Yair Assayag

He/him

"Growing up, Judaism was like the air that I breathed. Until third grade, I attended a Yeshiva school where we all learned Hebrew. I have a languagebased learning disability that made learning Hebrew just insane, and it was always hard to fit in. Ultimately, that's part of the reason I homeschooled for a year.

That year of homeschooling was my first chance to step outside of the Jewish community and form my own. That year was also the summer I started at Eden Village, a Jewish summer camp. Camp fostered a culture of kindness, not just in an abstract way, but a culture of wanting to advocate for the environment and goodness. Eden Village also allowed me to discover that, for me, Judaism is a relationship with nature.

Being in nature is one of the places where I've consistently found God. As a child, I remember my mother saying I would scream constantly, except when I went outside. And I'm just connecting these dots now, but I think you can reach out and find God when you're in nature. So, at least for me, that's always where I find God. And I think that being removed from nature is one of the things that I've always found hard in the conventional Jewish community.

Sometimes, it's also hard to be in the Jewish community. A small portion of the Jewish community will always be against people being who they are if it doesn't fit with tradition or the mold of how our people have survived for so long. And it's sad because it means that so many people will lose much of that truly beautiful learning and tradition. Being in that position hurts. I felt that pain when I had to leave my school, but I believe you can still find and create beauty by taking what you know - whatever that may be - and doing it strongly. That's what matters. That's why I believe the sake of joy is an act of resistance. I feel like we always think that kindness and joy come in peacetime, but they are almost meaningless in peacetime. I mean, it's never meaningless. But when it's easy, it's easy, and when it's hard, even the smallest acts make a significant impact. So I believe good always exists but must be created and fought for."