Credit: Flickr/Lab2112

Your Brooklyn is different from my Brooklyn. Both of our Brooklyns have 2.6 million people. They both contain many different cultures and ethnicities. It is ironic that its motto from the original Dutch settlers is Eendraght Maeckt Maght, or “Unity Gives Strength.” Brooklyn has so many groups that unity is nearly nonexistent. It’s more like peaceful parallelism than harmony.

You have Music Hall of Williamsburg and I have Satmar of Williamsburg. You have Paul Auster and I have Reb Ahron Shechter. You have Greenpoint, Park Slope, Gowanus, and Dumbo. I have Flatbush and Borough Park. You have cafes, coffee shops, jazz bars, dive bars, martini bars, strip clubs, and bowling clubs. I have the Seven-Eleven on Avenue M, and if I’m a “bum,” the Starbucks on 65^th street. You have new and used book stores. I have Judaica stores selling seforim, mezuzahs, and yarmulkes.

Recreation is not a word in my vernacular. I have a roadmap for my life plotted out for me even before I was born: Go to Yeshiva. Stay in Yeshiva. Sleep in Yeshiva. Get married. Bills? Marry rich and your in-laws will provide. You have opportunities. Ivy League. Liberal Arts. Two-year, four-year colleges. Trade schools. Me? Bachelors in Talmudic Law. Touro College if I receive rabbinical permission. Brooklyn College if I’m rebellious.

You want to be a self made man? What are you, a Protestant? My Rabbi leaned back into his chair and rubbed his eyes.

Brooklyn is seen nowadays as a city teeming with creative talents. A place where artists go to live, to be around other artists, to help their art grow. My Brooklyn is a place of rules and regulations, a place where growth is stifled and conformity is key. Before leaving my house I have to give every article of clothing a second thought. “Can I wear this? Is this appropriate?”

Your Brooklyn respects both the comfortable yuppies of Park Slope and the poor hipsters of Greenpoint. My Brooklyn rates people by their net worth. Although many people in my Brooklyn are not rich, many give off the impression that they are, so that they can be looked upon with respect. Appearing rich is also important in order to find suitable mates for one’s offspring. By seeming rich, there are also cliques that people can join. I never liked this because Jewish thought generally rejects earthly desires and indulgences. One might see it as contradictory for people to act ultra-Orthodox and at the same time be part of a culture that promotes big houses, big cars, showiness and ostentatiousness. How can you be so involved with yourself and be involved with God at the same time? We serve monetary idols.

There were many Saturdays when I would walk along Ocean Parkway and see scantily-clad hipsters riding their fixed-gear bicycles and having an all-around good time, while I was forced to walk in my stiff, wool Shabbos suit, sweating under my fur fedora. I envied their freedoms, the why-don’t-we-go-for-a-bike-ride-in-whatever-we’re-wearing lifestyle.

Online, I sought out and discovered various types of events where I, too, might partake of your Brooklyn; art exhibits to stroll through, games to watch, artisanal beer to drink, and unique food to sample. These all sounded alien to me. Partially out of curiosity and partially out of rebelliousness, I decided to become one of them. Before joining them, I had to first fit in. I shaved my beard and visited a hairsylist. Shed my black shoes for vintage green and brown bowling shoes. While I never completely rejected the uniform white shirt and black pants, I sometimes exchanged them for pink, green, or brown shirts. While they were still formal, they were less conservative. My pants essentially remained the same. While in yeshiva I always wore creased, dry-clean-only dress pants, at home I wore khakis. In my mind, black is black and whether it goes in the washing machine or not is irrelevant. So my pants were dark. My shoes stood out the most. Then I started going out. Reddit meetups, book readings, storytelling events. Open bars, trash bars, whiskey lounges, you name it. Live Moth shows and Moma. From a loud rave to a quiet museum, I got around.

After a year of fun, I learned a surprising lesson. You and I are not too different. We both have hierarchies that outsiders would view as archaic. We both have cliques that we scorn but secretly want to be part of. We both have a society’s expectations of us that we may view as unnecessary. This is why I returned to my community with all it’s rules. While I definitely had fun in your Brooklyn, I can now enjoy our Brooklyn even more.

At thirteen, I converted to a new religion. My deity was food and self-control. My God was a vengeful one, hell-bent on the eradication of my Self, wanting only complacency and utter devotion. I gaveth all of myself to him, wanting so much to believe that in disappearing beneath a mass of fabric, I would find the Truth. By the time I was fifteen, I was only allowed to eat seven things –– the number sounded perfect, to me –– and two years later, I found myself in a psychiatric hospital.  Located in Long Island just a short drive from the city, it treated the ailing Orthodox population from the outer boroughs, and it was there that I was formally introduced to Judaism.

Truth be told, I hadn’t realized before that observant Jews existed –– in my sheltered hometown, I hadn’t known a one, and in my one semester at college I had been too busy climbing stairs to notice them –– and these exotic creatures from my own backyard captured my attention immediately. I befriended a thimble-sized twelve-year-old named Faige’le and a boy, Avram, eighteen like me, whose diet had consisted of naught but chicken breasts for almost a year before his admission. Their families would come to visit them often, and they would greet each other by saying “Good Shabbos” on Friday afternoons. They knew me, as there weren’t many of us there, and were cordial, but I sensed a distance there, which made me want their attention and approval all the more. At night, after visiting hours were over and the unit was silent except for the beeping of heart monitors, Avram and Faige’le would tell me stories of how their grandparents had evaded the Nazis during World War II. In the mornings, they would dejectedly stab their kosher breakfasts with plastic knives, and balk at the mandatory one hour we spent after meals in the dayroom, safely in sight of the staff and away from the toilets and sharp objects.

I relished in learning the rules of their religion, the dietary restrictions and sartorial limits. A woman was admitted, Deborah. She was twenty and married but her body was so shrunken and awkward she looked maybe fourteen. Deborah showed us pictures from her wedding, just a few months before she came to the hospital. In the pictures, her round, healthy face glowed, but now she was swimming in her long skirts and loose sweaters, her face drawn, thick cheekbones visible beneath her pale skin. She told me one day that she was wearing a wig, which explained the incongruously lustrous quality of her russet hair. When she confessed this, she giggled in a flippant, almost embarrassed way. Thinking it wasn’t so serious to her, I went with my finger to poke her hairline.

“Let me see!” I said.

“No!” She laughed, recoiling from my touch. “Only my husband can see my real hair.”

