I recently attended camp visiting day for my two eldest children. I was expecting it to be a fun, hectic day, a chance to catch up with my kids, see their bunks, and hear about their experiences in camp. But then I encountered a feeling that I did not expect. As some of you know, I did not grow up in the Orthodox community. It’s been a long time now that I have walked this path; almost all of my adult life in fact, and I’m no youngster. It’s become a normal part of who I am, who my family is, how I look at the world, how I act. Indeed, most of the time, coming from a non-religious background isn’t something that I think about, other than when people ask me where I’m from. (Fort Washington, Pennsylvania; it’s a suburb of Philadelphia; and no, I do not know anyone that you know from Philadelphia.)

Which is why my feelings during visiting day took me by surprise. At first, as I picked up my kids, listened to their stories about camp, and brought them to a Walmart jam-packed with frum families, I had this feeling that “I’ve arrived.” There was this unexpected sense of validation that came from sending my kids to a typical frum overnight camp and seeing them fit in seamlessly. It’s the immersive 24/7 nature of overnight camp that sets it apart from anything that they’ve done before. If something was off in the way that they were raised, or how they acted, if they were missing some cues or nuances of frum life, overnight camp is where it would come out. And, thank God, my kids did just fine. So as we went through the rituals of countless other frum families visiting their kids, I felt “Wow, this is it; I’ve finally arrived.”

But then, in other ways, I still wasn’t there. It’s probably because this was my first camp visiting day, but there were definitely some nuances that I wasn’t expecting, some hacks and preparations that were not in the camp visiting day guide. Small things, but they were enough to make me briefly feel that I had “missed the memo.” For those readers who joined this community later in life, as I did, that is a very familiar feeling. While it’s been a long time since I felt it, there it was again. And during those “missed memo” moments, I thought to myself, “Maybe you still haven’t made it. Maybe you never will.” But I’m OK with that. Part of who I am, part of who I will always be, is an “insider/outsider” in this world. I’m not sure how well-documented this “insider/outsider” concept is, but I think of it as being a person with a foot in each of two different worlds—where part of you is fully integrated into one world, while another part of you is connected to an entirely different world.

This concept is a common theme in Tanach. Moshe Rabbeinu was the consummate insider/outsider. Raised as a prince in Pharaoh’s palace, he was fully integrated into the Egyptian royal court. Yet at his core, he knew that he was different and did not not fully belong to the world in which he was raised. Esther is another. Hiding her identity as a Jew, she rose to become the queen of Persia, but never forgot who she was. Yet another: Ruth the Moabite. A descendant of the enemies of Israel, she became the great-grandmother of King David, and how could you be more of an insider than that?

Why is this theme so common in our tradition? I believe the answer is this: The insider/outsider, with a foot in each of two different worlds, sees things that others cannot see. Moshe, for example, saw the brutal oppression of the Israelites that the Egyptians were blind to, yet could also imagine a different reality that the Israelites were too oppressed to contemplate. And in fact, all of us in the Modern Orthodox community are, by definition, insider/outsiders. At its core Modern Orthodoxy is characterized by devotion to our tradition paired with meaningful engagement with the “outside world.” Many of us are well-integrated into that outside, non-observant/non-Jewish world, particularly in our careers. But even as we engage with that world, we preserve our unique identity and worldview. And that insider/outsider perspective, rather than being a hindrance, sometimes enables us to see things in a way that a consummate insider may not.

So perhaps I’ve come to terms with who I am, even if I will never be 100% the same as someone who was born into this world. And, in a funny way, maybe it is this very insider/outsider status that is my most Jewish trait.

Steven Starr lives in Hillside, New Jersey with his wife, Keshet, and his children Ellie, Moshe, Meira and Rina.