Diplomat of Another Nation
My personal hero growing up was Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat who heroically issued a visa to my great-grandmother and grandmother, among many other Lithuanian Jews fleeing the Nazis. I wanted to be a diplomat like him, and gum up the works of the State Department to achieve something positive or heroic.
Through some lucky stroke, I was accepted to a small college in Minnesota, Macalester College, where the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan went and where internationalism was the religion. It might not be Georgetown, but it punched above its weight.
I majored in Political Science, and took only political philosophy and international politics classes. Next stop: the diplomatic corps. I took the State Department test and... passed round one, the multiple choice questions. These questions covered your worldliness. Then the next step, a recorded interview. Didn't pass that.
Regrouping, I thought that perhaps the next place to go would be the Peace Corps. I would be stationed somewhere around the world for a couple years, and with that new background and resume, I could try again. That didn't work either, because I didn't bother to lie about my cortisol medication, which required reams of hidden paperwork to document.
Well, I thought, maybe diplomacy is useless anyway. After all, didn't Sugihara rebel against his government? Why would I try to enter something that would grind me into a cog anyway?
I had to pivot, my career path and my ideology. Much of what saved me in college was reading Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed, and I really enjoyed leading our college High Holiday services. Why not go into the family business and become a rabbi? After all, I reasoned, a government is only as good as its people, and maybe religion was upstream of all of this politics.
When I called to inquire about rabbinical school with a dean of one of the schools, he asked me why I was interested. I unloaded a very long complex rant about Maimonides. He told me that I needed to "get out of my cave" and get some Jewish communal experience, and told me to go study in Israel.
Though I was hurt by his remarks, I made it to Israel, rooming with a Chinese convert who, by virtue of also training in culinary school, introduced me to kosher Uyghur food.
When I finally got into rabbinical school, I considered serving my country in another way — as a military chaplain. But an obstacle came up: I'm a dual citizen with Canada, and I didn't want to renounce my Canadian citizenship. In the back of my mind though, I feared serving in the military should an unjust president take control of it, so I was grateful to refuse to renounce the Maple Leaf.
In the middle of school, I heard about an offer to go to Siberia and help a group of teens learn about Judaism and celebrate a mass b'nai mitzvah. I got in and was flown to the Altay Mountains. Though I had put in the diligence to learn to read Russian, it was sadly very elementary. I relied on a translator. But it was this experience that made me feel like a diplomat for the first time: one of the activities was to talk to the parents about my political views. Yes, this was a planned activity. As the parents talked about their love of Putin and challenged me on my skepticism, I realized that there was something interesting and subversive about my form of diplomacy. I later on talked directly in English with one of the counselors about comparing corruption in Russia and America, and I saw that I struck a cord about the unjust conditions in the country — all while Russian workers peered over at us, trying to understand what we were talking about.
In Russia, it was the first time I felt like I was fully in a Jewish community — fully embraced. I had to change a lot of my dogmatic outlook over what religion was, since most of the kids around me were so drawn and excited about Judaism but were not (in my view at the time) Halachically Jewish. I started asking questions about what Judaism even was. Could it be that it was not a religion, but a nation, scattered around the world? Maybe, each group of Jews around the world conformed to definitions of Judaism that were influenced by their surroundings — it was purely a religion in religiously-free but culturally conformist America, and purely a bloodline in the former Soviet Union, an odd hybrid in Israel, etc.
I demanded to go back to Russia, and while eventually I got my wish, going to Vladivostok, I was grateful that the JDC gave me a chance to go Kharkiv in Eastern Ukraine. Before then, I travelled from Jewish community to community in Turkey, the Balkans, and central and western Europe, observing how Jews lived and struggled with their definitions of themselves.
There were many experiences that gave me a sense of a nationhood that surpassed the boundaries that I had previously understood, until the point came that I started seeing Judaism as a civilization, one that was fragmented in its scattering and through the impositions put on it by different governments. More than being a diplomat who could defy a system for a higher purpose, I started to understand that there might be something heroic in representing another nation entirely: my own.
