Over the past four years, I have been known for a lot of things in my high school. I do quizbowl, theater and I play softball. I care a lot about the things I get involved in. But more than anything else, I am known as “the Jew.”
It’s not usually said in a cruel way, although sometimes it is. Most of the time, it’s just how people identify me. If someone had a question about a holiday, they would ask me. If we were learning about the Holocaust or Judaism in class, everyone would turn to look my way. People thanked me personally when we didn’t have school on Yom Kippur, as if I caused us to have a day off.
I live in a heavily Jewish area in Pittsburgh, but my school feels very different. I am the only Conservative Jew there, and most of the other Jewish students are not very connected to Judaism at all. So in that space, my Jewishness becomes the thing that makes me stand out.
And sometimes, that can be a strange feeling. Not because I am ashamed to be Jewish, but because it can feel isolating.
There is a piece of Jewish wisdom that has helped me think about this. The Talmud teaches, Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Bazeh—“All of Israel are responsible for one another.” When I first learned that teaching, I thought it meant responsibility in a big moral sense. That we take care of each other and that we show up for each other in times of need. And that is true.
But with graduation approaching, I have started to think it means something else, too. It means that none of us is supposed to carry Judaism alone.
For me, that is where my youth group, United Synagogue Youth (USY), has come in over the past four years.
The moment I walk into a USY space, something shifts. Suddenly, I am not “the Jew.” I am just another Jewish teen in a room full of people who are proud of the same identity that makes me stand out everywhere else. I know that many other teens, especially those who go to school with few Jews, have had those same feelings in their own youth groups or summer camps.
No one looks at us when Hebrew words are used. No one asks us to explain what Shabbat is. No one is surprised that Jewish holidays matter to me. In these settings, being Jewish is normal. It is celebrated. It is shared.
And I should probably admit something else. I am not someone who loves being the center of attention, which means I may have chosen the wrong position by serving as USY international president for the past year. A lot of this role means standing at the front of rooms, speaking to groups of people I do not know, and having people look at me.
That’s not always comfortable. But I have noticed something interesting. When I am standing in front of a room representing Jewish teens—representing this community, representing something bigger than myself—I don’t hate the attention quite as much. Because in those moments, it stops being about me and becomes about the story we are carrying together.
The spaces that our community creates for Jewish teens are the reason this shift happens. In these rooms, Jewish teens get to experience what it feels like not to stand out alone. Being Jewish stops feeling like something you carry by yourself and starts feeling like something you share with a community.
The Torah tells us that when the Israelites stood at Mount Sinai, they stood there together. Not as individuals, but as a community receiving something sacred side by side. Judaism was never meant to be carried by one person in one classroom or one school. It was always meant to be lived together.
My time in USY reminded me of that every time I walked into a convention, every time I heard people singing during Havdalah, every time I saw teens showing up proudly as their Jewish selves.
Afterward, when I went back to school and someone called me “the Jew,” I heard it a little differently. I knew that behind me stood a whole community. And there is nothing lonely about that.
