All in the Family

From the time I was in high school, I planned to go into the medical field, maybe even become a doctor.

At the end of my second year of college, however, I was struggling with a difficult chemistry course, and I started asking myself, Ayala, why are you doing this?

My grandmother had always told me that I was a natural teacher, so I decided to forget about medicine and go into teaching. Having worked at Camp HASC during the summers and volunteered many hours for Yachad, the special-needs population was very dear to my heart, and I thought that special ed would be much more interesting than regular education. And so it was that I earned a master’s degree in special ed and began working as a teacher of children with disabilities.

I was very close with my grandmother, and I always enjoyed sitting at her kitchen table and catching up with her over a glass of juice and a plate of freshly cut melon. She would tell me how she and my grandfather, who died when I was three, had grown up in traditional families, and had begun their marriage in line with their upbringing: traditional, but not very observant. After their first son was born, they decided that they wanted to send him to yeshivah, but they didn’t want their home to be in conflict with what he would be learning in yeshivah, so in the 1950s — well before the baal teshuvah movement — my grandparents took the highly unpopular step of becoming frum.