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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“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)

The post I Went to India, And I Found “Shanti” appeared first on Jewcy.

Elisa Albert—long-ago Jewcy editor!—is the acclaimed author of the The Book of Dahlia (a novel), How This Night is Different (a short story collection), and most recently After Birth, a novel of childbirth, motherhood, daughterhood, and friendship, which was aptly described by Merritt Tierce in the venerable New York Times as “a shriek of a carnival ride inside a spinning antigravity chamber, the ultimate trippy trip” — i.e. very, VERY good.

After Birth is literally searing in its descriptions of labor, delivery, and the early months of motherhood. It’s also very compelling, funny, and deliciously dark. Michael Orbach sat down with Albert for a light conversational repast of religion, adolescent suffering, the art of writing, the Holocaust, and C-sections.

You grew up somewhat observant, correct? When I read your book I couldn’t help thinking of that blessing Orthodox Jewish men say about thanking God for not making them women.

What’s your religious background and how do you look at it now?

I find the further away I get from observance, the more fondness I have for it. I find it quite lovely on a lot of levels, now that I’m pretty disentangled… I grew up pretty solidly Conservative; I went to day school and then Hebrew High from seventh grade on. Then I went to Brandeis. My mom belongs to both a Conservative and Orthodox shul and she goes back and forth as she sees fit; my stepfather is into Chabad. My mom came to observance pretty late in her life. She was Jewish but a hundred percent secular. Then she had this midlife crisis—call it what you will—and became very religious, almost punitively so. It wasn’t until I was much older and in the homes of very observant people who are comfortable in their observance that I noticed [religion] had a nicer energy. My mother was never relaxed about it. She was trying to inhabit it very hard.

What was the genesis of writing After Birth?

I feel fortunate that I had an established writing life before I became a mom, so all of the confusion and fascination that goes along with motherhood had this very natural outlet. Of course I’m going to write a novel about it: that’s what I do. I didn’t do much writing until my son was about a year old. I was pretty deep into early motherhood, and when I finally got my bearings and could carve out some space to write, there was no question that that was what I was going to engage. I’m not really the kind of writer who looks too far afield… This was what my mind was full of.

How close are you to Ari, the narrator of After Birth?

I would say she’s like a distillation of a really bad day; a haunted house mirror reflection of fears I have. She’s a rumination on a dark corner, blown up ten times. I really like what Susan Sontag said in her notebook: “To write, you have to allow yourself be the person you don’t want to be, of all the people you are.”  Like an id. [Ari] is someone so incredibly hopeless and in such a dire state of despondency. She has that tendency to hold on to really negative stuff and let it define her. That’s a danger in this whole being alive business.

There are lots of dangers in being alive.

That’s true.

Speaking of the not letting go, Ari can’t seem to forget her deceased mother throughout the book.

She’s a really nasty mother who even in death won’t let up; just that very broken maternal line and that incredible legacy of damage and darkness and secrets and unresolvable stuff that gets passed down as a matter of course if we’re not super conscious and careful. Ari’s struggle is to break that chain: can I be a mother and not hand down more of the same? Can I end that legacy? Can I not let my dark shit get on this [new] person?

It’s like that Philip Larkin poem, This be the Verse.

“They fuck you up your mum and dad,” I can recite it. And interestingly, it ends, “Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.”

How did your mother take the portrayal of Ari’s mother in the book?

My mother’s an exceptional reader. She taught me to love books and it’s been a huge benefit and boon to our relationship. I learned from her how to love books and to go to books to find what I needed. My mother’s not one of those people who doesn’t understand what a novel is. She’s incredibly well read and that helps a lot. She makes jokes, like, “Well that character isn’t me, I’m not Israeli,” or “This time the mother’s dead!”  I think it might be harder than she lets on but she knows enough about books and fiction to stand back and I’m grateful for that. I have acquaintances whose parents are very threatening with ultimatums, like “If you ever write about us…” That’s pretty bad. I’m lucky. My parents just say, “Congratulations on being a writer.”

Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

I did. I didn’t know if I was any good—I mean I think I knew I was kinda good—but it still seemed so far fetched as I made my way toward it.  I think I always wanted to be seen and heard. When I was little, I wanted to be an actress.  I always had parts in the school play. I always had a need to be seen because I felt unseen in general.

Why?

Complicated family stuff. Growing up not super attractive in L.A. From puberty on, things were kinda dark.

Aren’t they always?

Some people just sail through, seems like.

They don’t become novelists; they become housewives and bankers.

Writing comes out of that feeling of invisibility.  It’s incredibly valuable but you don’t realize it until later. Sometimes I feel like whispering into the ears of passing adolescents, “I know things seem really bad but if you stick with yourself and don’t try to change…”

“Or kill yourself.”

I’ve noticed that the book seems to go after the sacred cows—both motherhood and, with regard to Ari’s grandmother, the Holocaust. Especially how her grandmother survives by becoming a prostitute to the Nazis.

People tend to put motherhood on a pedestal but think nothing of denying women the right to decent birth. The Holocaust has to be spoken of vaguely, in hushed tones, leaving out the basest human elements. I feel like this character’s irreverence is actually showing respect for the real issues, the real suffering, not all the gift wrap and bunting.  It’s so common for us to talk around the difficult things; the job of a novelist is to talk about the difficult thing. Baby showers are irrelevant. Standing in line for two hours to take a picture of Anne Frank’s attic is Tragedy Disneyland. The way it is in our culture, the baby registry is super important but we are silent about what happens to women in birth. Reverse it: there is something sacred and important here, but it’s not what we’re used to talking about. There is something incredibly harrowing and hard to look straight at, here; let’s show respect by actually trying to talk about it, even though it makes us really uncomfortable. Let’s not have our cathartic easy little cry and call it a day.

I think the graphic description of Ari’s grandmother’s having sex with the Nazis is a good example of that.

Right. Nobody wants to think about that. That’s how this woman saves her own life. A lot of people had to do things that are just too horrible to speak about. Everybody loves Anne Frank, me included, because she’s an innocent who believed in the triumph of the human spirit. That’s really easy to admire and cry about. Let’s graduate to something not so easy to admire or cry about.

When you said parts of motherhood that people don’t talk about, what were you referring to?

A lot of women go into motherhood wanting to not know much about birth. They choose to outsource birth, be a passive participant, give over their will and trust in whatever institution or whatever kind of care provider they’ve chosen.

Just a question of clarification: Ari describes her C-section as a bit like a rape. As you mentioned, some readers seem to think you’re anti-C-section. I didn’t take that you were anti-C-section insomuch as opposed to the passive nature of other people taking control during the birthing process.

I would say that. I’m anti-ignorance, I’ll go out a limb and say that. [laughs] Who’s going to argue with that? I’m anti-ignorance and the willful ignorance around birth is a shame. It causes a lot of problems. The book is not anti-C section; C-sections save lives in 10-15 percent of cases, where they’re really medically necessary. Unfortunately, it’s the most commonly performed surgery in America today and it’s performed on a third of all women giving birth.  That’s obviously problematic. Ari didn’t need surgical birth. She was bullied and terrified into it and she didn’t know enough to say no.  No one is saying we should go back to the time when women died in childbirth. But one in ten is very different from one in three.

What I took from the book is it sort of contrasts between birth, this really visceral experience, and the rest of our lives that are super non-visceral.

That’s a huge part of the book. A bit of a push-back against the disembodiment of modern life. We live a lot between our eyeballs and screens. Birth is one reminder that we are mammals.  We are monkeys and we have bodies and our bodies matter. When we disown them, ignore them or try to distance ourselves from them, there are severe spiritual consequences.

Related: The Book of Dahlia: Good, or Just Jewish?

