Preamble:
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“You need to focus on school. The first year of professional school is the most important.”
So says my father, and most everyone else who has either been through a tough program or knows someone else who has.
This ignores our reality—that when we enter law school, joining the piles of readings and never-ending renegotiation of our goals and expectations is the constant hum of the rest of our lives. Somehow it doesn’t conveniently pause when we walk into Gowlings. There are still relationships, parents, finances, babies, non-law school friends, everything. The background noise.
For me it is my conversion. I am currently in the process of converting to Judaism, which for me has been a decision long in the making. However, the tricky part is that I did not officially begin the process until shortly beginning 1L. Two of the most important decisions of my life thus far—diving into both law school as well as a major identity shift—have been occurring simultaneously, so that when I develop as a law student I am in parallel development as a Jew. Imagine: my first meeting with my sponsoring rabbi the same week as the grade release, the stress of midterms coupled with the searing pain of knowing my last romantic relationship was ending because there was no way he could go where I was going.
All together this has been my constant background noise. In the midst of 1L I have been researching denominations, reading Torah on the subway, running to a Judaica shop on Eglinton to buy a menorah in the middle of finals, having to break it to the people I’m dating that next year I’ll be keeping strict kosher and observing Shabbat, struggling to start Hebrew when every language I know uses the Roman alphabet. Somehow, I’ve been managing to do all this in between classes, interviews, and the long march of Legal Process assignments. But at the same time, I know that it can’t wait, and I would not want to—it was hard enough to push off the official process until September, when I can actually take the mandatory course. Mixed in is the question, often from strangers, of why, why, why? Why this? Or perhaps even more perplexing, why now?
It is hard to explain why I let something as intense as this take over at this pivotal moment in my academic and professional career. It is something I am only just beginning to piece together for myself. It includes both the long terrible stretch of Birkenau that seeps and weeps and the blaze of the Western Wall on Shabbat as the sun sets, a family mythology and an unstoppable need for the divine. The feeling I simply cannot push off anymore something I’ve known for years. I can count on one hand the number of people who know the story in full and, honestly, I’d rather it stayed that way than repeat it to someone just questioning me out of idle curiosity or bewilderment. Someone recently said he didn’t need to hear the whole thing, that it didn’t really matter seeing as we’d only just met. I didn’t realize until later what a relief that was.
There will always be the stressful parts, one prominent example being the weekly conversion class and mandatory Shabbat observance I’ll be keeping during the OCIs (who wants to join me? I kid). But these things are so, so minuscule compared to the giant waves of crashing happiness that my nascent Jewishness brings me every day or the love I feel from my Jewish and non-Jewish friends who are there to take me through this. I would not change my 1L for anything.
I hope you are not ignoring your background noise.