Building a Bayit: Holding the Particular and Personal with the Universal and Communal
STUDENT VOICE
Lilah Peck
Lilah Peck is a sophomore at UCLA, where she is studying Theatre and Professional Writing. She was a madricha in the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Teen Fellowship Program in 2023-2024.
Courtesy of UCLA Bayit
When I chose to live at the UCLA Bayit, a Jewish co-op that houses nineteen Jewish students of various religious backgrounds and different nationalities, I didn’t entirely know what to expect. I knew there would be two kitchen sinks, one large dining table, and eighteen other personalities committed to creating a pluralist Jewish home. I hoped there would be late-night schmoozing and friends to walk with me to Hillel on Shabbat. I never could have anticipated how central and significant this Jewish home would ultimately become to me. In this time of war, we have held our fear and grief separately and together. We know that our experiences and our views, like our Jewish practices, are perhaps just as distinct as they are shared. My Bayit community, with our singing zemirot by the backyard fire, our spontaneous sufganiyot-making one night of Channukah, and our Kabbalat Shabbat harmonizing, has brought me tremendous comfort and joy, but loving and learning from this shared community has also pushed me to examine what it means to have a core identity, especially when that identity contains contradictory elements.
A core identity, by my definition, is shaped by commitments that are central to your life. These commitments might be affirmed by actions or expressed as ideologies. A person can have multiple core commitments, and there may be conflict within or between them. They might include things you have actively chosen or things you’ve inherited through family or culture. Either way, these commitments are a central part of who you are. When you have multiple core commitments, you might have conflict within your sense of self, but these commitments nonetheless remain essential.
For years, and most significantly since spending my gap year in seminary, I have had a clear sense of my many core commitments. Halakhah, Jewish law, is one: it is central to my life, even though I struggle with it. Most of the time I’m not entirely sure how to define my relationship with halakhah or what I might want this relationship to be in the future. But this dissonance and uncertainty does not negate its significance and primacy in my life and identity. Being a theatre-maker and artist is a core commitment for me as well. Campus performances and rehearsals frequently happen on Shabbat, and I am often unable to participate because of my commitment to halakhah. I try to reconcile these dueling components of my identity by finding ways to honor my values of creating art and taking a day to rest from all creation. When I neglect one of these cores, I don’t feel fully myself. I must find ways to embrace both.
My love and hope for the land of Israel is another one of my core commitments. This commitment was cultivated through my time living in Jerusalem, my relationship with my family living there, and my inherited sense of connection with it as a Jewish spiritual center. This core is also continuously and excruciatingly challenged: by governments that don’t align with my values, by components of Israeli militarism that feel far from my love for the land of Israel, and by campus protests that force me to consider how close or far we are from creating peace. Over the past few years, I’ve struggled with how to hold something so foundational that is simultaneously so uncomfortable. What does it mean to orient myself around something that is so fundamentally complex?
When I moved into the Bayit, I realized that my core commitments must also contend with the new community I found there. Do I care if someone cooks food without a hekhsher in our kitchen? How do I feel about the Bayit hosting a party for Yom Haatzmaut? Answering these questions meant considering, and perhaps reconsidering, my own boundaries and priorities. Particularly after the Israel-Hamas war began, I started asking myself: how can I understand my ideas in relationship with the Bayit community if I don’t have complete clarity in my own convictions? Moreover, how can I expect this community to represent me, and how can I represent it, when balancing my core commitments is a matter of constant deliberation?
I often eat Shabbat dinner at Chabad, where I have a few ways of introducing myself. The first— “Hi, I am Lilah Peck” —is the most particular. It prioritizes my individuality over my relationship with the Bayit and what it stands for. It allows me to express my uniqueness but neglects my community, its influence on me, and its importance to me. The second, —“Hi, I am Lilah Peck the Bayitnik” —defines me as part of a larger group. I give up my individuality and allow my community to define me, or, at the very least, to represent me.
As campus politics around Israel roared in the background this past year, the stakes of how to introduce myself felt particularly high. I felt compelled to stand with my Jewish community, but I did not want to neglect the nuances of my own opinions. My third option— “Hi, I am Lilah Peck, and I live at the Bayit” —is choosing both the particular and the collective. This, to me, is the most compelling, but it is also the most difficult.
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Choosing both necessitates an understanding of myself and, more challengingly, a reconciliation of the distinctions between me and my community’s pluralism, which contains beliefs beyond my own. I could find frustration with the distinctions between my community and me. I could think, “I’m not represented here. The Bayit, my home, doesn’t represent me.” Instead, I view the diversity of my community with more optimism: I live in a space that holds complexity, and I am invited and encouraged to bring my own distinct self to that complexity. I am an advocate for my personal opinions in this melting pot. I am my own representative. Sometimes, perhaps even frequently, someone makes a statement or expresses an opinion at the dining table that I don’t agree with; I can feel upset, frustrated by not being unified with my other Bayitniks, and maybe even question whether my misalignment with this individual reflects a greater misalignment between me and the Bayit. I can think about leaving. Or I can feel inspired to articulate my own ideas, compelled to explore where my ideas diverge from theirs, and encouraged to find or make, if not a shared understanding, at least a shared sense that being in community is the higher priority.
