It wasn’t until b’nei mitzvah season a few years ago, when I visited dozens of different congregations to celebrate my friends as they entered Jewish adulthood, that I truly appreciated how unique my synagogue is.

It’s hard to define IKAR, my synagogue. I think that’s what makes it so special.

The congregation is nondenominational. Over the years, most rabbis have been either Conservative or Orthodox, but all were passionately progressive in the realms of social justice and tikkun olam. Our services take place in a basketball gym at a local Jewish high school, with nets dangling over our heads like floating, lacy kippot. Little kids hop onto the bimah during Torah readings and adults schmooze just outside the gym near pitchers of homemade herbal tea and coffee machines alongside every variety of milk.

And yet, a profound holiness flows through it all—the realization that God doesn’t reside just in dusty pews beneath gilded ceilings. We can brush against something larger even with plastic folding chairs and an Ark on wheels. 

When the High Holy Days arrive, IKAR erects a white tent to accommodate the surge of congregants. No one is turned away. Last year on Yom Kippur, my younger brother helped lead that outdoor service of hundreds. He blew the shofar and called the world to open its eyes, and I like to think everyone who heard stood a little taller.

I wasn’t one of them.

Instead, I had slipped away and curled up on a beanbag in the science lab upstairs with two of my closest friends. We were tired and lightheaded from the fast, but together, we could almost ignore it. Next to us, my phone was playing the livestream of the service downstairs.

One friend rested her head on my shoulder. I strung tiny, pearlescent beads into a Morse code friendship bracelet, and as I listened to my congregation’s voice lift in prayer, my fingers faltered. My breath caught, a startling, overwhelming joy blossoming inside me. 

My community finds sacredness in a basketball gym. I find my place in that community in a science lab.

I wasn’t at the service, but that didn’t matter, I realized, because I was a part of it anyway. I didn’t need to be like my brother standing on the bimah. Even in another room, even imperfect and exhausted, I carried my community, and they carried me.

So often when I think of Jewish joy, what comes to mind is loud and celebratory—the elation of the hora, the shofar’s blast, the b’nei mitzvah standing glowing on the bimah while the congregation sings “siman tov u mazal tov” and pelts them with candy.

But moments like my Yom Kippur in the science lab make me remember that the spaces between celebrations are not lacunae. Joy can be quiet, too. It can be this: a group of Jewish girls curled together under a table, listening to a Yom Kippur service and knowing they are enough.

This is what I love about Judaism. It expands to embrace the contradictions, to hold all of me—all of us.

I have experienced Jewish joy as a constant presence, holiness as a sprout that can thrive anywhere if nurtured. Because of that, I am certain I will be able to carry Judaism within me for the rest of my life, never out of reach. It isn’t conditional on a fancy temple; it doesn’t come only when I am at my best. My synagogue has taught me that I can find it anywhere.

That evening was the first Yom Kippur I didn’t feel hungry at all; there was no space left for hunger inside me. All my hollowness had been scraped away. I felt like I was floating, transcendent. I could have sworn that if you had peeled me open right then, my insides would have been glittering, stuffed full of stars. 

Hannah Gumpert, an editor at jGirls+ Magazine, is a 12th-grader from Los Angeles, Calif. She is a runner-up in the 2025 Hadassah Magazine and jGirls+ Magazine teen essay contest, which asked: Share an experience of Jewish joy and/or pride.