I’m about to turn 30—next week, in fact—and though I’ve been reassured by numerous friends who have already cleared this hurdle that nothing bad happens once you leave your twenties (and that in many cases, things actually get better), I’m still apprehensive. I’m not exactly enthused about getting older, perhaps because I’m not quite where I thought I would be at this age, both professionally and personally. And since much of my life revolves around fairly youthful passions like break dancing and gymnastics, I worry these pursuits might become incongruous with my new maturity. And let’s face it—while 30 doesn’t make you old, it makes you un-young. If you haven’t been already been called “precocious,” you probably never will, unless you somehow manage to make it on one of the New Yorker’s “best of” lists. (They consider anyone under 40 to still be young.)

But I do see potential upsides to turning 30, chief among them that I can no longer plausibly be a called “rebel.” I’m simply too old for that ish.

Throughout my twenties, as I moved away from Orthodox Judaism, I was branded a “rebel,” a label I grudgingly accepted even though it never really fit. New acquaintances, upon discovering my religious upbringing, would ask, “When did you rebel?” I’d grimace slightly at the label’s flexibility, this time appearing in verb form. My interrogator was imagining a more youthful version of me, cavorting with guys as I ate cheeseburgers on the Sabbath or went out dancing on Yom Kippur or something similarly extreme and sacrilegious.

But it wasn’t that way at all. It was gradual, methodical, and carefully thought out— the work of many years, not a wild summer. And nothing I did was extreme or particularly “in your face” or purposely contrarian. I wasn’t trying to get a rise out of anyone. (I was actually quite the rule-follower in high school.) Deciding to wear jeans or eating a salad with cheese or even getting a tattoo is all fairly banal stuff. It’s certainly not the stuff of movies or even reality television (unless it’s a show as boring as The Hills). In short, I was no James Dean.

Sisterhood contributor Chanel Dubofsky articulated my discomfort with the term “rebel in a piece for Role/Reboot where she examined the life lessons imparted to her by her mother and grandmother that she felt she had to undo. “There’s an incongruity, though, between the way we’re socialized to think about rebellion (something that a spoiled child does) and what unlearning the stuff we’re programmed to believe really looks like,” she wrote.

Unlearning what I had been programmed to believe has been the project of my teens and most of my twenties. It began in high school by simply challenging rabbis on subjects of Jewish import, especially as they pertained to the role of women. But even as I went back and forth with my teachers, I never really thought about acting on any of it. I mostly considered it an intellectual contest, one I wished to win because I’m gratuitously competitive. I loved it when I backed my teachers up against the wall with a powerful line of questioning, forcing them to resort to non-answers like citing a rabbinic scion, who was infallible by virtue of being a generation or two closer to the revelation at Sinai or something like that.

Of course, it didn’t end in debate—it never does. After spending years laying the intellectual groundwork for “rebellion” by studying source texts about modesty and women, I began to act on my knowledge. I started wearing pants once I realized that the halachic impediments to doing so were minimal at best. I did other things for less principled reasons (or at least without much textual support). At this rate, it took years to reach full-fledged nonobservance. I was the tortoise of going off the derech.

That’s why I bristle at being called a rebel, compared to bored kids thoughtlessly acting out. As Dubofsky observed, we have a tendency to view rebellion as juvenile, as something a child does to irk her parents or get a reaction from authority figures. And in the Orthodox community, this is definitely how the term is understood. “Rebellious” is used to describe any sort of adolescent misbehavior, especially as it pertains to violations of halacha (and almost always refers to breaches of modesty between the genders). But it’s also affixed to anyone who makes serious intellectual inquiries about Jewish law and worldview and questions the status quo. Nechamya Weberman’s victim was sent to him, in part, because she was considered rebellious for raising some serious theological questions in class.

The linking of these two forms of rebellion, whether by design or by accident, serves to delegitimize the more thoughtful version. (And, by the way, I have no problem with the “rebel without a cause” iteration. It’s probably an important developmental stage that I completely skipped.) A kid acting out is considered troublesome because he might entice others to the dark side, but his behavior is not viewed as a criticism of the status quo. “He’s just having fun,” or “He’s being influenced by the internet.” That rebel’s actions don’t constitute a major threat to the traditional worldview. But someone expressing cogent criticisms of the system is far more worrisome. Calling these people “rebellious,” with all the implied connotations of juvenile frivolity, is an attempt to neutralize their voices.

With or without a cause, I’m no longer a rebel. At 30, I just am. There are no more jeans to buy or colors to dye my hair or subways to take on Shabbos. I have done and will continue to do all of these things and more. But these days they’re simply part of how I live my life—not some means of being contrarian and sticking it to anyone else, be they family members or religious authorities.

And they never really were in the first place. Because I never was a rebel.

Previously: The Problem With Modesty Blogging
Olympic Gymnast Gabby Douglas’ Jewish Past

(Art by Margarita Korol)

The post The BallaBuster: Don’t Call Me a Rebel appeared first on Jewcy.

In case you choose to investigate me like Jonah Lehrer—I’m that important—I should warn you that a few of these concepts and jokes have been recycled from a blog post I wrote last year for my own site, The Anti-Girlfriend. There are only so many rib jokes out there.

