Was Everything Illuminated?

This year has been at the same time the most amazing and difficult experience of my life. In my senior year of college I decided that I wanted to spend a year in a Russian speaking country doing some kind of community health work. This year I was able to do exactly that. I feel blessed and honoured to have had this opportunity. The professional experience I gained was immense. I had the opportunity to do extensive program development and implementation, learn how a non-profit and NGO operates, in Ukraine no less, and be a part of an incredible international organization.

The personal growth I went through and the life education I received were also enormous. I learned so much about myself: about my strengths and my weaknesses and how to utilize and/or overcome them. I feel almost completely acculturated and very at-home in Ukraine, as scary as that is given some of the backwardness of this country. I was able to make a life here, and make sense of this culture and society. My Russian really is almost fluent. At graduation last year I spoke briefly with Tufts’ Provost. When I told him what I would be doing this year, he said, “Wow, you are really taking our global citizenship message seriously!” I do take the idea of global citizenship seriously, and after this year I am pretty confident that I could manage to live anywhere in the world, for a year at least. I am also more committed to the values of cross cultural exchanges, knowing foreign languages, and studying/living/volunteering abroad.

How I feel about being Jewish and what being Jewish means to me has also changed. I expected this to happen over the course of the year, and I have to admit it was one of the things I was most anxious about before I left. I started this year as an “un-affiliated Jew.” I was not involved in Hillel or any other Jewish youth group, I went to synagogue only for the High Holidays, and Judaism was something that was important to me only because it was important to my parents and grand-parents. There were many times this year when I felt very guilty for this; for taking my being Jewish and having had a Jewish education and up-bringing for granted. Seeing the vitality of the community here, and meeting so many people who were discriminated against because they were Jewish and were not allowed to practice at all, and now that they can are overjoyed by the “privilege” of just participating in a Jewish community, has inspired me to value being Jewish. Being Jewish and participating in Jewish communal life and maintaining Jewish traditions are all much more important to me now and I will be looking for ways to incorporate this into my life when I return home.

I leave for the airport tomorrow at 8am. This is probably my last post. Thanks for following my adventures in Ukraine! Not to worry, I'm sure there will be more to come...