My roommate sleeps through my alarm clock when I wake up at seven to pray every morning. He stopped asking which foods are kosher or if I can carry a book on Shabbat. He knows I'll turn the lights on again once night falls on Saturday, just as I know when he'll return from football practice. We got over our differences quickly and developed a good rapport of mutual respect. Our biggest issue is not having girls over, but where we leave our shoes.

I am convinced that we are incredibly capable of understanding those who are different from ourselves. Yesterday after class, our suitemate told us he had news. "I'm bisexual," he said casually. "So what's the news?" my roommate asked him. We have no trouble transcending the practical differences that arise between us. I've grown accustomed to explaining the kippah on my head and the tzit-tzit (fringes) that hang from my shirt. It is the consciousness of religious Judaism that separates me. It is the need to sanctify time through obligation that cannot be shared.

Growing up, nothing was more precious to my father than time. Wasting it was a capital offense in my house, greeted with leading questions and a judgement: "What else could you be doing now, Daniel?" I would be asked in a firm voice. Indeed, everything had a time and a place under heaven except laziness. Ten years later these talks form the basis of the Jewish life I lead. Being a religious Jew is an affirmation that my time is sacred.

There is a beautiful tension in Jewish spiritual life that grows out of the biblical narrative of humanity being simultaneously created in the divine image and of the dust of the earth. The result is that in Jewish religious tradition I experience the duality of living in the physical world of space but having the divine ability to sanctify time. My father's question was not asked in frustration. It was his stern expression of the dazzling possibilities of a life that chooses to sanctify time.

I remember clearly the accented voice of a religious teacher I knew telling me that spiritually I either moved up or down. "Ain [there is no] in between," she said, combining Hebrew and English. At first I dismissed her remark as simple and rash, ignorant of the complexity of human conscious. Only later did I realize that her comment was not aimed at me as spiritual being, but at my understanding of time. To float without moving either up or down assumes a watery notion of time that need not be utilized or wasted. To float denies the sacredness of time's possibilities.

My mother loves the last lines of Ecclesiastes. There is a time for everything, she tells me, but really we must follow God's path and walk in His way. Experiencing time Jewishly is not to utilize it, but to sanctify it.

Sanctity comes from limiting my choice and doing divine will. I don't rest on Saturday to rejuvenate my body, I rest because it is an obligation I have through my Jewish partnership with God. To walk in the Jewish religious path is to experience the divine obligation to sanctify days with prayer, weeks with Shabbat and Seasons with holidays.

I thought at Yale, living away from home and my community, I would be free from the tension of time. I thought that perhaps without external pressures, I could forge my own relationship with time and divinity. But that's not the case.

My father's questions, my mothers jarring attention to time's possibilities, community and divine obligations all stretch me to every direction creating the most authentic Jewish experience I've known. It is this very tension, that is so difficult to communicate to someone beyond the fold that makes my religious life Jewish.

Understanding Jewish time and divine commandment, the real mark of religious life, cannot be overcome like a cultural barrier. There is an existential reality unique to religious conscious that sees time not only as valuable, but sacred. Living and believing this way I take one giant step out of the larger community here at Yale. It is lonely and frustrating. On some level, however, that giant step puts me at the center of a smaller community of other religious people all living the same dynamic tension.

A few weeks ago I sat sipping my coffee at breakfast after the morning service at Slifka Center. The scene was familiar, everyone finished praying, and we sat quietly eating and doing work. "Do realize how much time we'll spend together the next four years?" another freshman asked. Everyone knew that "we" meant observant Jews. We joked about all the mornings we come to pray and eat together and the Friday nights we spend welcoming in Shabbat as a community. Underneath our jokes, I felt a solace knowing that although I might never completely integrate into the larger community, there was a circle I was bound to by a shared spiritual consciousness.

Maybe in this respect, my religious teacher was not entirely right. Maybe there is not time to float, but there might be a space for me in between. It's shaky and wavering but it sees the absolute need to be a part of a smaller group and the longing to contribute to the whole.

Daniel J. Smokler, TD'01, is an Orthodox Jew.