Confessions of a Gadfly

“There’s a girl involved.” — Me
“There’s always a girl involved.” – Lyle Wexler

I recently dated an Orthodox woman, a woman who is everything that Jewish women are at their best. Highly intuitive, kind, empathetic, modest, and beautiful. A complete shtetl bunny. I hadn’t fallen for a girl that hard that in years.

We hoped against hope (numerous times) that our religious difference could be bridged to some degree, that we could find a middle ground of sorts. But her sincere faith rekindled a lot of dark and dormant issues from my ba’al tshuva days, and as I revisited Orthodoxy from an older perspective, I found that I had not put them on the back burner, that I wasn’t “conflicted,� but rather, to a large degree, I had rejected, or at least could not commit to, many aspects of traditional Judaism. That it wasn’t about only being hurt and disappointment, it was also about very reasonable doubt, and heresy.

During this time I began fighting with beyondbt.com, which has some very nice posters, as well some very fundamentalist ones. I think that if I am honest, this was exacerbated by the romantic struggle I was having in my own life, though I have always struggled with some of these issues since I was nine years old, and went to my Orthodox Rabbi’s house for shabbos lunch for the first time, and my troubled relationship with Torah Judaism began. The Rabbi is a tzaddik, a maverick, and absolutely unmatched when it comes to emotionally intuitive issues. This is recognized as well in the prominent yeshiva he attends a half a day, where students line up for his advice. This was confusing to me later, as I thought The Rabbi was representative of Orthodoxy.

But like many BT’s who went in too far and too deep (though I was always on the Left within that paradigm) I found myself in a very bad place eventually. I went to YU, but that was unbearable in a very different way–and yet in some ways exactly the same sort of way.

I see BT’s who did things differently and love traditional Judaism, and at least with the ones who didn’t lose themselves to it or give up too much, I concede they may have something positive in their lives. But I just don’t believe it, and can’t stand the cultural aspects of it, nor the limitations that the trappings and the enclave put on a member. Modern Orthodox too. Essentially, I have no interest in being a part of an Orthodox community, even though I am only comfortable in an Orthodox shul.

Unlike many of my fellow contributors on Jewschool, I do not see progressive change or evolution as the answer, as I don’t think we have that mandate. It’s just not the driving force of the religion. We can opt out, not change the religion. And I frequently prefer to opt out.

But I never go very far, at least not for long.

Mordechai Strigler, the long-standing previous editor of the Yiddish Forverts, was known, in later life, to lay tefillin on occasion. It was said he did so not because he was a believer, but in order to do a mitzvah. I did not understand what this meant, until I noticed this was a similar motivation in my own life. A broken faith is not necessarily completely severed in every way. There are still loyalties, there are still attachments, there is still value, and there is still room for some possibility of kernels of truth.

But it is not enough for an Orthodox woman.