Secular Stuy from a Religious Perspective

When Stuyvesant administered the PSAT to juniors in October, I asked for a religious exemption to take the exam on a different day. The Friday date fell on Simchat Torah, a holiday when Jews celebrate finishing reading the Torah, and Saturdays are the Jewish Sabbath, which places restrictions on actions like using public transportation; neither testing day worked. So, I was scheduled to take the PSAT on Wednesday morning instead. When I entered the testing room, I somehow expected to see a few others like me: Jews unwilling to skip synagogue for standardized tests. Though I have not encountered many observant Jews in my time at Stuy, I imagined that I simply had not yet met them. However, my assumptions proved to be incorrect. As I sat alone in a blank white room with only the test proctor for company, I began to contemplate what this meant for our school.

Stuyvesant students represent a variety of organized religions, including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Among this vast religious diversity, however, is one dominant belief: atheism. In The Spectator’s 2021 freshman survey, 53.6 percent of the class of 2025 identified as agnostic or atheistic, a trend that has remained consistent at Stuy since. This statistic reflects a global shift away from devout thought toward a more modern, technologically centered worldview; in a study conducted by Pew Research Center, almost 30 percent of Americans identify as atheists or agnostic, up 17 percent since 2009.

Considering my own experience at Stuy, this demographic is unsurprising. When I first came to Stuy, I was curious about how religion affected my peers. I remember asking one Christian friend what going to church was like, wondering how it compared to synagogue. She responded that she did not know—she had never been; her grandparents were religious, so she identified as Christian without practicing the religion. However, when I asked her if she celebrated holidays like Christmas, she seemed surprised—why wouldn’t she? It appeared that the religious presence in her life had taken on an entirely non-religious significance, a common modern phenomenon. 

It seems that at Stuy, religion is used more as a reason for presents than as an opportunity for deep contemplation. While many of my friends may occasionally go to the temple with their families, these trips to the temple tend to be isolated to major holidays. Those same friends also easily discount any possibility of God’s existence. These observations are not intended to cast judgment on any of the diverse practices held within the Stuyvesant community; instead, I hope to highlight the fundamental differences between my own experience with religion and the experience of the majority of students around me.

My own religious story may sound utterly foreign to those who have not interacted with many observant Jews. I attended Jewish day school from kindergarten to eighth grade, where I learned Hebrew and studied the Torah and other biblical texts for multiple hours each day. I have kept kosher my entire life; in simple terms, I do not eat certain meats and fish, nor do I eat meat with dairy. I attend synagogue almost every Saturday, and I observe the Jewish holidays—even the ones school does not give off for, including Shemini Atzeret, Simchat Torah, Purim, Shavuot, and Sukkot. On Saturdays and holidays, I typically do not take transportation or spend money, as it is forbidden by ancient Jewish laws. My maternal family comes from a long line of Jews, Rabbis, and Lithuanian Bubbes. 

And there it is: my religious practices in a nutshell. These practices are both limiting and liberating; they place restrictions on the activities I can participate in and experiences I can live, but they also expand my perspective to encompass a much stronger understanding of spirituality and community. 

However, when people hear my religious story, their primary reaction is doubt. Not only do they doubt the legitimacy behind religious beliefs like the Torah and God, but they question why I, a progressive and open-minded young woman, would choose to observe this religion. They see religion as something that was forced upon me and sometimes pity my childhood self who was so blindly influenced by her environment. I, too, have wondered how my life might be different had I not been raised as an observant Jew. Would my core values or even my personality look different? Would I choose religion later in life, despite not knowing it as a child? These are crucial questions that I do not know the answer to. However, when they are asked by non-religious peers, they convey judgment as well as thoughtfulness, something that I have to deal with at Stuy; some of my peers are reluctant to engage with me in probing conversations about religion, and instead make assumptions based on a slew of facts that do not come close to providing a complete perspective on my religious upbringing. This is just one example of an interaction that has complicated my religious experience at Stuy.

