EmBRace Magazine, Issue #16 Released In Time For Shavuos

We were teenagers, born and bred in South Orange — Maplewood, New Jersey. I was a spiritual seeker, but at the same time, a Sunday school dropout. Reform was dry, nothingness, and my experience there made me think Judaism didn’t have any real meaning. My sister Shoshana Bracha and I were both thirsty for meaning, searching for the answers to life and not imagining that our Jewish heritage could have anything to do with it. I was one of those teens who was ready to go to India and learn philosophy. On my campus, if someone asked me, “Are you Jewish?” I would reply, “My parents are, but I don’t know if I am.” That’s how far and confused I was.

I had to do my high school senior project. The task was to do something big for a month — we were even able to take off school for it — and write a report about it. I knew I wanted to do something authentic — what was the most authentic thing I could think of? “I’ll work on an Amish farm,” I decided. I thought Amish people were very authentic. But after some digging, I quickly found out that Amish people do not want American girls in blue jeans coming to their towns to do research.

My next option was pretty adventurous. I had a friend whose father had a sailboat, and I had gone on a few sailing trips with her family. Remembering those trips, I planned to become part of a crew on a big sailboat and sail around the world. The clear obstacle of that was that first of all, it doesn’t take a month to sail around the world. And more importantly, my mother, who was never very strict about things, put her foot down and made it clear that I would not be sailing around the world.

Find out more about how two sisters found their way to authentic Yiddishkeit in the latest edition of Embrace.

A special thank you to Libby Herz for all of the time and expertise she puts into each of her magazine articles. We sincerely apologize for the oversight in not giving proper credit to her for the article titled Chassidishe Chinuch; The Femine Way published in Embrace 16, Spring 5784.

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