My parents struggled to choose a name after my birth in a shabby Moscow hospital. Nothing felt exactly right. After a month they settled on Yulia, a traditional Russian name that, they decided, was just unique enough. My mother loved the lyrical way it rolled off the tongue, Yoo-Lee-Yah. Most often, though, I was Yulya or Yulinka or Yulyasha.

When I was five-and-a-half, my family left Russia. I was still Yulinka in Vienna and Santa Marinella, Italy, where my family lived stateless for nearly nine months while I pleaded for chocolate ice cream and swam in the frigid Mediterranean Sea near our monastery-owned apartment.

A few months after our arrival in New York City, I became Sara.

My parents enrolled me in a Hasidic yeshiva for Russian-Jewish immigrants. We shed our secular names, and aspired to commit to memory everything our parents and grandparents never knew. Sara had been my grandmother’s birth name, before she felt compelled to change it to the more palatable and less Jewish “Alexandra,” or Sasha for short.

As Sara, I was the girl who learned to read both Hebrew and English at a sprinter’s pace, discarding all traces of an accent within months. Sara was bright, popular, and fiercely determined to rack up accolades. She moved from first grade to third grade the same school year, although at this particular townhouse yeshiva, that only meant a move to the adjoining room. All my new friends knew me as Sara. The name felt like my own. And Judaism was now at the forefront of my identity. At the yeshiva we devoted an entire period to reciting passages from the Chumash (a printed version of the Torah), starting with Bereshit. We’d sing the Hebrew verses followed by the English translation, over and over, until we knew them by heart. I learned the intricacies of nearly every biblical tale. The stories, the rituals, the history—all of it was mine.

After three years came unexpected news: we were moving to Virginia, where I’d be enrolling in a public school. Though I had once admonished my parents for not teaching my brother and me any Jewish rituals, I found it surprisingly easy to let go of the name Sara and the Orthodoxy it represented.

At the elementary school where I started fifth grade, they asked what I preferred to be called. “Julie,” I answered. I’m not sure where I first heard it, but I remember feeling it was an appropriately “cool” name, and at nine, being thought of as cool was paramount. It felt more me than “Julia,” the transliteration of my given name. I embraced this new identity. I was ready to be wholly American.

Julie was shyer than Sara, less adept at making new friends, but she was also more curious and more adaptable. As Julie, I discovered American pop music, like Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men, and the comforting malaise of a suburban life filled with birthday parties at the arcade and trips to the local shopping mall.

Sara hadn’t disappeared entirely, however. On my first day of Hebrew school at the local conservative synagogue, the teacher asked my name. “This is Hebrew school,” I thought. “In Hebrew school, you go by your Hebrew name.” So I answered, “Sara.” The teacher proceeded to introduce the rest of the class. “Kevin, Ashleigh, Lauren, Beth…” I immediately realized my mistake, but in my anxious nine-year-old mind, it was too late to correct it. My two identities were kept separate until a year later, when I moved to the better public school district attended by most of my Hebrew school classmates. There was a lot of confusion and embarrassment and awkward explaining. The comic ridiculousness of having three names wasn’t lost on me either, and I quickly learned to be self-deprecating. More than twenty years later, some members of the congregation still refer to me as “Julie-Sara.”

I felt that duality when I offered to do more for my Bat Mitzvah than was expected by leading certain prayers usually reserved for the rabbi—to the bewilderment of my classmates—because I genuinely loved them and was moved by the melodies. I’m still moved by prayer, by the crescendo of an entire congregation singing Avinu Malkeinu during high holiday services. There’s a purity to it, a lifeline to the past that feels indestructible.

I remained Julie all through middle school, high school, and college. Richmond, Virginia, my new hometown, was a cultural lifetime removed from the Russian-speaking neighborhoods of Brooklyn where we’d lived for three years. In Richmond, I had one Russian friend, who, like me, barely registered as Russian. We spoke about Russian food or cartoons every once in a while, but mostly we bonded over Tori Amos and musical theater. I was Julie, the girl who played soccer (less than decently), obsessed over Beat poetry, and hung out with friends over plates of French fries at a smoke-filled cafe downtown.

Most new friends were surprised to learn I was an immigrant. The more I told the story, though, the more I felt it burrow into me and become an ingrained part of who I was. My immigration made me something other than an average suburban teenager. The cloud hanging over my family and every other family who’d gone through a similar experience was always there versus here. Stagnation versus opportunity. Ignorance versus truth.