Being religious in a secular space comes with many more struggles, of course. For example, last year Shavuot, a holiday when Jews celebrate receiving the Torah, fell on the last two days of school. Instead of a four-day finals week, I had two days to complete all of my projects and tests and ended up having to do half of my drafting final at home despite not having the proper tools. Though my teachers were understanding and accommodating, that period was extremely stressful, but necessary in order to meaningfully celebrate Shavuot with my family. This experience is not unique—many observant students at Stuyvesant and beyond, whether they are Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, have a similar give-and-take experience with religious observance in a secular environment.

I also encounter an additional layer of hardship when I am asked to explain my decisions to my nonreligious peers. Questions about certain restrictions always give me pause, as I am never sure what sort of answer to give. My typical response to questions about certain restrictions is, “It’s a Jewish thing.” This abrupt but succinct response helps me avoid the endless stream of questions that typically goes something like this: 

“Why weren’t you at school yesterday?”

“I was celebrating a Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah.”

“Oh cool…what’s that?”

“It’s when the Jews celebrate finishing reading the Torah and sing and dance together.”

“Oh fun. Wait, why didn’t you just come to school afterwards?”

“I couldn’t really since it’s a holiday.”

“Why not?”

“On holidays we aren’t supposed to take transportation or buy things and things like that.”

“Woah, who decided that rule?”

“Uh…God, I guess.”

“Why do you follow it then?

“I don’t know.”

The truth is, I do know: this is my religion and it is meaningful to me, so I obey (most of) its rules. While I appreciate the innocent curiosity that motivates these conversations, I also find that they are frequently grounded in a lack of understanding of what being religious really means. Many peers enter such discussions with the misunderstanding that religion is something that a parent or supervisor forces onto you. What they might fail to realize, however, as their thoughtful inquiries morph into a sort of religious interrogation, is that some people choose religion for themselves. I am among those people, as is a significant minority of the Stuyvesant population. 

So why do I lie and say “I don’t know”? Why not help enrich my classmates’ understanding of religion instead? I think that, despite the pride I take in being a Jew, a part of me is shy about expressing that fact aloud. This is largely because, alongside the growth in religious apathy worldwide, another more subtle feeling has arisen: secular superiority. Today, many religious beliefs appear old-fashioned—and for good reason! Given recent technological innovations, mystical stories of God splitting the sea or bringing people back to life seem somewhat far-fetched.

On top of that, ancient religious documents tend to promote values that, when viewed through a modern lens, are clearly anachronistic and problematic. For example, my very namesake, Leah, is famous in the Torah for birthing eight holy children; like many biblical women, her story is limited to the children she mothered and little else. Growing up, I was angry that this was the legacy that I carried with me, and that Jewish scholars were so blatantly sexist that they could see little else in a woman besides her fertility. 

These doubts are ones that I have grappled with as I develop a personal definition of being Jewish. I have come to the conclusion that I can appreciate the cultural, familial, and spiritual connotations that my name holds without dwelling on the specificities of one woman thousands of years ago. However, for already non-religious people, the problematic elements of organized religion not only distance them from spirituality, but also encourage a unique sort of religious disdain. The ramifications of this perspective reverberate throughout our school.

Thus, as I sat in that empty room waiting for the timer to finally hit zero, I considered how attending this secular school has impacted me and my religion. In some ways, it is easy to argue that my religious commitments have been weakened. I am less strictly observant than I used to be, and I learn a lot less about Judaism daily than when I attended Jewish school. In many other ways, though, I think attending Stuyvesant has actually strengthened my connection to religion. When I was at a Jewish school, Judaism was the norm, not the exception, and therefore people rarely challenged the core values behind my beliefs. Since coming to Stuy, though, I have been asked on so many occasions to explain or defend my religious practices, giving me the opportunity to think critically about why I practice Judaism the way I do. I have weighed the pros and cons of every missed day of school and every skipped social event. What I have realized is that it is all too easy to lose myself in these casual but consuming deliberations; between the rush of school and the flurry of homework assignments, I risk not only losing my peace of mind but also losing bits of my identity. However, sitting in the synagogue every week, reflecting on myself and praying to God, I feel whole, if only for a few hours; those hours might be the most important in my entire week.