It Would Have Been Enough

During the Jewish celebration of Passover, we repeat the Hebrew word “dayenu,” which translates to “It would have been enough.” It reinforces that any one of the Passover miracles would have been enough for the Jewish people and yet they were provided multiple miracles, inspiring generations of gratitude. 

I was born in 1980. 

In 1981, I received my Jewish name, Leah, in honor of my late grandfather Louis. Four years later, my formal Jewish education began at Temple Israel in Canton, Ohio, with a consecration ceremony on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. On May 15, 1993, I became a bat mitzvah. In 1996, my friends and I — the same with whom I started religious school — celebrated our confirmation. 

In 2006, I stood next to my mother and recited the Mourner’s Kaddish at my grandmother’s funeral. In 2011, I recited it again at my mother’s funeral and sat shiva in her home.

I joined and left synagogues as life moved me from my hometown to a college town, then through new-to-me midwestern cities. I baked challah and fried latkes; I introduced my Catholic husband to the delicacy of matzah pizza. I taught the kids in my life how to play dreidel. I lit candles in my home for Hanukkah, for Shabbat, for yahrzeits. There have been more candles in my Jewish story than I can count, light and warmth and joy and grief always at my fingertips.

Dayenu. It would have been enough. 

And for a long time, that life built around Jewish values and traditions felt like enough. Until it wasn’t. 

In September, my Jewishness was critiqued — challenged, really, during a controversy at my local library. A meeting room was booked for an event hosted by an anti-Zionist Jewish library patron, which some in the community viewed as antisemitic. A local Zionist Jewish activist group publicly called for the booking to be canceled, citing safety and identity concerns. Two opposing Jewish narratives were held up and examined.

My perspective — as the Jewish president of the library’s board of trustees  — was absent from the public discourse. Library board trustee, an elected role where I live, represents the community’s needs and interests to library leadership to guide decision making, policy setting and planning. The oath taken by trustees in Illinois requires the trustee to uphold the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Illinois. Trustees also serve as advocates of the library within the community. The Chicago suburb where I live and serve has a vibrant, active Jewish community, which was part of the reason we moved here in 2018.

To some extent, my narrative was omitted because I am only one person on a seven-member board that acts as an entity. I suspect that my erasure is also, at least in part, because I “pass,” as older generations of Jews might say. My last name and appearance don’t immediately read as Jewish. Even in person, it’s easy to overlook the gold Star of David pendant I wear almost daily. There is privilege in passing. There is pain, too. 

In the flood of almost 10,000 emails I received over the course of two weeks, most of them criticizing the room booking, many people assumed that I was not Jewish. Some went further, suggesting I had never met or talked to a Jewish person. Local leaders made assumptions about my identity and appropriated the moment. Despite not being Jewish themselves, they claimed to speak for how Jewish members of our community felt — ignoring that Judaism values pluralism, recognition that different perspectives and practices are valid. They overlooked that I, too, was Jewish. That I, too, was hurting. That I was trying to lead the library, a beloved institution of our community, through a painful and deeply personal storm. I was insulted and microaggressed behind closed doors and in public forums. 

While my community was thrown into a crisis of Constitution, religion and intellectual freedom, I found myself in a crisis of identity, belonging and self. 

In the darkest moments of the six-month controversy, I wanted to give up. I felt myself unraveling, my edges becoming frayed. My sense of self — of service, of leadership, of community — is deeply rooted in my Jewish identity. But with an inbox full of strangers and neighbors shouting that I wasn’t who I believed myself to be, I no longer felt sure. I told my therapist about it, sharing that depression was taking hold. She asked me the most important question I didn’t want to answer: What’s your breaking point? When will you walk away from what is breaking you? 

Dayenu. It would have been enough. 

I could have walked away. I could have stepped back from my leadership role or resigned from the board. Instead, I increased the frequency of therapy appointments. I asked for help and support from friends. I called on a rabbi to ask about being the “wrong kind of Jew.” I fumbled through the discussion, asking impossible questions: Where does the Jew who upholds the value of intellectual freedom belong in a Jewish community harmed by the right to free speech? 

She reminded me that it is inherently Jewish to ask hard questions. To wrestle. To challenge. I wasn’t betraying my faith — I was living it. While my perspective remains the least interesting to people who talk about what happened at my library and in my community, I see it as a parallel for the story of Passover. 

I moved through my own Egypt, my faith firming in crisis.

There is no singular, correct way to be Jewish. The pluralism of our religion and culture is part of its beauty. Judaism is contradiction and conflict: questioning and tradition, debate and devotion, light and darkness. It is complex, sorrowful, joyful, imperfect. It is not measured by visibility or by being a ‘correct’ kind of Jew. It is who we are, where we seek peace, and how we move through adversity.