Telling Your Parents You Don't Believe

Pretty sensible advice for a very difficult situation.

Short Story About a Hasidic Girl

Author Rachel Ament emailed me a link to a very good short story she wrote called I Am a Criminal. She says it's "very loosely" based on stories told to her by neighbors in Boro Park. Excerpt:

Tamar opened the door to her apartment, pulled me inside with a hug.

“Baruch Hashem! Baruch Hashem!” she cheered. She led me to the dining room table where we played Gin-Rummy with Chinese playing cards. She held her fan of seven cards real close to her face. “Masha, stop looking,” she kept saying. Her mother soon entered with a casserole dish in hand, steam waving from its crust and her six or seven kids took their seats at the table. I took a seat diagonally across from Menachem, looked at him every now and then using only the corner of my eyes. He had grown into an attractive man, that Menachem. His face was quite youthful, all rounded edges, nice copper eyes that turned green in bad lighting. The only problem was his mouth which was rowed with these huge splint-sharp teeth. Teeth for a rodent, my mama once whispered to me with a laugh.

I didn’t want to stare at him so I tried to find something else to do with my eyes. I looked at my arm hair. I looked at the dog. I looked at Tamar, who was cutting her potato kugel into the shape of a star, swinging at the crust with these grand, seesawing motions, like she was sawing wood or something. She was no doubt about it soliciting for attention.

“Tamar,” I finally gave in, “What are you doing?”

“Its just, well you know… kugel,” Tamar’s face grew serious. “It's just so ugly, it's like...orphan mush. I’m just trying to make it more attractive.”

“You are so mental,” I said.

“She really is,” Menachem said, staring at his plate, already regretful. As he should have been. Menachem was a frum boy, mind you, and was weeding his way into conversation between two girls, one of whom was not related to him!—surely this meant our great solar system had kicked out of orbit. Surely this meant the planets were suddenly rotating the sun in the broken-wheeled motions of the hora instead of in its usual clean circuit. I mean surely.

My father once said that sins happen in clumps. You bee-bee-gun a bird for pleasure, enjoy the thuggish feeling of watching feathers blasting with blood and you begin killing animals higher up the kingdom. Shoot to the top, so to speak. I guess the same phenomenon was happening with Menachem. He began talking to me with longer and longer sentence and it was not long before he had curled his upper lip behind his gumline and smiled at me. It wasn’t some shy smile either but a giant comedian performance smile toppling over with all sorts of chemicals and romantic implications. I even spotted a matching wink in his left eye.

Hasidic Rabbis Bully Hasidic Actor

Abe Karpen, 25, a married father of three, was cast as [Natalie] Portman's husband in "New York I Love You," a film composed of 12 short stories about love in the five boroughs.

"I am backing out of the movie," said Karpen, a kitchen cabinet salesman. "It's not acceptable in my community. It's a lot of pressure I am getting. They [the rabbis] didn't like the idea of a Hasidic guy playing in Hollywood.

"I have my kids in religious schools and the rabbi called me over yesterday and said in order for me to keep my kids in the school I have to do what they tell me and back out," Karpen said.

While news of Karpen's withdrawal sent waves of disappointment through the movie set, the Hasidic community was up in arms over Karpen's acting gig - forcing him to flee for the weekend, a friend said.

...

Just Wednesday, Karpen was strolling along the Fulton Ferry State Park under the Brooklyn Bridge alongside Portman, 26, who sported a dark head-covering and a coat.

"They wanted me to hold her hand, but I said 'no way,'" said Karpen, who proudly stood his ground. "It's against our religion. You can't even hold your wife's hand on the street."

Then came the howls of protest about his unorthodox job.

"This is when I woke up and saw that I made a big mistake. My kids mean everything to me and my community where I live means everything to me," said Karpen, who comes from a prominent Williamsburg, Brooklyn, family.

His longtime friend Levi Okunov said the Karpens had to flee the city for the weekend. "The community wants to kill him," he said.

Hasidic community activist Isaac Weinberger said Karpen should have known better.

"We don't watch television. We don't go to the movies, so to be in a movie is the worst thing. It's a shame for any Hasid," he said.