When I told my non-Jewish friends that I had chosen to live at the Jewish co-op instead of in the campus dorms, they marveled not only at my choice to cook for myself and live with older students but also at my decision to separate myself from my peers so distinctly. I had chosen the particular, and it surprised them. Within the grander world of UCLA, the Bayit is a particular experience, a Jewish one in contrast to a universal, secular one. While I was sad to create distance from many of my non-Jewish friends, I was prepared to embrace this experience.
Over the last months, I realized that while the Bayit represents particularism to the world outside of it, within its walls it embraces a certain sort of universalism. By choosing to live in the Bayit, all nineteen of us have opted to put our shared commitment to Judaism over our individual preferences for a certain way of practicing Judaism. By living here, we highlight what makes us different from the outside world, and we create a community around the things we share. This relationship is meaningful, but it is not without its challenges. Our house meetings are not without disputes. Can we put a motion-sensing light outside the front door even if it will illuminate on Shabbat, creating a halakhic challenge for our shomer Shabbat Bayitniks? We want to reduce our use of disposable utensils, but we need these utensils for Bayitniks who bring in non-kosher food and can’t eat it with our kosher utensils. How do we synthesize our environmental and pluralist values? Finding answers that honor everyone is not easy, but we seek unity through conversation. We put understanding over convenience, especially recently, as these conversations have become even more complex.
An Israeli flag hangs above our dining table—its presence predates almost all of the current Bayitniks. After October 7, we discussed if it was appropriate to have this flag in our shared, public space. One Bayitnik sees the flag as a religious emblem, not a political symbol, while another feels uncomfortable inviting friends over because of its political implications. One Bayitnik feels the flag signals that here they can speak openly about their support for Israel, that this is a space where “Zionist” is a welcome word, which, as campus becomes increasingly hostile, is unlike many other UCLA spaces. However, other Bayitniks feel uncomfortable eating at the dining table beneath the flag. One Bayitnik mentioned our kashrut policy, which is that we must adhere to the kashrut standards of the most observant Bayitnik. Even if only one person is far stricter than the others, to ensure everyone feels comfortable and included, their practices are our standard. If there is only one Bayitnik who feels there should not be a flag in our common space, their comfort should take precedence. With this, we concluded that the decision should not be about us as individuals, or each of our particular feelings about the flag and what it represents, but how we as a Bayit can best maintain our commitment to pluralism. We put time and energy into these conversations, because this community, built on a spirit of shared respect and accommodation, is our highest priority.
The Bayit is a model for pluralism and tolerance, not only in a co-op, but in any Jewish community, and even in a college.
In our model, the symbiosis of personal and communal commitments is essential. Allowing ourselves and our communities to hold nuance is the only way we can survive. In the same way that I cannot manifest all of my values at one time, my community, my Bayit, cannot manifest all of its collective values at one time. I can’t ask my community to be less complex than I am—it includes nineteen times as much complexity!
While embracing particularism on a college campus can feel dangerous, or at the very least stifling, who else if not Jewish college students (especially those who are observant) can understand the necessity of holding the particular with the universal? There is inherent tension in being a religiously observant college student: I am here to learn and explore, but I have unequivocal limitations on that exploration. I am here to challenge my beliefs and engage with ideas different from my own, but not to question my central priorities. As an observant college student, I am predisposed to internal conflict: I want to befriend many different types of people! But I don’t want to eat in their dining hall… I want academic excellence! But I can’t go to the extra credit event on Saturday… Many of us are familiar with this rhythm. We know what this tension feels like. We have felt the sharp edges of our particularity, our Jewishness, holding us back from being entirely present within the universal campus community.
Inversely, Jews on college campuses can benefit from a universal, shared sense of Jewishness, but we also find it challenging to reconcile the differences within our highly polarized and incessantly divided Jewish communities. We must ask ourselves: how do we hold our core commitments even when they are in conflict? How do we understand our own nuances and the nuances and dissonance within our communities?
While these tensions rise, we need our universal Jewish community more, but it is even more challenging to find the reconciliation we need within it. This year, with a war in front of us and a community beside us, we feel how keenly we need to maintain both the particular and the universal. I certainly do. Now might be the scariest time to show our vulnerability, to say “I feel this way even though I feel conflicted,” but this bravery, this vulnerability, is our only way toward establishing tolerance and establishing, for everyone, a true bayit.
