The Greatest Challenge is from Within

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It was a cold December day.

I had just taken the bold step of enrolling in a community college. After handing in my forms at the registrar's office, I was instructed to meet with an advisor.

This was taking longer than I had expected, so I called my mother to ask her to pick up my kids from school. She agreed, so I found a chair and waited for my appointment.

I was ushered into the adviser's office a few minutes later. She was not ready to meet with me yet so I glanced at the newspaper clippings that hung from the office in her room.

One in particular caught my eye. It was the story of a girl who grew up homeless in Los Angeles. She was born to a teenage single mother and spent her nights traveling from homeless shelter to homeless shelter with her mother. However, this girl loved to read and spent every day in the library learning whatever she could get her hands on. This tendency continued as she got older. She enrolled in the highest-level classes available at her inner-city high school, got straight-A's, and ultimately went to Harvard with a full scholarship.

A nice story, but for some reason I was not particularly impressed. I thought to myself, "How could I not be impressed by this story? Isn't it the classic tale of overcoming adversity?"

Then it hit me. I was sitting in the office of a local community college--not Harvard.

While I'm sure that the article left out a few details, the girl in the article didn't seem to have an internal struggle. Her nature was to be studious, and therefore as soon as she was old enough to read she spent all of her time reading and studying. Given that she was a naturally intelligent girl who spent hours reading each day, it is hardly surprising that she got the Harvard scholarship. Intelligence and diligence are to a large extent genetic, and her genetic combination was strong enough that it could withstand being born into bad circumstances.

But how is any of this relevant to us, the community college students in this office?

I was not at Harvard, and neither were the other students who would sat in this office before me and would sit in this office after me, because we were not like the girl in the article. We did not make all of the right choices--we made mistakes. Whether the mistake involved joining an extreme religious group, having unprotected sex at 15, dropping out of high school, or simply not caring about school, most of us were here for a similar reason--to get a second (or third, or fourth, etc.) chance.

During the year that I spent at community college, I met many other students who were working hard at overcoming their pasts. I met a student who worked her way up from remedial elementary-school math all the way to calculus in order to fulfill her dream of studying environmental science. I met a woman who was at college together with her daughter, working her way towards a better job. I met a man who had just spent many years in jail and now wanted to turn his life around.

While I am happy that I am able to take more advanced courses now that I am at a regular college, I can't help but miss all of the inspiring students back at the community college, the students who had made mistakes.

I went to a research conference last week that featured the research of Undergraduate students who were considered "disadvantaged" by being from certain minority groups or from being first-generation college students. This is not a group that I am eligible for. My father is a university professor and my mother has a master's degree. My SAT score as good enough that I could have gotten into almost any college that I wanted to, but I didn't go to college because I thought that it was wrong to do so. I was "advantaged" and I blew it.

Yet here I am in school again, aiming for a doctorate someday.

My disadvantage did not come from my background but from myself. But perhaps beating oneself really is the greatest challenge.

Marrying Young and Financial Responsibility

On the first day of my college's summer session, I walked into my statistics class a little early and started speaking to the only other student in the room. I asked him what he was majoring in, and he replied that he had a double major--music (cello, I think) and mechanical engineering. An interesting combination, I thought, and certainly more practical than just majoring in music. So I said, "That makes a lot of sense, because it is probably easier to find a job in engineering than in music".

The student suddenly looked offended and horrified. He replied, "No, I don't care about money. I just love engineering."

Okay then. All I can say is that later on he will be thankful that his interests are music and engineering rather than music and classical French literature, because regardless of his motivations now at least he will be employable. I then realized, however, that I had this reaction because I have been in the "real world" for years and suffered the devastating effects of poverty brought on by lack of ability to earn a living.

When I married at eighteen, I was no different from this student. While I knew that I needed to get a job and work, the thought of going to college and/or delaying marriage for the sake of marriage was abhorrent to me. I didn't care about money or want to be rich. I was young and idealistic and felt that if I was willing to work hard then we would be fine. I was definitely wrong about that.

The problem is that both that student and I shared an attitude that is common among older teenagers and young twenty-somethings today. I would venture to say that for most middle or upper-class students, college is viewed as an expected rite-of-passage rather than a means of preparation for the future. Among frum people of the same age, the attitude is that marriage is a rite-of-passage and that finances will work themselves out afterwards.

Both of these attitudes reflect a lack of maturity. The problem within the frum world is that people typically get married while still in that immature state, which often leads to disastrous consequences.

"You Can Be Anything that You Want to Be, If You Try Hard Enough"

...Or maybe not.

When I was in ninth and tenth grades, my family lived in a small town far from any substantial frum community. I spent those years in a public school that had only five Jewish students, of which I was the only frum one.

In tenth grade I made friends with the girl who sat next to me in math class. Leila, a Muslim immigrant who came from Pakistan at the age of five, was one of the few students in the school who could relate to my religious observance, and I was one of the few students who understood her. We discussed topics such as modesty and dietary laws, and I was there to support her when her father caught her with a picture of a boy with his arm on her shoulder. The other students would not have been able to understand why her father cared.

One day Leila was quite upset. She described to me how she had spent hours writing and rewriting an essay for her honors' English class. She was distressed because she felt that no matter how many times she would try to rewrite it, the essay would still be terrible. Leila was an intelligent girl so I was sure that she was exaggerating, but I offered to look over her essay and help her rewrite it.

