“Shanti is the most important thing,” the shopkeeper told me as we sipped chai in his cramped, hole-in-the-wall trinket shop, which I had wandered into by chance.

There was nothing unique about Rajnish’s shop, which was located in a narrow alleyway in a touristy area near Jaipur’s Amer Fort. All of the vendors were selling the same items: god statues, bangles, incense, Aladdin pants, knit bags, and every other knickknack you could imagine getting in India. I don’t know what drew me into Rajnish’s narrow shop. And yet, months later, I can’t imagine having not met him.

I entered his shop to browse—nothing more. He immediately welcomed me like a long-lost friend. I reminded him of his daughter, he said, as he pulled up a stool beside his in the rear of the store and went about pouring me some chai. I insisted that I was just browsing, and that I didn’t need the chai. He wouldn’t hear of it. I sat between him and his Ganesh shrine on the wall.

My immediate thought upon sitting beside the golden idol of Ganesh, the Hindu God of luck, was, This is totally idolatry. But I’m not worshipping it. So there’s that. What would my parents think, I wondered, if they could see me? Upon telling them about my plan to travel to India, my father, a deeply religious man, deemed the entire subcontinent impure: “makom avoda zara,” he called it. A place of idolatry. He was concerned for my soul. Given how far my Jewish identity has drifted from the Orthodox one with which he raised me, it wasn’t an outlandish source of anxiety.

When I was comfortable sitting on the stool—or as comfortable as you can be on a stool—Rajnish immediately started showing me his merchandise. I despaired, fearing another scam. My first few hours in India had been an exhausting trek around Delhi in a taxi operated by a tout intent on taking me anywhere other than the hotel where I’d reserved a room—the experience made all the more frustrating because I knew exactly what was happening, I just couldn’t do anything to set him on the correct course. Even a call to Chabad had been intercepted by one of his co-conspirators.

So when Rajnish started displaying his wares—“historic” brass keys, “hand made” notebooks, and “one-of-a-kind” hookahs—I was skeptical. But I listened politely as he pulled out the items. Then he showed me a pipe. “This one,” he said gesturing towards the engraved, pink piece of marble depicting the Hindu symbol for Om Shanti, “is for Shanti. You know Shanti?” he asked.

I indicated that I was not familiar with it.

He placed his palm on his forehead and gasped. “Shanti is the most important thing,” he said.

“But what is Shanti?” I asked.

He placed his hand on his heart. “Shanti is this,” he said.

I was naturally confused, and he could tell.

“Shanti is peace,” he said. “People work, people are stressed, but the most important thing is to be happy and enjoy.”

I laughed. That was easier said than done.

Rajnish wanted to help me find Shanti. “Shanti is good energy. Shanti is the center,” he said, “Shanti is knowing the earth. Shanti is the most important.”

We proceeded to spend the next three hours in his shop discussing Shanti and the true meaning of inner peace. “How do I find Shanti?” I asked, as if Shanti was a missing wallet I could find at the lost and found. Shanti comes when you’ve found a balance and inner calm, Rajnish explained, and that only comes from knowledge and understanding. When I asked of what, he simply pointed up.

I was starting to understand Shanti. But, since this was a religious concept, and since I was struggling with religion in general, I had a long way to go before fully internalizing it.

***

Over the last year, Judaism and I have had some highs and lows.

I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish community in South Florida filled with charitable, warm, family-oriented people who value religion. They also find innovation downright suspicious, and regard ambition in a woman as a flaw. Nevertheless, to my parents’ begrudging credit, I was always more of a freethinker. My parents are pillars in our community, but their backgrounds are unusual. My mother was one of the first female traders on Wall Street in the early 1980s, and my father is a Gibraltarian Sephardi. Despite their relative diversity, they deeply wanted me to fit into their community. I was expected to dress according to standards of modesty, and to marry a good boy from a nice Jewish family in my early twenties.

