Modern Orthodox – Jewcy

“50 First Dates”: Learning About Love After Modern Orthodoxy

Daniella Bondar — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 04:01:50 +0000

My first real grown-up date, when I was 20, was an absolute calamity. Before agreeing to go, I had what felt like a 40-minute panic attack. “How do you expect to ever find a husband if you’re scared of a coffee date?” asked my Mom. She was right.

I was a ball of utter chaos: Was I supposed to offer to pay? What would happen at the end of the date? What was I supposed wear? What is dating? As we walked into the coffee shop, I tripped for no apparent reason. A kid laughed. Later, my date—a tall, dark, handsome Jewish law student—drove me through a cemetery. We did not go out a second time.

A lot of people are nervous on first dates, but I seem to experience excessive anxiety—or at least, I used to. Why? Because I grew up Modern Orthodox. I attended a yeshiva where there was no opportunity, really, for boys and girls to learn about the secular dating world. My school was co-ed, but it didn’t help the matter. Following halacha, the school’s message about was sex was firm: none of it before marriage. One of the main administrative goals each day was to keep boys and girls away from each other.

Modern Orthodoxy is kind of a gray area, encompassing was wide range of religious practice. When people ask about my parents’ practic, I hesitate about how to describe them. They keep Shabbat, but my mother wears pants, and they eat vegetarian food at non-kosher restaurants. Some members of my extended family who also call themselves Modern Orthodox are strictly kosher, and cover their hair after marriage. Most Modern Orthodox people venture into the secular world for study and work, but many only socialize with other Orthodox Jews. The level of familiarity with pop culture varies greatly from family to family and person to person.

The messages we received in my community about dating were confusing. Only certain activities were acceptable, and the rules seemed arbitrary. “Dating” meant that you walked to class together and maybe went over to their house for Shabbat lunch. My first boyfriend—who I ogled for three years before we actually started hanging out—lasted all of two weeks. We rode our bikes and sometimes sat next to each other when the whole gang went to the movies. Romantic. As far as the physical aspects of the relationship, hugging was about as far as it went. Maybe the occasional touching of the elbow. No hand-holding and certainly no kissing. It wasn’t just us.

When I was 15, a friend told the entire neighborhood that I was a whore because I sat next to a boy on a shul trip to Hersheypark. I was comfortable hanging out with boys in a friendly, platonic context, but unfortunately, some people in my Modern Orthodox neighborhood did not feel the same. (That same “friend” later got sprung sneaking out with boys, which led to some difficulties getting into seminary. The neighborhood covered for her.)

Every love connection I had was accidental. When you grow up together, you just get thrown together. You don’t date in a traditional sense, you simply hang out closer, with an almost imperceptible increase in frequency.

My first “real” relationship started just before eleventh grade, with a guy whose religious observance swung from eating at Olive Garden and making out with girls, to Orthodoxy, to some variation of the two. The first and only time he spent a weekend at my house, he showed up with a giant black hat that he had spent too much money on, which scared my parents, who wanted me to be observant, but wanted to make sure I stayed true to my own beliefs. With him, I got a taste of almost every type of Judaism. I thought it would broaden my relationship horizons, that I wouldn’t be so scared of guys and dating. It didn’t. He was the first guy that I had any sort of physical relationship with. Most of that had to do with the fact that he was from a different community and wasn’t raised Modern Orthodox. When I started dating him I kept most things from my friends, but a few warned me that being with someone who wasn’t religious was a bad idea.

Once I left the bubble of yeshiva and found my footing in the secular world of college and dorms and parties, I realized that those other folks in my community—the ones who attended Orthodox, single-sex high schools—had it easy. My friends whose schools were more Orthodox than Modern were having an easier go at college life because all they went to the same schools (Queens, Stern, YU), never completely leaving the bubble. They dated within their community, with people who had the same level of romantic experience and the same expectations. Their rules of dating were clearly delineated. Most of them are married now. I was the one with the problem: I was dipping my feet in dating pools beyond my depth, with people who were far more experienced and comfortable than me.

In my freshman year of college, my sculpture TA caught my eye. He walked into the studio with his newsboy cap and glasses, making me want to marry him. I lost all motor skills each time he approached my table. Once I accidentally smashed my little statue. My friend Sammi would stand next to me molding her clay and I’d nudge her, asking “What do I do?” The semester was grueling and I was in jeopardy of not finishing my final work of ‘art.’ The closest I got to flirting with him was lying to him about liking to fish. (I saw it on an episode of Gilmore Girls.)

When the semester ended and we all went home for the summer, my big move was sending the TA a Facebook message confessing that I had a big-league crush on him—something a sixteen-year-old might do. Needless to say, the relationship never blossomed, though we did stay in touch.

