End of Holiday Musings

The holidays have finally ended. Insert sigh of relief here. It's been a long, hard, and stressful season. Of course, I've felt this way every year since I started college and schools stopped giving me vacation every time a Jewish holiday rolled around. This year, however, was particularly difficult and forced me into thinking some thoughts about schooling that I never have before. 

Since I can remember I have been a fan of secular education, especially for college. To me, the idea of staying locked up in a Jewish bubble so that you don't have to deal with the outside world is a complete vinahafoch hu of what Judaism is supposed to be. As Norman Lamm said repeatedly in Torah U'Madda, Jews are not supposed to be insular and only be among ourselves. We're supposed to be an or lagoyim, and that entails being among the other nations. Aside from that, I always felt like going to YU and working for a Jewish organization was, in essence, giving up on something better for the sake of easiness. Paying $30,000 of tuition is a steep price to pay to get vacation on Succot.

This mentality served me just fine during college. There, I got to choose my schedule and could easily make my schedule so that I didn't miss too much during the holidays. Yes, on a few occasions it was impossible, but professors were generally understanding and according to university policy they were obligated to accommodate us. Was it annoying when all my friends at Stern and YU got off for basically the entire month? Yep. But I would continually pat myself on the back, knowing that I was living up to my ideals and taking the road less traveled.

Move on to my first year of grad school. All of a sudden I can't choose my classes. I have obligations in my lab. All of a sudden, the holidays mean missing out on major chunks of information. Even worse, it means continually telling me colleagues that they need to cover for me in various lab tasks. As the month wore on, I felt guiltier and guiltier leaving. Judaism was suddenly a burden, a terrible burden that I kept wishing I could throw off and get rid of. 

And now I wonder. Though I am extremely proud of the route I've chosen, I wonder if some of my friends really made very intelligent choices. Those that work for Jewish institutions don't have to deal with any of this. The month was an enjoyable one with time off for family and friends, and more importantly, time off to appreciate the holidays themselves. What I wouldn't give to have felt that appreciation this year rather than an impending sense of doom. 

Election '08

Like everyone else out there, I've been thinking a lot about the election.

The way I see it, I fall one of two ways on most issues. On many, I am definitely for Obama. These issues would include abortion, health care, and the economy. On a few, namely foreign policy, I'm in more of a bind.

Foreign policy is always a tricky issue in my mind. For one thing, there is so much intelligence that we know nothing about, that it's often hard to trust anything anyone says about how dangerous or not dangerous a particular person or country is. For another thing, I know nothing about being in an army, so for me to say that I have an opinion about when the troops should be withdrawn from Iraq would be naive. I honestly have no clue. I find a lot of what Obama says on the subject to sound quite sensible, but at the end of day he could be wrong and McCain could be right, and I wouldn't be incredibly surprised either way.

I do believe that Iran poses a huge threat, however, but that doesn't make my decision on that aspect any easier. How does one deal with such a huge threat? The rest of my family equates this situation with WWII, Ahmenidijad with Hitler, and any sort of diplomacy with the appeasement that allowed Hitler to get as far as he did in his plans.

I see this as sort of a "fear mentality," and while I think it is certainly a justified fear, I just don't think that I can let that sort of thing dictate my vote when the issues I AM certain about point me very clearly at Obama.