A Heart of Many Rooms: Cultivating Jewish Identities
Rabbi Sarah Pollack is the community engagement rabbi at the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life at Columbia/Barnard Hillel. In thinking about the new academic year, Reb Sarah offers thoughts on discovering and staying connected to your Jewish identity throughout your college journey.
The first time you step onto a college campus, you cross a threshold. You leave behind one way of life and enter another, a new and exciting space where you’ll learn how to do hard things. For Jewish students, this transition can be deeply connected to Jewish identity, which is so often about living between different worlds. For me, that meant moving from a Judaism I had inherited to one I discovered for myself.
I remember standing in the middle of my college quad during orientation week, clutching a folded campus map and feeling utterly lost. Not geographically — though I definitely was that too — but spiritually. For the first time in my life, nobody was going to drive me to Hebrew school. Nobody was going to set the table with the good china and light the Shabbat candles. The Judaism I had inherited like a family heirloom suddenly felt heavy in my hands, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to hold it on my own.
I realized I didn’t have language to articulate my own Jewish identity. That uncertainty, though, became my laboratory. It pushed me to investigate, to question, and to figure out what Judaism meant for me, not for anyone else. This disorientation, I’ve come to understand, is exactly where the work begins.
Now, as the community engagement rabbi at Columbia/Barnard Hillel, I tell students that college is a laboratory for living. It’s a place to try things on, be curious, and take risks. Discomfort is how we grow, and we often learn the most about ourselves in community, whether that community affirms who we are or challenges us.
This idea of holding multiple truths at once is captured beautifully in a Jewish text, Tosefta Sotah 7:7, which talks about the ongoing debates between the rabbis Hillel and Shammai. It says, “Make for yourself a heart of many rooms, and bring into it the words of the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel.” For me, this means cultivating a heart that can hold many different truths, like those of Hillel and Shammai, and many different communities.
Sometimes I need to be in a room with my people, those who affirm me and make me feel safe. Other times, I need to be in a room with people who are different, where I feel stretched and challenged. And still other times, I need to be in my own room, tending to myself so I can return to those rooms of community stronger and more centered. A heart of many rooms doesn’t mean everyone sits together all the time; it means having the courage and the wisdom to know which room you need and when.
A useful way to think about navigating these different rooms is the Orangetheory Fitness metaphor. In a workout, the green zone is rest, the red zone is maxed-out exhaustion, but the sweet spot is the orange zone, where your heart is working hard and you’re still growing.
We can apply this same idea to our Jewish identities. Sometimes we need to be in the green zone, surrounded by friends or a Jewish community that restores and affirms us. Sometimes we push ourselves into the orange zone, engaging with new ideas, exploring different perspectives, and questioning our assumptions. This is where productive growth happens. But if we end up in the red zone — feeling attacked, unsafe, or overwhelmed — that’s not a space for productive growth. That’s when it’s okay to step back into a room that offers you rest and safety.
When we are in the orange zone of exploration, it’s not about reinventing ourselves entirely. It’s about taking what we already love and integrating it into our Jewish life. If you’re a Swiftie, bring that passion into a Jewish space, like my colleague who runs a “Taylor or Torah?” trivia night. If you’re an athlete, invite your friends from the gym to Shabbat dinner. Start with what’s familiar and slowly elevate it.
Of course, not every moment will be affirming, not every room is worth entering. There’s a difference between productive discomfort and harm, between being challenged and being diminished. The wisdom isn’t in staying in every space that stretches you—it’s in learning to tell the difference between spaces that invite your growth and spaces that demand your shrinking.
College students code-switch between communities with a fluency that speaks to the many identities they hold. They’re building hearts of many rooms—a multitude of spaces complex enough to hold their complexity without demanding abandonment. At the root of all this is the very essence of being Jewish.
The first reference we have to being Jewish is when Abraham is called ha-Ivri – Abraham the Hebrew. Another way to translate ha-Ivri is Abraham the boundary crosser, the traverser. To be Jewish is to live in transition, to straddle multiple spaces, to carry multiplicity.
The goal isn’t to have everything figured out by graduation. The goal is to leave college with a vocabulary for your own becoming, with practices that sustain you, with communities that know your name. The goal is to build a life spacious enough to hold all the rooms your heart needs—the ones that affirm you, the ones that challenge you, and the ones where you can simply be quiet with yourself and listen.
Because in the end, this is what Judaism has always asked of us: not to choose between our contradictions, but to make them holy. Not to resolve the tension between who we were and who we’re becoming, but to find God in that space of transformation.
The laboratory never really closes. We just get better at working in it. The finish line isn’t that you figure it all out. The finish line is getting to a place where you can live your identity, talk about it, and find real joy in it.