After our math class we went to the library to look at the essay. I was shocked. Using the word terrible to describe the essay would be an understatement. The essay was so bad that I could not understand what she was attempting to write. It was clear to me that she really had tried, but that for some reason she had no grasp of grammar. So I sat with her and helped her rewrite her essay, and then did the same at least once a week at lunch for the rest of the year.

One day I asked her, "Why are you in honors' English if writing is so difficult for you?" To me it seemed that remedial English would have been a more appropriate placement. She explained to me that her immigrant parents wanted her to fulfill the American dream of going to an ivy-league university, so that she could get into a top medical school and become a doctor, so her parents insisted that she stay in the honors'-level English track. She told me that she wished that her parents would let her take courses that were more appropriate for her.

Her parents had absorbed one of the most common beliefs of modern American society, that a person can be anything that he or she wants to be by trying hard. This belief seems to transcend religious and cultural boundaries, and Leila's parents simply could not understand that their daughter could not do well in honor's English, no matter how hard she tried. Leila was quite good at math and may well have done fine at a middle-of-the-road state college, and then possibly have gone to medical school, by taking an appropriate English class that would have taught her the skills that she needed to succeed. Alternatively, if she really could not learn how to write well enough to graduate college, she may have been able to find a trade that suited her. If Leila had been my daughter, I would also have had her evaluated for learning disabilities. By pushing their daughter to go in a direction that was not appropriate for her, her parents were setting her up for failure.

This attitude is seen particularly strongly in the frum world. The frum world defines success quite narrowly, yet argues that everyone can achieve that measure of success if they try hard enough. While some "elite" sectors of the secular world are guilty of having the same attitude, in most secular households success is defined broadly enough that everyone can succeed at something. When success for a man is defined as being able to learn gemara for hours per day, is it any surprise that many people end up feeling like failures? Many people simply cannot do that, even if they "try hard". If success for a girl is defined as being a good mother to a large family, is it any surprise that many people fail?

People are different by nature. Everyone is unique, and effort is often not enough to compensate for having inherent difficulties in a particular area. No matter how hard I try, I will never be a good baalebusta. Hopefully one day I will achieve the level of "mediocre". So why should I spend my life working towards something that I will always be bad at, rather than working towards a goal that will enable me to excel?

I unfortunately lost touch with Leila and do not know what happened to her. I, however, am determined to do what Leila would have done if she had the choice. I am going to follow the direction of my innate abilities and find a way to succeed at something.

Welcome to my blog!

As this is the first post on my blog, I would like to begin by introducing myself and the purpose of my blog.

I am a married mother-of-three in her twenties who has recently begun having serious doubts about the validity of Orthodox Judaism and has thus joined the ranks of the orthoprax, the despised subculture of secret heretics who remain within the Orthodox community for various reasons.

I entered the frum community as a young teenager when I, together with my mother, decided to become more religious. My mother was always religiously-inclined and would have likely become frum earlier if it were not for her living in a southern town with only a tiny Orthodox community. I became interested in Orthodox Judaism as a young teenager when I realized that since I believed in Torah min Hashomayim, it was hypocritical for me not to keep the mitzvos. My mother followed me, at a slower pace, and ultimately became mostly-Modern-Orthodox. She would, and still does, break shabbos when her elderly mother calls and in other such situations.

I, on the other hand, became charedi--very charedi. I orginially became frum at the only Orthodox shul in our town, a Chabad shul. Then my mother remarried and we moved to a big city and I went to a "modern-Yeshivish" girls high school. I ended up deciding to go back to Chabad, went to a Chabad seminary, and married shortly thereafter. I took yiddishkiet very seriously and was very machmir in many areas. I kept a very strict standard of tznius, was very machmir about hilchos shabbos, and I davened and learned a substantial amount every day. I did not go to college because I thought that it was assur to do so and then I had three kids by age 23.

At that point my world began to crash down on me. I had grown up in the self-esteem generation, believing that I could be whatever I wanted to be if I tried hard enough. Therefore, despite being the intellectual type who also has severe ADD, I figured that if the Rebbe said that women should primarily be wives and mothers of large families that I could do so if I tried hard enough. After having a breakdown after the birth of my third child, I realized that is definitely not the case. Parenting is not my strong point, to put it mildly, and housekeeping is even less so. I found that I had little in common with other frum women who primarily wanted to discuss child-rearing and recipes, and I felt like the proverbial fish-out-of-water. I began to hate myself and feel like a worthless human being as I couldn't do even the minimum expected of me.

Starting college literally changed my life. I originally decided to go back to college in order to get a decent job, because I was fed up with the "bitachon method" of earning income. However, going back to college saved my self-image by allowing me to do something that I was good at--really good at. I quickly made my way to the top of my class and excelled at every class that I took (except for one class this semester, which will likely be my first college "B"). The fact that charedi Judaism tries to fit everyone into a mold, along with the economic problems inherent in the system, made me question the charedi system as a whole (I had already decided way earlier that I did not agree with Chabad), and once the questioning began, it made me realize that Orthodox Judaism as a whole is built on a very shaky foundation.

Now I feel trapped. I am married to a super-frum husband and have kids in the Chabad system. I want to be able to focus all of my energies on college because it is the only thing that I am living for these days, but I can't totally neglect my kids and my husband. I do not want to be frum at all, but attempting to leave a frum lifestyle would cause emotional and financial chaos for all involved. However, as a person who hates hypocrisy, living a lie is killing me psychologically. I also worry that if I stay then my kids will be stuck in the system and forced to fit into a mold into which they may or may not fit.

So here I am, sitting on the fence.