Authentic Self and the Assimilated Jew, Part 2: A Tale of Three More Workplaces

Job #3

Job #3 was even more accommodating of Shabbat observance. Even pre-COVID, Job #3 had a stated policy that everyone was allowed to work one day a week from home. I did tell my boss and my direct report (neither of whom were Jewish, but both of whom had met other observant Jews before) about keeping Shabbat, but it was basically unnecessary because I just worked from home on Fridays and working after Shabbat on a Friday would never be expected anyway.

I still dressed very modestly, but Boss and Direct Report were the kind of men who didn’t notice how I dressed anyway. I still ate at non-kosher restaurants, but it turned out that Boss and Direct Report both really liked a kosher restaurant near the office, so for team birthday/holiday lunches, we went to the kosher restaurant.

The Irony

Strangely, I felt less inclined to talk openly about my Jewish observance at Job #3. Maybe because Job #3 was so accommodating it seemed unnecessary. Maybe because the people I worked with were people who just did not seem to care in my life outside work. Don’t get me wrong – they weren’t callous people or anything. They just didn’t seem to have much interest in socializing about things unrelated to work. Maybe I realized that no one found weekends consisting of nothing but Shabbat observance and Torah reading to be particularly interesting.

This was my weekend, and no one seemed interested in hearing about it. Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Maybe because I was getting older and noticing that when I started talking about religious observance outside work, people would ask if I had kids, and then look confused when I said I didn’t. Not that one can’t be religious, not-that-young, and not have kids. But I kept getting the impression that whoever I was talking to was looking at me like I was defective.

While I was at Job #3, “being your authentic self at work” became more of a stated goal. I can’t remember if it came up in a management context (Job #3 had all of us take the Gallup Clifton Strengths assessment and attend a bunch of leadership classes about maximizing your individual strengths at work), a DE&I context (I worked at Job #3 when DE&I issues in the workplace started getting a lot more attention) or something else entirely. But it had the odd effect of me not wanting to be my authentic self to work, and instead, to share less about myself.

The Job Interview

While at Job #3, an industry colleague recommended me for an interview at their company. One of the people I interviewed with was head of a department with whom I would work cross-functionally. I asked my interviewer a question about how our teams could best work together.

Interviewer: I’m really bothered when another team lead says, ‘Oh, my team can’t stay after 5 PM on Friday to work on this.’ I get the need for work-life balance and I get that it’s the weekend. But that means that my team will need to work late to get this work completed. What about my team’s weekend? How come my team’s weekend isn’t equally important?

I nodded along in sympathy and understanding, although technically, I was doing this myself for my own Shabbat observance.

But Interviewer had a point. Every Shabbat-observant person I knew thought it was no problem to have their non-Jewish coworkers or bosses cover for them for Shabbat. And yes, sometimes those Shomer Shabbat colleagues would cover for their non-Jewish coworkers other times, but I didn’t work in a job where coverage on Sundays or Christmas would ever be expected, so this was something of a false equivalency. And yes, in a perfect world, non-Jewish coworkers would never incur additional work as a result of having observant Jewish coworkers. But let’s be honest – we don’t live in a perfect world.

I wouldn’t call Interviewer’s comment the turning point that forever changed my opinion on workplace accommodations for Shabbat. But it was a comment that stuck with me and made me think. Photo by Yosep Surahman on Unsplash

I didn’t get the job; the company restructured and decided they didn’t need the role that I was interviewing for anymore.

Job #4

Sometime later, I got Job #4 instead. When I joined Job #4, it was fully remote. Job #4 was into wellness and work-life balance, and long hours/working outside normal hours was not a normal part of the culture. I joined in May and, realizing that I might not need to disclose Shabbat observance any time soon (if at all), decided not to. I was senior enough and the workload and work culture were such that I could just block my calendar when I needed to on Fridays.

Job #4 was super-into the whole “authentic self at work” thing. And again, I felt compelled in the opposite direction not to share about myself. There were a couple of secular Jews at Job #4; I let them believe that I was equally secular.

By this point, I wasn’t 100% keeping Shabbat in anymore anyway. There were a couple instances where I had to work after Shabbat had started. At first, I felt weird and uncomfortable about it. My industry is small – what if someone from my earlier jobs noticed and thought I was a fraud? In fact, a few people I knew from Jobs #2 and #3 got hired at Job #4. But no one paid that much attention.

Maybe there’s a life lesson here: No one cares about your authentic self at work as much as you think they do. Image by Leandro De Carvalho from Pixabay

Job #5

I didn’t say anything to Job #5 about Shabbat observance. I started Job #5 in the summer when signing off early for Shabbat wouldn’t have been necessary, even if I was actually keeping Shabbat and by this point, I really wasn’t. Unlike Job #4, Job #5 expected some work on Shabbat, a price I didn’t entirely love, but that by definition, I ultimately didn’t mind paying, as evidenced by the fact that I have been paying it.

I’ve been working on Friday evenings/nights; I can’t exactly claim to mind if I chose to keep doing it…Photo by Bich Tran: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-laptop-beside-black-computer-mouse-inside-room-669996/

I took time off for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (I technically didn’t have enough PTO accrued since I’d just started – HR found me a workaround in the system). I didn’t even bother taking off for Sukkot/Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah – I didn’t have enough PTO, and I didn’t have any plans to look forward to for those holidays, (Sukkot sucks when you don’t have a sukkah because you live in a shitty apartment instead of a house, Yom Tov sucks when your marriage is fraught and extra time at home together to do nothing but argue isn’t desirable, and Simchat Torah sucks when you don’t have children). No one else at Job #5 was Jewish or knew much about Judaism, so no one was going to see this as inconsistent.

That summer, it was hot as hell in our apartment and the air conditioner was so loud, I couldn’t bear the noise of putting it on, so I suffered the heat instead; I started joining Zoom calls for work in sleeveless tops; I didn’t see the point of being uncomfortable in my own apartment for no good reason.

Work from home outfit. The super-modest work attire didn’t make sense anymore. Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-wearing-tank-top-sitting-by-the-window-920381/