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.” 

