Be careful what you wish for...

One night, almost ten years ago, I sat down with a purple pen and a sheet of lined paper and made a list.

I wrote a sincere and heartfelt list of the qualities that I was looking for in a chosson. I wrote on that list that I wanted my husband to be a sincere person, with true yiras shomayim, who was truly dedicated to yiddishkiet. I wanted someone intelligent who loved learning Torah. I wanted him to be srupulously honest. I wanted him to have smicha or be in the process of getting it, and ulitmately work in klei kodesh. I wanted him to focus on ruchnius rather than gashmiyus.

I davened to Hashem that I should find a chosson with these qualities. Whenever I davened shmoneh esrei, I focused my requests on finding a good chosson and building a Jewish home.

I got everything that I wanted. I got married at 18, on my first shidduch, to a chosson with every quality on my list. I had won the shidduch lottery. I had succeeded, by background had not prevented me from getting married, as I had feared that it would. My husband was even a FFB. I succeeded.

Or not.

What I needed was the exact opposite of what I had asked for. I needed more time and more life experience. I needed time to "find myself", despite my confidence that I had already done so.

Perhaps if I had done so, my list would have been different.

What I needed, or at least need now, is the freedom to grow and explore. What I need now is a partner who will view life as a journey, a person who is willing to question and search.

My husband recently showed me my purple list again. He explained that he has every quality on the list. He is right, he does.

But the list changed because I changed. Of course, I cannot expect him to change because I changed, but I can't refrain from changing because of him.

So I remain, tenuously perched on the fence.

For now.

"If only you wouldn't be Chabad/Charedi/Non-Modern Orthodox, you would be fine"

After practically every post I have written, someone has commented that the problems that I am bringing up are charedi-specific and that I should just become Modern Orthodox. Such comments are not limited to the internet, however. I have heard plenty of offline comments of a similar nature.

For the last few months, I have been considering writing a post on why I did not simply become Modern Orthodox. I could definitely think of a few good reasons to list, including:

1. The fact that I would be just about as unacceptable to my husband for me to live an openly Modern-Orthodox lifestyle as a non-frum one. He would never be okay with me openly talking to the kids about Modern Orthodox hashkafos or dressing to Modern Orthodox standards.

2. I have issues with accepting the concept of Torah M'sinai without some kind of proof because some of the things that are written in Torah are quite unbelievable, and others are very difficult to live with. No, the Kuzari mass-revelation argument is flawed and does not qualify as proof.

3. Despite my current fence-sitting, I am a big believer in consistency. Despite all of its flaws, the one thing that Chareidism has going for it is that it is internally consistent, which is precisely what drew to me towards Chareidism in the first place. Chareidism has a consistent way of interpreting halacha, and is not afraid to stand for beliefs and practices that contradict modern sensibilities if they are more consistent with the most straightforward interpretation of the Torah and Rabbinical texts. 

 Modern Orthodoxy, however, seems to lack this consistency. They bend-over backwards to find loopholes for halachos that they don't like, yet insist on strict interpretations of less-objectionable ones. Anything that seems philosophically-objectionable is deemed non-literal while everything else is literal. Why couldn't God have just said what he meant?

However, on further reflection, there are aspects of Modern Orthodoxy that I like such as the emphasis on morality, the high-regard for tradition combined with an openness towards modernity, and the sense of community.

Therefore, I would like to give my Modern-Orthodox readers a chance. Please, tell me, why are you Modern Orthodox? What appeals to you out being Modern Orthodox over being not frum, or alternatively, Charedi? How do you deal with the "difficult" sections of Torah, including sections that are historically highly improbably, such as the mabul or things that are morally-concerning, such as the laws that are discriminatory towards women. How do you reconcile halachos that seem outdated with modernity? And, most importantly, why should I join you?

I look forward to reading your responses.

My Daughter and I

I sat in the hospital room, late at night, holding my newborn. She was the only girl, born third in an every-second year sequence. My boys were born in 2004 and 2006, followed by my little girl in 2008. She was healthy and cute, but I was scared. I was scared not at the massive responsibility that awaited me, nor in awe of heaven. 

I was scared with myself. After both of my boys, I immediately felt, "I want another one". This time, for some reason, my thoughts were very different. This time I thought, "This is it. She is my youngest and I don't want any more".

"But it can't be!", I thought, "I'm only 23! A frum woman cannot stop having kids at 23! What's wrong with me?"

"I'm probably just thinking that way because I am temporarily overwhelmed", I thought. "I'm sure that I just need to adjust, then everything will return to normal".

This thought continued to haunt me over the next few weeks, despite my repeated attempts to push such "machshavos zaros" out of my mind. As the weeks went on, and the pressure from dealing with the children (and pretty severe post-partum depression) increased--I reached the point where I really couldn't function at all. I was unable to properly care for my children much of the time, so I did the unthinkable...

I asked for a heter. And after a thirty-minute interview by the rabbi asking every personal question imaginable (and repeatedly asking me if I had both a boy and a girl), I was deemed in need of a two-year heter. I shudder to think what would have happened if this child had been a boy. Apparently in such a case, my legitimate medical issues would have been irrelevant.