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In the late 1980s, Crown Heights locals going about their daily routine—rushing to farbrengens (Hasidic gatherings) with their Rebbe, or running errands down Kingston Avenue—might have glimpsed an anomaly in their midst: a Japanese woman, camera in tow, capturing the scenes around her. That woman was Chie Nishio, who spent a few years photographing members of the Chabad-Lubavitch community in Brooklyn, New York. Now, over 20 years later, her collection is finally receiving recognition at an exhibition in the Centreal branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, just a few blocks away from the community she so lovingly documented.

I met Nishio at the library last month to get a personal walkthrough of the photographs on display, 43 from the total collection of over 200 black and white prints. (Color would take away from the subject at hand, she insisted). Now 84, with silver hair framing her face, Nishio hasn’t lost any of the energy, wit and candor of her younger days.

As we scanned the prints she told me how she came to turn her lens on the Hasids of Crown Heights. Her interest was initially sparked by her Jewish husband, the acclaimed author James Trager. Though he was firmly atheist, Trager, now deceased, descended from illustrious lineage; his great-grandfather was one of the founding rabbis of the Jewish community in South Carolina. His grandfather moved to a Reform congregation interstate and the family, Trager included, eventually all assimilated.

Eager to learn more about her husband’s heritage, but with Trager unable to offer much insight, Nishio headed to Brooklyn to learn more about the people of the book. She didn’t have much luck with the strongly insular Satmar community in Williamsburg, where most were unwilling to engage with a foreigner and her camera. But in Crown Heights, a community unique among Hasidic sects for welcoming outsiders, Nishio was welcomed, and over the years she and her camera become a fixture in the Brooklyn enclave. She developed deep friendships with many of her subjects, and to this day she occasionally treks from her home in Manhattan to visit them in Crown Heights.

“I would say it all happened by accident,” Nishio laughs, “but with these people, there’s no such thing as accidental.” She points her finger heavenward. “It’s all arranged by God.”

Her photos offer an expansive yet deeply nuanced glimpse of Chabad life. Centered around the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, they portray a community of believers entrenched in ritual and practice. A one-month old baby laying on a silver tray for his pidyon haben ceremony, draped in cascading jewelry; a Bar Mitzvah boy checking the position of his tefillin in the mirror; a young bride trying on wigs in the salon before her wedding day.

Most notably, perhaps, the photos show the community’s reverence for its beloved leader, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson—known amongst his followers simply as ‘the Rebbe’—in the last years of his life, right before his death in 1994. Though women were not allowed into the main sanctuary of the synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway, Nishio captured the Rebbe from their vantage point in the women’s gallery upstairs. And if the community’s acceptance wasn’t enough, the Rebbe himself seemed to overtly support Nishio’s mission by blessing her on more than one occasion.

In one image the Rebbe uncharacteristically turns aways from the men in the Synagogue, towards Nishio in the women’s gallery above, and hands her a roll of coins. The Rebbe used to hand out dollar bills, and less often coins, with a blessing, as a symbolic gesture to encourage his followers to in turn give the money to charity and pass along the blessing.

“Everyone said I was special,” Nishio told me, “they came up to me after asking for their share in the coins.”

On another occasion, when the Rebbe was handing out honey cake before Rosh Hashanah, he again called over Nishio who was photographing from a distance, giving her a piece of cake and blessings for a sweet year. And Nishio—by her own admission an ardent non-believer—seems to get excited recalling the memory. “Somehow, I don’t know how, he recognized me!” she smiles.

Though ostensibly an outsider, her photos reflect a deep sensitivity and keen understanding of the practices of daily Hasidic life, and also the individuals behind the portraits. They also show the diversity of a community committed to reaching out to and welcoming newcomers to the fold. There’s the bewigged lawyer who gazes out through the frame, the artist surrounded by his artwork inspired by Jewish mysticism, and the mother of six who also edits a magazine.

“I came with no prejudgement,” said Nishio. “Maybe that’s why they were so open to me.”

Nishio, a firm feminist who contributed regularly to Ms. Magazine, hints to a certain kinship with the woman of the community.

