For the entire second half of high school, I would recite the Shema before bed just about every single night without fail. It wasn’t until the fall of my freshman year that this routine started to dwindle, and now it’s become a rare occasion for me to find myself saying the lines before bed. This has never been purposeful; I’ve just simply grown out of the habit, and I hardly think about it before bed anymore. Perhaps I’ve grown too tired, and all that I can think about once I hit the sack is actually sleeping. But I’ve noticed a trend outside of just my routine, in that the prominence of my Jewish heritage has been slightly hindered since I began college.

There are plenty of Jewish opportunities at Michigan. At a school that boasts one of the largest Jewish populations of any public university, it’s not exactly difficult to maintain a Jewish lifestyle in Ann Arbor. However my social sphere has changed drastically from high school. Now, the majority of my friends aren’t Jewish, whereas in high school nearly all of my friends were. Every once in awhile I’ll notice myself making a joke using a word in Yiddish, or referencing a site that I saw in Israel, and nobody in my audience understands. It’s almost come as a slow but steady culture shock.

I think it’s fairly common for people my age to go through phases when it comes to religion. In the early years of high school, I still didn’t see much of a point in Judaism. Now, after having found the point, I feel myself starting to drift a little bit from the importance of said point.

Last week at the Maccabi games, my family hosted three hockey players from Toronto. After they won their gold medal game, we were waiting outside in the lobby for them to come out of the locker room. I was wearing a Zeta shirt. I made eye contact with a woman across the room, and smiled, and she approached me. She asked where I was a Zeta, and she told me that she was also a Zeta at the University of Illinois. Zeta Tau Alpha is one of the least Jewish greek organizations nationally, in fact it is a sorority founded primarily on Christian values. Meeting another Zeta at the Jewish teen olympics definitely made my heart swell, and I’ve been thinking about something since: just because you are immersed in a different life than you’re used to at a given moment, doesn’t mean you cannot still exist in the same way that you have been prior—I am looking forward to rededicating my nighttime routine this upcoming year.