I thought about this husband of hers, probably just twenty, too. I thought about the way she spoke about him, not at all like my friends spoke of their boyfriends, all gooey-voiced and lustful. I thought about what it meant for him that she was sick –– no sex with his new bride, no babies –– and for her –– the disgust she felt when he put a hand on her, the rising panic at any move he made to be intimate. I had unceremoniously cut my long-term boyfriend loose a few months earlier after one too many tearful breakdowns when he tried to kiss me. His touch left me nauseated, his presence interfered with the solitude I needed to adhere to my rules and contemplate my fate. I was meditating, in my own way, on yichud, on being alone with my god.

When I returned to college after the hospital, I constructed more rules to follow regarding food, private habit, and social conduct. Certain clothing was okay to wear because it emphasized certain bones or covered certain monstrosities, certain food I deemed “clean” based on a system that evaluated color, nutritional content, and number of ingredients. Ziplocs became the ultimate fetish object; I delighted in seeing different foods –– cereal, nuts, apricots –– confined to different sized clear containers. The act of separating the alimentation, all amounts neatly determined by white measuring cups, was worship for me. I believed there was metaphysical meaning in these rituals of mine. What exactly it was, I wasn’t sure, but I thought if I just kept following the rules, one day I would understand.

Yet while I worked to get my world as small as a teaspoon, I found myself eyeing with greater fascination a world outside of mine. At school, I openly ogled the Jewish kids mingling outside the Chabad house. On subways, I’d find myself quietly inching toward a burly Chasid, clad in a black coat and reading a prayer book, and trying to read his lips. In a class on the Bible and English Literature, I made endless notes in micrographic script about the tenuous connections between dietary laws dictated by the Old Testament and all the typical mandates of anorexia. The similarity in rhetoric astounded me.  Perhaps food was the path to God after all, and the Jews and I were the only ones who knew it.

When I was ultimately admitted again to another hospital –– this one upstate, and considered a last resort for non-compliant patients –– I was greeted at the door by a young Hasidic girl from Monsey who, in an attempt to avoid consuming her dinner, was letting Ensure dribble over her hands and chin and then meticulously smearing the droplets of liquid all over the Styrofoam cup as if she were finger-painting. At ten, she was maybe too young to be thinking about obedience or modesty because in the mornings she would clumsily race around her room stark naked and slap her hands at her doughy belly.

“I’m so hot!” she shrieked. “It’s all this fat on my body!”

I tried to endear myself to this girl, whose name I learned was Beila, mainly by playing hand-clapping games while waiting in line for the bathroom. She smelled like shit, literally, but I didn’t let that deter me. Even now, I am not completely capable of verbalizing why I moved toward her and observed her so carefully. Oftentimes I find myself going over my disparate memories of her and wondering if perhaps I can determine which of her movements contained the magic, which moment was the one I became hopelessly infatuated with her not really as an individual but as an emblem of her faith. I recall her hopping into the dining room one evening –– she wasn’t allowed to sit with the rest of us because she was consistently disruptive during mealtimes –– and conspiratorially badgering another young Hasidic patient. “Hust getrinken? Hust getrinken?” The other patient, whose name was Shifra, turned her eyes nervously toward the floor. I think of Beila telling me about the necklace she wore, a small vial with a miniature prayer scroll inside, a gift from her grandfather.

“Do your brothers and sisters have one, too?” I asked. I knew she was one of eight.

“No, just me,” she said proudly.

“Why just you?”

Her eyebrows furrowed, and she looked at me as if I were dense. “Because I am the one in the hospital.”

I think of her davening in the morning, moving her body rhythmically toward the wall. We patients were forbidden to stand when we could be seated or to walk aimlessly around the unit –– anything that could be seen as a ploy to exercise was met with quick scolding. But no one said boo to Beila’s praying.

Davening definitely burns calories, I thought.

Sometimes I wondered about whether she knew, in those moments, which god she was praying to. Was she thinking, like a good Hasid, of Hashem, or like a good anorectic, of the intake she was managing to purge?

“Boruch atoh Adonoi… hamachzir neshamos lifgorim meisim.” One, two, three, four, five, six… one elohai n’shama equals five carrots.

In the end, it comes down to the sin of envy. I envied Beila for her ability to lose herself in both her religions, for being capable of such blind devotion. Even when it came to my own illness, I felt like a Wicked Daughter –– always doubting my path, entertaining the possibility of another way to salvation, always buckling beneath the pressures of my conscience and my hunger and gulping down my allotted Ensure so as to stay in the good graces of the doctors. I sacrificed hardly anything for my worship, and I saw this as weakness. Beila’s piety, by comparison, was fierce and unrelenting. She rebelled enough against the rules of the institution that finally one day the staff decided she had to have a feeding tube. The nurses ushered her into a back room, where she remained, screaming, for hours. Finally she emerged, her nostril caked in blood, an NG tube dangling down on top of her lip. She was quiet and vacant-eyed for days, until one morning she ripped the tube out in the shower.

It’s been eight years since I’ve seen Beila, and almost as many since my last hospitalization. My belief in anorexia as my own path to truth has all but disintegrated, leaving me almost –– but not as desperately –– untethered in the universe once again. My interest in Hasidim, however, who from the outside seem comfortably myopic in their mysterious world, has swelled inside me so greatly that some days I worry it has become its own consuming obsession. It feels like a deep, conflicted yearning, an unrequited love. When I pass Hasidim on the streets of Brooklyn, where I now live, I silently beg them to look me in the eye, to talk to me, but they never do. They just walk right by, as if I don’t exist.

By: Yoel Finkelman

Academic Studies Press, 250 Pages

I have a confession to make: I, Leah Vincent, possessor of six years of university education – including a graduate degree from Harvard University – become staggeringly inarticulate when confronted by a yeshiva bochur with only an eighth grade education and an astrophysicist’s intellectual confidence.

“But the statistical probability of matan Torah is virtually impossible!” he’ll argue. And all of my knowledge of the historical record and frum ethnocentrism and advanced statistics evaporates from my head and I’m left stammering stupidly while the yeshiva bochur nods authoritatively.

My handicap may have something to do with my brain being molded into obedience by a domineering father, whom I was told never to question, or by a culture that taught me my genitals invalidated my opinion. Either way, my condition is an embarrassment. And so, it was with particular satisfaction that I read Strictly Kosher Reading. Finkelman’s book is a thorough dissection of the frum community – and specifically my community of origin, the yeshivish community – through the lens of its literature. Finkelman does many things in this clever book, the least of which are providing me with clear sound bites that I plan on using in my next battle of wits on the merits of demerits of the Charedi world.

Even readers without Debate Inferiority Complex will find Strictly Kosher Reading a worthwhile read. Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, for all their clarity and comprehensiveness in deconstructing religious fundamentalism, have their limits. After all, what does the average Lakewood yungaman or mother of six know about the philosophical underpinnings of their religion? What they do know, what they act from, is their culture. And Finkelman pulls apart the paradoxes and contradictions in frum culture with the thoroughness, thoughtfulness and calm cool of a pick-up stick virtuoso.