My yeshiva left me with a pretty solid education, but almost no life skills. It wasn’t until I was nearly done with college that I started to feel at ease in the world of dating, and that was because I decided to work on an ethnography-type thing about the culture of online dating for credit. I actually picked dating as my writing project for the semester so that I’d be forced to learn how to go on a date.

And so, I went on dates. Many dates. I became a student of flirting, plate-sharing, coy glances, teasing. Each dinner or seat at a bar taught me something new. I learned that people who have been dating since they were 14 still get nervous. One of my first dates couldn’t seem to remember the college he went to. Another spilled beer all over the bar counter. And more than a few of them, jittery and clumsy, confessed to me that they were “a bit nervous.” So if I didn’t know how to answer a question or if I spilled my drink or tripped (which happened a lot), it was okay. More importantly, it was pure immersion therapy: the more I pushed myself, the more comfortable I became. After a while I stopped walking into glass doors. Making conversation became much easier. One guy even called me a good “verbal-spatting partner,” which I considered a win.

About three years after I confessed my crush to the TA, he messaged me on Facebook and asked me out. Butterflies were swing-dancing in my stomach, but I kept my cool and it went well. I accidentally called him by a codename Sammi and I had given him, but I covered it up with a cough and a smile. I didn’t feel uncomfortable and I didn’t feel as though I was playing dating catch-up. I felt normal. We didn’t get together, but I finally felt as though I had finally graduated into the adult world of dating.

There were many awkward moments along the way, but I think I have finally leveled off with my peers in the school of love. I am more comfortable now. Not confident all the time, but not frightened whenever I have to talk to a guy. I’ve found someone to be with who, I think, would be surprised to know what a disaster I used to be. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who grew up in communities similar to mine, and learned that we all share a common naïveté when it comes to the world of secular dating. But everyone has their ‘thing,’ no? Every person goes into a relationship with baggage or quirks or expectations—so it’s a process of consciously keeping those neuroses in check and not letting them hinder the progression of a relationship (or even that one date). There’s no formula to what works, it’s just a process of trial and error until you one day realize “Hey, this ain’t so bad.”

Daniella Bondar is a MFA Creative Writing Nonfiction student at The New School. Wandering New Yorker. Insomniac. She’s working on a memoir about her gold dress phobia. Follow her on twitter and find her writing at DaniellaRobin.com.

(Image: Shutterstock)

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

Rachel Delia Benaim — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 21:30:56 +0000

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.

“My father wants us to postpone our engagement indefinitely,” he said.

Seeing as we’d been engaged for just more than five weeks, and that his parents had encouraged us to have a short engagement, I was at a loss.

“What does that mean?” I asked. “Does it affect our practical plans?”

He wasn’t sure.

“Where is this coming from?”

He was silent.

“Talk to me—what just happened over the last three hours?”

“What I just told you,” he said.

“But why did that take three hours? What else happened?”

He didn’t know.

After dancing this confusing tango for about fifteen minutes, I asked if we could speak to his parents—after all, they seemed to be the ones with the answers.

After waiting outside a theater for twenty minutes, his dad walked out sporting a grin fit for a Cheshire cat. The air was tense. He asked about our day, or something mundane like that. “I was wondering if you could explain what’s going on,” I blurted out, seemingly incapable of small talk.

“We need to test your relationship,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve gotten to know my son more this month and now I see that he’s irresponsible. He’s not ready to get married. He’s not a man.”

“Huh?” I said, in total disbelief of what this father, who had wanted us married within four months, was now saying about his own son. “I don’t see that in him—could you give me an example of what you’re talking about so I can understand?”

I looked at my fiancé hoping he would stand our ground, champion our cause. Nothing. He looked more like an injured child than I’d ever seen him in our two and a half years together. I felt like someone had punched me in the gut.

“Look,” I said, trying to digest everything that was happening. “Could we sit down in the morning and talk about this? Maybe if you and your wife have specific concerns we can alleviate them or work on them—we’d be more than happy to do that.”

He looked at his son, no longer addressing me, the girl he clearly regarded as unfit to clean his shoes.

“I’ve decided and that’s it. Can I go to sleep now?” With that, he walked away.

Naturally I broke down on the spot. My fiancé said nothing.

***

On the first day of my last semester of graduate school, my fiancé ended our engagement over the phone. I called to wish him goodnight. He told me that he didn’t know what he wanted. I was confused. We had discussed this. He wanted to marry me. He wanted to find a way to make it work with his family. It was difficult, but that was what he had said he wanted.

“Is this the last time we’re ever speaking?” I asked, assuming he would say no and we could build from there.

“Yes,” he said choking back tears. “Know this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

“Sucks,” I said. You can always count on me for my eloquence and emotional expression. “Good luck. Bye.”

