It is a strange ache to yearn for what you were told never belonged to you. Stranger still to be told that remembering is betrayal.

We live in a time that craves clarity, demands sides. Binaries flourish. Allegiances harden, cancel culture is real. One must be for or against, in or out, righteous or villainous. But I have come to believe that the deepest work of being human is not found in choosing a side but in cultivating the stamina to dwell in contradiction. To hold many truths without collapsing them into one.

As Francis Weller writes, “The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and be stretched large by them.” This stretching requires vulnerability. It is, as he says, a skill. One we must practice, especially in times of chaos and rupture.

My mother, of Norwegian descent, converted to Orthodox Judaism before meeting my father. They fell in love at the University of Minnesota and eventually found their way into the Chabad community, where I was raised. I grew up at the intersection of customs, between languages, between kitchens. My Dodas’ homes were dense with scent - cumin, rosewater, saffron and adorned wall-to-wall in rugs. Our home was more spare, with art that spoke of diasporic longing. Chagall, floating figures, angels and fiddlers. My mother made cream soups, salmon with squash, sloppy joes, and “noodles, sauce and cheese” (a favorite among me and my siblings - anelli, or circle pasta, with Hunts tomato sauce and Cholov Yisroel mozzarella shipped from Crown Heights). 

For a long time, I saw myself as a traveler between worlds. I wore my adaptability like armor belonging nowhere, accountable to no one. But beneath that identity was a craving to be rooted, to be seen, and to be claimed.