shalom” or “I’m going to bake some challah” always filled me with a familiar nostalgia.

It was no different with my coworkers.

There was one moment in particular that stuck with me.

A mother on the call spoke about starting her workday with a prick of anxiety as she drops her kids off at a Jewish school. I have a 13-year-old daughter, and I felt that in my gut. Thirteen means she’s at the age when she’s been attending a lot of her friends’ b'nai mitzvahs. On these Saturday mornings, I drop her off at one synagogue or another, and watch from my car as she walks past an armed guard or a metal detector. And tamp down thoughts about why they’re there.

The chat gets active. Relating. Of course, having security at our schools and synagogues has always been the norm for us. This has been true as long as I can remember, and it’s true not only in the U.S. But lately the norm has felt anything but.

“The fear is real these days,” I write in the chat. “Thank you for bringing that up.”

It was another coworker on my team who introduced me to these gatherings, messaging me a link one day. She told me it was a Jewish group, and I instantly clicked.

“I didn’t know we had one!!” I wrote back, two-exclamation-marks excited. “How do I get on the mailing list for future events?”

This coworker and I had actually bonded over being Jewish — years ago — when I met her in our San Francisco office. I don’t remember exactly how it came up, but when it did, I instantly felt a connection with her. (This is one of the cool things about being Jewish, this kinship many of us say we feel with each other. There’s a reason we refer to other Jews as “members of the tribe,” a somewhat tongue-in-cheek reference to being descended from the 12 tribes of Israel.)

Even though my coworker and I were raised halfway around the world from each other — she’s Israeli with long ties to the Middle East; my ancestors are Holocaust survivors who fled to the U.S. and Canada — we share the same cultural references.

I once asked if she remembered the Hebrew version of Sesame Street — Rechov Sumsum — which I used to watch in Jewish day school.

“YES!!!” she replied. “Who was your favorite character??”

“Oofnik of course!”

“Disagree,” she wrote. “The star was always Kippi.”

She also understood my excitement when I discovered holiday songs from popular Israeli artists on Spotify; growing up, there was only that one Hanukkah song — you know the one — that would be interspersed with Christmas music on the radio.

“My Hanukkah playlist was on point this year,” I told her proudly. “Israeli songs > Adam Sandler.”

Being around my Jewish coworkers has been a balm, especially in recent months.

I’m lucky though. I’ve always felt safe at work. It’s the little things, like being able to talk openly about my daughter’s bat mitzvah in a team meeting. It feels like relief.

I have a complicated relationship with Judaism. My family is moderately religious, and the school I attended through 8th grade was a modern orthodox yeshiva. Let’s just say I was not a fan. There are a lot of rules to being a religious Jew, and many of them — at least how I saw it — seemed to fall unfairly on women.

But here’s another cool thing about being Jewish — it’s literally in our DNA. You can be Jewish and secular. You don’t have to care about religion at all.

For most of my adult life, I never thought of being Jewish as a core part of my identity. I’m sure there are several reasons for that. I’m not particularly observant. Most of my friends are not Jewish. And then there’s my own baggage.

But something changed when my dad died in 2021. My dad, I should point out, loved being Jewish. If he had given any thought to the legacy he wanted to leave, I’m confident he would have said that it was passing down his Jewish pride.

Like many Jews, I felt Oct. 7 in a very visceral way. So many people in my community had been personally impacted — friends, extended family members, coworkers, members of my synagogue. There was also the collective grief that I saw in many of the calls I found myself dialing into.

I suddenly felt drawn to other Jews in a way that surprised me. I started to relearn my rusty Hebrew. I attended synagogue services even though they’re not my thing. I was clicking on Zoom and Teams links and crying with strangers. I even (get this) went to a karaoke night with other Jewish parents.

It wasn’t something that was easy to talk about. Behind it all, there was the fear, the worry that expressing any grief in the workplace would be seen as choosing sides in the conflict.

But other Jews got it.

It wasn’t a political statement. It was just pain.

I never felt a connection to an employee resource group as strongly as when I discovered Shalom. I carry many identities — as a woman, as a parent — but suddenly this identity felt like the one that mattered.

Ever since my dad died, Passover feels different. My dad used to make the best sedars, full of gusto and verve. I never missed one, and always sat on his right-hand side, a reliable singing duo. The first year that I had to lead one without him, the magnitude of the responsibility washed over me. I messed up one of his signature songs and it killed me. Late that night, after everyone else had gone to bed, I sat in his chair and practiced. And practiced. And practiced until I got it right.

I never messed it up again.

And this year — the year of my daughter’s bat mitzvah — it strikes me so deeply that I’m not just the keeper of melodies for the Passover songs that my father and grandfather would sing. I’m passing down the entirety of our Jewish culture and traditions. (Even the silly ones, like my husband purposely mispronouncing Hebrew words because he knows it annoys me, or his love of bad Jewish puns.)

Several weeks ago, I applied to be the global co-chair of Shalom. I still can’t entirely articulate what compelled me to do so. But it felt urgent. Meaningful.

Last week, my fellow members welcomed me into my first leadership meeting.

“Please come prepared to deliver your drash,” one of them joked on Teams. She was referring to the words of wisdom that are offered after reading the Torah, usually imparting some modern takeaways from the Biblical text.

“What’s this week’s parsha?” I wrote back, using the Hebrew word for the weekly Torah portion.

I was kidding, of course, but within seconds, she had found it. And I knew I had found my people. “I feel at home,” I typed. Including a big, goofy, grinning smiley-face emoji.