I Love It When Two Worlds Collide

by DK

18 comments

1 Annie { 01.15.08 at 6:16 pm }

Interesting column, but I’m not the biggest fan of her conflation of Orthodoxy and Chasidism. Other kids have “drunk the orthodox kool aid?” Or maybe they just enjoy the Orthodox lifestyle, and dislike judgmental, controlling parents.

2 cipher { 01.15.08 at 7:07 pm }

Why is Lisa Loeb qualified to give advice? Because she’s a celebrity? (”Celebrities - is there anything they don’t know?” - Homer Simpson) What really bothers me is that I’m 51 years old. Why the hell do I even know who Lisa Loeb is?

You know, David - I’m dismayed to realize that I agree with the mother. You put close to three decades into a child - you don’t want to be told she’s rejecting all of your values by marrying someone whose belief system you consider regressive. You don’t want to be told that she can no longer eat in your house, that your time with the grandchildren will have to be monitored and/or limited because - chos v’sholom - you might say something that would damage the little tateleh’s emunah or hashkafah or whatever the f**k it is that gets damaged when they’re exposed to apikorsus. Basically, after lavishing love and attention and ungodly amounts of money on the kid for 25, 30 years - you don’t want to spend the rest of your life being made to feel that you aren’t quite good enough.

This made me remember something I haven’t thought of for about two years. I remember my cousin, mother the boy who became a Chabadnik, crying to me because she missed the little things that he would no longer do with her - like go out for an ice cream, which was no longer possible because the Rebbe told them they can only eat cholov yisroel dairy products. When I asked him if he could make an exception just to make his mother happy - don’t even eat treif; go to a place where the ice cream has a hechscher - he refused. He said it would be the slippery slope; if he gave in on that, she’d expect him to give in on something else.

The little bastard is in town for a few days; I think I’ll smack him when I see him on Thursday.

And yes, Ron, I know - the mother could resolve all of this if she’d only become frum, which is what HaShem wants her to do, and in her heart she knows it, and we all know it too. We’re all going to Gehinnom.

3 C-Girl { 01.15.08 at 10:13 pm }

It’s very easy to give quality parenting advice when you’re 39, not religiously observant, unmarried, and have no kids. Thank you, Lisa. Now please shut up and sing.

4 SJ { 01.15.08 at 11:36 pm }

check out my comment on that blog XD

5 DK { 01.15.08 at 11:58 pm }

“like go out for an ice cream, which was no longer possible because the Rebbe told them they can only eat cholov yisroel dairy products.”

It’s a very nice thing to promote chalav yisroel only to baal teshuvahs. Really promotes shalom bayis…a very nice thing indeed.

6 mohammed { 01.16.08 at 12:34 am }

The point should be made that “lavishing love and attention and ungodly amounts of money on the kid for 25, 30 years” doesn’t give parents the right to live their kids life for them.

7 cipher { 01.16.08 at 8:26 am }

There was a time when I would have agreed with you, Mohammed. I don’t any longer. As a parent, you don’t have the right to tell your child how to live his or her life - but you have the right to expect a certain amount of consideration. Also, you’re operating from the premise that Orthodox Judaism (presumably Hareidi-style ) represents absolute truth, and therefore trumps all other concerns. Not only do I disagree, I find it highly offensive. Evangelical Christians say the same of their belief system.

C-Girl - What you said, absolutely.

(BTW - I went back afterward and read it again, and realized that the correspondent was the girl’s father, not her mother.)

DK - perhaps a trackback is in order?

8 Annie { 01.16.08 at 9:50 am }

Cipher– just out of curiosity, would you feel the same way if the girl was raised very observant (not Charedi) and her parents paid for private school and college, instilled her with their values, and then she decided to become non-religious? What if she decided to keep her children from them because she didn’t want them to be “poisoned” with those views?

Also, what kind of credentials do MOST advice columnists have? Fame seems as good a reason as any.

9 mohammed { 01.16.08 at 10:43 am }

Cipher
I do believe that but it wasn’t part of my argument.
Parents have no “rights”. If a child chooses any lifestyle which is incompatible with a good relationship with his parents, whether it’s OJ, Hari Krishna or cocaine, as long as he’s over 18 and legally sane it’s his choice. It may be unfortunate from the parents perspective, the kid may be an ingrate and an asshole, but all you can do is ask for your money back or try again.

10 DK { 01.16.08 at 1:07 pm }

What attracted me to this specific column was not the advise itself, but that throwing a VH1-type star into an Ortho-bashing situation is, well, quite funny. And humor has always been part of the Bintel Brief’s appeal.

11 Nechama Yenta { 01.16.08 at 5:13 pm }

It’s all too familiar. Whatever our kids do with their lives is truly their business, but a little respect and consideration goes a long, long way. Not to mention love.

