Memoir

The way you get into yeshiva is the exact opposite of red tape. It is the absolute shitshow of a free for all. You kind of stand around the dean’s office and hope to bump into him. You talk to someone who knows someone who might be able to put...

I went back to Zlibermans for a month. I thought, “if only I stay in their dorm, that’ll give me the structure I need.” So I moved into the overcrowded apartment that was the main dorm, a 5 minute walk from my house. One person was sleeping on the kitchen counter....

I joined the army on my 20th birthday. I desperately wanted a change in scenery. This whole yeshiva thing wasn’t working out. I hoped to take a break from it and come back with new energy. I wanted to experience the broader Israel. Meet new people, go to new parts of...

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...

I will not go into detail about this chapter of my life, because it involves other people. I will say this: experiencing other people suffer can be more traumatic than suffering yourself. I still feel myself relapsing into PTSD-like experiences of anxiety and stress when people around me experience...

As all this darkness and such was unfolding I found myself in a top rabbinical academy, studying to get Smicha and become a Kiruv rabbi myself. I had dreamt of this for years. This was the purpose of it all – to apply all those years of knowledge for the...

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...

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...

I always transition quickly. Within a week, there was no indication that I was ever religious. I would take tourist friends I met at hostels on tour of Meah She’arim, to try to look at that world through their eyes. Just a fascinating anthropological study, instead of a social institution...

I have long had a tenuous relationship with Israel. Israelis as a collective bug the shit out of me. Rude, bureaucratic, with very little sense of tact, sophistication, or anything that I perceived as culture. I never really was Israeli – despite being born there, Hebrew is my second...