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. Another had suspended his bed from the ceiling using ropes and chains. I didn’t even make it into the house.
There was a hut someone had built on the roof, with wooden walls and a roof made out of old hotel greeting banners. Every morning I’d wake up on my mattress on the floor and look up at “Welcome Aish Birthright, to the Dan Pearl Hotel.”
That lasted a month, until the shitty dorm situation and the zero change in my attitude towards the subject matter, had me slip right back into my old pattern.
The next stop? Aish Hatorah.
I joined their post-high school program and stayed in the Moshav dorms, which, incidentally, smelled like shit. Socially, this was the first time I actually felt like I belonged – I had always been friends with the English speaking, cultured guys who were twice my age. Now I was in yeshiva with them.
But academically, I was on another level, and I had a hard time finding someone who was my equal to study with. Nonetheless, I have good memories from that time spent surrounded by positive, relatively open minded people in a beautiful study all.
It was also the first time I really got to express some creativity. I was part of a band. I wrote parody songs for the purim shpiel (“Welcome to the hotel aish hatorah”). I co-wrote a play for the same, which is still one of my proudest creations. What is it with purim being the only day of the year when you’re allowed to be creative?
But academically it wasn’t working out, so I started studying half day with a chavruta in the Mir. The Chavruta was great, but the Mir was just massive rooms full of people who you didn’t know. Like a busy Manhattan street. I was just another face, and never officially registered there.
There was this feeling of emptiness, of not belonging, of a foreigner in a distant land, that accompanied me throughout my wanderings. To this day I associate beautiful summer days with the anxiety that comes with freedom and opportunity – the feeling of squandering potential.
By that point I had tried out 5 yeshivas and been through 10 chavrutas, many of which were fancyass private tutors my parents paid good money for. None of them helped, in retrospect because my relationship with Gemara was tenuous at best.
I’d have much preferred to study philosophy and mysticism for example, but that wasn’t even a thing in the charedi world. You need to study gemara all day, every day, except for half an hour in the evening where you can study some mussar to remind yourself why are a bad person.
My chavrusa was leaving in March, and I was not interested in finding yet another one. I was sick of searching, and I knew I wouldn’t find anyone else as good as him.
I had not succeeded in registering in any yeshiva to avoid the draft, and I decided to proactively enlist.
I joined the IDF via Aish’s hesder program without telling my parents.
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 the country. I’d been to Tel Aviv less than five times in my life.
I wanted a sense of comradery. After years of isolation, always feeling different and alienated, I wanted the sense of brothers in arms that the army is so famous for.
I wanted to learn discipline. I felt I lacked the willpower to do what I knew was right in my life. I was tired of waking up late and not doing what I had resolved to do. The army teaches you disciple, I was told.
I wanted to make a choice that was big, and completely independent. That’s why I didn’t tell my parents – I knew they’d be supportive, but it was a choice I needed to make on my own. So I joined, and only after I did, was I told that my terrible eyesight meant I wouldn’t be in combat (I’ve since had LASIK surgery).
I appealed, but it didn’t help. I did a 02 non-combat basic training where I wasted my time for a month, shot a rifle a couple times, and cleaned the base’s kitchen for Passover. I was surrounded by asthmatics with flat feet and bad knees who didn’t give a fuck. I was in perfect health, had run a half marathon a few days before, and took the “training” as seriously as if I was a navy seal.
Since I was doing a shortened service and then going back to yeshiva, I had very few non-combat options, and although I requested to be an instructor in the engineering corps, I was assigned to be a military case-worker in the least appealing unit I could have possible asked for – the army’s once all Charedi unit. I one of 7 seven males with that role in the entire Israeli army.
The ultimate irony of this role is that nothing I joined the army for was actually fulfilled. I stayed on the same base for my entire service, surrounded by exactly the type of charedi ex-yeshiva students I most despised. The army didn’t know how to deal with men with my position, so I lived in isolation, fell between the cracks, and experienced neither comradery nor discipline.
I remember shuffling to the showers in my crocs and t-shirt at 10 am past the entire unit as it was assembled in strict attention while the national anthem played. I once went AWOL for three days because of a tooth ache and no one noticed I was gone. Once again, I belonged nowhere.