Why was I so hesitant to ask for a heter? It wasn't because I was unaware of their existence or afraid the rav would reject my claim. Rather, because a "normal" frum woman is supposed to have as many children as possible unless she "can't handle it", asking for a heter was tantamount to saying that I was an abnormal failure who couldn't handle life. Eventually, the situation got desperate enough that I had to do just that--admit that by frum standards I was a failure and not normal.

However, this realization crushed more than just my fragile self-image--it crushed my entire worldview. 

Unlike many others, I had no problem with Judaism's concept of the role of women. If the Torah (or for that matter, "da'as Torah"), viewed women as having a different role than men, then it must be for the best. Equality, or lack thereof, didn't enter into the equation at all. I saw nothing inherently wrong with the idea that a woman's primarily role should be to raise a frum family, with her doing other things only when needed to fulfill that primarily. Although I have always been more of the intellectual type and had severe ADD, if God put me in this position it must be that I had the capabilities to overcome it and fulfill my God-given role, and only through doing this could I achieve happiness.

Well, I did try, and I couldn't "handle it". Not only that, trying for so many years to be someone that I am not, took away my ability to focus on what I am good at. Rather than struggling for many years to be a mediocre homemaker, I should have put my energy and focus towards working at what I am good at.

I ultimately realized that the problem was not that I failed to fulfill my Torah-ordained destiny, but rather that the Torah failed to take my destiny into account. Not everyone can be boxed into predefined gender roles, nor should they. It is illogical to assume that an all-powerful and all-good God would create everyone differently, yet expect them to fulfill the same general role with minor variations.

This began the journey that led me to where I am today.

However, the great irony is that my daughter, the little girl that started me down this path, is the stereotypical female that I never was. She has consistently, since birth, fulfilled practically every female stereotype in existence. It is almost as if someone gave her a book of instructions on how to act like a girl, and she followed it to the letter. At 15 months she would cry if I gave her pants rather than a skirt. My little girl who has never seen a Disney movie wants everything to be "pretty" and preferably pink. She loves playing with dolls, hates getting her clothes dirty, and attempts to take care of her brothers and the house.

Maybe there is something to those gender stereotypes after all.

To Your Own Self Be True--Or Maybe Not?

? אם אין אני לי, מי לי

? וכשאני לעצמי, מה אני

? ואם לא עכשיו, אימתי

"If I am not for myself, who is for me? 
And if I am only for myself, what am I? 
And if not now, when?" (Avos 1:14, translation from chabad.org)


These famous words of Rabbi Hillel have been going through my head quite frequently. They seem so wise and so obvious, yet so hard to fulfill in practice. 

If I am not for myself, who is for me? 

When I tell people my story, I often get the response "How can you live this way? You have to be true to yourself".


I see their point. Living a double life is hard--very hard. I feel awkward in the frum world, like I am pretending to be someone whom I am not. I feel like a hypocrite when I tell my children that they may not play with a muktzah toy on shabbos--then go into my room, lock the door, and use the internet. I hate having to lie to my children to hide my aveiros, and having to explain everything to the rest of the world.


I can't help but wonder what it would be like to live life honestly--on my terms. I could be myself without needing to hide anything. Avoid the hassles of observance, the fights with my husband over religious issues, and the lies.


However...

And if I am only for myself, what am I?


My decisions affect others. 


Throughout my life, I have consistently been labeled as selfish. While I try to be a good person, I have never been the type to go out of my way to do chessed projects. I am terrible at cleaning and am therefore constantly called selfish for not doing my "fair share". (This is despite of the fact that I do far more than my fair share of things that I am good at. When I work on group projects at the school, the other people often end up being the group while I do the project).  


To an extent they are right. When describing myself, "selfless" is not the word that would come to mind. Especially in the midst of this crisis, I find that I spend way too much time considering my own needs over those of my children and husband.


As I know that I have this fault, I realize that I need to try to rectify it by focusing on the needs of others. And I just can't justify breaking up my family in order to avoid feeling like a hypocrite. What kind of person would that make me?


On the other hand, I wonder if staying in this environment is in fact hurting my children. When the very act of telling my children that the petrified log in front of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History is 200 million years old sparks a huge argument, maybe staying in this environment isn't the best thing for the kids. 


Or maybe I can find a balance, a way to live my life, educate my children, and maintain shalom bayis. How? I don't know.


And if not now, when?


Who knows?

The Book of Life

One of the most well-known--and most fundamental--teachings of the Ba'al Shem Tov, and the Chassidic movement as a whole, is that everything that one experiences happens because of hashgacha pratis (divine providence), and happens for the purpose of teaching a lesson in avodas Hashem (divine service). Therefore, one should constantly think of which lessons can be learned from every day life events.

