This summer, I decided to stay in St. Louis to take classes at school. Then, in order to fill the other ten or so hours of my day not occupied by Calculus, I began to look for a job, and eventually met a family that had been looking for an afternoon nanny.

The family is Israeli and having only been in America for a year, they still speak mostly Hebrew. The kids were amazed that I could understand them, though I imagine they were also somewhat disappointed in realizing that they could no longer use it as a secret language.

Things started slow. I would come over for three hours, a few times a week to play games, read books and make macaroni and cheese. Things quickly grew more and more comfortable and a month after I began nanny-ing for the family I had a particularly interesting conversation with two of the kids. I had just picked up Liya and Uriel, 6 and 8 years old, from their camp at the JCC. We started talking about school—what grades the two of them were going into, how they liked class, and the ways American school is different from Israeli school. For some reason, among the back-and-forth about our experiences in kindergarten, Uriel grew curious and asked, “wait, are you Shomer Shabbos,” which, for those who don’t know, means do I keep the laws of Shabbat.

I answered with a simple, “No, no I don’t,” and immediately, Liya asked, “but why not?”

I felt like she had just asked me where babies come from. I wasn’t sure what her parents had told her about the importance of keeping Shabbos, and certainly didn’t want to create any sort of conflict about the matter.

“Well…” I started. Then—maybe because he could sense my discomfort, or maybe because he just wanted to prove to his little sister that he knew everything—Uriel chimed in, “Liya, not everyone is Shomer Shabbos. It’s OK.”

I was relieved at the sound of Uriel’s explanation because I truthfully was not sure what I was going to say. Would I say I was too busy as a college student to cease work on Saturdays? Or that keeping Shabbat didn’t feel important to me? Neither of those answers seemed justified as I played them over in my head, so we just left the conversation with “not everyone is Shomer Shabbos. It’s OK.” It was one moment when I was especially grateful for the short attention spans of young children.

I, however, have not yet been able to move on from the question. Why am I not Shomer Shabbos? Furthermore, why do I not go to synagogue every Friday night and Saturday, or keep Kosher, or wear shorts or kiss boys or do anything else that does, no matter how strongly I’d like to believe it doesn’t, does go directly against a mitzvah given to Moses in the Torah.

In this week’s Torah portion, Eikev, both G-d and Moses continue to prepare the Israelites for their entrance into the Promised Land. Three key points are made in such a preparation:

1. The Israelites should not fear their enemies, nor should they fear infertility, illness, and hardship—because G-d is with them.
2. The Israelites should remember all that G-d has done for them both in freeing them from Egypt and protecting them in the desert.
3. The Israelites should “beware that [they] do not forget the Lord, [their] G-d, by not keeping His commandments, His ordinances, and His statues” (Deuteronomy 8:11).

You may have guessed that my concern is with the 3^rd order. I’m well aware that I do not obey the 613 Commandments given to Moses by G-d, but I would not take that to mean that I have “forgotten the Lord, my G-d.” But how is that justified? Why am I allowed to choose which commandments to follow and which to disregard even though Moses so clearly says “you shall love the Lord, your G-d, keep His charge, His Statutes, His ordinances, and His commandments, all the days” (Deuteronomy 11:1)?

Not surprisingly, I have no specific answer for this question. At least, I have no specific answer for this question that one could consider “scholarly” or “factual.” To answer the question, I refer to the second part of the Shema, which we are given in this week’s parshah, and which we commonly refer to as the Ve’ahavtah: 

“You shall set these words of Mine upon your heart and upon your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand and they shall be for ornaments between your eyes. And you shall teach them to your sons to speak with them, and when you sit in your house and when you walk on the way and when you lie down and when you rise” (Deuteronomy 8:18-19). 

Now, when Liya and Uriel ask me about other things, like why I don’t keep Kosher, I tell them, very simply, “I wasn’t raised that way.” My parents followed G-d’s commandment to teach the commandments to their children, just as my parents’ parents had done for them. When things shifted, I can’t be certain, but I practice as I was taught. And until I do have a deeper understanding of how exactly I want to live as a Jew—which laws I’d like to keep and how strictly I’d like to keep them—I feel confident in practicing in the way I was taught, practicing in the way my parents taught me.