“When I came to the United States, people said to me, ‘Oh you’re not typical,’ because they have their own imaginations of what they think a Japanese woman is like. But they don’t know too much about it. Maybe based on a book, maybe they visited Japan and just saw the surface. So what I found in Crown Heights is that, yes, as an outsider walking in, the women are wearing a wig, long skirts, they’re supposed to cover their legs, but you walk in to talk to each family, each woman is different, each individual is different.”

“From the outside and from the inside it’s a completely different story most of the time,” she observed.

Perhaps Nishio is not, after all, an “unlikely portraitist,” but actually the ideal observer of this community, and the perfect person to document the color of its activities—in all the glory of black and white.

The exhibition, ‘The Hasidim of Crown Heights, Brooklyn: A Community Study by Chie Nishio’, is on display at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central branch through February 1, 2015.

(Image: Chie Nishio)

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I remember my first crush clearly: I was in davening (prayer service) in sixth grade, and I saw a boy a year older than I was donning his tefillin before the service officially started. I remember thinking to myself how gorgeous he was—it was, quite literally, a “tefillin turn on” (a phrase for when someone finds another person doing something Jewish to be attractive). In that moment, I was overcome with a debilitating fear that would stay with me until long after I came out five years later: I became afraid of my own sexuality, and I had no one to whom I could turn and share my fears. Growing up in the Orthodox community and attending Orthodox elementary and middle schools, no one ever talked about sex or sexuality, let along feelings of same-sex attraction.

The only time sexuality was ever brought up to the male students was when my seventh grade Bible teacher spent an entire class ranting about how Massachusetts’ legalization of marriage equality was wrong. Other than that, sexuality was never discussed. The assumption was that we nice Jewish boys would grow up to date and ultimately marry nice Jewish girls, and that our female counterparts would date and marry nice Jewish boys.

Two weeks ago, Josh Orlian, a 12-year-old Jewish boy from White Plains, New York, auditioned for America’s Got Talent as a stand-up comedian, where he told several very off-color sexual jokes. It raised eyebrows—as well it should have. There stood a boy in a kippah, not yet bar mitzvah, making jokes about fellatio to Howie Mandell and Howard Stern.

But at the same time, this shouldn’t be jarring: sex is something that most twelve-year-olds think about on a very regular basis. And, yes, the blowjob joke he made was fed to him by his father, and, yes, perhaps it might have been irresponsible of his parents to allow him to stand up in front of a live audience and make those jokes—but that doesn’t change the fact that twelve-year-olds are on the verge of puberty and are thinking about sex. Orlian’s Modern Orthodox day school has the right to be unamused, but that doesn’t change the fact that middle school students will always make crass jokes amongst themselves.

Funny or not, Orlian’s performance—and the controversy that resulted—forces us to confront the Modern Orthodoxy community’s squeamish attitude towards sex education. Just because we don’t talk about sex with our adolescents doesn’t mean that they aren’t thinking about it, in the same way that teenagers will have premarital sex whether or not we choose to talk to them about safe sex practices. Despite the fact that no one I knew ever really talked about homosexuality or sexuality in general, I still turned out queer, and came out of the closet before I had a chance to have any major discussions about sexuality and Judaism. Not talking to our kids about homosexuality won’t stop them from coming out: they’ll just live in fear—like I did—that their communities won’t accept them.

We should be fostering our youth’s sexual education and knowledge, not fretting over the fact that the public now knows that, yes, Orthodox boys and girls think and talk about sex. We can’t sweep these conversations under the rug until just before college, because sex and sexuality are all around us as we enter puberty. Instead, we need to give young, frum Jews the language and tools they need to make informed decisions when it comes to sexuality. For guidance, we can turn to our own rabbinic texts, which deal frankly with matters of sexuality—for example, the rabbis in the Talmud went to great lengths to understand when a woman becomes an adult, how to classify a person who does not fit into the binary of male and female, and to share wisdom about sexual pleasure. Our current repressive attitude towards sex actually runs counter to Jewish tradition.

