It’s a responsibility the 30-year-old global citizen is quite philosophical about, whether in terms of what it means for the diaspora as a whole or who he is as a modern Jewish traveler.

“No matter how far you travel,” Herszberg said, “you always return to where you began — home.”

Experiencing the world’s religious diversity firsthand

Herszberg said he grew up in “a typical, Jewish suburban” home in Melbourne, Australia. But at the age of two, his South African-born mother took him to visit his great-grandmother in Canada.

That was his first trip abroad, and it was not too long after that Herszberg became fascinated with the idea of travel. He told The Sydney Morning Herald that ever since he was a little kid with the flags of the world hanging in his bedroom, he was hooked on the idea of visiting other countries.

As a student at Yeshiva College in the Melbourne suburb of St. Kilda and a law and arts student at the city’s Monash University, Herszberg used every opportunity he could to go abroad. Money made on holiday jobs funded his early travels, and education grants gave him the opportunity to study overseas in China and the United Kingdom. He later worked as a lawyer in Hong Kong.

Then, in 2019, Herszberg quit his job and started to travel full time, hoping to become the youngest Australian to visit all the world’s countries. COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions put a wrench in his plans, however, and he was only able to get going again after lockdowns were lifted.

Though the records may not be his, Herszberg said seeing the world from another perspective and stepping out of his comfort zone far outshines any accolades or titles. The opportunity to grow in his experience and knowledge of other religions was a specific blessing of the trip, he said. “I’d never even been inside a church until some of my travels in my early 20s,” Herszberg said, “and there was so much I didn’t know or understand. I felt uncomfortable, not knowing where to sit, if I could sit, so I just stood and walked around.”

That discomfort, Herszberg said, was not out of animosity but curiosity. As he began to travel more, he sought out opportunities to visit more churches and other holy sites —  temples, mosques and monasteries. “So much of this trip was about pushing myself beyond various frontiers,” he said, “and transcending the barriers that we put up in ourselves because of our religious, cultural or ethnic backgrounds.”

The more Herszberg traveled, that initial fascination turned into a certain familiarity. Whereas early on he noticed more of the differences between Christianity, Islam or Buddhism and the Jewish faith with which he was familiar, Herszberg slowly began to appreciate the similarities they shared. As time progressed and he was invited into peoples’ places of prayer or witnessed a ritual or ceremony, Herszberg began to see how each religion channeled something of shared human desires, fears, or longing for community.

“There’s a moment when you’re in a particular place or taking part in an experience when you can feel there’s something the air — a higher element that the people around you are seeking after, together,” he said.

Exploring the end(s) of the Jewish diaspora

While Herszberg does not consider himself religious, the concept of communitas — or shared intimacy — resonated with him as he connected with Jewish people and stories around the world. Whether he was visiting a synagogue in Damascus, Syria; a “mikveh” — ritual bath — in Cairo, Egypt; or a Jewish school in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Herszberg always had a sense that these were his people.

“I didn’t exactly have a sense of spirituality as I went to these places, but there was always an element of collective belonging,” he said.

In fact, Herszberg said he almost experienced the “end of the diaspora” in a way. “The Jewish people have always been scattered and been defined by dispersion,” he said, “but the more I traveled and the more people and stories I got to know, the more I saw how these scattered communities are connected. That they know each other — both literary and in a sense of shared identity.”

In the end, Herszberg said he found the worldwide Jewish community to be pretty small. “Every country I visited — if I was there on a Friday — someone would invite me to a Shabbat dinner,” he said. Then, in the course of the evening’s conversation, Herszberg said he would find someone both parties knew.

These moments made Herszberg feel at home, no matter where he was traveling. Herszberg said that whether he was in Uzbekistan or Ghana, the smells were the same, the conversations sounded similar, and the whole experiences felt familiar. “Literally,” he said, “these Shabbat dinners felt like home.”

Herszberg tells one story from Tehran, where a seemingly random man came up to him and invited him to his house for dinner. As Herszberg sat down, the conversation soon turned into a roundtable on the various relations they held in common. “I sat there and was like, ‘How is this happening in Iran?’” Herszberg said. “Those kinds of experiences make the worldwide diaspora feel like a very real and personal community.”

Herszberg’s journey, however, was not only one of new connections and relationships gained. It was also one of confronting loss and coming to terms with the present absences of Jewish communities destroyed or driven out in the past.

Whether confronted with piles of human ash at concentration camps in Central Europe or walking through neighborhoods that used to be defined by everyday Jewish life, Herszberg wrestled with the tensions between loss and legacy, stories lived and silenced.

In certain places, he felt the weight of tragedies like the Holocaust or the large-scale displacement of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa from the 1940s to the 1970s. Herszberg said he felt a sense of haunting familiarity as he walked through suburbs in Warsaw, Poland, or Prague, Czech Republic, and places like Aleppo, Syria, or Baghdad, Iraq. In each neighbourhood, Herszberg could almost hear the heaviness of the past crying out, the forgotten sounds of synagogues and schools, kosher shops and Jewish cemeteries still reverberating in the walls around him.