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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The most recent news dividing ultra-Orthodox and secular Israelis is the law by the Education Ministry allowing state-run religious schools to ban sex education, prohibiting an entire textbook chapter dealing with reproduction and sexually transmitted diseases, YNet reports. Women’s rights activists are incensed, stating that just because one group wears burkas and the other bikinis, they each need to know the facts about sex.

“This is completely ridiculous,” Israeli parliamentarian Michal Rozin of the left-wing Meretz party told The Media Line. “We need to know how our bodies work and the way children come into the world. The religious education (sector) fails to understand that children already know about this from the Internet and other places.”

Well, we all saw how well abstinence-only education worked here in the United States.

(Photo by Shutterstock)

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If I could choose my job title, I would be a Professional Conversation Starter. I want to start awkward conversations with Jews who are looking for an outlet to speak. I want to discuss the scary and judgment-filled topics that drive individuals in Jewish communities to silence. I want to talk … I want to talk about shomer negiah.

Shomer negiah literally means “guarding one’s touch.” It refers to the practice of refraining from physical contact with members of the opposite sex outside of marriage. It’s a choice reflecting the decision to reserve the intimacy of physical touch solely to be experienced with one’s spouse. The practice manifests itself in an incredible variety of ways for different people. Some individuals who define themselves as shomer negiah struggle with whether to shake the hand of an opposite-gendered professor or whether to give a friendly hug to an acquaintance at a party; others struggle with drawing the line between kissing and more intimate acts.

I have watched my fellow Jews navigate the delicate field of negiah observance throughout my life, but my interest in this institution and Jewish sexuality in general really started in college. I grew up attending Orthodox day schools, where the extent of my sex education was a single class in sixth grade during which a teacher told me that getting my period was my body’s way of practicing for childbirth. As a senior in high school, we girls were pulled aside for a week of classes about the laws of nidah while the boys had study hall. I entered Brandeis University a prototypical clueless, sheltered Jewish girl.

I applied to join an organization that provided counseling and educational programming about sexual health and sexuality. I was accepted and received a 70-hour crash course each fall on every aspect of sexuality, from birth control options to sex toys. The field quickly became my passion.

I taught educational programs to campus groups and first-year halls and held one-on-one counseling sessions in the office. My sophomore year, members of the Orthodox community began discussing relationships and sexuality with me when they learned that I’d grown up in an Orthodox community. I began holding workshops specifically geared toward Orthodox girls and answering their questions. These conversations and my workshops led me to realize that Orthodox girls wanted a venue where they could discuss negiah and how it impacts relationships, intimacy, and sexuality. Like me, they did not grow up with an outlet to discuss these topics in a safe, non-judgmental setting and clearly it was something they wanted to discuss.

Shomer negiah poses challenges for both women and men. Individuals interpret its exact boundaries differently, which can lead to judgment between friends about the legitimacy of others’ practices and choices. A friend once explained to me that she and her friend both wanted to discuss a change in how they practiced being shomer negiah, but neither one brought it up for fear that the other would judge them.

Inevitably, people’s shomer negiah statuses—the particular way they choose to practice, including how strict they are and from whom they permit touch—become known within their community. This means that, in addition to thinking about the personal implications of the practice, individuals must be prepared to respond to others’ assumptions about their level of general observance based on their shomer negiah status. A person can find his or herself judged for being “too” shomer, not shomer enough, or for making exceptions that are not to the judging party’s taste. Furthermore, members of an Orthodox community frequently keep tabs on one another’s shomer status as an important factor in choosing whom to date. Dating somebody who feels differently about the observance of negiah within a relationship can create questions and complications for otherwise-compatible couples.

All of these phenomena are evident just from sitting on the kosher side of Brandeis University’s dining hall. Upperclassmen scrutinize freshmen to ascertain their shomer negiah status. Opposite-sex friends give each other “shomer hugs” (a hugging motion that stops just short of contact). A table discusses whether the couple two tables over is “shomer” behind closed doors—the Orthodox equivalent, in some ways, of questioning whether a new couple is having sex, except that the judgment that accompanies it impacts a person’s social and religious status in the community.

The combination of my experiences as a student and a sex educator made me want to learn more. I floated the idea to friends of starting to collect people’s stories. I asked people who were shomer negiah if they thought it was a good idea, if they thought people would contribute, and if they thought it would be a helpful outlet to discuss these sensitive issues. The answer was a resounding yes.

So, I started The Shomer Chronicles. People either email stories to theshomerchronicles@gmail.com or submit them through an anonymous form on theshomerchronicles.com. I then post the stories on the website’s blog. I want to give people an outlet to speak to an audience that understands them. A contributing storyteller (who gave me permission to use her information), Jessica Kasmer-Jacobs, a master’s student in English Literature at NYU, explained the premise best when she said, “There has never before been an outlet where the readership understands the issues without having to preface the piece with, ‘Well, in Judaism we do this weird thing where we don’t touch each other until we’re married.’”

The stories have come from both girls and guys with ages ranging from 18 to 30. My biggest fear is that people will interpret my posting stories about people’s struggles as an effort to unilaterally discourage or bash the institution of shomer negiah. A friend, for example, asked me whether the site would be just a bunch of angry girls posting about how terrible shomer negiah is. That is not my goal. My goal is to give people an outlet to discuss their emotions openly and without judgment. I will not downplay people’s experiences or censor their stories to preserve a certain image of shomer negiah, or go out of my way to highlight negativity.

The stories illustrate the vulnerability and questions that come with being shomer negiah. One storyteller discussed the difficulty of explaining her decision to become shomer negiah, to her friends. “Almost instantly,” she wrote, “I noticed a change in our friendship—I was perceived as the naïve and innocent one. It was spread around, naturally, and while I was usually comfortable discussing it, I noticed that people began trying to talk me out of celibacy.”

Another wrote about the struggle to reconcile her beliefs with her desire for intimacy. She writes, “I lace my fingers through [your hair] until I reach the yarmulke at the top of your head and feel its threaded, circular edges. You wear it, like the others do, as a reminder of your duty to God. … Sinners, they call us? What kind of covenant am I breaking in loving a man of God?”

Related: Feeling Out My Post-Shomer Negiah World

(Image via Shutterstock)

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