10 | AUGUST 17 • 2023 PURELY COMMENTARY continued from page 8 er who declared that I didn’t have “a drop of Judaism inside of [me],” then proceeded to push her way into my attitude toward Judaism as much as possible, pressing a siddur into my hands and urging me to relearn the words. She inculcated within me that insouciance toward school- work was not the appropriate attitude and urged me to do better academically. By the end of the first semester, I was the teacher’s pet — and I had entirely reversed my belief on what my future would be. From down here with the telescope, I was envisioning a household brimming with children and warmth, a home wholly bound by me. I was cradling a baby while rocking back and forth before Shabbat candles. Without anything more than a teacher’s support, I could fully see the other side; there was a comprehen- sive system set up, imbued with its qualities of comfort and stability. I finally just — I just got it. There is something deeply relieving about having one’s entire future planned out, especially if they feel medi- ocre or in despair over what the modern world requires. Yes, it requires the price of buying in — and selling one’s critical thinking, opposing political ideals, and anything that falls into the category of “different” — but for people who don’t know who they want to be, having a ready- made identity is cathartic. And I didn’t know who I was. Thus far, I was constituted solely of iconoclasm; my per- sonality was molded by heat- ed reaction. Nothing came from a genuine place because I was under the impression that earnestness was a bad thing, yet another product of growing up in a place rife with contradiction. I played the part, albeit poorly. There was just so much that had been imple- mented early on by myself that I had to start changing, so much that I wondered if it was impossible. I didn’t really care about material things because I felt that my appear- ance was a futile project. My humor was raucous and, yes, drew laughs, but often left me feeling as though I was pro- viding a service rather than building connection. I wasn’t graceful and I had no rhythm and I dropped out of the play once I found out that I was in ensemble. I desired to be feminine but had stumbled upon the idea that femininity was reliant on externals, so I resigned myself to the bare minimum. When I glance through the lens of the telescope, this is a comet, flickering. I fluctu- ated so often between fear of not being one of them and the desire to be, I was an amorphous gray puddle of a person. Like a historian, it is easy for me to generalize about parts of my life by their zeit- geists and worries. Sometimes these fears were so all-encom- passing that it felt like I was the only person alive. There’s a poem by Emily Dickinson on her observations of chil- dren’s education: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —/ Success in Circuit lies/ Too bright for our infirm Delight/ The Truth’s superb surprise/ As Lightning to the Children eased/ With explanation kind/ The Truth must dazzle grad- ually/ Or every man be blind —” (Dickinson 1263). As the poem dictates, inun- dating every child with the whole truth is an impossible, possibly harmful task — it is likely the correct move for educators to ease kids into their knowledge. But from an early age I could pick up on the fact that “telling the truth slant” was conflated with oversimplification, blatant insulation and the overtly positive attitude toward polar- ization. Those around me praised the extremes, but in doing so, they asphyxiated our abilities to pick up on nuance and the value of compromise and balance, sending us reeling in future situations where those exact values were in necessity. At 17, I recognize the posi- tives and negatives of growing up in a place that seemed to have a strange approach to critical thinking and differen- tiation from large groups. For one, while I was perhaps the exception to this experience, it’s very safe to have a foun- dation, even if it exists for the sole purpose of building one- self up off of it. For another, I was exposed to a distinct kind of logic unique to Rabbinic literature and was instilled with the value of, at the very least, learning something. But, like I said before, at 17, I’m too close to myself to know what any of that really means. All I know is that see- ing myself now, parsing out the positives and negatives, approaching scary situations with their pros and cons in lists in my head — it feels like an entirely new era in my history. Esti Klein is a student at Frankel Jewish Academy in West Bloomfield. $7.5 Million in Security Grants to Michigan Faith-Based Institutions U.S. Sen. Gary Peters (MI), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, announced that $7.5 mil- lion in grant funding will be awarded to nonprofits and faith-based organizations across Michigan to help them protect their facilities against potential attacks. The funding is from the Department of Homeland Security’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP), which Peters has champi- oned, to help religious institu- tions, including synagogues, churches, mosques, gurd- waras and other nonprofits, strengthen their security in the face of rising threats and attacks. Peters helped lead the reau- thorization of this essential program last Congress and has helped secure substantial funding increases in recent years, including $305 million in a funding bill that was signed into law last year. “Houses of worship in Michigan and across the country continue to face threats and attacks that are inspired by hate based on religion, like antisemitism and Islamophobia,” Peters said. “While this funding will be critical to helping communities feel safer, I will continue pushing the feder- al government to do more to combat the continued threat of domestic terrorism, including white supremacist violence.”