And though my family assimilated quickly and willfully (no Russian television, few Russian friends), intrinsic differences remained. My parents are warm and loving, but they’re also unexpectedly direct, which has caught many Americans off-guard. They’re patriotic in a way U.S.-born citizens can never truly understand. And yet, there’s still a lingering cynicism that no amount of American positivity can scrub clean.

There are also the cultural mainstays of Soviet life my parents can never entirely forget—nor do they want to. Vladimir Vysotsky is the music of their youth, and I’ve never seen them feel music so intensely as when they’re listening to one of his songs. I can’t help but love him, too. My mother and I sing patriotic Communist anthems on long car trips. We register the dangerous naiveté of the lyrics, but the act of singing the songs—my mother and I, together—transforms them into something comforting.

My parents never took to processed American food, and our table, even at Thanksgiving, is laden with celebratory Russian dishes like caviar, smoked meats, eggplant dips and beet salads. Russian culture, at least in major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg, was remarkably homogeneous under Communist rule. The food, the music, and the movies were all scarce, and so cultural “favorites” were everyone’s favorites, which is why, perhaps, it is so easy to bond with fellow Russian immigrants. True counterculture was reserved for the truly subversive.

During an internship interview my senior year of college, the coordinator uttered the name atop my resume.

“Thanks, Yulia,” she said. “We’ll get back to you.”

“Actually,” I responded, as I had many times before, “You can call me Julie.”

“But Yulia’s so much prettier.”

“Okay,” I said, unsure how to interpret the backhanded-compliment. “Yulia’s fine, too.”

For the past 10 years I’ve gone by Yulia in the workplace, though I continue to introduce myself as “Julie” to new friends. At first, I felt a bit like an impostor. It was strange to hear colleagues say my name. I barely felt Russian, way less Russian than many writers and authors whose Russianness was a central tenant of their writing, but whose bylines were Americanized names like Gary and Ellen and Julia.

Plus, “Yulia” is a formal name. It contains one more syllable than the casual Yulya. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a Russian person call me aloud by my name, despite my mother’s fondness for it.

Was I fooling my colleagues into thinking I was something other than who I was? Slowly though, I grew into it. As I started getting published, seeing “Yulia” as a byline below a story I’d written felt right. It is my birth name, after all. It represents a unique life, a journey that’s taken me from a Communist childhood, to statelessness in Italy, to an Orthodox schooling, and finally, to American adolescence and adulthood.

I’ve decided I like the internship coordinator’s comment, about my name being pretty. It reminds me of my mother’s comments about why she chose it in the first place—her fond gushing over how beautiful she thought it sounded.

To minimize confusion when first introducing myself, I sometimes follow “Yulia” with the refrain “like Julia, but with a ‘Y.'” In a way, though, the name feels not at all odd or out of place for the city to which I’ve returned: New York City—the city of immigrants. It has a home here, a point of reference.

One night last summer I met friends in Coney Island for a Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball game. There was beer and popcorn and fireworks—a collection of all-American trappings. After the game we walked to a Russian restaurant, where we drank vodka and feasted on blintzes and borscht. On the boardwalk, within yards of each other, couples writhed to reggaeton and Russian grandmothers sashayed to old Russian ditties. Yulia feels like the name best suited to this mishmash of a city, itself a fitting metaphor for my own patchwork of an identity. Feel free to call me Julie, though, if you’d like.

Yulia Khabinsky is a research editor and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Jewish Daily Forward, Narrative.ly and other publications. She blogs about New York at Notes From the Wonder City. Follow her on Twitter at @ykhabinsky.

Image: Shutterstock

Related: The Refusenik That Wasn’t
Gary Shteyngart On Surviving Solomon Schechter, Soviet Pain, And Botched Circumcisions

The post Julie and Yulia: One Immigrant’s Name is as Complicated—and Enriching—as Her Identity appeared first on Jewcy.

Leah Vincent may be best known for her shocking escape from a restrictive Orthodox community in Cut Me Loose, her leaving-the-fold memoir, but since its release, she’s been working to carve out a space for less traditional approaches to sacred text. In The Forward this week, she wrote about her struggles approaching Jewish scripture and her attempt to reclaim the Shema as a feminist prayer.

This month, Leah stopped by OMGWTFBIBLE to read the continuation of Joseph’s story. Together, we dove into Joseph’s deception of his brothers and discussed what happens to families when people push each other away. Oh, and there were jokes.