One of the major concepts he points out, is that while the frum community preaches a strict adherence to “us versus them” realities, in actuality, the frum community has become significantly acculturated into the scorned secular world.

For one example of this, Finkelman cites The Jewish Guide to Natural Nutrition, a book that frames its arguments with words from Maimonides to validate that author’s work but whose content is almost exclusively based on contemporary science.

An even more potent example is Finkelman’s evisceration of Lawrence Kelemen (which I’ll admit to relishing deeply; Kelemen was a guru-style teacher of mine in seminary, and the fawning of young women around his cult of personality always made me nauseous). Kelemen’s parenting guide, To Kindle a Soul, criticizes liberal American parenting attitudes, particularly its permissiveness, and claims to teach ancient Biblical approaches to child rearing. One would expect Kelemen’s book to therefore promote violent parenting skills, such as the passage in Mishlei: “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” or the Metzudas Dovid that says “Women who are compassionate with their children…murder them.” Instead, Kelemen concludes: “Yelling and hitting usually flips children out of the learning mode…. and into the obedience mode… which is characterized by a nervous disrupting or rebellious state.” Finkelman shows that Kelleman actually parrots the liberal American perspective he scorns: advocating for gentle, calm communication and teaching through example.

This mimicking of secular values is also apparent in philosophical works that turn to science in an attempt to validate their assertions – which leads to another bizarre contradiction: The authors “find themselves using scientific language to defend positions that the mainstream scientific community rejects. Haredi Judaism wants the prestige and authority of scientific discourse, but without accepting the conclusions that scientists themselves reach.”

Lastly, Finkelman points out the contrast between books meant for kiruv vs. those meant for insiders. Kelemen’s Permission to Believe, for example, a work clearly meant for a non-frum readership, couches its arguments to appeal to individuals searching for truth. On the other hand, a book like Rabbi Dessler’s Strive for Truth, emphasizes submission to rabbinical authority.

“A potential recruit into the Haredi community,” Finkelman writes, “is praised for his intellectual honesty…[However,] a yeshiva student who insists on his unbridled right to search for truth with rationalistic tools might not be treated with the same respect.”

Don’t we know it, Dr. Finkelman, don’t we know it.

Credit: Ollie Crafoord

He pressed all the weight of his body onto mine, climbing onto me in the passenger seat. His head touched the beige interior of the car, as I put my feet up around him on the dash. It was warmer than usual, but still an unbelievably cold December night. The windows were fogging around us and the car had an eerie orange glow from the streetlight above.

A rush of tangled memories streamed through my mind.

When he first asked me out I was ecstatic with disbelief. I always assumed I could only meet someone through my frum friends or at shul. I mean, no shadchan wants to deal with post-OTD girls, right? It wasn’t my fault that drinking and smoking seemed like a good idea at 17. The transparent barrier of my frum childhood had dissolved too easily.

Lesson learned: In the frum world your indiscretions are written on your forehead.

But he didn’t seem to care. One evening he asked me out, on a ride home from campus. We had met at school, two of the few frum kids at City College. It was innocuous enough that I had to accept, hardly influenced by his form-fitting polo and dazzling smile. I was impressed that he wore his tzitzis, even if he left them tucked in and only wore a baseball cap on campus.

The first date was nothing like the few shidduch dates I had been on or my dates in Israel.

After we had coffee, we strolled around the city and talked about all our common interests and similar pasts.

We were two screwed up peas in a pod.

We had both ended up miserable at our chosen schools in Israel. We had made friends and come home outwardly ‘flipped out’ and internally unchanged. He told me about the issues with his overbearing parents. The disaster, that was his high school yeshiva experience, rivaled my own. I just couldn’t believe that while I had been suffering in Bais Yaakov, there was someone so near, feeling the same way.

At the end of our first date, I was weak in the knees. The cold winter air didn’t bother me as I stood next to his trim figure in the streetlight outside the hip coffee shop. I was captivated by his suave attitude and tight body; I had never met a frum guy like this before.

When we got close to the car, he swooped in to open the door for me. I essentially collapsed into the passengers seat, delirious with happiness.

A frum gentleman!

As we approached my street, he swerved into a spot at the end of the block. Looking over at me from the driver’s seat, he began to open up about all his issues, the theological problems that bothered him and his professional dreams. He told me about how he had chosen the wrong major and hated doing math all day. He explained that his parents had unrealistic expectations of him, forcing him into a career that would never bring him happiness.

Just as I began to empathize, trying to think of ways to comfort him, he leaned over the armrest separating us.

I slid over, bumping into the freezing cold window.

“What do you think you’re doing? I’m shomer negiah!”

“REALLY?” Suddenly, I was amazed at how shocked he looked at my retort. He stared into my eyes, like he was going to find some sort of key to open my lock.

“Yeah, I don’t touch the guys I date. I haven’t for years.”

I contemplated being truthful, telling him that no bochur I had ever shidduch dated had made a move on me, but I felt like it would make me look unappealing.

“Well, would you reconsider?” And with that, he leaned over again.

“Listen to me! No way!” I tried to sound forceful, but he smelled like Hugo Boss and sweat. The pheromones were stronger than my resolve.

I shifted away toward the window again, this time putting an elbow between us. As he straightened up, he looked disgruntled for a moment, but then flashed a grin.

“No problem, I’ll drop you off at the door. This was really fun.”

As I slid out of the car I regretted my decision, momentarily feeling like a teenager again.

Before I shut the door, I ducked back in. Leaning over the armrest I gave him a kiss on the cheek. His face lit up, as I straightened up and my breast brushed his chest. I wiggled my way back out of the ‘98 Taurus, noticing its peeling paint and dented door.

“I love you!” he yelled, before I shut the door.

I was conflicted as I walked up the steps, confused at his exclamation and my own actions.

~ ~ ~

I can remember that night so clearly, I thought to myself now, as he shifted his weight.

He kissed me hard on the mouth, nothing like our first few months of easy lip-locking in dark corners on campus and during movies. He sucked on my lips and pinched one of my breasts hard, using it like a stress ball for his muscular hand. After almost ten months of confused bliss and perplexed agony, I couldn’t tell anymore whether I had always been this way.

Harder, faster. I whispered in his ear, licking the lobe and sucking gently on his neck.

I couldn’t even hide these late night events from my friends anymore. They knew why I always wore a turtleneck, some had even noticed the bruises when we were trying on Shabbos outfits in a dressing room.