In this week’s Torah portion, which is the first of the year as the cycle of readings renews after Simchat Torah, we encounter the creation of the world, the animal kingdom, man and then finally woman from man’s rib.

As a young yeshiva student, I never learned the obvious feminist critiques of this particular allegory even if the narrative was at times subtly presented as a reason for the “natural” pecking order—men in dominion over women. According to this view, Adam is the earliest known venture capitalist with an eternal equity stake in women’s bodies. In other words, a very early forerunner of the Republican Party.

Rather, my teachers explained it from the matchmaking perspective. Adam was lonely and noticed that everyone else—all of the newly created animals—had a complement. Bulls had cows. Male monkeys had female monkeys. (I suppose he Adam could’ve been patient until some of those female chimps evolved into suitable partners, but he was solidly in the Creationist camp.) Like the lead female character in every romantic comedy for the last twenty years, he was tired of being stuck alone at the singles table. But there were no sassy gay best friends back in those days, so he took his grievances to the Ultimate Wingman—God.

“God,” Adam said shrilly, “all of my friends are married. It’s not fair.”

As most know, God then put Adam to sleep and created a wife, Chava, from his rib. And because of this, men are compelled to seek out their missing rib in the form of a wife, who was created from it. In Bereishit it is written: “On account of this a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his woman.”

Superficially, it’s actually very cute—the orthopedic equivalent of those “best friend” necklaces you used to wear in middle school, with each friend wearing one half heart until the inevitable falling out over a guy or a nasty text.

It’s also nice to read a narrative where the man is depicted as the needy one, desperate to meet a mate, the one made to feel that there are simply no suitable women out there for him to mate with. (“I’m sorry,” Adam’s simian best friend must’ve said. “I just don’t know of a girl for you. All the women I know are married and apes.”)

But as a modern woman, the orthopedic soul mate narrative is troubling, and not just for the popular domination/subjugation narrative it supports. The biblical origin story of Adam, his rib, and the male quest to find a “helpmate” also provides some scriptural basis to the “dating” rules—that the man should be in pursuit and that a woman is supposed to wait around until a guy comes around and identifies her as the possessor of his rib.

I know it might seem like I’m taking this whole “rib” allegory too seriously, but as a result of medical experience, I’ve been forced to give this body part a lot of thought. You see, one third of my bottommost floating rib on my left side was removed and placed in my spine to fuse my spine. “I’m creation, upended,” I joked with my friends.

When I was 14, I was diagnosed with scoliosis, but mine was not the Judy Blume version of the spinal abnormality. I was no Deenie. Hers was relatively moderate, correctible through a brace. Mine was quite severe. By the time it was diagnosed, it was already in the operable range—above 50 degrees. A few months later when I underwent the procedure, the curve had jumped to 72 degrees. I was getting pretty close to being contorted into a right angle.

Typically, the surgeon removes a bone chip from the patient’s hip and breaks it into even small chips, which are then inserted in between the vertebrae. Like the two parts of a broken arm knitting back together, the bone chips fuse to the vertebrae, creating one solid, immoveable mass, correcting and arresting the growth of curve. Then titanium rods and screws are then inserted to act as internal cast.

But since my surgeon elected to perform anterior and posterior fusion on me—mostly due to the fact that I resolutely refused to wear a brace after the surgery—he removed a third of my rib since he was already in the anatomical neighborhood. Instead of being created from someone else’s rib, I was mended by own.

In the immediate aftermath of the procedure, I didn’t give this much thought. I didn’t think about what lay underneath the scar that stretched from behind my rib cage to mere inches from my navel. Mostly, I was horrified by the sight of it, collapsing in hysterics when the bandages were first removed.

But as the years progressed, I changed my tune when it came to the scars. (The other one runs down two-thirds of my spine.) I came to regard them as badass—signs of my ability to overcome a major physical setback. A year after the fusion, I went back to my beloved sport of gymnastics. In my mid-twenties, I added break dancing to my athletic repertoire.

Still, I didn’t give my ribs much thought until a couple of years ago when I started feeling intense pain and tightening in the left side of my chest. I thought I was having a heart attack and went to my doctor in tears. I was 27, a quasi-vegetarian who worked out five times a week with no family history of heart disease or problems. I couldn’t understand how this could be happening to me.

Thankfully (and as my doctor expected), my heart was not the problem. My ribs were. Specifically the ones on my left side were not as mobile and flexible as they needed to be in order to expand and contract for breathing because the muscles around them had tightened up. “Why the left side only,” I asked “and not the right?”

“Because you’re missing a part of your rib on the left,” the scoliosis specialist answered. “The muscles there have less skeletal support.”

And for the first time in thirteen years, I really missed that little piece of my rib.

I guess this means I sort of understand guys a little better—the need to pursue that missing piece of you. Of course, I don’t have to look much further than my back for my missing piece, but that’s really difficult. It’s really tough for me to twist because of the titanium and screws in my spine.

Anyway, I guess I’ll have to pursue my missing rib the way the men have—by pursuing a mate. Can you really blame me? I’m rib deficient, just like the boys.

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