For my position, I got a few weeks of training and then was responsible for pushing an insane amount of paperwork around to get soldiers in need the two solutions that solve all problems – money and time off. The sign I created and hung up in my “office” (read: room with a desk and a plastic chair) summed it up well: we provided “Financial solutions to emotional problems.”
I traveled all over the country visiting the homes of soldiers in need. I got to ask parents about their shitty relationships with their son or spouse. About the amount of debt they were in. About their medical disorders. A parent once showed me his Viagra prescriptions. Another time I had to ask a mother just how abusive her husband was being towards her.
I’d come back to base and file a report, which was then forwarded on to my officer, which was then sent to her officer, who decided if the solider was worthy of said time off and vacation that they had applied for.
It was intense work, and frustrating. You couldn’t control the results – as is typical in the army, the people who needed the most help were the least likely to get it – certainly not in a timely manner. I cared deeply about my responsibilities and my soldiers, and took the stress and circumstances very personally. I had soldiers who stayed on base because they had nowhere to go on their time off, and there was nothing I could do about it.
As was usual for me, I was extremely effective and extremely resentful. I was named “top trainee” (from my group of seven) during my training period, visited more houses than anyone else, and developed a reputation for scathing sarcasm and emotional outbursts. I was told on my last day of service by my senior officer that she’d never met anyone more professional – or more bitter.
During my entire service, I was devoutly religious. On my few weekends on base, I brought my suit and hat with me. I was awkward and uncomfortable around my female colleagues, and never touched them once. I never swore. I tried studying every day while on base, or at least wanted to / felt guilty when I didn’t. I had a chavrusa when I got back home on weekends.
And I ate only badatz, which meant I starved during most of my service, since it was shmitta year and I didn’t eat heter mechira or rabbanut meat.
My army experience was formative, but very different than I had hoped for. In retrospect, I learned you cannot run away from your problems or expect your circumstances to fix you. Had I more emotional resources and maturity I would have handled the entire experience in a much more effective way, but that came years later with time, experience, and therapy.
I had once close friend, Nirel Ayash. We became incredibly close, or at least, I felt close to him, as we shared the isolation of our role together. We had our own inside jokes, our own shared grievances.
A fellow social worker, he was National Religious, not Charedi. He came from a Yeshiva called Mitzpe Yericho and I noticed that everyone I met from that place seemed to be extra nice and particularly refined. I decided to attend it once I finished my service.
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 seriously. They didn’t study as hard. They had weird philosophies that were not acceptable and didn’t align with the true, Charedi way. All this I “knew” from osmosis.
My entire time in Mitzpeh I barely studied rav kook, because I was so afraid he’d corrupt my mind. It was after a lot of soul searching that I entered single class being taught on the subject. It was years before I properly studied rav kook, or rabbi nachman, or other chasiddic texts. They were the closest to my heart – more intuitive, emotional, mystical.
The first time I studied tanya, I felt like I’d be retroactively robbed of it during my entire childhood – Zilbermans were fiercely anti-chabad. They mocked the Hassidic group-think with a rote, methodical group-think of their own. The irony.
Mitzpeh had the most well-adjusted Orthodox Jews I had met. Some had hobbies. Some had interests. Some looked you in the eye when they talked to you. Don’t get me wrong, there was a fair share of weirdos and many operated within a very fixed agenda. But there was an overall open mindedness there I hadn’t experienced anywhere else.
All that, once I got in. Of course, when I applied, I was treated as an outsider, as someone who was different, and I was placed in Yeshiva on a trial basis because no charedi person had ever survived there before. Myself and one other person were the only people there who were a black suit and hat on Shabbat.
Shabbat was a completely different experience there. It was still. We were isolated in the middle of the desert. And there was this kind of magic to be felt in the stillness of that desert, in that soothing silence where you heard nothing but the wind, looking out over the twinkling lights of Jericho in the valley below.
But within that stillness, and the simplicity, there was feeling that I lived with constantly, and it was more pronounced than ever. Physical isolation has a way of bringing your own demons to the surface.
Loneliness.
I dreamt of being in a relationship. To hold someone close at night. To be there for someone. To belong.
And I dreamt of a way to magically cure my pornography addiction, as the Torah promised having a wife – “bread in your basket,” they called it – would accomplish. I built an entire castle in the air out of the fantasy wife I would have. “I once spoke to a woman,” I mused. “And that went swell. Surely I am capable of being in a relationship with one.”