But when my ex-fiancé abruptly ended our engagement last year, my relationship to Judaism and Orthodoxy changed. I noticed how some people in my community started to treat me differently, and for the first time I started to really feel the connections between power and gender and status—and I didn’t like what I saw.

It became painful to be in a room with people who only saw me for my relationship status; to be in a room where girls were either talking about their own marriage prospects, or gossiping about others’.

Then I took a religion reporting class at Columbia Journalism School, where I was exposed to a whirlwind of new ideas, and found myself reevaluating my relationship to organized religion.

From my community, I had learned that Judaism was social and dogmatic, not spiritual. The way I related to religion had no bearing on how I related to God. When I struggled with tzniut, the Jewish laws of modesty, it was because I wanted to fit in with my friends and make my parents proud, not because I actually believed that God cared about the length of my sleeves.

My newfound disenchantment with people who, to me, represented Modern Orthodoxy, translated to a disenchantment with other areas of my religious practice—and dress was the most immediately apparent. Wearing the uniform of a community that I felt out of step with socially and culturally was a little like walking around in a Che Guevera t-shirt: I believed in some of the philosophies, but not how they were executed. I felt like a fraud.

My dissatisfaction with communal practice and norms led me to return to Jewish texts. I had hoped to find solace in the narratives and discourses that I had once spent hours hours debating. But instead of reconnecting with religious doctrines, I felt confused. How could today’s rabbis turn to texts that display a fundamental misunderstanding of science when debating the halakhic ramifications of women’s issues?

My faith, on the other hand, came from my home, and from seeing how my parents lived and treated others. That’s why no matter what happened—no matter how angry I was with God—I always believed there was a God. Eventually, that’s what I was left with: A belief in God (if not a strong connection to him), and an underlying passion for Judaism. But what was I to do at that point?

I tried to find comfort in my community, in the theology of my upbringing. I guess you could say I succeeded in some respects and failed in others. At some point, I stopped trying altogether. That’s how I wound up in India sipping chai with Rajnish and a Hindu deity.

As clichéd as it sounds, I needed to find myself. After the year I had—with personal struggles and professional wandering—I knew that I needed to go to a place that was completely foreign to me, but charged with spirituality. I hoped that the shock of the unfamiliar would bring me back to some sort of connection to God.

***

I left northern India, where I met Rajnish, to travel south. (No Floridian would opt to spend time in a cold climate when 80-degree weather is just a train ride away.) As I travelled, I started to internalize the meaning of Shanti.

Two travelers I encountered—Isaac, a nomadic American backpacker who went to India on a journey of self discovery, and Oriel, an Israeli who was doing his obligatory post-army India stint—helped me to refocus the lens through which I view God.

On a rooftop in Mumbai, Oriel, who was raised in a traditional Modern Orthodox home in Jerusalem, encouraged me not to think of religion as a series of rules. “Think of it as a way to connect to God,” he said. This, for me, was unique. Despite an extensive Jewish education, I never really learned about God. I was taught about religion, text, and laws, but not how to connect to a divine being. So it was interesting to talk to a 22-year-old Israeli with a similar upbringing about God. The fact that there were religious Jews who thought about God as a loving being as opposed to a dogmatic taskmaster was reassuring.

Nomadic Isaac, too, reframed how I envision God. At one point while we hiked along a snaking path on the side of a rocky cliff, he shared his perspective that God may or may not be an omnipotent being, but the concept could also refer to the spark of godliness in every person. Everyone is God. I didn’t realize it at the time, but walking with Isaac and exchanging ideas about God was helping me to find my own inner peace, my Shanti.

Once I started thinking about the Hindu concept of Shanti with my Jewish brain, it started to fall into place for me. In my mind, Shanti sounded a lot like a fusion between the first commandment of knowing God—“anochi Hashem,” I am the Lord your God—and the Jewish concept of tranquility, “shalva.”

In my experience, Shanti is the understanding that you’ll never really understand. I don’t know what is going to happen, I don’t know the root of everything, and I’ll never really know God. But, to me at least, Shanti is being okay with that, being able to make peace with the unknown. To quote Socrates, “I know that I know nothing.” Once I realized that, I was overcome with a sense of tranquility I didn’t even know I had been missing.