At the core of the conversation was the question of whether, sitting on the throne in Egypt, Joseph is hiding himself or is finally living authentically. Listen above to hear our thoughts, then let us know what you think.

The next live recording of OMGWTFBIBLE will be at Beauty Bar at 8:00PM on May 26 and will feature author Michael Malice (Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il).

David Tuchman translated the Tanakh as a comedy and called it OMGWTFBIBLE. Each month on his podcast, he calls up a different guest to read as many chapters of OMGWTFBIBLE as they can while they both make fun of it.

Jewcy is the proud (internet) co-host of OMGWTFBIBLE. Read more about the project here, and listen to previous episodes here.

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Last week, Rabbi Ari Hart, the co-founder of Uri L’Tzedek, wrote about his personal struggle with the liturgy and the recitation of the blessing thanking God “for not making me a woman,” which as a liberal sort, he finds problematic, you know, because of misogyny.

Rather than omit or amend the blessing as some Modern Orthodox folks—from Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky to Senator Joe Lieberman—have done, Hart decided on a different tactic. Citing his fidelity to Orthodoxy and the entirety of halacha, Hart does not feel comfortable changing the blessing to match his principles. Rather, he will continue to thank God for not making him a woman while keeping in mind all of the reasons that it is indeed better to be a man—from rape to the glass ceiling to lack of religious leadership opportunities (particularly in his denomination, which doesn’t allow for women rabbis) and so on. You see, it really sucks to be a woman and Hart is rabbi enough to admit his privilege.

My knee jerk reaction was to blog snarkily about Hart’s post, pointing out that what he was suggesting is akin to the oft-discussed and derided ironic hipster racism. As Jezebel’s Lindy West astutely pointed, some white folks (the ones with college degrees) seem to think that “not wanting to be racist makes it okay for them to be totally racist.” Hart is suggesting something similar—as a male, a member of the privileged group in Orthodoxy, he gets to rejigger the meaning of a blessing that has often been viewed by women as hurtful, to twist into something that he can feel good about. It’s sort of like how straight people decided that “queer” was no longer insulting and that LGBTQ should reclaim it. (Oh, wait—it didn’t happen like that?)

While I still stand behind that original blog post and the arguments contained therein (and as a very belated birthday present, I would very much like someone to make Hart a “Shelo Asani Isha” t-shirt he can wear ironically on a New York street corner while explaining his intent), I’d like to address the emotions and feelings that seem to motivate the writing of his piece. (And I think it’s totally fair to make assumptions about Hart’s inner mental state since his “strategy” demands the same of those around him—for us to hear him recite the particular blessing and infer what he’s thinking about his male privilege.)

Like many progressive Orthodox Jews, Hart is torn up about the sexism embedded in Jewish law and liturgy. But he really likes being Orthodox and doesn’t want to do anything that calls his status into question, which is a reasonable fear. When Kanefsky wrote about not saying the blessing, some considered him to have stepped outside the bounds of Orthodoxy. So Hart continues to thank God daily that he was not made a woman. And the cognitive dissonance he feels living as an Orthodox male who believes that sexism and its consequences are wrong is clearly weighing on him.

I think we can all sympathize. It’s difficult to live perfectly in accordance with one’s values. We all buy goods that are made by workers who underpaid and mistreated. Those goods are often manufactured in ways that are destructive to the physical environment. The list goes on and on.

Some may protest these unjust systems and try to change them for the better. But for those of us who don’t take to the streets to fight against oppressive institutions, I’d like to think that at least we’re not actively rationalizing and defending our actions. (This isn’t much, I’ll grant you. In fact, it’s so little, it’s practically nothing at all.)

Hart, however, is treating the blessing as a thought problem, one that can be fixed if you can simply find the right arguments. By coming up with a different way of understanding it, he seems to think the matter is put to rest at least until all of the ills he lists at the end of his post are corrected. (And what then? What happens when women are totally equal? Will the Orthodox, if that category still exists, say the blessing a hundred years from now or whenever women have achieved equality?).

His approach has been fairly typical of Orthodoxy’s encounter with feminism—at least online. Confronted with certain practices that have their roots in very misogynistic notions about women, many Orthodox men and women insist that the problem is not the law but the explanation of it. ‘No, wait! You don’t understand!’ is the sentiment that has launched a thousand apologist pieces. (This also typifies the Republican response to their thrashing in the 2012 election. They seem to think that blacks and minorities simply didn’t understand their message and platform; their new strategy is to better explain themselves to minorities. I wonder how they’ll rationalize voter ID laws.)