I had never touched a woman before. I had no idea what I truly liked or didn’t like in another person – relationship was all about intellectual stimulation and Myers-Briggs discussions for me at that point.
I had never worked a full month in my life, and wouldn’t for several more years. But that’s nothing to hold you back from establishing a family, if you’re charedi.
So at the ripe age of 21 and a half I informed my parents that I deemed myself worthy of marriage. “All my classmates got married at 19,” I pointed out. “I’m way older.” And my sister was about to start dating soon, I wasn’t about to have her one-up me like that.
One month later, I dated the first woman I had ever met. One month and ten dates later, we were engaged.
Three months later we were married. Three months after that, she was pregnant.
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 helplessness.
There is no worse feeling like knowing you have all the answers, or the right perspective, and being incapable of transmitting that to another, or helping them in any way.
One of the most miserable moments of my life: I have left the house and am trying to jog. Trying to run away from the misery that is my existence, but it stays right there with me. I am a terrible person, this is obvious, and that weighs down on me even more. Why am I even alive? What right do I have to cause others so much pain?
I cried and I ran and I cried some more, and I really just wanted all of realty to fold in on me and for everything to just cease being. This wasn’t a wish for suicide, because I did not have the courage to do that. Nor was it depression, because I was feeling too much. This was misery, the pain of existence and the suffering I cause others and myself by doing so. It was the wish for this to be no more, but not of my own doing.
Those years, most of my twenties, just appear like a gaping black hole, a sea of darkness, when I look back at them. So much helpless misery. So many situations that were way beyond my ability to even begin to cope with. It brought out my worst behaviors, my darkest sides, adding even more guilt to the mix.
I remember desperately grasping at straws, like a drowning man who’s mostly gone – more underwater than above it.
Looking for answers in the Torah and secular books. Seeking guidance from “experts”. Making phone calls to “resources”. Trudging through the streets to put up signs on neighborhood bus stops in an attempt at creating my own support network. I was willing to do anything, yet no one could suggest what that thing would be.
So much anger, so much resentment, so much helplessness. A complete victim, I then displaced as much of it as I could upon everything I could blame. I still feel the anger and pain burning in my chest when I write this. it’s been years of therapy, daily meditation, and growth, and yet the feelings are always there, right beneath the surface.
People sometimes ask me if I think life is worth living. People often say that life is a gift and we should enjoy it. When I look back on my life, the pleasure I have experienced from existing does not even come close to the pain I have endured. So it seems so unworthwhile.
Maybe one day, I’ll experience more joy than I have suffering and things will balance out. Maybe I’m just one choice away from doing so. It hasn’t happened yet.
Am I suicidal? Not at all. I have too much responsibility, and too much attachment to this world, to want to remove myself from it.
But do I wish I had never existed in the first place? Absolutely.
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 sake of “saving the Jewish people”, “making an impact”, and “helping people” – all lofty goals that made me feel a bit better about myself and the existential anxiety I lived with every day.
I remember my mother bragging to one of the thousands of Shabbat guests they’d hosted over the years. “Shalom Tzvi wants to be a Rabbi,” she had said with pride. I was probably 14 at the time. I had even applied to the program while still single, in my teens, but was told that I needed to be older and married.
The day arrived and I was both. I moved from Mitzpeh to Jerusalem just to be close to the Kollel, and became one of the first second-generation rabbinical students in the Aish world – both my father and father in law had gotten smicha from this Rabbi.
It doesn’t matter how much general knowledge you know, Smicha is given to you after the study of certain aspects of Halacha, specifically. Most commonly the laws of Shabbat, Niddah, and Kashrut. I discovered very quickly that the Halachic aspects of Torah were the least appealing to me.
First there was the discussion of how to deal with Rabinnical dispute. I was taught that, surprise surprise, there are two main opinions on how to conceptualize the myriad of disagreeing opinions in every facet of Halacha. One says that both are actually right in God’s eyes, while the other says that there’s still a wrong way but you won’t be held accountable if you follow the opinion you thought was the right one. We’re already off to a bad start.
Then we started studying the laws of Kashrut. An excruciatingly frustrating process for me, where there was no clear actionable result even after days of study and ever-nuanced opinion.
