At school, I no longer had to wait. I was free to do as I pleased and ceased observing the day altogether. But strangely, immediately, Shabbat presented itself to me in a transfiguring light, the radical antidote to all that displeased me here.
The beauty of North Jersey is in its honest, unassuming appearance and demeanor. If you’re scared away by the old factories with broken walls, signs advertising divorce for $399 dollars, or oil tanks, these places won’t be nice to you. But if you go inside, take the train to Journal Square and walk up JFK Boulevard, and say talk to the guy leaning against an old street lamp outside the train station, you’ll find it welcoming. It’s a rugged, middle-class area, but it won’t reject you unless you refuse it.
Settling back into old routines once again in London this summer made me think about my relationship with my old life after a year living in America. Although I was catching up with friends in similar ways and places to during my time at high school, this time all of us had come back from new places and lives so different to our old ones.
When I tell people my name, people often ask if I’m named after the city, or, if they’re particularly bookish, the library. I’m actually named after neither. For a long time before I was born, my mother couldn’t figure out what to name me. She really liked Caitlin as a middle name, but had no idea what would be good for my actual name.
“To ask people to tell what’s suspicious and unusual is to expose innocent individuals to a system that constantly profiles and projects fear, to always assume the worst.”
“She told me she was a writer, and when I left she gave me three books in French, on Proust, Vienna, and magic. It was a sweet thing to do, because our conversations had been mostly in English, and we tried French together like friends failing to be lovers.”
Maybe it’s just the New Jersey weather or the tint of the van’s windows but it seems like it’s always foggy when I drive to Garden State, a sprawling correctional complex whose hallways I’ve walked through without ever really managing to glean the building’s external shape. We always drive towards it from the same side. Inside the hallways shoot off from rounded enclosure where the guards sit like identical grayish-beige spokes from a wheel. Sometimes it’s hard to find my way out because everything looks the same.
“These days, learning a language feels particularly significant and necessary. Learning a language: a small multiplication of life in a world of multiplying death.”
“She wanted to relive the memories, the ephemeral emotions of happiness she felt when she was younger – unmolded. She did not account for the fact that she was a different person hoping to feel the sentiments of years ago.”
When I want to stay updated with breaking stories or the latest headlines, I like to browse through my Twitter or media apps. I never expected to learn the most about the news surrounding Ferguson, Missouri through my Snapchat.
In Jadwin Gym, His Holiness spoke extensively about love, compassion, and empathy for other people. He urged the audience to focus on the “one-ness of humanity” and to achieve meaningful lives through compassion and dialogue with people different from ourselves.
