On Lag B’Omer, the last Wednesday of the semester, I snuck past a challah baking event to say goodbye to the Stony Brook University Chabad Rabbi, Adam Stein. Rabbi Adam and I danced with his children to the music from a livestream of Meron in his backyard. At a pause, I tapped my kippa and tzitzit and said, “I wanted to rub it in. You were wrong; I did stay religious these four years.”

Rabbi Adam responded with a chuckle, “You cheated. You went home every Shabbos.”

Since graduating, I’ve told this story to friends and rabbis with responses ranging from, “I agree: That’s cheating,” to “I never had any doubts you’d stay Orthodox” to “I thought I’d have to cut you out of my life after a year in secular college.”

As a Five Towns-grown, Modern Orthodox boy, the fear of assimilating, especially in secular college, has been seeded and cultivated within me from almost the beginning of my education. When I decided to attend Stony Brook University for undergrad, almost everyone (not my parents) freaked out.

One high school principal still reminds me that I was the first student from DRS, my yeshiva, to attend SBU for undergrad (I don’t think I was). My Rabbi expressed concern but left it at that. One friend tried to convince some other friends to agree not to give up on me even though I would attend a school with little Orthodox Jewish representation. Rabbi Adam told me it would be virtually impossible to maintain my religious observance.

For this reason, or because I’m all about preparation, I established a religious foundation for myself six months before attending Stony Brook. I emailed two JLIC rabbis. I learned with my rabbi in Israel while talking about challenges and solutions with others. By the time I started my freshman year, I had scheduled learning time with five rabbis in Israel, two friends, my Rabbi, and my dad each week. I made an effort to attend every Hillel and Chabad event on campus and immediately joined the Hillel student board. This, in addition to my own academic schedule.

The number I remember hearing regarding modern and centrist Orthodox Jews going off the derech secular college is one in four. I’m deeply confused about what that means. Is “off the derech” total denial of God? A shift to Conservative or Reform Judaism? Intermarriage? Does “secular college” include Yeshiva University or Touro College?

Based on what friends and rabbis taught, I expected to show up to an 8:00 a.m. college class that opened with a powerpoint entitled, “Philosophical reasons why Judaism is completely wrong and you should be a Marxist.” I expected to be invited to party after party while secular Jewish and non-Jewish classmates goaded me into drinking my weight in vodka and exploring sexuality towards orgiastic nirvana.

In real life, girls who had no problem divulging their sex lives took my being shomer negia (not touching those of the opposite sex) more seriously than I did. Students asked me about the thing on my head and the strings hanging out of my shirt. I had hours long conversation about feminism and Judaism, about circumcision and consent, about religious growth and challenges.

Of course there were difficulties, too. It’s easy to skip shacharit (morning services) when there is no minyan and you have 8:00 a.m. classes. I couldn’t keep up that freshman semester learning schedule and so had to cut it down. But small lapses in observance happen to us all no matter where we are in life. It’s up to us to work up and bounce back.

I think it’s a major misconception that people lose their religion when they get to college. In my experience, many of these people really lost their religion years prior. College is their first opportunity to explore alternative lifestyles without having their communities breathing down their necks. Someone with an unwavering dedication to Shabbat, for example, won’t cut corners once they’re in university. But someone who only kept Shabbat because their family and friends at home did probably won’t keep it through four years of college.

Reasons for leaving the fold of Orthodox Judaism can range from intellectual disagreements to the general trend towards secularization to not feeling comfortable within the system. To deride secular college is to lower the fever rather than heal the infection.

In college, I’ve found, people are generally accepting to those who can defend their practices. This is no reason to get complacent, but I feel no more obliged to fear collegiate pressure to give up my religious beliefs than the girl I meet at Starbucks who tells me she’s a practicing Wiccan. We’ve both clearly thought about and can defend our respective religious practices.

Throughout my four years, I was more likely to get, “Hey, I’m sorry to bother you—and please tell me if I’m being offensive—but what exactly are you celebrating this holiday?” than any philosophical attack.

To expect all young Orthodox Jews to only engage within Orthodox spaces is idealistic at best. Rather than express undue concern and try to pressure students to stay in Israel a second (or first) year or switch to a more “Orthodox-friendly” campus, rabbis, friends, and community leaders can offer support for young Jews’ journeys. I had enough chutzpah to bother people to learn with me but sometimes this seeming lack of support can dishearten young Jews further.

