For the last six months, I have been studying intensively for the LSAT, or the Law School Admission Test. Between logic classes, practice exams and nightly research on what fields other than law in which a philosophy major can find a career, I found refuge where I had always found it: Cleveland sports. My family is from Cleveland. Whenever I would go there, my uncle and I would go to various sporting events. Some of my most cherished memories include watching the Cleveland Indians lose, watching the Cavaliers lose and watching the Browns lose.
My LSAT was supposed to be June 6. Due to a tropical storm that never hit, the exam was canceled halfway. We had to come back two weeks later to retake it. The night before, the Cavaliers had lost their second championship game to the Golden State Warriors.
On the sixth, after driving through the drizzle from the exam location to my friend’s house where I was staying, I did what any sensible Cleveland sports fan and college-aged test taker, who experimented with six months of sobriety in order to study for arguably the most important test of his life, would do: get drunk and sleep on someone’s floor. In my drunken stupor, I did something I had never done before: I made a deal with God.
I am a skeptic. I have “struggled” with my family’s Judaism from the start (I was 8 days old when they removed my foreskin). If the Cleveland Cavaliers win the NBA Championship, and if I score well on the LSAT, I will go to a Friday night Shabbat service.
Two games passed, and the Cavs had won one game and lost another, resulting in a 3-1 situation. To recover and win, the nation’s expert basketball analysts agreed, would be nothing short of a miracle. It seems my skepticism was justified, and God remains a manifestation of our strange desire to find meaning in a universe that is clearly devoid of it. Or God had simply neglected my prayer the same way He neglects the prayers of (insert tragedy here). One of The Onion’s greatest pieces is titled, “God Answers Prayers Of Paralyzed Little Boy. ‘No,’ Says God.”
Time passes. Cleveland shocked the world. More time passes. I was pleasantly surprised with my LSAT performance.
Last Friday I sat uncomfortably in a synagogue for the first time in more than eight years. The rabbi approached me after the service. I opened up and told him my relationship with Judaism (or lack thereof), my personal political take on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (I’m a minority in the Jewish community) and my, more or less, abandonment of the faith after my bar mitzvah.
The rabbi, politely trying to mask his disappointment, told me I was always welcome at “our” synagogue for a meal, a service, a chat — you name it. His hospitality was as overwhelming as it was undeserved. Some fellow Jews have called me a “traitor” or a “self-hating Jew.” Non-Jews have called me a “kike” or a “Heeb.” None of those had ever struck me the way this rabbi’s kindness had.
On July 4, the political debate between my friends and me endured as it always has. Talks of terrorism, xenophobia, self-defense and religious extremism were discussed ad nauseum. There was an eerie patriotic irony as they talked of things they hate (liberals, conservatives, Trump, Hillary) around things they love (hot dogs, pool toys, beer).
That rabbi and I disagree on every conceivable facet of existence. On topics of religion, politics, lifestyle, morality, etc. that rabbi and I will never find common ground. But, for a brief moment, something made me forget all of that. Something reminded me that, despite our fundamental differences, we are all struggling together, each and every one of us: Jew, Muslim, Democrat and Republican alike. In this struggle, we find differences in attempts of solvency. Sometimes these differences are vastly divisive.
They don’t have to be.
Zachary Lee is a UF philosophy senior. His column appears on Tuesdays.
