My name is Josh Cross and this podcast wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for October 7th.

Let me back up and explain what I mean. Let me tell you about the Jew I was on October 6th.

I've been producing Jewish podcasts for nearly seven years and I've been a Jew for a little over 47. I came up going to a

reform temple as a kid occasionally usually on high holidays but not always. I had a

bar mitzvah but never did any youth group stuff, and I wouldn't have been caught dead at Hill-Ellen College.

On any given weekend, you might find me smoking barbecue pork ribs on my back patio, about 10 feet from the mazizah on the back door.

When my son didn't really jive with the normal bar mitzvah process,

I created him a different one. I had him instead interview everyone on both sides of the family to find out what being Jewish meant to them.

And all of my kids know and feel deeply that they're Jewish, even if they rarely set foot in a synagogue.

All of this is to say I was Jew-ish. Caring about the tradition and definitely seeing myself as part of the Jewish people,

but living mainly in a modern secular American world.

The temple I went to as I grew up was amazing and I had the same rabbi for my entire

life, Rabbi Eric Wiznia of Blessed Memory. He was basically there for everything from birth

through my wedding and even my son's Bar Mitzva. The temple Rabbi Wisnia led,

Bechaim in central New Jersey, is the kind of place where some Jews

would show up on Friday night, just having eaten pepperoni pizza before they drove to synagogue,

and others walked five miles to get there. You might even find the guy who's worried about shotness

next to the woman who doesn't even know what that word means.

It was and still is a place where Jewishness was in the air.

People were doing Jew things that Jews have always done.

For me, being Jewish was really just like being a fish in water. I was steeped in it.

It was the framework my conception of the world was and is built on.

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