Even Modern Orthodox day schools which do have more progressive sex education programs often wait until too late—ninth or tenth grade—to discuss sexual health and gender identity. This education needs to begin earlier, in middle school. It is time to stop being afraid of sex and sexuality, because when we are, we fail to give our adolescents the tools they need to lead sexually healthy and responsible lives. Arming teenagers with the tools and the language they need to lead sexually healthy lives must become a part of our Modern Orthodox value system—even if the endeavor sometimes makes us uncomfortable.

Ultimately, Josh is just like every other adolescent. The only difference between him and other twelve-year-old boys is that he wears a kippah while he thinks and talks about sex and sexuality. This only reflects poorly on the Orthodox community if we keep pretending that the way that we talk about sexuality and gender—and by this, I mean not talking about it until the very last minute—is just fine. We need to remove the taboo surrounding sex in Orthodox Judaism to give our kids the education they need, lest we continue to put them at risk.

Amram Altzman is a rising sophomore in a joint program with the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University. He is also a blogger for New Voices Magazine, a website for Jewish college students. You can follow him on Twitter @thesubwaypoet.

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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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Amidst the tragic events unfolding in Israel, an important moment transpired in the Orthodox Jewish community: Rachel Fraenkel recited the mourner’s Kaddish at the funeral of her murdered son, Naftali, and the numerous male attendees—including the Israel’s chief rabbi, David Lau—responded “amen.”

Yair Ettinger, writing for Haaretz, described Fraenkel’s public recitation of the Kaddish prayer as “a seminal moment from a religious perspective”:

This was no demonstrative act; it was the act of a bereaved mother saying the Kaddish for her son, immersed in the Aramaic text.

Still, there was great significance in her doing so before a large crowd of people, including Chief Rabbi David Lau and Rabbi Yaakov Shapira, the dean of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, who sat in the front row, and the Knesset members who attended the funeral — all of whom, coincidentally or not, belong either to national-religious circles or to Shas.

Most of them had probably heard of women who recite the Kaddish, but it is doubtful whether they had ever had the opportunity to respond “Amen” to a woman who actually did so. More important, most of the thousands of people in attendance, and the even larger number who watched the funeral at home, had never seen a woman reciting the Kaddish before.

In non-Orthodox Jewish congregations where women are counted as part of a minyan (quorum), this is not a new development, but in Orthodox communities, women traditionally do not recite Kaddish. Halachically, it is an obligation that falls to male family members. But in recent years, increasing numbers of Orthodox women have been adopting this mitzvah, either in female-only prayer groups, partnership minyanim, or more progressive Orthodox synagogues.

In January this year, Shelley Richman Cohen wrote movingly for Tablet Magazine about the comfort she derived from saying Kaddish for her son Nathaniel, who died at the age of 21 from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy:

Had Nathaniel had the zechut, the privilege of living a full healthy life, chances are he would have had children to say Kaddish for him. Since that was not to be his fate, who would be more appropriate to say Kaddish for him than his mother? I carried him in my womb, I birthed him, and I orchestrated the life he led. For his 21 years our lives—his and mine—were inextricably bound together. It was out of a profound sense of loss that I took on the commitment to say Kaddish.

At that moment, I don’t think I fully grasped what saying Kaddish would really mean. Yes, I knew it was said at three different prayer times every single day. Yes, I knew I would have to say it for close to a year. But no, I don’t really think I thought about how difficult it would be for a person like me who is, despite the best of intentions, perpetually tardy. All I knew was that I was grieving for almost every aspect of my son’s short life and I wanted desperately to be able to connect to him. Kaddish was a means for me to continue doing for Nathaniel.

The online response to Fraenkel’s public Kaddish has thus far been overwhelmingly sympathetic and positive. Fraenkel is a respected halachic authority who teaches Jewish law at two renowned women’s institutions in Jerusalem; Ettinger notes that she contributed last year to a “religious responsum examining the issue, with a bias toward the public recitation of Kaddish by women.” It is a great misfortune that she must now heed her own advice in such tragic, unnatural circumstances.

