so consider this a check-in
i’m for the first time in my life relatively comfortable with where i am for a lot of mitzvot. i’m in a good place with prayer; i have kosher utensils and my own microwave oven; my shabbat practice is not necessarily in a perfect place but i am almost to a really good place; i’m learning the parsha and other torah regularly. i’m getting pretty good at laying tefillin every day (except shabbat etc.). i’m not trying to brag or claim im infallible, what i mean here is more that these things are becoming my normal way and if/when i don’t make it that’s a sad and correctable deviation from the norm, rather than the fact that i davened (say) being a deviation from the norm. which is incredible! like i intended to keep shabbat for the first time in the summer of 2011. and now here i am.
a lot of this is due to wearing tzitzit -- i really wanted to wear tzitzit but felt i couldn’t honestly do so whilst not being engaged in daily prayer, and that pushed me over the edge. i also felt like i shouldn’t be wearing visible tzitzit and eating in non-kosher restaurants -- so i stopped.
other parts are due to being more comfortable claiming the identity of “a jew who learns torah & keeps it” -- it is unfortunately sometimes scary to set up a chevruta, but i feel like i’m over that bump now
i owe so much to hadar and i am so lucky that i went.
also.... i’ve [realised that i want / decided] to be a rabbi. i want to spend my life engaged in the torah and invested in helping jews keep it, and building jewish communities of the sort that sustained me and gave me life and so much more. this is tricky because of denominations.
in another life i would love being orthodox, i think. unflinching commitment to halacha and mitzvot is really really key for me, but people keep telling me that, socially speaking, wearing tzitzit puts me beyond the pale of the orthodox movement. and the amount of tzuris that people get in terms of communal politics who push the boundaries of social orthodoxy in a way permissible by halacha, is too much for me to plan a life weathering it. so i’m not sure i want to go to maharat.
barring a Hadar smicha programme which they did say explicitly they weren’t planning to do, i will probably go to JTS. if they’ll have me, i mean. i am not in love with the idea of leaving england for 5 years, but there is nowhere in england (theres one reform rabbinical school where you can get masorti smicha but they dont. teach you halacha? which is something of a deal breaker for me even if everything else was perfect for me, which it is not), so (shrug).
i am aware that by making this denominational decision i am just switching the external tzuris of gender politics and internal tzuris of torah min hashamayim for external tzuris of trying to get non orthodox jews to keep halacha and internal tzuris of whatever the h*ck masorti jews have as theology
im in my 2nd year of my degree right now so basically what this means is i shld go back to hadar this summer & not get an internship, if possible, but also that i can stop trying to figure out what to do With My Life
thank you all, you know? for being here with me, for however long.