***

When I emerged from Rajnish’s shop, the sun had sunk low, and the pink city was glowing. It was beautiful. We took in the view together—a view Rajnish never tires of seeing—and then it was time for me to leave. Rajnish shook my hand vigorously and said he had truly enjoyed speaking to me. It occurred to me that I wanted something, a keepsake to remember what I knew, already, would prove to be a transformative experience.

I looked at Rajnish and said I wanted to buy the pipe. He was shocked—I had made it clear that I didn’t want to shop—but thrilled. I bought the Shanti pipe, not because of what it was (I had no use for a pipe), but for what it represented: the self-confidence and assurance that I had finally reclaimed.

Plus, he gave me a good price.

Previously: Breaking Up is Hard to Do—Especially in the Orthodox World

Rachel Delia Benaim is a freelance religion reporter. Her work has appeared in Tablet Magazine, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, and The Diplomat, among others. Follow her on Twitter @rdbenaim.

(Image: Amer Fort, 2008. Credit: Robert Cianflone / Getty Images)

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Walking into the current installation at Soapbox Gallery in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn is like walking into an alternate reality.

At the gallery’s entrance sits a twin bed made up with worn, floral linens. On the wall, the outfit of an ultra-Orthodox girl hangs unassumingly. A sign indicates that this piece is called Gut Nacht Hindy (“Good Night Hindy”). The bed is flanked by two aged bedside tables. On the left-hand side, a tattered book of tehillim (psalms) lies unopened. To the right, dying flowers sit in a mason jar, atop an open drawer exposing a collection of old family pictures.

The exhibit—emphatically titled “BE!“—is a personal memoir of sorts, inspired by artist Sara Erenthal‘s upbringing as an ultra-Orthodox Jew, and subsequent departure from that world.

Erenthal, 33, resides in New York, and has been showing her work publicly for the last two-and-a-half years. “I was challenged to bring my life story into this gallery,” she says, and indeed she has: while I was there, one of her cousins—who also “broke free” from Orthodoxy (his words)—visited the gallery to show his support, and recognized himself and his parents in a few of the family photos.

Erenthal was raised by Neturei Karta parents in ultra-Orthodox communities in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem, Borough Park in Brooklyn, and Kiryas Joel in upstate New York. She ran away from home to escape an arranged marriage at 17, and her entire community rejected her.

The community, she remembers, is a strict one. A large-scale sculpture that stands out as the centerpiece of the show, Eidele Meidele, channels this very memory. The giant papier-mâché sculpture depicts a girl’s face, eyes turned down, with long, thick braids made of coarse rope. Braids were the singular hairstyle permitted to the artist as a child; here they are secured to the floor, representing the community’s expectations and limitations.

In Erenthal’s world, “everything is imperfect, it’s flawed in some way.” Her portrait series of an ultra-Orthodox mother, father, and son are deliberately imperfect. The portraits, which hang prominently around the gallery, are made of different materials, including burlap, like the sacks Neturei Karta members wear to anti-Zionist protests. Their clothing is frayed, with strands still sticking up from the final product. “It’s imperfect,” Erenthal reiterates, “but it’s intentional.” It tells her story.

“My family didn’t really fit in anywhere,” she recalls. There is no Neturei Karta community in New York, so even though Erenthal grew up among other ultra-Orthodox Jews, she was never really fully one of them. Furthermore, she revels, “my mother’s a little bit of a hippie and artsy,” which is not mainstream within those communities. When asked more specifically about her family, she looked visibly uncomfortable. “I’d rather not talk about them,” she said.