Image: Photoillustration Ivy Tashlik; original photo Shutterstock

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In a way, the 2013 documentary “Brave Miss World” (recently released on Netflix) is two movies: It’s a celebrity biopic about Linor Abargil, the Israeli Miss World of 1998, and it’s the story of how a woman becomes an anti-rape activist.

Abargil was brutally raped in Milan at the age of 18 by travel agent Uri Shlomo Nur, just seven weeks before winning the Miss World crown. In order to heal and raise awareness about the prevalence of rape, she started a website for women to share their stories, and the film (produced and directed by Cecilia Peck) picks up in 2008 as she prepares to travel to meet them.

“Brave Miss World” offers viewers two distinct kinds of voyeurism: we see Abargil’s journey from Miss Israel to model to activist to Orthodox mother of twins, and we hear the tragic, intimate narratives of the rape victims Abargil visits and interviews, her brow furrowed in consternation and anger as she listens to their storms.

With no qualifications other than her own experience and her fame, Abargil travels from Ohio to South Africa doling out advice—even commands—to women who have been brutalized in countless ways. “I’m not going to tell you, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for you, it’s so sad’,” Abargil says to one victim who doesn’t want to come forward to her family. “Ok, I can tell you that, but it’s not going to help you recover.” She valiantly goes on, telling the survivor, “You need to heal yourself and we need to push each other to do it, no mercy.”

Abargil has a message: speak out about your assault, for that way lies the land of the healed. “It’s the hardest thing to do, I know, to speak, but then, it’s like the best pill,” she tells a survivor. “It heals you.”

She is absolutely convinced of this by her own experience, and astounded by survivors who might prefer to mourn and heal privately. Her reaction to such women is equal parts endearing and unsound. “Why do you think all the victims—it’s really bother me, it’s why I’m asking—on TV they cover their faces? Why they don’t stand and talk about it?” She demands of a rape crisis center director, who patiently explains that many victims fear being shamed. Thanks to supportive family and friends, and a natural tenacity, Abargil is remarkably impervious to this stigma.

There is something supreme and even magnificent about her confidence. A group of teenage girls in South Africa—some as young as 13—confide that people don’t listen to them when they talk about being raped. “She just wants attention,” one says, mimicking the attitudes of their supposed protectors. “Even though she cries, she wants attention,” another girl recalls being told. They all nod in recognition.

“You know what you say when they tell you you want attention?” Abargil says. “You tell them, ‘Yes.’” The girls all laugh. “True! This is what I want. And if you don’t give it to me, I’ll cry louder.” It’s such a wonderful and restorative message for women of all cultures who are silenced and told that they are attention-seekers when they report rape, and Abargil conveys it with a zealous charisma.

It’s her confidence and intuition that told her how to talk to her rapist on the night she was abducted and attacked (It was only a one night stand, Don’t worry, I swear I’m not going to tell anyone), which probably saved her life. That same confidence took her from moderating a website where women write in with their rape stories, to meetings with Fran Drescher and Joan Collins—who both share their rape stories on camera—to law school and the office of the Attorney General.

But anti-rape activism is only one of the things Abargil becomes stubbornly attached to, against the advice of family and friends. She also begins a transformation midway through the film from a secular to a wholly religious—and I mean religious—existence. With the help of a flirtatious Breslov rabbi, Abargil pulls her family, gay best friend, and boyfriend (later husband), into the sphere of her new spiritual existence, replete with head covering, modest dresses, and a refusal to touch men. This is not a person who does things in half measures.

Victims of rape could do worse than have an advocate in the stunning, stubborn Abargil. But still, there’s something discomfiting about the way her grim cause is boosted by the cult of celebrity. While visibility is crucial to help raise awareness about important causes—think #BringBackOurGirls, or even Angelina Jolie’s mastectomy op-ed—”Brave Miss World” prompts the question: isn’t there something smarmy about those who need a celeb to say “I was raped” in order to care? Also, what is the long-term impact of public confession on rape survivors? Abargil’s thesis—that talking about sexual assault publicly is healing and cathartic—is not one she has arrived at through an education in psychology.