An Agnostic Bar Mitzvah and the Fraud of Orthodox Judaism

I was moved by this:

glumbert - Ballsy Bar Mitzvah Speech

I am so sad that I didn't have a community as nurturing as this boy's. I can't imagine the crowd I had at my bar mitzvah reacting with appreciative laughter if I'd been able to be as honest as this kid. What do you think would be the reaction in an Orthodox shul? Would he be booed and interrupted? Would the Rabbi have launched into a stinging condemnation afterwards? That'd be my guess, although I can't know for sure.

How can your religion be authentic if people can't be honest about their doubts and beliefs? The way every Orthodox bar mitzvah speech is wholly accepting of Orthodox dogma reminds me of when Saddam Hussein won 100% of the vote in his last "election." Total B.S., and for the same reason. They can't handle the truth.

Children should be encouraged to seek honestly for the truth, not pressured and censored into being the perfect little ditto-heads that Orthodox kids are, at least publicly. Can you imagine a bar-mitzvah boy getting up there and saying that he doesn't know if God exists or whether Moshe "really" split the sea? I can't see an Orthodox boy even saying "I couldn't really relate to this parsha." What does it say about your religion that there is so little room for honesty and openness?


(Via Random Good Stuff.)

Elsewhere

• At Beyond Teshuva, a story of a married woman who became Orthodox while her husband remained nonobservant.
• Via DovBear, 10 Weird Religious Practices. Kaparot made the list at #4.
• Via Andrew Sullivan, the most disturbing children's book I've ever seen.

Reader Poll: Children, Religion, and Happiness

For the religious: Would you prefer your [hypothetical, if necessary] child to be religious or happy, assuming only one was possible?

For the nonreligious: Would you prefer your [hypothetical, if necessary] child to be nonreligious or happy, assuming only one was possible?

I recognize that the assumptions are not true, but it's still an important question.

What if I'd Gotten Married When I Was Still Orthodox?

It seems to me that the essential determinant of the divide between the frum skeptics and those of us who left Orthodoxy completely is whether we were married at the time we started having serious doubts. Orthodox culture is such that it's not generally plausible for a man or woman to come out as non-Orthodox without causing adverse consequences for his or her family. These consequences can include divorce, shunning, and even difficulty finding mates for one's children. I have nothing but sympathy for those who choose not to make their doubts or disbelief known even to their families.

Corresponding with a few of these frum skeptics recently, I got to wondering what my life would have been like if I'd married my last Orthodox girlfriend before I'd gone too far down the path away from Orthodoxy.

We would have had an Orthodox ceremony, of course, making it as liberal as I could get away with, but still containing language I could not agree with and some antiquated notions of marriage. I would have suffered through sheva brachos.

After the wedding, I suppose I could have attended shul the way I did anyway at that time in my life: go for the short Friday night service and try to enjoy the singing, and time my arrival perfectly on Saturday morning so that services were just letting out and it was time for kiddush (i.e. socializing.) We would have attended Shabbat lunches at other couples' houses and had them to our own. I would have made kiddush and sat through benching either letting my mind wander while moving my lips or actually saying some of the words to pass the time.

What of my intellectual explorations? Would I have dared to read Dawkins? To join the Internet Infidels Discussion Board? Or would I have settled with a hodge-podge of Jewish mysticism and apologetics? I doubt could have actually believed that stuff, but I probably would have been careful not to look at it too hard. What would have happened when I discovered the J-Blogs?

How would I act at work? Could I ever be comfortable as "the Orthodox guy?" What would I feel about explaining why I couldn't eat bread next week or why I couldn't attend the company social event? How could I answer my gay coworkers when they asked about Leviticus?

And then, kids? How would I feel at a bris? Would I have chuckled to myself during the pidyon haben? Or felt cheated if my daughter only got a simchat bat?

And then, preschool. How would I feel when my 3 year old came home and told me that God is everywhere? And when he asked me to say the shema?

Could I have handled it when she got a little older and asked why her Rabbi said that all non-Jews secretly hate Jews on the inside? Or what the word schwartze means? Or whether I would slaughter her if God commanded me to?

Then what if she asked me why the boys got to learn Gemara when she was stuck in Navi? And what exactly is a "firmament," andyway? And why does God command the murder of women, children, and even sheep? And is it really wrong to be gay?

What if my wife wanted me to start getting to shul earlier? And being a good role model for my children on Yom Kippur? And what if the gabbai asked me to lead the prayers or read from the Torah? What if a friend asked me to be a witness at his wedding and I knew that I wouldn't be a kosher witness because I turned lights on and off on shabbos? Would I start to hate being asked to lead the benching?

