By my senior year in high school, I was spending a minimum of four days a week at our synagogue. Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays I was an assistant teacher at Hebrew school. Tuesdays were for youth group, where I was on the board. Once a month we had an upper-classmen pizza and Torah study. Every other month was a regional youth group event (where I was also on the board), which we anxiously awaited. I spent my summers at Jewish summer camp, sat on my city’s interfaith youth council, and planned to spend my first year out of high school living in Israel. My best friend (now becoming a rabbi) and I proudly accepted the nickname the “god squad” (ok, we may have seen the movie “Keeping the Faith” a few too many times and called ourselves that.)
All of this is a long way of saying that I was something of a NFTY (the reform Jewish youth movement) “golden child” – I took each passing strand of Judaism offered to me and wove it into my life until it became the defining characteristic of who I was.
After school years, I taught at a public school for a while, and continued to teach Hebrew school and work at summer camp. It was the logical next step for me – I assumed that one day I would run a summer camp or be a Rabbi, and I was just biding my time until I got to do that. I knew that I was good at working with kids, and planned my life accordingly.
So it seemed like I was arriving into my dream world when I accepted a job working for Kutz (the NFTY youth leadership camp) in 2011. Fittingly, I met the woman who is now my wife in my first week. Something not so dream-like happened though – I failed miserably at that job. I was flat out terrible.
My success working with kids came from being able to improvise – to pull the right words out of the air to talk to a homesick kid, or motivate a bunk, or get across a difficult concept. I quickly learned that those magic moments I created were the product of hours of long term planning and following through on larger ideas by other people. Those moments required magnitudes of patience and perseverance with no promise of success, and I simply couldn’t hack it. I had somehow achieved the adult job I most wanted without actually becoming an adult.
I left feeling like a failure. Leaving any job is hard, but to feel that I had done so badly for an organization I so revered stung terribly – NFTY was what I was best at; what did it mean about who I was if I wasn’t actually that good at it? The summer after I left I got a part-time job working at a hot dog cart on the Highline; I remember hiding behind a pillar when two former coworkers strolled by.
For a while hiding was my best solution. I moved from the cart on the Highline to the actual restaurant in Park Slope, I stayed away from events where I might bump into those from my former life; I shied away from Jewish ritual practice and study. I threw myself into the restaurant world and pretended I had never wanted to work with Jewish youth.
Starting at the bottom of a occupation that I knew nothing about and had no experience in forced me to learn perseverance; working hard at a job that only a few months before I would have thought was below me taught me patience. Skills I had not believed myself capable of only a few months prior became a part of my daily routine.
I didn’t notice NFTY starting to creep back in to my life, at first – I used a meeting template I had created as a Unit Head at Crane Lake for my first restaurant staff meeting as general manager. I used the standard NFTY program format to write a proposal for a consulting job I was offered. Time and again, as I took on new challenges, I fell back on things I had learned living the URJ life. When I left my role with Kutz, I convinced myself that the skills I had learned in my time in NFTY were worthless or fake. I’ve since realized those skills – the confidence to lead, the compassion to work with others, the desire to foster a good and holy community – are what allow me to be successful in this field. I might have stepped away from NFTY, but NFTY has never really left me.
These days, I try to cook Shabbos dinner a few times a month. We invite people over, we laugh and eat, and we bask in the warmth of the cooling stove and each other’s company. That warmth resonates to my first experiences in NFTY, where I learned the quiet spirituality of friendship and the power of faith. NFTY is the tree that helped support my early growth, and when I fell from the tree I learned to grow on my own. For a little while I thought that I had failed at being the perfect example of the power of NFTY. Now I’m pretty sure that that is exactly what I am.