I quietly whispered to these ex-Bais Yaakov girls, telling them all about how great he was. All my closest friends knew about his muscular arms, his broad smile and our hot nights. They didn’t realize we were mostly in his car, listening to Enrique Iglesias, because he thought it turned me on. I couldn’t remember if I had liked everything so rough in high school or even during my wilder nights in Israel.

I had still kept one standard, no intercourse.

I had to make it a mantra, reciting it mentally as things started to get too hot every night.

No intercourse.

No intercourse.

No intercourse.

Even drunk, I could always remember that one rule. Not that it was any great accomplishment.

He continued stroking my chest as he leaned to the left and loosened his designer belt buckle. Using his usual move, he pulled me closer and wrapped an arm around my waist, to the small of my back. I pulled his jeans down a few inches and slid my hand in his boxer briefs. I wrapped my legs around him, leaving just enough room for my arm between us.

He closed his eyes and started to make little noises, like tiny stifled moans. I licked his ears and kissed his neck, trying to think of something new and interesting to do. He startled me by opening his eyes and pushing my jean skirt all the way up to my waist.

“Come on…” He stroked my chest and reached downward for me. I was surprised he had thought of me before finishing himself.

Suddenly the alcohol haze dissipated and I realized this wasn’t his usual protocol. He wasn’t just planning to return the favor.

With both hands he gripped the sides of my thighs, effectively pinning me in the passenger’s seat. He started to pull down my underwear with his left, massaging my ass cheek with his right hand.

“You’re so hot. I love you. You have the sexiest tits.” he spoke in my ear, almost at full volume.

“I don’t think… I just really want to…” I murmured some vague protestations, but everything felt so good.

I felt sick to my stomach.

This is not you. You don’t want to do this. You are better than this. He didn’t even take you out tonight.

Some voice of reason screamed at me to stop him. He looked ridiculous trying to slide his boxer briefs down lower and continue stroking my stomach, ass and breasts. He was good, but he didn’t have five hands.

“Seriously, we are not doing this in the car.” I looked blankly into his eyes, trying to make myself clear.

“But it could be so good, we’re so in sync…” He looked at me with rounded eyes, pleading and continuing his seduction.

I was drunk, but not drunk enough for this.

“Seriously, I want you so bad right now, you have no idea.” I laced my fingers through his. “You’re so hard, I promise you are the best. This just isn’t me…”

He didn’t stop.

“I want you, but if we do this… You’re raping me.” I cleared my throat. Even I wasn’t convinced.

He shifted all of his weight backward, onto his right leg. The look that crossed his face was mangled anger, disappointment and shock.

“What? You just said you want me.”

“No. Not this, not like this.” I felt so weak, powerless and afraid he wouldn’t accept my terms. All of my fears, coupled with the intense attraction to his cut body and his boyish grin, the conflicting feelings made it unbearable.

He rolled over into the driver’s seat, momentarily honking the horn with his left leg.

“Fine.” He tried to keep cool, but he was clearly angry with me. I guess he thought the Tequila shots would’ve put me over the edge.

“Then blow me at least?”

I knew he thought he deserved some sort of reward for honoring my wishes and I leaned over to the glove compartment for a condom.

“Nah, there aren’t any more, I need to take more from the nurse’s office at school. Come on, we didn’t have one last time…”

I thought about our last rendezvous, in my aunt’s basement on Shabbos. I gave in when he impressed them all singing Zemiros.

“Fine. I guess.” I leaned over and pressed my body against his. I hoped this would be good enough for a little while longer. I kissed him and he briskly cupped my neck, squeezing all the tension out of it, if only for a moment. As I traced my fingers down his chest, feeling the ridges of his wife beater, I admired his soft curly chest hair. He hated it, but I wished he wouldn’t try to wax it away.

As I looked up at him he smiled, but it seemed forced. Moments later, he rolled his head back onto the headrest and his genuine smile started to creep across his face. After a minute or two my neck started to ache again, as I tried to reposition myself without pushing the pedals or honking the horn with any of our tangled body parts. As he started moaning loudly, I looked up at him.

“You don’t have to, you know. Just, whatever you want to do.” I whispered, to quiet his senseless act of gratitude.

He is just being theatrical for my benefit.

The noises quieted and he settled back into the stifled moans I was used to.

When he finished he kissed my forehead, pretending he was trying to be cute. “I love you.”

You just don’t want to kiss me on the mouth until I drink something. I thought, as he reached for the bottle of girly lemon flavored vodka he kept under the passenger seat.

I took a sip and we resumed kissing, the usual post-cum protocol. He knew he owed me, but he didn’t want to piss me off again. I opened my eyes as we kissed, looking at his eyelids for a moment. I pulled him close as we rolled over onto the passenger’s seat again. His weight felt like the warmest blanket. For a moment, the voice of reason in my mind quieted.

I tried to engage him in conversation, “How was your day? Did you finish the project…?”

“No, I didn’t even get a chance to open my laptop. Actually, I better get home and start working, if I want to finish by Friday morning.”

“No, no, no… That’s not what I meant. I mean, lets watch a movie or something? We can watch an action movie…”

I quickly realized he was now intent on going home. He started to pull his jeans up and reached for the length of belt hanging awkwardly off of the loop it had snaked through. I felt like crying.

We had been so close, just a few minutes before.

Don’t cry. I thought. Another of my mantras.

Don’t cry.

Don’t cry.

Don’t cry.

My eyes were moist, but I restrained myself.

“I’ll pick you up for school at 8:30? Okay?” He asked nonchalantly.

“Sure, I’ll be waiting at the door. Just text me.” I tried to sound cheerful.

“You want a coffee? I’ll get you a Starbucks, if you want.”

“Sure, sounds good. I love you.” I started to get out of the car.

He cleared his throat. “Where you going so fast?”

As I leaned over to kiss him goodnight, he squeezed my ass.

“I love you too.”

I knew that he didn’t as I slammed the front door shut and I heard him fly down the street.

I’m worth more than a cup of coffee. I thought.

I could smell his sweat, mingled with Hugo Boss, on my sweater.

I lay down on the couch and pressed my face hard into the pillows, trying to stifle the sounds of my crying.

Did I ever think that I’d be making a film about leaving the Orthodox Jewish community? Putting my most personal memories—my home videos, excerpts from my diary—on the big screen?

Definitely not.

I began the film when I was a sophomore in college. If you’d met me then, you wouldn’t have known that I’d grown up in the Orthodox Jewish community. I had dreadlocks, wore sleeveless shirts in the summer, ate bacon, and didn’t observe a single Jewish holiday. You wouldn’t have known that you were looking at a girl who once placed nationally in the Chidon ha-Tanach, who could read a daf of gemara like a champ, and who, despite not having picked up a Hebrew book in years, could hold her own in any Torah debate.