The two main threads of the film—celebrity biopic and activism—exist in tension with one another, rather than being complementary. Abargil’s conversion to ultra-Orthodox Judaism is surprising and largely unexplained; unsettling, even. And the fact that we need a white beauty queen to stamp her disapproval on African rape for it to come to our attention is extremely depressing.

But despite these aesthetic quibbles, the film is inspiring. There is something uplifting about a woman like Abargil, whose dogged approach to the things she wants spills over into a desire to help other women. A woman who gets everything she wants. A woman who survives a brutal rape by telling her rapist exactly what he wants to hear, who presses charges against him unsuccessfully in one country and—never discouraged—jails him in another. It’s uplifting to see a woman with such power, who never doubts her story or her right to happiness, or her belief that all other women deserve the same.

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Every year in the lead-up to Purim, the Jewish media produces joke articles which satirize the major issues of the day. It’s just one of the ways we enact the Purim spirit of “v’nahafochu,” which celebrates the reversal of power dynamics in Esther and Mordechai’s rescue of the Jewish people from Haman’s decree of extermination. This year’s Purim section in The Jewish Week joked that “a whopping 92 percent of American Jews are so disconnected from their traditional roots that they are unaware of the report issued last year that indicated that American Jews are increasingly disconnected from their traditional roots.”

Communal leaders dress in silly outfits, normally serious rabbis let their hair down, and, amidst the revelry, we loosen our standards of decorum. Purim costumes, too, often poke fun at Jewish and secular news stories and personalities—a few years ago I dressed up as Sarah Palin, which should tell you something about my political views.

Often, this is a good thing. Venerated media institutions show a lighter side; we see our leaders as more human. But satire is most effective when we mock the powerful, not those with less power. What happens when the principle of v’nahafochu pokes fun at those without the privilege of power in our community? This Purim, I experienced that firsthand.

I have had both the benefit and the misfortune of being at the center of one of the major Jewish news stories of the year—I am a teenage girl in an Orthodox environment (though I don’t identify as Orthodox, a fact often glossed over by eager reporters) who lays tefillin. I’ve written extensively about this, and consequently, have exposed myself to significant vitriol from those who consider me to be “simply ignorant of Torah Judaism,” and “on a very stupid path that will prevent them from becoming good Jewish mothers.” I’ve also received positive comments and messages, from women and girls inspired by the voice of a tefillin-laying woman in the public sphere. These messages spur me to continue my activism.

Not surprisingly, the phenomenon has been satirized in several places. The first Purim article I encountered about my female tefillin-laying peers was in the YU Observer, the official student newspaper of Yeshiva University’s Stern College for women. The piece, entitled “How to Buy Tefillin: A Woman’s Guide,” begins with the statement, “Buying tefillin for your first time is a scary experience.” The writer then goes on to provide tips to help “a girl feel good about her newest toy.” These include purchasing Tefillin Barbie (how absurd, for a woman to want to see representations of herself in popular culture!), advice for married women about head-coverings that accommodate tefillin (this is an issue that married women have struggled with, and one that I am likely to deal with in the future as well), and what sort of shirt to wear to accommodate the arm-tefillin (the trials I have had in finding appropriate outfits are too extensive to list here).

The primary failure of this satirical article (written by someone who has clearly never been a tefillin-laying woman) is its accidental honesty. Getting tefillin as a woman is scary, people do stare at you and whisper behind your back, and the feeling of your “shidduch points plummeting” is very real. My anxiety over my future place in the Jewish community arises directly from this sort of derision. There is no humor in this advice. The condescending tone and lack of understanding of women who observe this mitzvah serves only to further stigmatize us, to make us a curiosity or a joke.