Click. By severing the phone connection, I felt like I had severed a vital limb. But where were the paramedics?

***

In a national online poll of 565 single adults conducted by Match.com for Time Magazine, 20 percent of participants said they had broken off an engagement in the past three years, and 39 percent said they knew someone else who had done so. Forty percent of all marriages in the U.S. end in divorce. And everyone and their brother breaks up with a significant other at some point. Break-ups are painful, certainly, but they’re not heavily stigmatized.

But in the Modern Orthodox Jewish community, a broken engagement is regarded differently than it is in the secular world. Our community places so much importance on marriage—in some circles, it is still the marker of ultimate success. When a couple becomes engaged, they meet a societal ideal. If they break the engagement, for whatever reason, they then fail to meet this ideal. A break-up tarnishes both parties with failure, even if they’re otherwise successful individuals. People whisper. They’re uncomfortable. What, they want to know, is wrong with these two people?

So people don’t talk about their break-ups, and friends skirt around the topic. Silence creates stigma—which leads to more silence, which leads to more stigma. My father, quoting Job and Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, encouraged me to take my heartache in silence and leave everything up to God. He was there for emotional support, but he didn’t think I should be speaking about my relationship.

This pressure—and stigma—is felt more acutely by women than men in the Modern Orthodox community, I think, because status is conferred less readily upon us. In recent years, Modern Orthodox women have taken leaps in carving out spaces of equality within the framework of halakhic Judaism. My current roommate is one of the founders of the Washington Heights’ Kol B’Ramah partnership minyan, in which women can lead parts of the prayer service. Another close friend has taken on the cause of women’s leadership in Jewish communities. Her mission is to ensure that women can become presidents of synagogues, make announcements from the pulpit, and lead communal (though not ritual) events.

I have found that my friends willing to champion the role women in Judaism have been more understanding of me, and more accepting of my broken engagement “situation.”They don’t see me as broken. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because they know that women are more than silent voices behind a partition in synagogue. They know that a woman’s worth isn’t measured solely by her status as a wife, fiancé, or partner.

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.

So I understand why my would-be-bridesmaid was concerned I might be treated like “a stigma,” and why my father encouraged silent stoicism. But over the last few months, I’ve come to the realization that if we just spoke more honestly about our break-ups, the stigma would be diminished. People would no longer literally cross the street to avoid me, concerned I might infect them with my single-hood (or perhaps because they don’t know what to say).

As my relationship crumbled, my voice and ability to tell stories, to reflect, kept me sane. I spoke to my friends. I spoke to my family. I was never silent. I experienced a traumatizing misfortune: the person I trusted most in the world, the man I would have spent my life with, let me down. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me—or even wrong with him, for that matter.

Just as there is new a openness to talking about sex education and mental health issues in Orthodox communities in order to de-stigmatize those topics, why don’t we talk about break-ups and romantic disappointments more honestly? This will help undo the fear of being seen as “damaged goods.”

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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Passing on Purim For A Night In With Netflix

Daniella Bondar — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 19:00:17 +0000

I used to love Purim when I was growing up. Mom always came up with the cutest Mishloach Manot for my friends, from candy-filled plastic hearts to sweet little ceramic Claire’s boxes. When the holiday fell on a Sunday, my parents would both be home and the table would look like a garden of cellophane-wrapped baskets. We’d stay up late the night before packing in an assembly line, and the next day I’d drive with Dad around the neighborhood to deliver the gifts. He’d lift up his windshield wipers and cover the tops of them with gloves. Then he’d turn the switch and the makeshift hands would wave. Instead of Jewish music, he’d play Led Zeppelin and drive up and down the neighborhood streets. The tunes shouted from the windows, becoming the soundtrack for the costumed families frolicking up and down the streets. I’d watch them through the window. They’d wave and smile as our blue sedan drove by.

The last Purim I celebrated was my freshman year of college. Interestingly enough, it was the furthest I had ever been from home during a holiday. My friends and I—Jewish and non-Jewish—dressed up and went to a huge carnival that Chabad was throwing. We were in the middle of Nowheresville but there was music, games, and all the food you could ever want.

It’s been a while since anything resembling that has happened on Purim. This year I stayed in and watched Mad Men reruns in my pajamas. Instagram fed me a slew of pictures of family and friends dressed up. In between Don Draper’s affairs, I double-tapped each one. Like.

Growing up in an observant home, I learned that being Jewish meant you just did certain things. I never questioned it. Shabbat happened every week and it was normal not to watch television or drive the car. Holidays were filled with beautiful traditions and family. But now that I live away from home, and am not sure I believe in religion at all, being Jewish doesn’t mean being religious the way it used to.