The problems with the blessing (and with the status of women with Orthodox Judaism in general) cannot be explained away. In a small way, “shelo asani” contributes to all of the ills that Hart opposes and even some others, like homophobia, since the blessing implies that the worst thing a man can be is feminine. It’s not just a locker room taunt—it’s written into our liturgy. We have to do better than finding a more palatable explanation.

What’s so disappointing about the Huffington Post defense of “shelo asani” is the source. Hart has made a career out of helping the poor and aiding workers, out of taking action against injustice, out of doing something.

Of course, helping those groups doesn’t fundamentally disrupt the halachic system (though it is disruptive to the capitalist system). We are supposed to perform acts of charity and treat the goy in our midst with kindness and dignity. We are not allowed to mistreat workers and deprive them of pay or even make them wait for their money. Uri L’Tzedek is not changing the legalistic status quo as much as enforcing it, which is still highly commendable and difficult work.

But when Hart is confronted with the idea of change that could be disruptive to the Orthodox status quo—addressing women’s status and treatment—he doesn’t respond with the same verve. He seems to feel powerless to do anything, even amending or omiting a blessing.

William Faulkner is rumored to have said, “In writing, you must kill all of your darlings,” referring to those exceptionally fine and funny sentences that a writer is in love with despite the fact that they are off-topic or detract from your narrative intent. The writer’s emotional attachment to a particular phrase, paragraph, or page can keep it off the chopping block.

The offending blessing is hardly a “darling,” but Hart and others are treating it as such, permitting nostalgia and the emotion the old-timey liturgy evokes to cloud their judgment.

Yet as painful as darling slaughter is for many writers, it usually improves the overall work. If writers can eliminate their favorite phrases then perhaps we can have an honest discussion about cutting deeply troubling sections of our liturgy.

Because there’s a limit to how much sympathy I can muster for progressive men like Hart who argue to retain the old, oppressive forms for reasons of nostalgia or the desire to retain membership in a certain clique.

I get it. Change is difficult and destabilizing. It can be unpleasant to tinker with traditions and prayers that are part of a lifestyle that you mostly find beautiful and meaningful. Yet to these folks I still say—get over it. Your pain, while legitimate, is minor compared to the experiences of those who have been marginalized and oppressed by thousands of years of rules and blessings that have regarded them as property, trivialized their intellectual capacity, and denied them access to power.

But even if you can’t get over it, please don’t argue your liberal bona fides even as you continue to retaining those practices and prayers that many women find damaging.

I know, I know—perhaps I should be grateful that an Orthodox rabbi is even able to acknowledge his privilege. But guess what? I’m fresh out of gold stars.

Previous columns: The Photographer Who Captured a Disturbing Domestic Violence Incident
Misogyny in Israel—and Not Just at the Western Wall
Obsessive Compulsive Passover

The post The BallaBuster: Let’s Stop Rationalizing Sexist Prayers in Judaism appeared first on Jewcy.

Earlier this month, the condiment company J&D’s (“Everything should taste like bacon”) released—and quickly sold out of—a line of bacon condoms. The product is now only available by waiting list, and if you don’t believe that artificially-flavored latex prophylactics would sell, see for yourself.

Not surprisingly, J&D’s is a half-Jewish enterprise, the Jewish half being Dave Lefkow. In an interview, Lefkow said that he thought it would be funny to get J&D’s seminal product, Bacon Salt, kosher certified (it contains no actual bacon).

Traif is a hip(ster) restaurant in Brooklyn whose executive chef is, no surprise, a Jew—and whose tag line is “Celebrating pork, shellfish & globally inspired soul food.” The late David Rakoff wrote about his experience of eating pork in Germany, which made him feel very aware of his own Jewishness. Luzer Twersky, a former Satmar who left his Hasidic community (and may soon star in a reality show about it), told the New York Post, “When I had the first bite, I felt angry…I felt how could my parents keep this from me?”

Bacon is more than a pig product. It’s a cultural statement. The fetish, the joke, and the irony justify consuming bacon, though it is fattier than fat, and the trayfiest of trayf. Did the Post ask an ex-Hasid about an innocuous non-kosher food like Starburst Fruit Chews or Jell-O? No. Because who cares about Starburst Fruit Chews and Jell-o? They went right to the bacon. Bacon carries cultural currency.