In addition to telling her story, Erenthal’s exhibit also considers what her life would have looked like had she not fled her community and marital expectations. Taking up a prominent section of the gallery, 22 Styrofoam wig heads manipulated with papier-mâché sit in near-perfect lines on the cement floor. The installation, she explains, depicts “what would have happened if I stayed in the community and got pregnant and then kept getting pregnant.” She chose the number 22, she explains, “because it is visually powerful.” Above the heads, speakers provide a soundtrack of ultra-Orthodox Israeli children playing in Hebrew and Yiddish, courtesy of Matan Dorembus, a film student in Be’er Sheva.

Directly parallel to this hypothetical reality, Erenthal depicts her actual reality. She did not remain in her community, nor get pregnant. Instead she forged a new path for herself, enlisting in the Israeli army and then backpacking through India. A video installation dramatically depicts this process of emancipation. In the video, she stands naked, bound in tefillin, at first looking dejected and passive, and then trying with growing intensity to break free of the religious bonds.

The show is open at Soapbox Gallery this Thursday, Friday and Saturday through September 13, with a special concert this Friday night from 7-10pm.

(Image by the author)

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Earlier this month, Google banned three violent anti-Hamas games from its Play Store. The games—which could be played on any Android smartphone—were uploaded in the last week of July, when Israel’s Operation Protective Edge was at its peak.

Though the games weren’t quite as successful as Flappy Bird, they took off like wildfire. One was a spoof of Whac-A-Mole called ‘Whack the Hamas.’ A description of the game ‘Gaza Assault: Code Red’ challenged potential users: “Terrorist cells are launching rockets into your country, do you have what it takes to protect your citizens?” The rules of the app were simple: the player would take control of an IDF drone equipped with powerful weapons, and aim to hit targets in Gaza. It was loosely based on real IDF tactics. ‘Bomb Gaza,’ which was posted on July 29, simply required the player to “drop bombs and avoid killing civilians.” Before Google removed the app on August 4 it was downloaded over 1,000 times.

Many Google users expressed outrage in the feedback section of the ‘Bomb Gaza’ page, reports The Telegraph. “To think that you can turn genocide, murder and ethnic cleansing into a game is absolutely disgusting,” said one. “My beloved brothers and sisters are dying in Gaza and some stupid ignoramus decides to make a game like this,” said another.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Chris Doyle, the director of The Council for Arab-British Understanding, said these games normalize violence. “We’ve seen huge amounts of hate language and bigotry over the past few weeks. It’s the last sort of things that’s needed… These games glorify the horror and violence of the bombing of Gaza.”

“You can have video games that deal with war, but when you base it in a reality of a conflict that’s going on right now it’s extremely problematic,” he said.

Google removed the games from the Play store in the first week of August. A company spokesperson said “we remove apps from Google Play that violate our policies,” but would not comment on the Gaza games.

The Israeli developers of these apps have a different perspective altogether. One of the developers of ‘Bomb Gaza,’ Roman Shapiro, told The Daily Beast that “the game was a joke made in 2 hours.”

“It is based on avoiding killing civilians,” he said. “As usual, Jews are demonized by everyone. Not surprised. Fuck them all.”

The developer of ‘Whack the Hamas,’ Avishay Segal, told The Times of Israel that he saw the removal of his game as “unfair.”

“Our app doesn’t advocate for any type of violence against groups of people based on anything, be it on their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity,” he explained. “We developed the app only for fun and relaxation, for the people who are being killed every day by a terrorist group.”

(Image: Screenshot by author)

Related: An Open Letter to Selena Gomez, From Two 12-Year-Old Fans in Southern Israel

The post Anti-Hamas Game Apps Spark Controversy in Google Play Store appeared first on Jewcy.

Dear Selena,

I’m writing to you on behalf of two 12-year-old girls living in Southern Israel who were upset by something you posted to Instagram a few weeks ago—a post which expressed sympathy for the people of Gaza, but also provided a space for your followers to condemn and delegitimize the State of Israel in the comments.

I met Noa and Yarden* in Southern Israel while I was doing some reporting for a few stories about religion and conflict in that region. This may be a bold statement, but they’re your biggest fans—seriously, your biggest fans. “Selena Gomez,” cried Yarden. “I love her! I love her music!”