Endless debate over things that had little practical application – we spent weeks learning how to salt a liver. There was a total absence of any system of logic that would make comprehension or memory any easier. A nightmare for a big-picture person like myself who just wants to understand how it all fits together.
On Fridays, we’d have specialized classes to prepare us for the day-to-day of kiruv and interacting with people. Experts would come in and regale us with tales from the field and actionable advice. As a whole though, it was surprising how little emphasis was placed interpersonal or leadership skills, compared to the amount of time spent subjecting ourselves to the tests of academic rigor.
A few things strike me when I look back on my time with this esteemed Halachic authority I was studying under. Firstly, how inaccessible he was, how much I didn’t feel I could go to him with my personal problems. He was way too big and awesome for my puny issues. Second, how intense he was. My mother had studied with him, as had my father, and both told tales of a loving and personable individual. I found him polite and cordial, but distant and intense as fuck.
Finally, he had a way of eloquently and passionately expressing the most retarded views, or apologetically justifying extreme philosophies and practices. There was that one time he stated in class that young couples should be encouraged to have children as quickly as possible because with today’s divorce rates and marriage difficulties, having a child can be the only thing that holds the relationship together. Fuck him and his Orthodox beliefs. Now I’m divorced with children.
It wasn’t just Torah abstractions I struggled with. After trying three times, I dropped out of my Masters in Sociology studies halfway through the program because I couldn’t comprehend the teacher’s half-assed attempts at teaching statistics. I still dream of becoming a therapist, but I’ll need to find my own way of getting there, one that involves as little abstract theory as possible – I’ve exhausted my tolerance for any of that at this point.
In the daily Halacha shiur, I was bored out of my mind, had zero interest in the topics themselves, and could barely understand what was being discussed. I started reading ebooks on my computer under the guise of taking notes. I doubt anyone was fooled, but no one cared.
I discovered organizational psychology, which fascinated me – how to help systems function better with the help of psychological insight. I started hungrily reading entries from The Encyclopedia of Modern Psychology – proving that when I was interested in a topic, I could definitely buckle down to learn more about it with little outside direction.
One day I found a book on my computer called The 4 Hour Workweek. The first few chapters beat me over the head with a reality check worthy of the world’s best life coach. What are you doing with your life? Why are you where you are? Who are you trying to please by being conventional and following rules?
These questions struck a chord, and I realized that the reason I was sitting on that bench was because I thought it would make my parents happy if I became a Rabbi. I was fulfilling their dream, attempting to win favor in their eyes, instead of doing what was best for me. It’s something many people realize in their teens but I was too much of a do-gooder to examine my intentions at that time.
Once I had the realization, I was ready to walk out of the room at that moment and never look back. I had an awesome chavruta at the time who kept me on for three more excruciating months until the year was up.
To this day I’m not sure if it was worth sticking it out for those three long, painful months where I compromised on my own desires in order fulfill the social construct of “finishing what I’d started”.
There is no doubt that Tim Ferris’ book changed my life. It inspired me to make bold choices, to push my comfort zone with specific exercizes, and to experiment with outsourcing and lifestyle design. I can point to huge successes and formative experiences I’ve had as a result of this book, and am grateful to the motivating kick in the pants those first few chapters provided me.
Either way I finished my time, scraped by my exams, and a few months later was awarded formal certification – I was a motherfucking rabbi.
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 middle, bothering everyone else, because he’d started to cry. I used to try to daven shmone esre with a baby in my arms, anxiously hoping they wouldn’t start crying while I was trapped, unable to move, in that position.
A few years later, there are two kids in the picture, and I’m trying to pray at home while watching both of them. I should have been in shul, praying with a minyan like I was supposed to, instead I was stuck at home, trying to simultaniously fulfill my obligations to God while fulfilling my obligation as a father.
I’m shit at multitasking. It was all I could do concentrate, to not get bothered for a few seconds. “How the hell am I supposed to pray to you, God, while all of this is going on?”
I was angry and resentful. Women are supposedly exempt from structured prayer because they need to care for their kids. In what way was I different than a woman, that I somehow had to juggle Tefillin, minyan, and a 45 minute davening, with caring for two kids?
