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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If you aren’t familiar with the dark, delicious voyeurism that is PostSecret, this is what it is: the diary of the universe, on the internet, in postcard format.

Contributors send a postcard (yep—real, old-fashioned snail-mail) with a secret to the founder of the site, Frank Warren. Each week, Warren selects a bunch of highlights and posts them online. (Archives aren’t visible on the main site, but this unaffiliated Tumblr has ’em all.)

A couple of weeks ago, this postcard went up, and it kind of blew me away. The handwritten note reads: “I’d be much happier married to religious gay man than as a single, Orthodox (straight) woman.” It’s a simple, unadorned statement, but terribly poignant—and I think a little ambiguous. Does she mean, “I’d be much happier married to religious gay man than remain single forever?”

Another possibility: might the author prefer to knowingly be married to a gay religious man than a straight religious man? If so, it’s a pretty damning indictment of her perception of sexism in heteronormative Orthodox Jewish culture. (Of course, this card is reflective of one woman’s experience, and it would be remiss to extrapolate it to apply to all straight Orthodox men.)

Whatever her story, the card provokes a lot of thoughts and—in interwebz speak—feels. Is being a single Orthodox woman more lonesome than being in a sham marriage? Or is this just heaping stereotype upon stereotype?

Your thoughts?

p.s. Kind-of-related: Areleh Harel, the Israeli rabbi who arranges marriages between gay men and gay women.

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In what appears to not be a joke and actually a real thing, Africa’s Mail and Guardian is reporting the existence of glasses, designed for Orthodox Jewish men, which blur women from sight. Yep, glasses that blur your vision.

From the article:

The ultra-Orthodox community’s unofficial “modesty patrols” are selling glasses with special blur-inducing stickers on their lenses.

The glasses provide clear vision for up to a few metres so as not to impede movement, but anything beyond that gets blurry – including women.

It’s not known how many have been sold. For men forced to venture outside their insular communities, hoods and shields that block peripheral vision are also being offered. The glasses are going for the “modest” price of $6.

Never mind the confusing mechanics behind eyeglasses that do the opposite of what eyeglasses are presumably supposed to do—namely, facilitate clearer sight—this seems to be more than a little dangerous. Also, $6 seems a bit steep for a pair of fake glasses, just saying.

(Image via Shutterstock)

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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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Okay we get it: your mom, your rabbi, your cousin who wants to be Rachel from Glee and about 80,000 gentiles really love the Maccabeats.  We’ve seen this pointed out sooooo many times in the last month that, at this point, we’re kinda sick of it.

But you know what?  Since there is really no such thing as a good mainstream Hanukkah song, we will take whatever we can get.

Jonathan Mark at The Jewish Week really thinks that the success of the Maccabeats video is partially due to their overt Orthodoxy, and points out that the Macabeats video scored over three million views on Youtube, versus the 960,000 views Judd Apatow’s AJWS video scored.

What Mr. Mark fails to realize is that statements like this are what tend to make people avoid any and all organized Judaism.  Even worse, this divisive position has the potential to deter those already trying to find their own way into the Jewish world outside of the traditional classifications and labels.

“[A] non-threatening, non-religious entry into Jewish life for the unaffiliated” could easily be translated to “if you want to take baby steps into a more spiritual life, we don’t want you,” and is the sort of stance that should be frowned down upon by Jews (of all sorts!) that hope to participate in a community of inclusion.

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