But anyone who knew me as a teenager knew my story. There were words for people like me. Words like “questioning,” and then “troubled” and “at-risk,” and, finally, “off the derech.” And if you’re off the derech as a teenager in a Jewish community in suburban New Jersey, it’s not a private thing.

Everyone in the community knew that I switched, in the middle of eleventh grade, from my all-girls yeshiva high school to (gasp!) public school. What they didn’t know was how my initial doubts—doubts that there was a God, doubts that God wrote the Torah, doubts that the Torah should be taken literally—set off a tsunami inside of me, the full force of which only became evident much later, when the logical progression of these doubts shattered the foundation of my very existence. At age 16, my entire identity—from my name to the way I dressed, from the food I ate to the way I spoke—suddenly felt like it was based on a massive lie.

There was only one group of people who really understood what I was going through: other “at-risk” teenagers from the Orthodox community. We came from Teaneck, Flatbush, Stamford, Far Rockaway, Manhattan, Woodmere, Cherry Hill, and yet somehow we all found each other. We ate non-kosher, smoked cigarettes, got high, had sex, and with our eyebrow piercings and bleached hair, we looked like any other punk teenagers our age. Except that unlike them, we would leave our houses late Friday afternoons, and spend our weekends sleeping on park benches or subway cars. We were no strangers to police detectives, psychologists, rabbis, drug tests, or community gossip. In lieu of acceptance from our own parents and the community, we became a family, united by our rejection of Orthodoxy.

Some of us graduated from high school; others didn’t. But afterwards, the question came up: would we be going to Israel? Almost everyone from the community, rebellious or not, spent a year studying in a yeshiva there after high school. Most schools were geared towards mainstream kids, but there were special yeshivot targeted to “troubled” adolescents like us. Our parents, usually at their wits’ end, would readily finance flight, tuition, and living expenses for the year.

Anna Wexler, Director of “Unorthodox”

I never seriously considered spending the year in Israel. I was too angry: at the religion, at my parents, and at the community. All I could think about was my eighteenth birthday, which loomed magically ahead, the year when I could finally get my own bank account and credit card, without needing a co-signature from my parents. I planned to use the money I’d saved up to run away as far as possible from everything.

Which is exactly what I did. The week I turned 18, I purchased a one-way ticket to Katmandu and spent a year backpacking around Asia. Aside from once hearing the Chabad truck blasting “Mashiach, Maschiach, Mashiach!” while walking down a Bangkok street, for the entire year I had not a single reminder of my roots.

My friends, meanwhile, had spent the year immersed in their roots, and when we reunited in America, I was in for a shock: almost all of them had become religious. Suddenly my guy friends were wearing black hats, learning in yeshiva, eating kosher and keeping Shabbat. Some stopped speaking to me altogether, as they didn’t want to be “distracted” by women. Others were now shomer negiah, and would no longer greet me with a hug. Many of my female friends now wore long sleeves and skirts, and wouldn’t come out with me on Friday nights.

I tried to be happy for my friends. I told myself that I loved them and cared about them, and if they were happy, I should be happy for them. But deep down, I couldn’t shake a feeling of the betrayal: we’d been a family, and now the bonds that had held us together were broken.

What had happened to my friends was—and still is—such a commonplace phenomenon that there’s even a name for it: flipping out. I’d watched rebellious kids a few years older than me come back from Israel wearing black hats, but for whatever reason, I never thought it would happen to my friends.

As I started college, I couldn’t quite move past what had happened to my friends. I wanted to investigate the phenomenon of flipping out and write about it: what exactly happens over this year in Israel? Why do so many people go back to the faith, year after year?

But a chance meeting with a film producer caused me to rethink the proper medium for the story. The essence of documentary film, he said, was to capture change on camera. So I got my best friend from college, Nadja, on board and despite having no experience with filmmaking, we set out to follow three teenagers as they spent their year studying in seminary in Israel.

Still images from the film “UNORTHODOX”

Throughout the project, people told me that my story was part of the film. I stubbornly insisted otherwise: this was a movie about the year in Israel, not a movie about me. It was only years later, in the editing room, that I understood how much richer the teenagers’ stories would be if you watched their journeys through my eyes.

And so I decided to put myself in the film: to include the darkest moments of my adolescence, the wild highs of my rebellion, and my very personal struggles with religious belief. I opened up my own life in the same way that the three subjects had agreed to open up theirs.

This film contains different narrative threads: there are stories about leaving, stories about leaving and coming back, and stories of never leaving at all. In some ways, my story is different from those of other Unpious readers: I grew up in the Modern Orthodox community and so the scars of my painful departure from Orthodox Judaism are not visible on the outside. But on the inside—where it counts—I believe we suffered the same trauma, of experiencing the whole universe as a rug that has been suddenly been pulled from beneath you.

Finally, I have an appeal to make: I need your help in getting this film out there. Nadja and I have been working on UNORTHODOX for seven years now. The footage is shot, the story is laid out, and over the summer, I put together a first draft of the film. At this point, we need to raise the money to work with a professional editor to complete the movie. We are now appealing to the public, to people who are interested in the film and to those for whom our stories resonate. Our trailer is now up on Kickstarter.com. Please take a look, pledge if you can, spread the word, and please help us finish the film that contains your story as much as it contains mine.

My entire family was there. Our eyes were glued to the monitor that kept track of his vitals, its glaring digits telling a brutal tale. The doctors had already told us that his days were numbered but you didn’t need to be a doctor to know that. If you saw my brother in the last week of his life, you knew that the devil had already laid his hand on him.

Then it happened. His numbers started falling like rocks bouncing down a steep decline. The alarms started buzzing. As the nurse rushed in, I swear I felt the angel of death squeeze between my sister and me and head to my brother’s bed.

My mother leaned over the bed and took my brother’s hand, then softly patted his head. Despite his age of 28, she spoke to him as if he were still the little boy she once doted on.  “Tatteleh, please try to hold on.”

He then took his last breath. We screamed Sh’ma Yisroel and Hashem Hu Elokim, it was Yom Kipur and Tisha B’av rolled into one. I hugged my sister and wept in her arms like a child. My mother held my little sister and cried the silent tears of a strong and faithful woman.

“We can feel sad, but not bitter or angry; that’s for people with no aibishter,” they said, as my brother’s dead body lay nearby, still warm. “There is a Creator and this is part of His plan.” But I did feel bitter. It hurt me to see my brother suffer, and then to see and feel the anguish of losing a child and sibling.