Then my daughter shit herself. You’re not allowed to pray in proximity to a dirty diaper. Changing a diaper with Tefillin on is a frustrating process, where you try to not get shit on the straps. Taking Tefillin off and putting them back on is the bane of most guy’s existence.
“Really God? Is that what my prayer is worth to you? A bunch of shit? I’m trying my hardest to talk to you, to do what you’ve commanded me, and you’re shitting on it all?”
I took off my Tefillin in a rage, changed the diaper, and stopped praying. No more shachris, mincha, or ma’ariv. No more minyan. I still put on Tefillin for a few minutes every day, because there’s an even bigger punishment if you miss a day of Tefillin.
But there was a lightness that came with that. With not needing to worry about what time it was. From having an extra hour and a half to do things every day. My day was slightly less burdened. I felt relief.
So the cracks were starting to show. I was very resentful to the rabbis for all the extra shit they had piled on to the core, written law. Burdening my already overburdened life. Fulfilling the literal obligations as they were originally intended is effortless in comparison to the 6 hours between milk and meat, the two weeks of Nidda, and the endless other crap that had been tacked on, but never removed, over the ages.
I started doing all the deoraysas and none of the derabonon’s – with smicha and 14 years of study behind me, knew exactly which was which. I had become philosophically Conservative Jewish, having faith in God and the overall concept of things but believing that the Rabbi’s had messed me over along the way.
Yet I remained very religions in other ways. I grew my hair long, but still made a point of never walking around without some sort of head covering. Kosher was always easy for me to keep, I’m not much of a foodie. When I went to visit Budapest, I went clubbing every night but made sure to be back in Israel by Shabbat and to bring kosher food with me.
I stopped keeping Niddah. But when I accidentally bought a Rabanut shwarma, I gave it to a co-worker because it wasn’t Badatz.
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 was done for me.
And my life came crashing down. It was official. I had failed.
All those efforts. All those attempts to do right. All the earnestness and trying and tears and prayers – they all meant nothing. If they had culminated in success, they’d be part of a journey. But I had failed, so they were worthless.
At that exact moment, everything else fell apart as well. I was done with this God. I was done with these rules.
Not only did they get me into this mess, which is maybe just the way the world should operate; no, they made everything worse. They made everything harder. And they provided zero guidance and meaning along the way. In fact, doing the opposite had oftentimes been the only thing that brought some relief.
I have always been an unusual person.
Unintentionally different than most people: out of the loop, bewilderedly bumbling through life, feeling like I’m looking *at* the world instead of living in it. Very often, what worked for other people just doesn’t work for me.
The TV shows don’t make me laugh. The sports teams don’t get me excited. Owning things doesn’t make me feel good.
The renowned therapist’s recommendation? Doesn’t help. The revered Rabbis advice? The exact opposite of what I need. The insights from best-selling self-help books? Commonplace.
Therein lies my most fundamental criticism of religion – simultaneously very personal, yet inherently universal: how can one set of rules apply to everyone?
We point to gay rights as extreme examples, but what of the myriad of day-to-day challenges? What if I don’t get a sense of belonging from going to shul? What if I’m a night owl and don’t like waking up for shachris? What if I’m not academic and don’t want to learn Torah “day and night” as I’m commanded to?
What if Niddah is eating away at my relationship? If Shabbat makes me feel stifled and trapped? If halacha fills me with anxiety, and the philosophy, with guilt?
They say that God talks to everyone via the Torah to accommodate for their own special needs. All I see is a book written by ESTJ’s, for ESTJ’s.
After 26 years of trying to contort myself into this tiny box that was not me, and never was; a framework which I never had the capacity to even question, I was finally so very fucking done.
Fueled initially by the most fundamental anger, I started making decisions that were completely my own, for the first time in my life. There was no longer anything else to guide me, only my own intuition, my own sense of right and wrong.
And what do you know? There were lots of answers there. They looked exactly the opposite of what religion thought I should do. What most of society thought I should do.
Yet when I listened to my instincts, I found happiness. I was able to make mistakes, and own them. These were *my* mistakes, and I would make them in stride, as part of being human. I could just as easily reverse and make a good choice. It was all me, and my relationship with myself.
One of my worst memories, the one that leaves me most angry at religion, involved a situation where I absolutely knew what the right thing to do was. And I did not take that action, and instead helplessly watched others suffer, because the Torah said it was wrong. I suppressed my conscious for the sake of “Truth”, my own knowledge of what is wrong and right for a “higher power”.
