I didn’t grow up observant.

I had Shabbat dinners sometimes, a few years of Hebrew school, and a quiet certainty that Judaism was mine — alongside a louder certainty that I was behind. In my mind, Torah study belonged to people who could open a page of Rashi without panic, who walked into shul without negotiating with themselves first, who already knew the choreography of Jewish life.

So I did what a great many diaspora Jews do. I kept the culture — the food, the humor, the moral vocabulary — and I postponed the text. Not out of indifference. Out of intimidation. Every door into “serious” learning looked like a commitment I wasn’t ready to make.

The guilt was soft and constant. You should know more. You should take a class. You should be further along by now.

What finally moved me was not a campaign, a book club, or a dramatic return. It was something almost too small to admit: one short teaching a day, on my phone, in plain language — with the source visible, so I could see it wasn’t someone’s opinion wearing a kippah.

Ninety seconds. That was the whole ritual.

Somehow, that was enough to start again.

The permission slip I didn’t know I needed

The first line that stuck came from Pirkei Avot — a teaching I had probably heard before and never applied to myself:

“Do not say, ‘When I have free time I will study,’ for you may never have free time.” (Pirkei Avot 2:4)

I had been waiting for the mythical evening when work would quiet down, the children would be older, and I would become the kind of person who sits with........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)