And then you let them down. You hurt them. You prayed for Gaza, but not Israel, taking sides in a conflict that is not your own. By doing that, you isolated some fans.

Selena, Noa and Yarden have something to say. They love you. They idolize you. That’s why they want to say this—because they’re worried that their idol hates them simply because they’re Israeli. I wanted to relay their message to you. The remainder of this letter is based on my conversation with them.

“Everything you say about the Arab-Israeli conflict is wrong. It’s so much more complicated than anyone not living here can imagine,” Yarden said. “Even the people in central and northern Israel don’t understand it they way we do. So, Selena, why did you say what you did?”

“To you, Rihanna, and anyone else who has anything ill to say about us and our people,” Noa added, “come visit us, spend a day in our life and see what it’s like.”

Israelis, like all Middle Easterners, are known for their generosity and hospitality. “We’d be more than happy to host you for however long,” Yarden said. “You can even stay with me or Noa—we have safe rooms, bomb shelters, in our houses. We have to, given the number of rockets that are fired at us daily.”

Noa and Yarden live in Israel on Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, a small village of 500 people two kilometers from the Gaza border. They’re the last Israeli residents before the border crossing between Israel and Gaza. On any given day, they are pummeled with rockets. On a good day they have two warning sirens—in Hebrew they’re called tzeva adom. On a bad day they can have as many as fifteen.

“From the time the sirens signaling the rockets sound, we have 15 seconds—just 15 seconds—to run for safety,” Noa explained, with a twinge of lingering fear in her voice. “Usually, the Iron Dome intercepts the rockets before they can harm us. When that happens, everything shakes from the booms—my house shakes, our whole neighborhood shakes. And in turn, we all shake. It’s terrifying. There is nowhere to hide.”

“We live in our shelters now,” she continued. “They still shake, a lot, but when shrapnel falls from the intercepted rockets, at least it can’t hit us. We hardly ever leave our shelters.”

At that moment, I must interject, the girls and I heard a bone-rattling boom—a boom that you feel in your core. I jumped, but the two girls just looked at me and said, “don’t be afraid. That is us bombing Gaza—it’s not here. Nothing will hurt us from that boom.” A few moments later, a plume of light grey smoke appeared through the trees in the distance. “Gaza is close to here,” Noa said. “Very close,” Yarden added.

“We”—meaning the Israeli Defense Force—”don’t bomb to hurt,” they felt the need to tell me. “We bomb to defend. In Gaza the terrorists bomb because they want to terrorize us—and they do!”

“I remember on the first day of the war, oh, what a trauma we experienced,” Yarden recalled. “Noa and I were on the beach very close to here. We were enjoying ourselves, swimming, you know, because it was hot. And then, all of a sudden, we hear a siren. As daughters of the south, we knew what that meant. We had 15 seconds to find shelter. But we were in an open space with nowhere to go. We saw the rockets approaching overhead. It was terrifying! With nowhere to hide, we did the next best thing: we dropped on our stomachs and covered our heads, lest shrapnel from an intercepted rocket fall on us.”

8 seconds.

7 seconds.

6 seconds.

5 seconds.

“And then two loud booms. Everything shook. The Iron Dome had saved us. We were safe. But with rockets being targeted at our homes, could we ever be truly safe?”

“Between me and my classmates who live in villages like Zikim, Carmia, and Sderot, all over Southern Israel,” Noa said, “rockets are aimed at us all the time. Without end.”

“But we live in the South of Israel,” Yarden added. “We’re used to this way of life already. We were born into this. It’s our life.”

Noa’s family has lived in Yad Mordechai since the kibbutz was founded in 1936. They came here to escape anti-Semitism in Europe. They built the kibbutz up with their own hands. They defended it from Egyptian invaders in 1948—there were only fifty kibbutzniks with twenty outdated guns between them, facing hundreds of trained Egyptian soldiers. But the kibbutzniks, Noa’s family, persevered. They then lived in peace with their Arab neighbors in Gaza. Sure, there were tensions and flare-ups, but for the most part they lived in peace. And then just after Noa and Yarden were born, the rockets started.