I will never forgive the Torah or Judaism for putting me through that, and I will never again be in that situation. I now listen only to myself.
Since then, I have made extremely difficult decisions that pain me daily. I have fucked up, sometimes knowingly and sometimes accidentally, in massive ways.
I can live with that.
Because for the first time, the choice is mine.
I’m in Tel Aviv on Shabbat, staying in a hostel. Hanging out with some German tourists who I’d met that day. Telling them the story I’ve just told you.
Two weeks earlier, I’d read the entire Torah portion in synagogue, the assistant Rabbi at my cousin’s bar mitzvah.
Now I’m on the way back from the beach, with five shekel in my pocket. I buy a falafel from an Arab shop in Jaffa.
I feel so light, so free. No more worrying about how many laws I’m breaking at any given moment, whether God approves of me today, or where I’d find my next Kosher meal.
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 that had fucked with my mind for my entire life. I wished I didn’t care so much. I wished all those stupid rules were just entertaining, like visiting a Mennonite village.
We ate cholent. I explained about all the posters on the wall. I showed the Ferster hat store and how there’s no mannequins in the windows. And I tried to forget.
Sometimes I’m hit with a wave of nostalgia. For the Kotel. For Tefillin. For the feeling I got in the Beis Medrash after putting in my all and actually “getting” the daf. I wanted to so badly for it all to work, for my life to be as simple as theirs – one foot in front of the other, from cradle to grave. My classmates, people I went to kindergarten with, are in the same room I left them in 12 years ago. They have five or six kids.
Their lives are simple. I can’t go through the day without a midlife crisis.
I sometimes wish I still believed. I wish it still worked for me. I wish I could separate the good memories from the bad associations, the Chad Gadya from the anxiety about getting Chametz on my Matzah. But I can’t.
But I can’t compromise on my values, I can’t ignore the illogical framework that contains it all, the myriad of half-assed ideas that don’t fit into my world view.
In a way I’m as religious as I always was, as passionately opposed to Judaism as I was devoted to it. The core me hasn’t changed.
I attended a Vipassana retreat about six months after my transition. It was life changing. 10 days of total silence. No talking, no eye contact, no writing. More physical and emotional pain than I’d ever felt in my life.
Images came up during the meditation, unsolicited visions, fueled by rage. I’m using a bible to smash in the faces of my classmates. Never have I felt such an urge for violence. I hit them with the spine of my book as hard as I can, and their faces invert into a reverse imprint of a Tanach.
So much anger. I have nothing in common with these boors, these utter simpletons, who don’t speak English, who know nothing about the world; who drool, mouth agape, at the sight of a TV or ambulance; who crowd around my books like natives around an explorer.
Why did I have anything to do with them? Why was I forced to share a room with them for eleven and a half years? They knew nothing of science, of history, of geography. Their inner worlds seemed far less complex. I despised every one of them for being in my life.
I had learned Buddhist philosophy for the first time, and it made much more practical, tangible sense. There was an immediate positive difference in my day. I finally had tools to cope with my anxiety, to deal with my suffering, to put things in a healing perspective. And thus began a pattern that expressed itself over and over again – retroactively mourning the absence of things in my past.
Where was Vipassana all my life as I struggled with anxiety and the meaninglessness of life?
How could God neglect to tell me, even once, about the life-changing power of focusing on your breath for an hour a day?
Could he not have swapped a single instance of “And God spake to Moses and thus he said” for one “And thou shalt focus inward and observe thy thoughts without attaching to them?”
Where would I be if I had spent all those hours meditating instead of praying? Studying law instead of Talmud?
What would I know if I had spent 14 hours a day learning about the subjects that actually interested me instead of endless pages of Gemarah?
I began a daily meditation practice that continues to this day, and, unlike Minyan, I’ve never had to force it. It was immediately, obviously, beneficial to my life. I cried harder than I’d ever cried, had more insights without trying, and for once didn’t need to try to artificially foster enthusiasm towards a ritual.
I am always pushing myself out of my comfort zone, sometimes too far. And so, when I found myself stirred to dance in the street and face my social anxieties about self-expression head-on, I acted upon it; despite the gripping terror of self-consciousness and standing out. I had moved back in with my parents, back to my youth, back to the street across from the school I had spent most my life in and hated.
