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WEEK #1: August 5, 2022

When I was five, my parents let me know it was time to start going to Sunday School at Temple Israel. I will admit I was extremely skeptical about the prospect of having another day in school when I spent so much of my time there. Then my dad, Ron Scharff, made me an offer: if you agree to be a student at Sunday School then I will agree to go as a teacher. Five-year-old me, not yet a seasoned veteran in the art of deal-making, did not see any possible counter-offers and agreed. 

How fortunate that I did! Over the next 13 years of my life, I spent thousands of hours at TI doing everything I possibly could. I was a student at the Religious School from kindergarten through Confirmation and post-Confirmation classes. In middle school, when classes for my age group were in the afternoon but my father was teaching and my younger sister, Micah, was in class I worked as an assistant in the main office. Then I was hired as the music assistant and worked in that role until the end of high school. I also joined TIFTY the minute I could in seventh grade and continued until I graduated, holding leadership roles along the way and using my musical skills to songlead at both local and regional events. I was consecrated, became Bar Mitzvah, and Confirmed at TI. I feel deep gratitude to Temple Israel which offered my parents a welcoming and warm Jewish home in which I was able to grow into the Jew and the person that I am today.

I wanted to tell you, reader, all of this in order to place in context the rest of my story. It's safe to say I am both a TI and Reform Judaism lifer. It’s a point of great pride for me that everywhere I go I get to tell people, “yes, there are Jews in St. Louis,” and, “yeah, it's actually a very strong community.” That, alongside a lot of bold talk about my Cardinals’ fandom, of course. 

My journey since graduating Ladue High School has taken me quite far from Suburban St. Louis, MO. My first stop was Yale University, where I received a degree in history. In my first two years of studies I, admittedly, did not place any sort of Jewish involvement near the top of my list of priorities choosing instead to focus on baseball (where I played on the varsity team) and the myriad social opportunities that college offered. Most significantly, however, to my journey was my decision to study Modern Hebrew beginning in junior year. Suddenly I was offered tools to not just use this secret second language I used in Temple, but to express myself and to understand others in the language of our people. My Hebrew studies reinforced and expanded all that I had gained at TI and helped reshape and strengthen my Jewish identity in welcome and exciting ways. 

As I approached the end of my undergraduate studies, like most twenty-two-year-olds, I had no clue as to what I wanted to do with my life. What I did know was that I badly wanted to continue learning Hebrew and I knew that there was one place in the world I could definitely do so — Israel! I got in contact with Hillel at Yale and they were able to guide me in searching for meaningful opportunities the following year in Israel. I applied for and was accepted to a program called Masa Teaching Fellows, in which native English speakers were assigned to elementary schools in a number of Israeli cities to work as language enrichment teachers. While the program was wonderfully disorganized, as so much in Israeli society tends to be, that is not what stands out most to me from that year. 

In August of 2013, I got on a plane and took the ten-plus-hour flight for the very first time to Israel. I had signed up for a 10-month program in a place I had not visited, and other than the cheesy educational clips we watched in Hebrew class, knew very little about. I landed with other participants in my group in the late afternoon hours and we were taken by bus to a hotel in the hills surrounding Jerusalem. A whirlwind evening led to a few hours of very jet-lagged sleep and I found myself awake a bit before 5 am. I made my way outside to sit and read and wait for the morning program to begin. As I sat there, dawn began to creep over the horizon and the sun began illuminating my surroundings. As I took in what I knew to be a foreign view, the words of Psalm 121 filled my mind: esah einei el heharim - I lift my eyes to the mountain, from where will my help come, and suddenly the world around me felt very familiar. In a crystalizing moment, I realized that all I had learned at TI about our people, our tradition, and our faith ran like a current through the land beneath my feet. As so many Jews do when they arrive in Israel, I felt at home. 

This was the beginning of a now decade-long love story between me and Israel. It's a story I am excited to share with all of you, those who have a relationship with Israel, and those of you who are yet to discover yours. Over the next few weeks, I will write here primarily about Reform Judaism in Israel, but it was important to first introduce myself to you and talk about all that brought me to where I am today. I hope these entries will be the beginning of a dialogue between us.

With questions about me or about my journey to Israel, you are welcome to reach out to me at joshua.scharff@gmail.com.