“At this point, I’m not scared of the sirens anymore,” Noa stated plainly.”I’m scared of the booms, but not even so much. I’m really more scared of the terrorists who are shooting them.”

“Why can’t we just live in peace?” asked Yarden. “We hope the kids in Gaza are good and safe,” she said. “We don’t wish this kind of trauma on anyone. I’m sad that everyone dies. We can’t live like this. Let’s just be neighbors in peace.”

“That’s all we want here,” Noa said. “Peace.”

I’m paraphrasing now, but the girls wanted you to know that you’re still one of their heroes. Look at everything you’ve overcome in your life! But you hurt them. They just want you to understand before you isolate them, before you dismiss them and their families as bad people.

So, will you take them up on their offer and visit? Will you see their life and cheer them up?

On behalf of your fans in Israel,

Rachel

*The girls’ names have been changed.

Related: In Lieu of Tel Aviv Concert, Neil Young Donates to Budding Israeli & Palestinian Musicians

(Image: Randy Miramontez / Shutterstock.com)

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It wasn’t quite lunchtime or dinnertime when I met my friend at a cafe on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It had been five weeks since my broken engagement, and this was the first time I was seeing my would-have-been bridesmaid, who lives three blocks from my Washington Heights apartment.

Dressed in her black skirt and J Crew vest over her Kiki Riki, she arrived at promptly 4:30. She asked me about school, she asked me about my roommates, but not once did she ask me how I was doing. Not once did she bring up the ‘incident,’ my source of emotional turmoil.

Within half an hour, I was fed up. I needed to talk. Didn’t she see that my eyes were red and bloodshot? Didn’t she notice the fifteen pounds that had melted off me in the last month? Didn’t she see the bags under my eyes?

“So, want to know about my ‘hashtag’ broken engagement?” I asked, with a hint of desperation in my usual sardonic tone.

She stared at me. After a moment, she became over-animated. No, she didn’t need to hear about it, she said, but she did want to comfort me: “It’s, like, so good that people aren’t treating you like a stigma,” she said over our salads. When I look visibly confused, she added, “like, broken engagements are stigmatized, but it’s so good that everyone’s treating you normal and, like, not a stigma.”

I took a sip of Merlot. So this was how my life was going to be now. Great.

***

We had finally finished cleaning up my fiancé’s parents’ Jerusalem apartment from the engagement party they threw us the night before, when his parents told him they needed to speak to him. Later that night, he went on a walk with his father. I stayed in their apartment watching TV—after all, how long could it possibly take? When they came back more than three hours later, he told me we needed to go for a walk. Protesting because of the bitter cold, I asked if we could just talk inside. “You’ll want to be outside for this one,” he told me.

I layered up, donning his thick pullover, black thermal leggings, a black knee-length skirt, striped knee socks covered by black winter boots, and my black coat. I guess my subconscious was already prepping me for the upcoming mourning period.

With that, we stepped onto the narrow, winding roads of Palmah Street together for the last time. We had many memories of these roads—my fiancé had moved to Israel over the summer to conscript to the army, and this was the third time we had been in Jerusalem together in the last six months.

The first time I went to shul in Washington Heights after “the incident,” I bumped into a group of girls I had known briefly in college. They wished me mazal tov, but when I gently explained “I’m not engaged anymore—but it’s OK! How are you?” they made up an excuse to walk away faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo.

Has it affected my dating life? Well, some people ask uncomfortable questions about me, like, “Why didn’t her fiancé want her? She seems like a catch, but obviously there’s something more…,” but frankly, I don’t want to date those people. I have realized that anyone who views me as stigmatized isn’t someone I can build a life with—our ideologies and perspectives are too different.

Rachel Delia Benaim is a freelance religion reporter whose work has been featured in Tablet Magazine, The Diplomat Magazine, and The Gibraltar Chronicle, among others. She lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

(Image: Shutterstock)

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