A few days after Purim, a photograph was shared by a friend of mine on Facebook, and later tweeted by the New Jersey Jewish Standard. It depicted a grinning woman in a long skirt, a striped cape that looked like a tallit, and a head-tefillin perched atop a sheitel; behind this woman stood Rabbi Hershel Schachter. The woman in the picture is Shoshana Schachter, his wife. Rabbi Schachter is the man who recently stated that permitting women to don tefillin “remains a matter of Yehareg v’al yaavor—where one should be killed rather than violate it.” After weeks of trying to laugh off cruel internet comments, Rabbi Schachter’s words pained me so deeply I cried.

Rabbi Schachter is a venerated figure in many segments of Orthodoxy, and I have teachers I like and respect who are his students. As the Rosh Yeshiva at Yeshiva University’s rabbinical school, he carries significant clout, and his halakhic rulings are widely respected. To see Rabbi Schachter amused by and seemingly condoning the teasing of woman who wear tefillin is insulting beyond words. It is already incredibly painful to me to have experienced outright rejection and condemnation for my beliefs; as a person who is committed to halakhic practice, statements that place me outside the halakhic community cut even deeper. By mocking the religious commitment of women who wear tefillin (a commitment which I would expect a man who has dedicated his life to Torah study to understand intimately), Rabbi Schachter further reinforces the marginalization of my peers and myself.

Satire is designed to provoke questions and to weaken disproportionate authority, and Purim is the perfect time for this brand of humor. But to use the holiday as an excuse to deride a small group of girls and women—people who have already been on the receiving end of much censure—is unconscionable. It goes against everything that Purim stands for. Like all groups, the Jewish community benefits from sincere and frequent critiques of power, and from using humor to facilitate those critiques. We are bettered by the yearly opportunity to examine the people and institutions we look to for leadership. It is my hope that next year, we can use Purim as an opportunity to do just that.

Avigayil Halpern is a senior at the Hebrew High School of New England. She is a Bronfman Youth Fellow for 2013, a Rising Voices Fellow through the Jewish Women’s Archive and Prozdor, and an alumna of Drisha’s Dr. Beth Samuels High School Programs. She maintains a personal blog at theprocessofthetaking.blogspot.com. Follow her on Twitter at @avigayiln.

(Image: Girl With Tefillin by Michal Patelle)

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“You’re allowed to go right up to him, yeah. You just can’t touch him!” So says one yeshiva student, holding a camera pointed to another, about a guard stationed outside one of London’s royal buildings.

The young man pictured moseys—yes, moseys—toward the soldier, then stand next to him. The difference between the two is obvious, palpable, already comic: a yeshiva bochur in black and white with jaunty payos and a big black yarmulka, pictured next to a becloaked, behelmeted guard, the strap under his chin both infantilizing him and preparing him for battle.

While posing for the camera, the young man starts to weave an entire narrative about his relationship with the soldier, docu-drama style. “We went to school together,” he says, gesturing towards the soldier. “He went his own way.”

At first, the guard seems in charge of himself, quite capable of fulfilling his duty to not laugh. The yeshiva student speaks of their days at school together, choosing the guard’s school as the context for their shared past, where they studied martial arts. He starts out with a questioning kind of tone, as though he isn’t sure whether the soldier is the person he is describing, but as the narrative progresses he grows more confident.

“He was never talkative,” the yeshiva student says, and starts to describe the guard as a youth. At this point, it is clear that the guard is listening, and moreover, struggling to maintain his composure. As the student launches deeper into his fiction, things get worse for the guard, until the final epic breakdown. The student interrupts his own narrative as he alights on the perfect weapon: “His mother always picked him up from school. You know, he was that type of guy, until he was twenty, his mother always picked him up from school.” At this point, the guard breaks. And I mean, breaks. He doesn’t just smile, or grin, but breaks into a full-on giggle, halted as quickly as possible by a shake of his head and a blush. The students dance away, ebullient.

What’s amazing is that the thing that finally breaks the guard is a shared experience which totally dissolves the distance between them: they both can relate to making fun of the guy whose mother picks him up from school, “until he was twenty.” While it is possible to find two people more different than these two, they are different enough that their shared experience—and the humor that derives from it—is touching, as well as hilarious.

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