Without consciously deciding to, I drifted away from community and observance. Part of me is happy about that—even before I left, I knew I didn’t quite fit in. There was no one for me to discuss literature with or argue over the arts. I’d sit on the floor of used bookshops by myself while my friends hung out at the mall. As soon as school—our common denominator—vanished, so did our bond. And yet, another part of me feels bad that Purim came and went without a single sparkle of the delight and fun it once held for me. I’ve been on a religious roller-coaster for most of my life, and in my twenties—on the cusp of adulthood—it has become even more difficult.

So now I am faced with the task of redefining observance.

The meat of observance, for me, lies in two things: culture and community. What I believe, or don’t believe, about where the bible came from doesn’t have to disrupt my connection to Judaism. Realizing that I don’t have to practice religion the way my family does has helped me to reconcile my nostalgia for my childhood with my discomfort with traditional observance. If I want to, I can still spend Purim with my family, or call up an old friend and ask if I can latch onto her plans. Culture is about tradition and the group of people you belong to, and that has little to do with theology and faith.

In terms of seeking out a new community: I haven’t found one that’s quite right for me, yet. Many of the people I grew up with, if they left home at all, left for the Upper West Side or Washington heights. I chose the East Village. I don’t know where my generation of culturally-identified, secular Jews is going. But for now, I am coming to realize that despite the choices I have made, I can hold onto the parts I want and still call myself observant, without feeling like I am lying or cheating. I can create new traditions, keep old ones, and find new communities and friends. I can have my own garden of cellophane-wrapped baskets.

(Image: Shutterstock)

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Modest Chic: In One Season, Out the Next—Unless You’re an Orthodox Jew

Dvora Meyers — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:29:35 +0000

Back when I was in yeshiva high school, three-quarter length shirt sleeves were all the rage at the Gap. My friends and I joyously rifled through the racks at Brooklyn’s Kings Plaza branch of the store, thrilled to buy a piece of clothing that we could wear right off the hanger—no alterations required to meet modesty guidelines. It was a victory for female Orthodox Jewish shoppers in the late 90s.

I have no idea why the powers-that-be at the Gap and other stores decided that season that covered elbows were “in.” But my friends and I were grateful that, for once, we could shop in the same chain stores as the rest of the country and be part of what, in retrospect, was a really ugly moment in fashion history.

Another such moment is now upon us. As this BuzzFeed article observes, it has never been a better time to be a fashion forward Orthodox Jewish female. Decreed by designers, retailers, and trend-setters—reality TV star Olivia Palermo, stylist Rachel Zoe and the regal Kate Middleton among them—modesty (or tznius, as Ashkenazic Jews are wont to say) is officially back in style.

The necklines are higher and the hemlines longer. The fabrics are less clingy. It is finally possible for an Orthodox (or Mod-Ortho) Jewish girl to walk down the street and not be immediately identified as such, blending in with the rest of the young, hip set.

(I’ve got an internal chip that is like one of those police scanners but instead of picking up on the presence of a cop car, I can distinguish a skirt-wearing Orthodox girl from the general skirt-wearing population. Same goes for sheitels, the wigs that married Orthodox women wear. No matter how expensive they are, I can pick them out from a mile away. I’m like a bomb sniffing dog for wigs.)

Unlike many in the ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic camps, some more mainstream Orthodox folks do wish to be able to slip into the wider society every once in a while. Many go to secular colleges and are avid consumers of pop culture. They live tantalizingly close to the mainstream and though they put religious priorities above all else, they are still greatly affected by Madison Avenue. When congruous with religious law, they want to be part of American culture.

But designers are probably not responding to Orthodox girls’ deep seated desire to blend in. So this begs the question—what exactly is driving this current mainstream fashion trend to cover up?

I like to (wholly and unoriginally) call this the Brooklyn Hipster Effect. Though hipsters are much maligned and the term itself has practically become a punch line, certain fashion sensibilities of the Williamsburg kids have taken root and started to influence threads not found in a thrift store. Their sartorial challenge: I’m going to pilfer the racks of this secondhand shop for other people’s cast offs and layer practically to the point that it seems like I’m wearing my entire wardrobe all at once—and dare you to not find it sexy and alluring. And so far, it’s been working. No need for cleavage and knees here.

But can the influence of Brooklyn hipsters last forever? Odds are, no. Fashion is nothing if not constantly evolving. Some day real soon those aspiring artists will decide that overt is sexy and the plunging necklines and tight fitting clothing will return. And failing that, I’m sure that the spandex-loving 80s trend will reassert itself in, say, 2018. (Just a guess.)

So, frum girls, do as my circle of friends did all those years ago—stock up. Buy those skirts and blouses in every color and texture, because this too shall pass.

Dvora Meyers is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Tablet and several other publications. She is the author of the essay collection Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess and blogs at Unorthodox Gymnastics. You can find Dvora on Twitter here.

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