I would play music in my wireless headphones and dance in Rothchild square between my parents’ house and the school. I danced with my eyes closed. It was the only way I could bring myself to avoid the reactions, admiring or incredulous, of passersby.
My dance moves (Illustration)
One time I opened my eyes to find myself surrounded by a group of Midreshet Harovah girls.
In my pubescent years, the Midreshet Harova seminary girls who roamed the streets of the neighborhood represented nirvana. The most idealized manifestation of female magnificence ever encapsulated in mortal form. Now they were here in the flesh, and wanted to know what I was listening to. I put my phone on speakerphone and we danced together. I tangoed with a midreshet harova girl. It was magical.
Closure.
The middle finger became a key part of my personality. It was a visual, visceral message for the world to fuck off, to get out of my head, to finally keep their distance. I no longer wanted to know what other people thought I should do, or how they felt I should be. “Fuck off, all of you.”
I incorporated it into my dance moves, to help overcome my self-consciousness. When I felt fear, judgement, oppressive thoughts from my past come up, I’d bust out the fingers in an outburst of self-assertion. Sometimes the voices would represent the collective culture of my upbringing. Other times I could trace the oppression and inhibition, the “you can’t do that, you can’t be that” voices, to a specific tangible figure.
It’s almost midnight. Eyes closed, I’m twirling through the square. Fighting the demons. The image of my old Rosh Yeshiva, Rav Yirmiyeh Zilberman comes into my head. “I heard you were making films on Friday afternoon after school,” he tells 14-year-old me. “Stop making them. Don’t be creative. Don’t express yourself. Squeeze tighter into the box. You are shit and deserve to feel like one. Be ashamed, be very ashamed.”
I keep dancing, dancing as hard as I can, dancing to save my life. I flail my middle fingers in all directions, keeping the demons at bay. “Get the fuck away from me,” I dance.
The garbage really ties this picture together.
I stop mid-dance move, middle fingers still extended, and briefly open my eyes to make sure I wasn’t about to smash into anything.
Who should be standing in front of me, staring, having just walked out of one of the school classrooms hours after anyone was supposed to be there?
Rav Yirmiyeh.
I briefly meet his gaze. My stomach flooded with all the familiar feelings of guilt and shame.
Having grown up deeply ingrained in the Orthodox Jewish world view, it’s a constant process for me to re-examine what I was taught. Some things obviously rubbed me the wrong way, and I questioned them as part of my journey.
Other things were less aggravating, so I simply accepted them at face value. It’s been years since I was religious, but those assumptions still stand in my mind. And it’s at random points that I have realizations that to others are probably obvious.
Realizations like “Hey! Kiddush Levana is remarkably similar to a pagan moon-worship ritual.”
Yes, we have specific instructions about how to not look at the moon. How to make sure it’s not avoda zara. But maybe that’s a clue as to the areas that were probably “avoda zara” in the first place?
From animal sacrifice to the constant admonitions to not worship idols – it may be obvious to outsiders, but to me it’s an ongoing revelation that original Judaism was not a sudden monotheistic flash of mt. sinai light in the darkness. Rather, it was a constantly evolving invention of the people more or less in line with the trends of the time.
There comes a point pretty early on where the average kid realizes that Santa Clause isn’t real (if you haven’t yet, sorry to ruin that one for you). And yet I, 30 years old and a sceptic by nature, have dozens of Santa Clauses I still live with, part of an airtight deceptive narrative perpetuated by thousands.
It’s harder to dismiss the bullshit when you grew up surrounded by people who mocked Santa. They mocked the “lies”, so what they do must be true. They mocked what everyone knows is fake just for toying with the idea. And yet they deeply and fervently believed much deeper bullshit which they applied to their everyday life.
I wish I could dismiss all this crap as easily as I dismiss the Easter Bunny. Instead, the annoyance, anxiety and guilt of having done Kiddush Levana, of having not yet done Kiddush Levana, of wanting to do Kiddush Levana but not having ten men / a cloudless sky / enough days since rosh chodesh, still lingers; along with thousands of other minute pagan practices I devoutly gave my life to.
Have you worshipped the moon yet? Because the one true God will be really pissed if you didn’t.