It would be better to instill a foundational understanding of our values and a support system for when we, inevitably, find ourselves somewhere Orthodoxy does not reign. For all the concerns about my leaving the “Orthodox bubble,” I’ve emerged with greater commitment than some who have remained within these four years. And I’ve been exposed to a wider and more nuanced world.

College is a time to explore and find yourself. We shouldn’t be told to erect walls and go four years without evolution of thought.

Educate young Jews to love and understand the foundations of Judaism, support them, and let them be.

Image via Pixabay

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It wasn’t your everyday invitation to lunch at a second-rate restaurant.

It was an invitation to see a nose.

I had pleaded with Elon not to do it, to save his thirty thousand shekels and invite me to a first-rate restaurant to see something else: a new hairstyle, a tattoo, the latest Nike LunarEpic Flyknit shoes. I tried to reason with my friend that by keeping his ancient Jewish-Iraqi nose while living in the modern city of Tel Aviv, he could enjoy the best of both worlds, and without losing a shred of his dignity in the process.

“I’ve lived with this nose for 47 years,” Elon informed me over the phone.

“Exactly,” I replied, happy we were on the same page.

“That’s 47 years too long,” he said.

When we hung up, I stood in front of the mirror and studied the parts of myself I wished were different: longer, shorter, fuller, thinner, smoother, younger. I studied them, scrutinized them, picked a fight with them, then dismissed them with a shrug and went into the kitchen to make dinner.

 A month went by, and Elon called to invite me to lunch at his favorite Thai restaurant, which might have passed for a Thai restaurant had someone on the staff been able to produce a lime wedge.  

“I did it,” Elon said.  

I didn’t need to ask what.  

“Will I recognize you?” I asked.

“I barely recognize myself,” Elon replied.

We met for lunch. Elon walked in beaming, his face free of backstory, answerable only to itself. Two days earlier, I would have taken cover behind the menu to conceal my disappointment, but two days earlier I had shared Elon’s story with my ex-husband, who stopped me mid-sentence and put me in my place.

“Read Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man before your lunch,” he advised me, adding that to fret about someone’s physiognomy was passé. That even as a Renaissance humanist, Pico was ahead of his time, distinguishing people from nature by our ability to change at our own choosing, our capacity for self-transformation.

“Before you accuse Elon of losing his dignity, consider that the nose job might be his way of keeping it,” Asher said. Then, knowing I would likely not visit Pico’s oration before I visited Elon, he enlisted Google and called on the philosopher himself. “We have made you, Adam, a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer,” he read aloud, then closed his computer.

“I like the new you,” I said to Elon in a half-truth. His face was as plain now as my pad Thai lacking lime, the plastic surgeon apparently unaware that after Pico and the Renaissance, artists stopped being artisans and became individuals, their art a function of their creative expression rather than technical ability. With his new punim, Elon could have hailed from anywhere in the world, or from nowhere at all. But there was something else: for the first time since I had met him two years earlier, he looked me in the eye when he spoke.

“I feel as light as a feather,” he said. “And as free.”

A month later I received a Whatsapp picture of Elon standing in front of some unidentifiable stone structure, an Israeli flag perched in one of its cracks.  

“Hi Dalia. I just came back from Treblinka and am going to Jerusalem tomorrow to sign up as a volunteer tour guide at Yad Vashem,” he wrote. “But I’m having a philosophical problem that maybe Asher can help me with. Can an Iraqi be a tour guide at Yad Vashem?”

The answer was obvious (yes), but I still took the question it to Asher.

“Interesting,” Asher said. “It reminds me of the philosophers from the Vienna Circle, many of them Jews, who argued that most philosophical questions are pseudo questions, questions that don’t have a meaningful answer because they’re not worth asking in the first place. But because they can’t be answered in a meaningful way, they take on a relevance and lead to more pseudo questions. The task of philosophers is to separate real problems from pseudo problems. Of course, the ultimate pseudo problem was the Jewish Question, which led these very thinkers to emigrate in 1938. Tell Elon that when he becomes a tour guide at Yad Vashem, he’ll learn all about them.”

I stared at the picture of Elon, a man dwarfed by a monument, his nose neither a question nor an answer, but a thing of irrelevance, an irrelevance that allowed him to emerge from his shell and blend in with his surroundings, a “creature of indeterminate nature,” like the chameleon Pico wrote so lovingly about.    

Or Woody Allen’s “Zelig,” which I would propose to see with Elon the next time we got together. But something made me think he had already seen it.

Image via Wikimedia.

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