My mom’s mother was Jewish. This is the sentence on which my entire identity pivots, even though she was the only one of my grandparents who I never had the opportunity to meet. She became Catholic before she married my Catholic grandfather. And so, my mom was raised Catholic. She attended Catholic churches and Catholic schools, with limited knowledge of her Jewish roots, but still, that was there. Then, my mom ended up marrying a Jew from Montreal who agreed to raise a Catholic family, given the importance of the Catholic faith to my mother. And, as my parents were attending marriage prep, my dad offered to attend mass every other Sunday with my mom. The priest and my mother thought this was a pretty good offer, for a Jew. My father had been raised, up until his bar mitzvah, going to synagogue regularly with his parents and twin brother. But around that time of the boys’ bar mitzvah, my grandfather was becoming more skeptical of religion and no longer insisted on it. My father and my uncle would then play hockey on Saturday mornings instead. My parents were married in the Catholic Church. My mom, having been a lifelong Catholic, and my dad, committed to raising a Catholic family while insisting that he would not be baptized, is how I came to be raised Catholic from the get go by my two Jewish parents. My parents found common ground on the things that united them, and there are many. Through exploring our family history, they deepened in our two traditions and had a sense of enthusiasm for exposing my brother and me to both of them. And so, my brother and I grew up with Hanukkah and Christmas and Passover and Easter. We had a very natural integration within our family life. Sometimes it would be the same weekend that I’d go to the Outdoor Way of the Cross beginning at the downtown cathedral and then to the Jewish film festival at the local synagogue. As a child, I had a lot of religious sensitivity and always showed a lot of interest in such rituals and activities. When I was a teenager, my grandparents moved from Toronto to Calgary and, shortly after my Bubby passed away, Zaida moved in with my family. He lived with us from the time that he was 89 until he passed away when he was 96. In this context, I got to know him very well because this was during my high school and university years. And so I learned about how he came to Canada from Poland in 1937. I learned about his upbringing and trajectory and how he had read the Great Books and then become more skeptical of religion. We became very close. We went on dates at Italian restaurants. I would leave my term papers on his pillow and he would leave the Canadian Jewish News on mine. We had a very special relationship– the memory of which continues to nourish me to this day. He still hoped, however, that I would give up my belief in God and that I might do this by reading the Great Books. And so, I went on to pursue, of my own interest, a Liberal arts education. And then he thought that, if that wouldn’t do it, then perhaps facing up to the history of the Holocaust might do it. I took this up as somewhat of a dare from my Zaida and studied liberal arts and, in my first year of university, also signed up for a Holocaust study trip to Germany and Poland with two survivors and sixty students from all across Canada. This trip was formative for me, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t recall that trip in some way. Basically, it led me to question all sorts of topics and to engage seriously with questions of Jewish identity, morality, and mortality. I remember thinking: If dehumanization is at the core of genocide, then what does it mean to humanize humanity? I wanted to know the antidote. I also remember visiting the former Nazi concentration camp Majdanek, and pressing my hand against the monument praying: Lord, etch this on my memory and engrave this upon my conscience because I don’t want to ever forget the testimony of the survivors that I’ve heard in this place. And so with that education and the question about what it means to humanize humanity, I studied political science. I was especially attracted to German Jewish thinkers like Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt. When I completed my political science degree, I worked for a couple of years at a journalism startup and focused on advocating on issues of fundamental freedoms and human rights. After two years of that, I saw a two-minute video advertising a new English-language master’s program in John Paul II Philosophical Studies at the Catholic University of Lublin and I felt that God was saying, “Leave your country and go to the land that I will show you– it’s Poland.” My grandfather had died only a week or two prior to me seeing this video and so I felt a sense of permission and call to enter this program and steep in Jewish-Catholic relations and the history of the 20th century and to study the life and thought of John Paul II and so many other noble lives that I would encounter. As soon as I got to Lublin, I realized I was only 15 minutes away from Majdanek, the camp that I thought that I would never return to again in my life where I then became a regular volunteer. I thought that if I was going to study in that city that I certainly needed to go and be a volunteer and a guide to give this history its due through my engagement with it. My two years in Poland were a season during which I cultivated my sense of responsibility and gratitude and wonder. And, I think that responsibility and gratitude are two of the key themes that I receive in a particular way from the Jewish tradition. And yet, I could always find a way to achieve some synthesis of these themes in the life and thought of John Paul II. It was also during my studies in Poland that I travelled to Israel for my first time and since then, I have been there six times. These experiences led to my passion for promoting pluralism and nuanced humanizing approaches to the conflicts and tensions that we see. And so, my Jewish heritage and Catholic faith do indeed bring me much joy. Yet, of course, there is also some tension and angst. There have certainly been experiences of tension and confrontation during which I have questioned: Is it really worth it? And in those moments, when I’ve questioned whether it’s really worth continuing with this Jewish-Catholic thread of my life, I have found that God is saying to me, “Receive the double gift. As long as you are receiving these two traditions with gratitude and wonder, then it will not be a source of angst or, at least, it be so in such a way that is more than bearable. It will bear many friendships and much fruit.” Recently, I spent four years assisting a pro-life Catholic member of parliament. His grandmother was half-Jewish and attributed her survival in Munster to Blessed Clemens von Galen’s outspoken criticism of the Nazis. Every team member in our office became very familiar with von Galen’s story as we worked vigorously to expose and try to prevent Canada’s expansion of euthanasia to persons with disabilities and mental illness. Now, I am grateful to be living and studying in Rome in a new degree program in Judaic Studies and Jewish-Christian Relations. This is an ideal context for the interior renewal that comes from reflecting, as Josef Pieper would describe it when he was young, “on the fundamentals of my existence.” May God make use of everything for His purposes.