As an observant Jew, here’s what bacon represents to me: If you’re Jewish, even if you’re a secular Jew, eating bacon is saying, ‘I am Jewish, but I think I am refuting my Jewishness by eating trayf in public, so therefore I am totally affirming my Jewishness.’

I myself am stringently, stubbornly kosher. When it comes to bacon, though, I’m an outsider. I didn’t grow up kosher, so I’ve tasted it—and I think it’s gross. I’ve thought it was gross since way before I even considered going kosher. Smelling it as I walk by the bodega every morning makes me nauseous. I usually hold my nose past the coffee carts selling egg and bacon sandwiches on my way to work. My worst nightmare is to be feeling a little sick on a warm, poorly-ventilated, rocking subway car only to have some pork eater get on the car eating a bacon-and-egg sandwich. I feel like puking into my messenger bag. (I actually carry barf bags with me in case of this very situation.)

The weird resurgence of bacon in the past five years as an object of culinary fetish seems to me to be a direct reaction to increased awareness of healthy food (Skinny Bitch, Fast Food Nation, et al.), and also to what is basically the emergence of the second wave of American baalei teshuva (the first being in the 1960’s). Suddenly every dudebro and his “ironic” hipster cousin are indulging in bacon as a statement.

That statement is a lot like that of the “bad kids” I went to high school with, the most obnoxious of whom used to sing in the halls to his Rage Against the Machine tape on his walkman, “F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” Except he totally did what people told him. He’s for sure making more money now than I am—and playing a lot of golf. (I know that because of Facebook.)

At Pardes, Brooklyn’s boundary-breaking gourmet kosher restaurant famous for its unlikely combinations of flavors, the chef occasionally makes beef “bacon” ice cream. Pushing the porcine flavor of bacon in the already revolting medium of parve ice cream has to be done to make a point (because there is no way it could be done for flavor). The point is, as Dr. Evil said in Austin Powers, “I’m with it…I’m hip.”

I don’t really care what other people eat, as long as they don’t strap me to a chair, hold my nose, and shove their nasty food in my mouth. But the Jews and bacon shtick—and it is completely shtick—it’s a fetish. It’s a symbol. If Jews want to eat bacon in private because they have a compulsion for it, that’s none of my business.

But Jew fools himself if he eats bacon. No matter what he eats, if he two-fists bacon-wrapped scallops covered in mayonnaise on white bread and washes it down with a glass of milk while kneeling down to idols, he will always be Jewish. In that case, why not give the Jewish soul what it actually wants: kosher food.

From this author: It’s Hard to Be a Mensch at a Crowded Kosher Supermarket on Thursday Night

Previously on Jewcy: Kosher Salt: I Don’t Eat Pork
Hebrew National and Me: Answering to a Higher Authority
Insane Trayf Item of the Week: Bacon Coffin
Exposed: The Jewcy Bacon Fetish

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A few weeks ago, the Forward published a long account about the trials and tribulations endured by Orthodox college students who wish to remain shomer negiah while attending secular universities where the so-called hook up culture is ubiquitous. Featured prominently in the story was my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, where many of the more religious kids maintain a “hands off” approach to mundane social interactions and especially dating. And throughout most of my four years at Penn, I, like many of the subjects profiled in the article, practiced shomer negiah.

My practice was not as absolute as it was for some of the subjects in the article. I never eschewed casual contact like handshakes, which for me didn’t seem to defy the halachic injunction prohibiting touch that is derech chibah, or in an affectionate manner. I wasn’t so indoctrinated that I could actually sexualize a handshake.

Even before college, my teenage libido frequently got the better of me during gymnastics practice, when I sometimes insisted on a male spot on certain skills, telling my female coach, who was more than capable of carrying me through any flip, that I needed a stronger spotter.

What I meant to say was that I needed the high school-aged Stefan, who was often shirtless, to lift me through a somersault. But I rationalized it thusly: crashing into him after a failed attempt at a back layout couldn’t really be considered affectionate touch, right?

I was not the only observant student who was trying to figure out ways around the rules. At the start of my freshman year of college, one of my fellow adherents (and there were many who professed to be shomer, at least in public) told me about a recent interaction with the similarly observant guy she was dating. They were on her bed at a relatively safe distance when he picked up one of her teddy bears and used its paw to gently caress her cheek.

At the time, I thought this was just about the most adorable, romantic story I had ever heard. It also turned me green with envy. I was 17 and fresh out of twelve years of all-girls schools and camp, and I too wanted to be caressed by a stuffed animal. (This whole admission is far more cringe-worthy to write than it is to read, I assure you.)