And what if my son didn't want to read his bar mitzvah portion? Could I insist? Would I? What if he went to summer camp and came back with a black hat and a well-worn set of mishnayos? Could I learn with him while holding my tongue about what I really thought? What if he decided my wife and I weren't being strict enough about kashrut and that our oven wasn't kosher enough? What if he went to yeshiva in Israel and wanted to stay a second year? A third? To eschew college and become a Rabbi?

Or what if he started reading Dawkins and was asking questions about evolution and the age of the universe? Could I pretend that saying "yom" means "age" solved the problem? What if he honestly believed in Orthodoxy but wondered what the deal was with the Documentary Hypothesis? What if he became an atheist while my daughter became ever more frum?

How long could I stay silent? What would its toll be on me and on my marriage and on my kids?

What of grandkids?

I'm just glad I got out when I did.

Should Incest Be Legal?

I'm aware that the anti-gay crowd is fond of using the slippery slope argument to claim that if we let gays marry (or have sex, before that argument was rendered moot by the courts) then there's nothing stopping us from legalizing bestiality, incest, and polygamy.* Part of me therefore wants to keep quiet about my feelings on incest and polygamy for fear of giving ammunition to the opposition's (false) argument. The part of me that's in control, though, prefers to speak his mind.

In Germany, there are brother and sister who are fighting for the right to continue having sex with each other. The story goes that the brother was given up for adoption and didn't meet his sister until he was 18. They soon fell in love. (Strangely, this is pretty common for siblings who meet for the first time.)

After the couple met and began a sexual relationship, they had four kids, with tragic results:

All but one of them have been placed in care and two are mentally damaged as a result of inbreeding. In 2002, Mr Stübing was given a one-year suspended sentence after being found guilty on 16 counts of "illegal coitus" with his sister.

My personal morality stems from the idea of "your right to extend your fist ends at the tip of my nose," or, if you're not hurting anybody, what you do is your own business. So masturbating while thinking of a child sodomizing a sheep might reveal that you have some mental problems, but I wouldn't consider it immoral. Stealing, murdering, abusing, etc. are immoral because they cause harm to others.**

It's clear to me that having kids through incest should be illegal because of the grievous and unnecessary harm to the children. Although this belief has some troubling implications, not least the very slippery slope towards criminalizing having children with people with low IQs, minor genetic disorders, etc., I think that in instances where the harm is grievous and predictable, like brother-sister incest that leads to children, we can safely make that ruling.

What of siblings who have no chance of having children?

Mr Stübing, an unemployed mechanic, was released from jail last year and is still living with his sister. Although he has had himself sterilised to avoid fathering more children, he could be sent back to jail at any time for persistently reoffending.

By what justification may the government prevent them from having sex today? That most people find sibling sex repulsive? Repulsion is no basis for law -- we allow neo-Nazis to speak, after all. (Actually, Germany doesn't, but even though I disagree with that stance, there's at least conceivable grievous harm that stems from allowing hate speech.) If religion is a suitable basis for secular law, then the case is clear, but as you might imagine, I don't think religion is a good basis for law. The only other arguments I can imagine are similar to those used against gay couples -- that they set a bad example, or otherwise pose some threat to "traditional" families or children. I do not find such arguments convincing.

I therefore believe that consensual, adult incest should be legal and is not immoral, provided there is no chance for children to result from the union. Where to draw the line on infertility is another troubling and complex question, of course. Simply using condoms or the pill is not sufficient to rule out the possibility of children, but having the government mandate surgical sterilization is distasteful, to say the least. While I'd encourage siblings who get pregnant to have abortions, government-mandated abortions would be deeply disturbing as well.

I think the only coherent policy is that brother-sister incest that may result in children is disallowed as reckless endangerment. The government should not mandate sterilization, but simply recognize that the problem is the reckless endangerment of offspring rather than the act itself.


* For the record, I believe adult, consensual polygamy should be legal, although not necessarily institutionalized by the state as marriage, and am unsure about bestiality because of the question of the animal's consent. Bestiality should be treated as a subcategory of animal cruelty .

** Things get complicated when all choices are harmful and you must pick the least harmful one, like killing in self-defense or putting violent criminals in jail. There are also some gray areas in which people can reasonable agree like whether a aborting a fetus is a significant harm or whether it's okay to harm non-human animals or other organisms. (I eat meat, but even most vegans are happy to eat plants, fungi, and bacteria.)