I did not suddenly stop believing in a Supreme Being because I saw suffering in the world. My family has experienced suffering from the time of my earliest memories, so pain does not negate the existence of a God. But it did finally confirm what kind of God he is. The childrens’ ward at a cancer hospital is not necessarily a proof against an omnipotent God, but if he does exist, it serves as a testament to his character.

I have no reason to be angry with God as I don’t think He played a part in any of this. I do however feel rage when my intelligence is offended by those who say He did. What twisted mind conceived of a world where it is important to tie your left shoe before your right but it is “part of a plan” for children to die before their parents?

When I hear of the Torah being written and the Mishanyos being studied in my brother’s memory the only image that comes to mind is a feckless victim being slapped across the face and all he can do is give the other cheek.

After a tiring day of sitting shiva, despite having visited with family and friends till two in the morning, fatigue was not what I was feeling. I felt terrified. I had just witnessed the untimely death of someone I loved. The prayers offered by his family and friends and the countless others who never knew him fell on the deaf ears of an indifferent God. I was mourning the death of someone not much older than myself and I realized how vulnerable I was to nature’s wrath. I was shaking with fear and there was no God to make me feel safe and protected. I felt alone and exposed.

I fell into bed and crept beside my wife, who, sensing my pain, drew me close. She was silent as there was nothing to be said. And in her comforting embrace I realized that while we there is no Higher Power to whom we can appeal in a time of need, the love of a fellow human can sustain us just the same.

Credit: Feliz Paloma

Often, on her way to the welfare office, Mrs. Stein drove through the Syrian neighborhood. It was full of large opulent houses, the same ugly Mercedes station wagon in every driveway and dozens of Mexican housekeepers. Her friends joked that they only taught Spanish in Syrian yeshivas so the students could speak to their maids.

Occasionally she’d catch sight of a pretty Syrian lady in heels and spandex pants that showed a round derriere formed from hours on an elliptical, paying the grocery delivery man. How lucky that woman was, Mrs. Stein always thought. Her husband goes to work all day. Her kids go to school all day. The Mexicans clean the house and prepare the food. She telephones for her groceries from Kosher Korner and the diminutive delivery guy brings them to her door. Mrs. Tawil has all the time she needs to sweat off the weight from childbearing, so she will look fit enough to seduce her husband and keep Mr. Tawil’s eyes off his secretaries.

Mrs. Stein felt too young to have a stomach forced to seek refuge behind a girdle. She was only 26 and if she hadn’t started having kids at 19, she might still have her beauty. At least, she thought, if her marriage had turned out the way she’d hoped, she’d be content. The light turned green and her clunky Dodge minivan lumbered into a left turn. Her children ransacked the back. Crumbs and chocolate-soiled wrappers littered the floor. The kids battered each other and when they complained to her, she turned up the cassette player until it belted out a Jewish tune loud enough to drown them out. She’d reduced parenting to “leave me be,” and “deal with it.” The kids’ll raise themselves somehow, she figured. Isn’t that what all the parenting books said?

As horrid as her marriage was, she refused to divorce her husband. Mrs. Stein’s father frowned in all the wedding pictures, wishing she’d married someone more familiar to her family. She had grown up Chasidic in Monsey and had met Asher through a friend’s husband. He studied at a yeshiva in Borough Park. She was young, and desperate to show her father she could make her own decisions. If she divorced Asher, she knew her parents would lecture her about knowing better.

She pulled up at the ghastly new condo complex built especially for heimishe families. Her kids were grazing in the front yard of Mrs. Sutton’s house. Fortunately, Mrs. Sutton let Mrs. Stein dump the kids on her for a while. Mrs. Stein entered the messy duplex decorated with photos of rabbis she’d never met and didn’t know much about.

Asher was at the table reading one of Dr. Dovid Feinberg’s self-help books. The pink of his panties was peeking out behind his mess of tzitzis.

“What if the kids had been here?” she scolded him. He quickly fixed himself as Mrs. Stein fumbled with an overflowing garbage bag. “Can’t you at least take out the trash?”

Asher didn’t look up from his book. When she returned, she removed three frozen dinners and preheated the oven. Asher got up, walked into his bedroom and returned with a bottle of wine and a mischievous grin she’d seen many times before. He was offering sex.

Nobody would suspect their marriage was a joke. On the surface, it didn’t look that different from the marriages of their friends and family. None of the men in their community held their wives’ hands or slept in the same bed. But for the Steins, sex was a tradeoff. Mrs. Stein stared at the bottle of wine and collected her fantasies. This time he wanted to go to one of Dr. Feinberg’s conventions in Monsey. He hocked her about it as he winoed up, then chased the bottle with a Fresca.

It was only seven minutes of one way, passionless fucking. Asher couldn’t show even the slightest emotion. She grinded away as he drunkenly did his part by keeping his circumcised anatomical dildo at full salute. She lay naked in her bed as Asher silently redressed. He slid into an expensive pink corset.

“Nu, you buy for yourself but you can’t buy me something nice?”

Asher looked towards her blankly and looked down as he slid back into his stockings.

“I don’t know what you like,” he muttered. “I don’t even know your size.”

“Well, if you buy yourself some nice lingerie, you could buy me something. I like to look pretty too. Can I try on yours?”

Asher looked at her blankly. His friends in yeshiva had said he was a funny guy with great wit and personality. These traits she never got to see. Every day, Asher woke up and went to the mikva and to daven. After that he went to learn until noon. From noon to seven he stocked shelves and delivered for the butcher. They paid him in cash each day, plus tips. If the butcher didn’t need him for the day, Asher locked himself in his study reading Dr. Feinberg’s golden advice on living a heimishe life and answering back missionaries.

Mrs. Stein had never seen a Jew for Jesus and neither had her husband. Nevertheless, Mrs. Stein tolerated her husband using all his money to buy Dr. Feinberg’s books, tapes, and other tchotchkes. Asher reciprocated by doing the bare minimum she could ask of him.

The next morning, Mrs. Stein woke to find a note on the kitchen table:

Dr. Feinberg’s convention was moved to Baltimore.
Took the minivan. Go rent a car for the week. I left you some money.

It wasn’t moved. He’d lied as usual. She wouldn’t have cared anyway. She dropped her kids off with the pretty teenage redhead from down the hall whose name she always forgot, while she went to rent a car.

At the rental lot she perused the minivans. She hated the thought of driving around in another minibus. In the corner of the lot sat one of those ugly Mercedes station wagons all the Syrian ladies drove. She approached it as if it were the burning bush, trembling in the presence of a car driven only by the privileged and not by the pious. She inspected the leather-wrapped interior. It was shabby and the leather was cracking and the wood warping, but it was a Mercedes. She cringed when she thought of the price.