Though I still think the story is kind of cute, I also find it disturbing. My friend and I were so immature and clueless about sex and navigating the tricky sexual and romantic interactions between men and women. And our respective yeshiva educations had labored to ensure that we wouldn’t know much more before we got married. I suppose this wouldn’t have been too terrible if you managed to stay religious and marry someone as clueless as yourself.

But if you decided to abandon the practice in your early 20s, as I did, you find yourself in a new, more sexually experienced dating pool, feeling like a kid in water wings while everyone else around you can swim with ease. And if your new peer group assumes a degree of sexual experience and your old one has none, it can be quite difficult to find practical advice on the matter.

That’s how I felt during my senior of college when I decided that I was done observing shomer negiah but didn’t know how to signal to my friends, most of whom only knew me as really observant, that they could now hug me or thrown an arm around me in group photos instead of being forced to lean in awkwardly without touching. I briefly considered donning a pair of Hammer pants and singing You Can Touch This, but decided to remain mum on the subject until I graduated.

The years after college involved a move to a different coast where I was free to reinvent myself as someone who wore pants and touched men—no song and dance number needed by way of explanation. But despite my fancy new jeans and tank tops and indiscriminate hugs, I was still rather clueless. It took several years of awkward fumbling to attain a degree of sexual experience and confidence.

This awkward past is part of the reason I find the newly launched website Jewrotica so charming. Though the name suggests some degree of naughtiness and kink, many of the posts on the site seem to be aimed towards a less sexually experienced demographic, which seems to be part of the design of founder Ayo Oppenheimer. (Even the more sexually adventurous writing doesn’t feel especially titillating or extreme in a world where Dan Savage is now considered mainstream.)

Oppenheimer was raised Orthodox and experienced the same sort of culture shock that many of the subjects in the Forward article felt at being introduced to secular college life and dating. At least part of the aim of Jewrotica seems to be educating others who grew up similarly sheltered.

At times, this means having the sort of debates you might hear at a Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance conference. There was one recent post that presented halachic and societal arguments about whether or not women can and should wear pants. Obviously, clothing is a bit part of feminine sexuality, so this information is not entirely out of place.

It sounds, however, like a lot of the reasoning and rationalizing I did a few years before I was ready for any sort of sexual contact. Though ostensibly I majored in English and Communication in college, I actually spent my first two years concentrating on the academic/Talmudic/philosophical reasons I could wear jeans.

To read those particular posts as an adult isn’t illuminating as much as it is nostalgia-inducing. They took me back to a time before I possessed practical knowledge, when Jewish practice was about arguments and proofs, where thinking about doing was about as far I was willing to go.

I’m glad that other young Jewish women will have a better source of information about sexuality than I did back in my college days when I primarily relied on television. And I plan to continue reading Jewrotica, if for no other reason than to reminisce about those awkward years that you never truly overcome.

(Image via Shutterstock)

The post Feeling Out My Post-Shomer Negiah World appeared first on Jewcy.

Hanukkah is coming up—or at least it’s the next Jewish holiday on the calendar—and if you’re wondering what to get for the six to 10-year-old girl in your life who has a penchant for laughing and eating inappropriately in public, then look no further. The ultra-Orthodox community in Lakewood, New Jersey, has devised a game that teaches young girls the truly important lessons in life: that their bodies are hyper-sexualized and practically anything they do in public can be construed as inappropriate. At least the antiquated Victorian notions about young girls and women allowed them to be seen, if not heard.

The rules of this game seem to be simple—a scenario is presented on two different cards, one pink and one green, and players need to choose which is the appropriate action for a “Bas Yisroel” (Daughter of Israel, spelled for proper Ashkenazis emphasis).

The cards with the “bad” actions are pink because the game creators couldn’t make them red. (Duh!) This would make them very difficult to read. And as I was taught in camp, red is a slutty color. Wearing it is like waving a big red flag in front of a bull/man and basically asking him to look at/gore you. But they couldn’t choose a color for the “bad” card that was gender-neutral cause girls need to associate their sex with inappropriate actions. Hence, the choice of pink. It’s the favorite color of most girls (and the U.S. women’s gymnastics team).