12 cipher { 01.16.08 at 9:31 pm }

Annie,

Firstly, I hear you about advice columnists. What credentials did the Friedman sisters (Ann Landers and Dear Abby) have? Although, I think that today, papers try to get advice columnists who at least have degrees in counseling or psychotherapy. I agree with C-Girl - a young woman who is single, unobservant and has no kids wouldn’t be my first choice to give advice in a situation like that. Fame isn’t as good a reason as any. And I’m sick of celebrities screaming “look at me!” as soon as someone hasn’t been paying attention to them for five minutes.

As far as your other question is concerned - I’ve been thinking about it all day. I typed a rather lengthy response, then I realized that no one is interested in hearing me rant, so I’ll keep it brief.

It depends upon what you mean by “very observant”. If you mean seriously committed Left Wing Modern Orthodox, then it would bother me, for the most part. If you mean RWMO, yeshivish, Hareidi - then no, it wouldn’t. I’d regard the daughter as having freed herself from a stifling, regressive belief system that has become an anachronism. I see it, along with conservative evangelical Protestantism, reactionary Catholicism and Islamic fundamentalism as a form of addiction that is holding back the development of our species.

Furthermore, to be frank, for me a lot of it lies in the manner of presentation. As David knows, I’m friendly with a LWMO rabbi and his wife (although, like Avi Weiss, he prefers the term “Open Orthodoxy”). I don’t agree with them theologically, and I’m never going to, but it isn’t an issue for me because they’re very warm, friendly people who don’t use their beliefs as a stick with which to beat other Jews, nor as a barrier with which to keep them at bay. I can honestly say that, apart from a handful of liberal Orthodox people (and I mean literally a handful, in that I could probably count the number on one hand, and certainly no more than two), I have never met an Orthodox person who didn’t to some extent manifest an attitude of condescension toward the non-Orthodox - and that includes every Chabad shliach I have ever met. If the rabbi and his wife do feel superior, they do such a good job at hiding it that I’m willing to take them at face value.

For every Shlomo Carlebach or David Zeller or Yitz Greenburg, there are hundreds who are, to put it mildly - not.

As DK knows, this is a subject that pushes my buttons. In addition to my negative experiences with the Orthodox in general, my young cousin, whom I mentioned earlier, is in the process of being brainwashed by Chabad, and it infuriates me. I’ve literally found myself in the absurd position of arguing whether or not the earth revolves around the sun - and he seems genuinely not to understand why it bothers me so much that he thinks it doesn’t.

13 DK { 01.16.08 at 9:34 pm }

Cipher, you wrote,

“It depends upon what you mean by “very observantâ€?. If you mean seriously committed Left Wing Modern Orthodox, then it would bother me, for the most part.”

Did you mean wouldn’t bother you there?

14 cipher { 01.17.08 at 8:15 am }

I meant that it would bother me if I knew of an LWMO couple whose child became non-observant and wouldn’t let them see the kids.

15 Ron Coleman { 01.17.08 at 10:22 am }

Cipher, I wouldn’t make the facile argument you suggest. Remember, there are people I love who are not religious, including my parents, and I can hardly imagine them being religious. They see their grandchildren a lot, though probably less than if we were not religious at all, all other things being equal — which they probably would not be.

There are a lot of thinks parents don’t “like” about what their adult children do. They simply are entitled to honor and respect, however, and not more. We all have to steel ourselves for the moment, not inevitable but always possible, when our children’s choices will diverge meaningfully from what we would “like.”

I have always said you can expose children to values, though not make them accept them; and you can teach them good manners; and that’s about it.

I have never heard first hand of any frum family, in any sector of the frum world, that has “cut off” a family member that had become non-religious. I actually do know cases of the opposite happening.

I also think the Chabad factor complicates this.

16 cipher { 01.20.08 at 8:04 am }

Ron,

OK, I apologize for taking a swipe at you. I do stand by everything else I said.

Yes, Chabad is a strange beast. On the one hand, it considers itself to be on the “left fringe” of the ultra-Orthodox world. On the other, its devotion to the Rebbe borders on idolatry, even among those who don’t (supposedly) consider him to have been Moshiach.

I must disagree with you about frum families not disavowing members who become unobservant. Both Faranak Margolies’ Off the Derech and Hella Winston’s Unchosen discuss the phenomenon. The web is now full of blogs maintained by frum atheists and agnostics, who live lives of silent despair, terrified to come out, as they will be ostracized by family and friends, lose contact with their children and be thrust out of that isolated world without the skills to make a living. It happens, Ron - and I don’t think it happens only occasionally. This is the nature of denial.

17 cipher { 01.20.08 at 8:38 am }

I meant denial on their part, not yours.

18 Ron Coleman { 01.21.08 at 1:35 pm }

I am sure it happens, Cipher, which is why I tried to choose my words carefully (and in such a way that you could not disagree): I should have said I have never heard of this first hand, in terms of meeting a person to whom this has happened or encountering a family that has done this.

But I am sure it has happened, though there can be any number of reasons why it might — not all of them benighted.

Maybe I just live in a really nice neighborhood!

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