A smiling olive-skinned orthodox man wearing a black vest came towards her.

“Hello, this car is for rent!” he cheerfully informed her.

“It’s probably way to expensive for me. I should really look at one of those older minivans.”

“A lady crashed into a pole. It was rebuilt under warranty. My neighbor got it and drove it. Everywhere. Canada, Mexico. California a couple of times. This car’s been everywhere. It has 250,000 miles on the clock so I decided to put it here on the lot to rent. It’s very worn, but hey—it’s a Mercedes, right?”

Mrs. Stein drove back home with an ear to ear grin. She imagined herself driving one of those small Mercedes convertibles like a middle-aged Italian man. She took a detour to Gravesend and patrolled the neighborhood waving at the Syrian ladies loading their kids into their ugly Mercedes wagons. Most smiled back uneasily. Some waved back frantically with wide smiles wondering: was that Mrs. Tawil?

The Mercedes had modern technology: seat warmers and electronics she never knew existed. She’d driven for almost two hours when she realized the nameless redhead teenager watching her kids would be cross. In front of her condo was a big parking spot. It took her a few attempts to park her prized Mercedes. She would learn. She had a week before Asher returned with their minivan and she planned to make the best of it.

Her children and their teenage babysitter greeted her at the door. Mrs. Stein gave the babysitter some money and asked her to take the kids out for just a little longer. As soon as the house was quiet, Mrs. Stein stripped naked, jumped into her bed and masturbated fervently several times until she was panting as if she’d ran a marathon. When her kids arrived home, she introduced them to the new Mercedes. She took them for a ride around the block and they explored its features.

That week with the Mercedes, Mrs. Stein’s life was different. Everyday a spot in front of her condo was free. The car seemed to make her kids want to behave. Every day, before she took them out to run her errands, they would quietly choose one Yiddish DVD to watch during the ride. All drinks stayed in the cupholders; upon debarking all areas were checked for grime and wrappers. For Shabbos shopping Mrs. Stein even went to the supermarket all the Syrians ordered their groceries from.

When she got home, her heart sank when she saw the parking spot in front of her apartment, which God had kept open for her all week, now occupied by a black hubcap-less, dented, Dodge minivan. Asher sat clean-shaven on the couch with a book. The kids ran to greet their father who kissed them each on the head and handed them a fifty-state coin collection kit. She smiled. Sometimes he could be so human. The kids settled into their gifts and Asher resumed reading. Mrs. Stein’s contempt returned swiftly as, as usual, he didn’t help or bother to ask about her week.

“So you return again shaven?”

“I’ll regrow it, I uhh… mangled it and I had to shave. Moshe Pipik will get over it.”

The kids switched on a DVD and began dancing around the living room. Asher rose to return to his study.

“Asher,” she called to him, “don’t forget to check on the kids. I gotta return my rental car.”

The same olive-skinned religious man was there, and he smiled to her cheerfully.

“Did you enjoy the car?”

“Oh, I loved it… my kids loved it too!”

“Did your husband like it?”

“Uh… yeah, he liked the seat warmers. Out of curiosity, how much would you sell it for?”

“You are a nice lady. I’d give it to you to for eight and a half.”

“That’s a lot.”

“This model with less miles goes for over twenty! And it’s been perfectly maintained.”

When she returned home, the kids sat quietly on the couch reading. They nodded in acceptance of a dinner menu of fried fish. She had to knock on the door to her husband’s study several times before he answered.

“What?”

“You want fried fish for dinner?”

“I picked up cholent and kishka from Eisenstein’s. I have food.”

In the middle of the night, she suddenly jolted awake. Her clock read 4:10. She put her hair in a snood, wrapped herself in a robe and went to inspect her hibernating cave. After checking on each child, she walked out onto the terrace. The brisk wind rustled the trees amongst the street lamps. She looked down and noticed their Dodge wasn’t there. She went upstairs to see if her husband had left a note.

The door to his bathroom was closed, but the light was on. Curious, she entered to find a note covered by a key. She picked up the note and a polaroid picture fell out and landed face side up. Her eyes widened. It was a photo of Dr. Dovid Feinberg and her baby-faced husband dressed like a goyishe teenaged girl, sitting in Dr. Feinberg’s lap, holding a divorce certificate dedicated to Mrs. Feinberg. Everybody was in good spirits.

Chavi,
I left. I will give you a get, no question.
I was trapped my whole life and for once I am free. I am sure you will feel the same.
I would like to see the children. Someday I will have my operation. And we’ll have to explain it.
Love, Asher/Ashley

Mrs. Stein walked to her husband’s study where he regularly slept and slowly unlocked the door. Timidly, she entered and scanned the room. She slid open the first side of the closet. There was nothing but a line of suits, his shtremiel box, and a white kittel still wrapped in plastic from the dry cleaners.

“He could’ve left me something…”

She opened the other side, revealing dozens of ladies outfits. Expensive ones too. Probably gifts from Dr. Feinberg. Shoes and jewelry galore. She spun around and noticed the computer on the desk, along with dozens of pictures of Dr. Feinberg and Asher—Ashley, now—and a brown envelope.

Inside the envelope was a pile of cash and another note:

Never needed to use SS money so it’s all here.
Please don’t expose Dr. Feinberg and me.
Will send more for kids.

Over 80 grand. She jumped back to the closet and began trying on all his clothing. They fit! All of his stuff fit her! She let her hair out and examined herself in the mirror, dressed elegantly, wearing sparkly jeans or spandex pants and heels.

The Mercedes. She needed it.

As soon as it was morning, Mrs. Stein ran to the rental center and purchased the Mercedes. She was cruising Gravesend when a loud boom sent the car sputtering and spewing smoke from the crevices of the hood. She stepped out glaring at the noxious fumes of her overheated German car.

Then she smiled. She strolled to one of the Syrian mansions and rang the bell. A fat Mexican lady answered the door. Mrs Stein invited herself in and marveled at the beauty and wealth inside.

“I am Mrs. Tawil,” she told the Mexican lady.

“Es la casa del familia Dwek,” the Mexican woman said.

Mrs. Stein waltzed around the kitchen in a gleeful daze.

“Estoy llamando a la policía!”

Mrs. Stein ignored her, climbed the stairs and entered the lavish bedroom. She undressed and lay down on the bed under the blankets. Any minute Mr. Tawil will be home. He will be home to lie in bed with her. He will buy her a new Mercedes. The fumes of her burning car billowed into the bedroom. In the distance the fire engines blared. The fat Mexican lady yelled in Spanish. Mr. Tawil will be home any minute.

