Memoir

When he was something like 10 years old, his school’s idea of an educational experience was bringing in a sheep to be ritually slaughtered and dissected.  Nothing could prepare him for the moment when the sheep went from alive, albeit bound, to an explosion of red blood that burst forward...

I remember trying to take my baby son to Shul so I could pray in a Minyan. Feeling like an idiot by walking around with him in a sling, getting funny looks from everyone else there. Hoping and praying (get it?) that I wouldn’t need to walk out in the...

I hated Morah Tova for about 12 years. I was proud of how much I hated her. My mother says she was a frustrated artist. I remember telling her she was not invited to my birthday party. She seemed unfazed. I hated going to kindergarten. I would cry, I am...

“I’m poly,” I wrote her. “So it’s complicated.” “How come I’m only finding out now?” She wanted to know. “Most poly people put it in their profile. I am not poly.” “I’m sorry,” I said. “I forgot to add it.” “Well, take care then.” --- We had hit off unusually well. Most of my...

“All who stop their studying and speaks works of idleness, shall be fed everlasting coals,” the Talmud had warned. “One who is walking down the road, studying, and stops to comment ‘how beautiful this tree is, how beautiful this field is’, behold, he has forsaken his life,” admonished the Mishna....

It all fell apart one day, and I do not get credit for doing so. The initiative came from outside myself. I did not have the inner strength to do the unthinkable, the fortitude to acknowledge failure, the resilience to be anything but what my current shitty life was. So it...

12th grade is the first year of Yeshiva gedola. Literally the big leagues, this is the first year of the rest of your life. You enter a study hall that could literally be the place you sit for the next 50 years. My classmates are still there 12 years...

Mitzpeh yericho was my only exposure to the National Religious community in Israel. Being charedi, I half admired half looked down upon them. They were so much more balanced. Their lives were simpler, less burdened, seemingly, by religion. And yet that itself was the problem – they didn’t take religion as...

One of the most important days to me, far more than my birthday, is the day I left religion. This is the day, to borrow from fundamentalist religion, that I was born again. For many people it's a gradual process, but for me there was a day in mid-august...

When I became bar mitzvah, things got intense. I knew that everything until then had been child’s play, just practice for the real thing. Now we were playing for real, and every move I make and every law I break, He’ll be watching me. I remember breaking down and crying...