For many of us, it\u2019s the beginning of the year. Not the year that starts with Rosh Hashanah. I mean, the academic year. If you\u2019re a student, a student\u2019s parent or a teacher, professor or other education professional, the beginning of September can mean only one thing. It\u2019s time to get back to the grind.<\/p>\n
This is both exciting and a nerve-racking time. You want people to like you and appreciate your skills, talents and special gifts. You want to feel welcome and make others feel welcome, too. Seeking approval is an important part of life. We all do it, right?<\/p>\n
As overachievers, my husband and I try to start early. He mentioned that some new colleagues were moving in down the street at the beginning of August. They were moving from another country, so we should try to help, we figured. The wait for one\u2019s belongings to arrive and pass through customs can be awhile. (For us, it took 10 days.)<\/p>\n
My husband was out of town when they arrived, so I sprang into action. We loaned them a picnic basket filled with dishes, silverware and cups, some patio chairs and, when they asked, even a broom and dustpan.<\/p>\n
A few days later, my husband home, we enjoyed a Saturday together out in the sunshine. When we checked our email again, we found that our new neighbour had asked us to loan more items. We apologized, but explained we weren\u2019t usually online on Saturdays. \u201cOh!\u201d she replied, \u201cDo you do a tech Sabbath?\u201d I had to look this up, but this term was coined in 2010 by Tiffany Shlain, an internet pioneer, and her husband, Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor. It is based loosely on the notion of unplugging from technology on a traditional Sabbath.<\/p>\n
I was flummoxed. There seemed to be no nice way to say, \u201cUh, no, I do real Shabbat.\u201d So, I thought, OK, I will try to explain. I said something like: \u201cIn the safety of Canadian diversity, we observe real Shabbat, not just \u2018tech Shabbat.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are Jewish and try to take the day off from Friday night to Saturday night. So, we have a big family dinner on Friday nights, we go to synagogue on Saturdays many weeks and we spend the day together, sometimes with friends. However, if you need to reach us, you can always call the landline or walk over and knock on the door. We use the phone when necessary, drive, turn on lights, etc. We are not very strict in our observance; sometimes, we spend the day as a family outside, at a farm or doing an outing together. We just try to rest and not to work.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe hope your belongings will arrive soon!\u201d<\/p>\n
Her response? I kid you not \u2013 she said, \u201cThanks for sharing.\u201d<\/p>\n
I felt completely uncomfortable and embarrassed. This was from a new neighbour, someone to whom we offered the loan of various items and tried to welcome. I left it there, I had nothing else to say. My partner was somewhat more hopeful, that perhaps they were just clueless. He tried to explain how hard it is sometimes to be a minority in this way.<\/p>\n
In the end, I realized that this fit right into the \u201cnew school year, new school experience.\u201d Many of us are seeking approval from peers, colleagues, family members and friends. We jostle and jockey for position. We want others to admire us or, at the least, accept who we are. Then, in an effort to bond or make connections we maybe overshare with people who couldn\u2019t care less.<\/p>\n
At the start of the new school year, I\u2019m often keen to make new connections, but it would have been altogether possible for me to say nothing about who we were or why we weren\u2019t online on Saturdays. We might even have saved ourselves the trouble by not offering to loan things in the first place. However, in the interest of being welcoming to strangers and reaching out to make friends, I ended up feeling embarrassed and self-conscious rather than proud. I didn\u2019t like it.<\/p>\n
Before I moved to Canada, I lived in the southern United States in a place where I had good reason to feel wary about revealing too much about my religious life. We knew it could be an issue; it wasn\u2019t an especially tolerant place.<\/p>\n
Based on recent news events \u2013 a swastika painted on a car in a Winnipeg neighbourhood, an election scheduled for Shemini Atzeret \u2013 I have to conclude that maybe it\u2019s time to be more careful here.<\/p>\n
Sadly, for the first time in 10 years in Canada, I\u2019m wondering if I would have been better off to keep my Jewish practice to myself, and reveal less. Maybe if I were hip, I\u2019d be considering a tech Sabbath, but no. I\u2019m connected to something that\u2019s perhaps less popular, but a lot deeper. Sometimes, sharing this is important, even if it isn\u2019t always the cool answer.<\/p>\n
Joanne Seiff<\/strong> has written regularly for CBC Manitoba and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including <\/em>From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. See more about her at joanneseiff.blogspot.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For many of us, it\u2019s the beginning of the year. Not the year that starts with Rosh Hashanah. I mean, the academic year. If you\u2019re a student, a student\u2019s parent or a teacher, professor or other education professional, the beginning of September can mean only one thing. It\u2019s time to get back to the grind. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[801,3157,218,8302],"class_list":["post-33193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-op-ed","tag-antisemitism","tag-canada","tag-judaism","tag-lifestyle"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}