Photo: Rachel F. Young/Fotolia

Ever since I met Yitz and his friends, I’ve been struggling with the question: How do I explain Williamsburg to my mother and Alabama to the Chasidim?

When I first mentioned my new friends to my mother, she was less than thrilled. “These don’t seem like your people,” she said. “Are they freaks? Is that what you like about them?”

I went on to explain what I liked about them—their warmth, their humor, their apparent unconditional acceptance of me, a shiksa, in their midst—but my mother only listens to me half the time, and only haphazardly remembers what she does hear.

“Here’s the takeaway, Mom. They’re welcoming. I’ve never met a group of people so willing to take me in, sight-unseen.” These friends have mostly rejected the tenets of Chasidism, they tell me, but there’s still something about them that appears rooted in their culture, the emphasis on family and community and opening their doors to a stranger. “Maybe I’m honeymooning,” I said to my mom after a moment’s thought, “but I’m enjoying it for now.”

With that, she gave me a break. No doubt I’ll have to explain myself again next week, but for now she’s content that I haven’t sold my soul to a cult.

I was considered a gifted child. Aside from an absolute inability to carry a tune, I excelled at pretty much everything. I started speaking single words at nine months, full sentences by a year. I read Steinbeck in the second grade. When I didn’t score perfectly on a standardized test, I still reached the 98^th percentile. When I sketched storybook characters, no one believed I’d drawn them without help. I was pretty sure I was normal. My mother was convinced otherwise. Ever since I was little she has been monitoring my life anxiously, afraid that one day I’ll turn my interests to something misguided like heroin, or worse, the Moonies, and she’ll lose me—and all my precious gifts—forever. To my mother, the Chasidim are just another entry in her long list of worries.

As a child, others around me, too, had great expectations: either I was going to save the world, or I was going to shatter, too fragile to be useful. While still in elementary school, adults used to ask me ridiculously mature questions. “What med school do you plan to attend?” a friend’s mother once asked as we waited for the bus the morning after a sleepover party. I was eleven.

Now, as an adult, those who’ve known me since childhood think I’ve fizzled. I haven’t accomplished much to speak of, which my best friend Maggie has been reminding me a lot lately. “You seem interested only in—I don’t know—autistic kids, vagrants, trannies… For godssakes, get a real job.” Not only have I failed to cure cancer, but I’ve developed a fascination with outliers, people on the fringes of society. Chasidim, Maggie seemed to say, are just more of the same.

On the phone again the next day, I reminded my mother that I live five blocks from Maggie and I rarely get to see her. I have to text her two weeks in advance to get a slot in her busy social calendar. But these Chasidim—they get together every Friday night. “Can you picture that, Mom? Can you imagine gathering up your family members and friends for a big dinner every single week? No soccer practice, no work meetings, no trips to Wal-Mart?”

My mother admitted she couldn’t. Sure, families in the secular world have dinner together, but it’s not a drop-everything affair and it isn’t imbued with a sense of sacred importance.

And then, as we were talking, Yitz called. “Gotta go, Mom,” I said. I was meeting Yitz and his friends for the Shabbos meal, and the z’man—one of the many words I was learning—was fast arriving. I felt bad for cutting my mother off, but my guilt was assuaged by the sound of the TV in the background. She wasn’t exactly giving me her full attention.

Yitz told me to pick up some booze for the Shabbos meal, and I hastened to get dressed. I shimmied into some black tights and the one tznius dress I owned, then pulled on a long wool coat to complete the ensemble. My black lace-up ankle boots instantly marked me, by the scrutinies of real Yidden, as an outsider playing an odd game of dress-up. Fortunately, I could still pass as young enough to have my hair uncovered. The important thing was that I was present and genuine. And that I came with whiskey in hand.

I used Shabbos dinners as an opportunity to improve my vocabulary—mikvah and heimish and gefilte fish. I particularly liked saying Yiddishkeit, playing with the emphasis, spitting it out forcefully. If anything, I was dedicated and it endeared me to my new friends. I still didn’t quite grasp why they liked me, though. I was openly critical of some aspects of Judaism, and I couldn’t suppress my laughter when Yitz explained niddah to me after a few drinks. “Really? God cares when you have sex?” But yet they embraced me, and I basked in their warmth. I’d never met so many people so willing to accept me.

Saturday morning, I lay in bed and my eyes drifted to the framed college diploma on the wall. “The Savannah College of Art and Design awards, on this first day of June in the year of 2009…” After my college graduation ceremony, my favorite professor pulled me aside for a tight hug. He told me I was one of his brightest students, and he really believed in me. What would he think about me now? That day isn’t so distant, but it turns out that I’m just an average adult. Quirky, yet average. He might be disappointed. I’m disappointed, for Christ’s sake. Thinking about this made me want to call my mom.

“I’ve decided that it’s okay that I’m never going to save the world. I’m okay with it. I am still special in my own way. I have friends that love me.”

“Does this have something to do with those Jews?” she asked after a pause. “I get why you like them, but why in the world do they like you?”

I thought it best to change the subject. “Can we work out the Thanksgiving menu now. Does Emily want that cornbread stuffing this year?” I’d decided to host our family’s Thanksgiving dinner at my apartment in Brooklyn. My family is flying in from Alabama and I’m gathering up a few wayward friends for what I hope will be a heart-warming union of loved ones. I even purchased a new dinner table which makes my kitchen look like it belongs to a large Chasidic family–hardly enough room for the diners. The oversized table is a visual declaration of my revised values and a chance to edit my life’s script for the positive.

“Maggie said she’d come over the night before to prep the soup, and Yitz offered to bring a loaf of challah. That’s bread.”

“As long as it doesn’t taste funny…” Mom trails off and I roll my eyes. “I’m interested in meeting one of those Chasidics, though. Lord knows they’ve got to be more normal than those green-haired kids you brought home in high school.”

And more normal is all the approval I need.

“madonna+hashem+real+estate+lisence”

Sounds like a great business plan to us.

“how to test for virginity”

We don’t recommend this method

“why does the western wall have many cracks?”

To get to the other side! Oh, wait- wrong joke.

“amish sex through a sheet”

Amish?? That’s our gig! Don’t go stealing our shit, Mennonites!

“seventeen days of fog”

Sounds like me after my birthday. Man, what a party!

“good use for non tznius clothing”

Ah, the dilemma of every thrifty BT. Here’s an idea: donate it to your local OTD kid.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Originally published on Hasidic Rebel on October 10, 2007, and reprinted here with permission. Authors have asked us to note that as the essays featured in “Best of the Blogs” document journeys of transformation, the author’s views may have changed since initial publication.

Nominate your own Best of the Blogs posts with an email to unpious.submissions@gmail.com.