This thought, and its opposite, ran through my head as I sat and listened to a Rosh Hashana speech given by a Reconstructionist rabbi. He discussed the traditional concept of Rosh Hashana as a day on which God sits in judgment and determines who will be written in the "Book of Life" and merit to live for the rest of the year. (Apparently God has an extensive library as other such books include the "Book of Sustenance" and the "Book of Health", etc.)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/5713922088/sizes/l/in/photostream/

While nobody over the age of ten, even amongst the most Orthodox, believes that God sits there with a physical pen and writes in a physical book, even the concept that God selects a day to make judgments about the whole world, and that are prayers affect those judgments, seems quite illogical.

Even if one can accept the concept that one can actually change God's mind through prayer, which is quite a philosophically difficult position to accept, it still seems illogical to believe that God would choose one day of the human calendar upon which to make an essentially irrevocable decision. Why would a prayer said in the middle of the Hebrew month of Cheshvan matter less than one in Tishrei? And more fundamentally, why would God punish someone for not praying? The prayers on Rosh Hashana are primarily praises of God, and a perfect God shouldn't need praise. Of course, traditional sources do explain that God desires prayer in order to benefit the one doing the praying, but if that is true it seems illogical to harm or kill someone for the sin of not trying to improve oneself.

So, for someone who does not believe that God is sitting in judgment determining our future, or who does not believe in the traditional concept of God at all, what is the point of Rosh Hashana?

According to the Rabbi's speech, which seems quite consistent with the little that I know about Reconstructionism, on Rosh Hashana we are written in the book of life not by a heavenly decree but by our actions. When we make a conscious effort to do teshuva (change our actions) and improve ourselves, then we can consciously write a better future for ourselves. Through setting aside a day (or two) to reflect, we can write a future of life, health, and prosperity. No divine intervention needed.

Of course, this is easier said than done. An Orthodox, yet open-minded, friend of mine told me recently that the main problem with my fence-sitting is not my lack of religion, rather my lack of decision making. She believes that I am not taking enough control of my life and am instead letting life happen to me. I believe that is definitely a valid criticism and perhaps something that I ought to focus on during this Aseres Yemei Teshuva.

Regarding the belief of chassidus that one should take everyday events as a lesson for avodas Hashem, perhaps the opposite is true. The Reconstructionist approach of taking the concepts of avodas Hashem as a lesson for everyday life seems to have a lot of merit--and fits in quite nicely with the "Repurposing" concept that I wrote about a few months ago.

On that note...

G'mar chasima tova!

The Greatest Challenge is from Within

http://www.flickr.com/photos/krcla/2069243613/

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.

A Former Fanatic Revisits Tznius

Hi, my name is Fence, and I used to be a tznius fanatic.

Yes, you read that right, the author of this OTD blog who now wears pants and short sleeves whenever she can get away with it, used to be really into tznius--for years. I practically had Oz V'hadar Levusha memorized and was makpid on everything from covering my head (I kept my hair covered at all times except when showering) to covering my toes (opaque tights, "aidel" shoes, etc). I also learned the mekoros from tznius inside halachic sefarim, and would readily debate and defend my tznius standards whenever asked.

Despite what many people who know me speculate, I did not go off the derech because of frustration from keeping such a high standard of tznius. This was not a case of taking on too much and then confusing chumra and minhag. As I said, I learned mekoros and knew full well that many of the things that I kept were in fact chumros.

So, what happened?

I believe very strongly in acting in a way that is consistent with the way that one believes. I decided to become frum as a young teenager because I believed that the Torah was true and therefore felt that it was wrong not to keep it. Despite the tremendous difficulties that it involved, I took on one mitzvah at a time until I was fully shomer mitzvos, or since of course no one can keep all the taryag mitzvos, as observant as possible.

As tznius--or to a lesser extent, the equivalent for men, yiddishe levush--is the ultimate external representation of ones beliefs to the world, I viewed this mitzvah as particularly important. Therefore, I was extremely bothered by frum people who did not keep tznius properly. I viewed frum people who believed in the halachic system, including the principle of "minhag yisrael Torah hee", yet dressed in a manner totally inconsistent with halacha, as the ultimate hypocrites. How could I have respected someone who believes that there is a God-given objective truth, yet chooses to openly violate it to fulfill a taavah to follow fashion? So, yes, not only was I makpid on tznius, I was also intolerant of those who were not.

However, as I grew older and circumstances led me to start questioning Judaism, I ran into a problem. At first I held steadfastly to tznius even while breaking shabbos, because tznius had become so important to me that I could not bear to deviate from it. Yet as time went on and the dichotomy between my beliefs and the way I dressed grew wider, I could not bear it any longer. My way of dress had to change. But, as I was and still am living in the frum community, it could not change completely without harming my family. So, I joined the ranks of the not-quite-tznius frummies whom I had once despised. But I have started dressing in a truly secular manner at college and wherever else I can get away with it, in order to minimize the need to live a double life.

As I walk down the street in questionably-tznius, yet frum-looking clothing, I can't help but wonder if there is a young woman out there looking at me with the same disdain that I once felt towards others. If there is, then she is somewhat right. I am a hypocrite, but not in the way that she thinks.

What goes around, comes around.