Now onto to the scenarios. Girls are given a choice between, say, yelling from a school bus when they see their teacher on the street or telling her in school the next day so as not to create a scene. Or laughing out loud so that everyone stares or doing so quietly until someone asks you why you’re turning beet red. (Wait, wouldn’t it be bad for a girl to turn red? Wouldn’t that attract the male eye?) Or eating ice cream on the street instead of indoors. Or dancing as if no one is watching (because you’ve drawn the shade). Or undressing properly since ostensibly God is watching? This game makes God sound like a creeper. Also, the “bad” choice in this situation is undressing as though no one is watching, since you’re alone. The pink option here actually sounds more reasonable and modest.

Since when in Judaism, or life, are there only two choices? How about eating the ice cream with your left hand instead of your right, with a shinui? Why aren’t we searching for loopholes in true halachic fashion?

The scenarios presented on these cards seem fairly ludicrous if you were raised outside of the ultra-Orthodox community or have watched one hour of television in your life. You might even be tempted to think they are barely tethered to ultra-Orthodox reality. But you’d be wrong. Even though I was not raised in Lakewood or anything approaching its fundamentalism and I watched television while doing chumash homework, I have firsthand experience with one of the games’ scenarios. As a 16-year-old working at a very religious sleepaway camp in the Catskills, I used to walk back from the swimming pool in flip flops (Crocs had not yet been inflicted on us), sans socks or tights, but in a long robe that covered my knees and elbows easily. More than once, I was taken aside and told I was being a bad influence on the campers under my charge for not putting my socks back on after a swim. (Did I mention that this was an all-girls camp? The only men around were workers. Rabbis and their sons kept their distance from the pool and lake areas.)

You might be thinking that my defiance of the sock rule was a sign of early rebellion, but it wasn’t. I wasn’t making a statement about modesty and ankles. My concern at the time was my precarious laundry situation. It seemed ludicrous to me to put a clean pair of socks on my damp feet and into flip-flops after a swim because wet socks would gather more dirt as I walked back to my bunk through the forest. I didn’t want to dirty extra pairs of socks unnecessarily.

I tried explaining my concerns to the staff member who took me aside, but she was not sympathetic. This conversation would repeat itself several more times throughout the summer—she’d catch me and tell me that I wasn’t fit to be seen by young impressionable girls while I tried to make her understand that I simply didn’t have enough clean socks

I can’t be certain that my socklessness was the cause, but at the end of the summer when assignments for the following year were handed out, I was left high and dry. I would not be returning to work next summer. (A small confirmation of my suspicions—when I posted the link to these playing cards on my Facebook wall, a camp friend wrote that she had been similarly admonished for not wearing socks to and from the pool and was demoted to shittier jobs over the course of the summer as a result.)

By choosing socklessness (and clean laundry) above ankle modesty and the young hearts and minds in my charge, I suffered real world consequences far graver than losing a game to a friend on a Shabbat afternoon. I lost the $500 dollars I stood to earn the following summer as a camp employee and had no choice but to spend that time doing gymnastics in a leotard and little else.

If the game fails you, allow my experiences to act as a cautionary tale. If you don’t wear socks, you’re nothing more than a hop, jump, and cartwheel from unemployment—and spandex.

Lakewood ‘Modesty’ Game Cards For Young Girls [Failed Messiah]

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This was the first Rosh Hashanah I didn’t go to shul. I still saw friends, went to meals, dipped the apple in honey more than once, yet I never entered any one of the several minyanim I’ve frequented in the past. I never opened the machzor I’ve been using for years, the one I received free in the mail for a hoped-for donation that I didn’t send. And I never heard the shofar blasts calling me to repentance.

Does this mean I was blameless all year, that I had nothing to repent for? Hardly. It’s just that despite the myriad of rituals, the primary way the Jews I know mark Rosh Hashanah is with an extra-long synagogue service. And I don’t enjoy prayer.

This is not merely a sign of how degenerate I’ve become since leaving Orthodoxy. Prayer, even when I was a full-on believer, was always the most difficult part of Judaism for me. I’ve never been able to sit or stand still and even the most vigorous shokeling, the ritualistic swaying that the religious set do while davening, was never enough to keep boredom at bay. As a child, I was able to leave services without glares of disapproval and would spend hours in the ladies’ room with a friend, swinging from stalls (though I never did giant swings like John Cage did on Ally McBeal) and giving bubbies the scare of their lives when I popped out.

As I got older, I was expected to stay in the women’s section for even longer periods of time as though age had miraculously reformed my twitchy nature. It did no such thing. Throughout the practically daylong Rosh Hashanah services, I’d alternate my foot tapping from one leg to the other and then back again. I would leave my seat as often as possible to get sips of water from the fountain or to visit the restroom. I no longer attempted acrobatics in the stalls. Rather, I engaged in the more teenage-appropriate behavior of checking my hair in the mirror. But after five old ladies entered the bathroom and then left, I felt obligated to return the sanctuary.

Despite these stratagems, there was still left ample time to stew in my seat. Or stand and pray. The worst was mussaf, which translates to “additional service.” The first part is recited to oneself and I did my best to complete it as quickly as possible in order to get a chance at sitting before the even longer repetition portion began. (Woe unto me when I learned at school that I wasn’t supposed to sit down in front of a person still engaged in prayer. I’d stare angrily at the woman behind me who seemed to be taking her sweet time communing with God and seeking blessings for her family. I hated her so much.)

I also engaged in “machzor math” by flipping to the end of the mussaf service to figure out how many pages were left until the final shofar blasts of the day. (As a math-phobic person, this remains the only type of arithmetic I’ve ever been any good at.)

At times, however, I took a grim satisfaction in surviving the service as though I had run some sort of liturgical marathon. Back at school after the holidays, we’d boast to one another about how long our davening lasted. The winners (and losers) were the ones who didn’t get to eat lunch until it was practically time for seniors in Florida to get their early bird specials. (This same sort of competition was applied to Passover seders. Eating dinner before midnight was a sign of impiety.) In Orthodox Judaism, as in my beloved sport of gymnastics, your grit is measured by how much suffering you can endure.

As an adult, I stopped attending Orthodox services. I found congregations that shared my values, from egalitarianism to social justice. There is just one problem—these guys use a liturgy very similar in content and length to the service of my youth. And they really like to sing it out.

Again, I found myself resorting to the same time-killing strategies I used as a kid. I showed up late, got up often to go to the bathroom and get sips of water. I found people to speak to. I rose and sat with the congregation. And I counted how many pages we had to go until we would be free for the day.

When I woke up on Monday morning, I was ready to go through all of it again. I’d show up late and then distract others with mindless chatter. And then I’d distract myself when they’d finally shush me. I’d rise and sit in accordance with the script. Once again I’d hope that instead of ten or twenty minutes of connectedness with the material and the songs, maybe I’d get half an hour this year.

Then I decided to go back to sleep. Perhaps it was pure laziness that kept me in bed for hours with a book and a cup of coffee until it was time to meet my friends for lunch. And it was that, at least in part. But it was also me finally recognizing that prayer wasn’t meant to be my form of spiritual expression and engagement.

On some level, this is surprising. I’m a writer and rabbinic Judaism (as one good rabbi friend once pointed out to me) is a verbal culture. I enjoy text study and can argue for hours. You’d think that prayer, being comprised of a lot words written into books, would also thrill me. But when confronted with the liturgical text, I rarely feel anything in the recitation of it, even amongst a group of friends I love and respect. It mostly leaves me cold.

So what’s the difference between the intellectual discussion that excites me and the prayers that bore me to distraction? It is, in part, the demand for stillness. I’m not a meditative sort and I feel most connected when I’m moving and dancing. But it’s also the rote nature of these lengthy services. What I cherish about literary analysis and debate is that though we are working from a static text, we’re improvising as we argue. For me, spirituality is achieved, however briefly, from constant shifting and changing. I can’t work from a script. (Or remember a beam routine much to my former coach’s chagrin.)

This reminds me, like virtually everything else in life, of a moment from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When Werewolf Oz is asked about Sunnydale High School’s marching jazz band, he explains, “Since the best jazz is improvisational, we’d be going off in all directions, banging into floats…scary.”

Similarly, a standardized davening keeps the congregation together. The unity and cohesion of many voices joining together, saying the same words, is for some an incredibly spiritual experience. I have friends who find great fulfillment and connectedness in the traditional service.

Thankfully, these folks mostly indulge me and my inability to daven. After two years of living in Los Angeles, my friends hosted a Shabbat lunch to bid me farewell. When it came time to bench after the meal, one announced, “I think that because it’s Dvora’s last Shabbat here, we should bench quietly and to ourselves, the way she likes it.” It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

Though undoubtedly these friends also find Rosh Hashanah davening overly long—I’ve spied others doing machzor math—they enjoy a good sing-along and get into it. I wouldn’t want anyone to cut it short on my behalf.

Besides, the longer they spend in shul, the more time I get to spend in bed or dancing around my apartment before I meet them for the most Jewish act of all—eating.

(image via Shutterstock)

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