Down the rabbit hole

(This is turning out to be an active day.)

Reading this article, and especially the following quote, got me thinking.

"Not dissimilar from the RCA’s anxiety about contesting the Israeli Rabbinate on the question of conversion, many Modern Orthodox parents are in a quandary about what to do when their children come home talking about aliyah, abandoning Columbia or Penn for Yeshiva University or Touro College, or taking on dietary stringencies (e.g.halav yisrael) that makes eating in their parent’s home a complicated matter. Remember, we are not talking about Baalei Tesuvah who come home andkasher their mother’s treif kitchen. The parents of these returnees are alreadyOrthodox, that is, they live a life of halakhic observance that they take to be in accordance with Orthodox standards. Now they must contend with their children, in some way acting as surrogates for either “ultra-Zionist” or “Torah True” Orthodoxy (more on this below) who tell them they are not living fully halakhic lives. "

This is a good, even classic, example of the slippery slope that religious Judaism is facing. Become more religious than your parents and tell them that they are not properly halakhic. This of course means abandoning parental respect, basic manners, civil behavior, and the understanding that the Halacha, while meant also to guard against outside influences, is really less important than how it makes you behave as a person. You should be a light unto the nations, not a nitpicky lawyer.

This may be a bad analogy, but Judaism is like yeast in a container. It's a breathing mass, it grows, it changes character, it matures. It's not the container that matters but the living being inside it that does.

What happens if we follow this to the logical conclusion, of ever more strictures? Where do you stop? I spoke to a friend last Shabbos, who went from being Reform-raised to Satmar in a few years, about the eating habits of Jews in the Neturei Karta and the extremist Lev Tahor group. These Jews make the Satmar look not religious, according to my friend, and certainly won't eat in their homes.

Flour is triple-sifted for bugs. Chickens are not eaten, ever, because the religious Jews are afraid of all the 'genetic engineering' done to the chickens that may render them treif. No chicken eggs are permitted either; instead quail eggs are used. In bread-making, yeast is not used for fear that the ingredients used to grow the yeast were not kosher. Instead, grape juice is left to spoil, and then the resulting starter is used to make sourdough challah bread, with quail eggs instead of chicken eggs. (It is supposed to be quite good.)

Among Satmar Jews in New York, marriages to underage women are rare, but they do happen. The average age for women getting married is 17-19. 16 also happens. My friend had heard of a marriage between a 15-year-old girl and a 25-year-old man, and a marriage between a 14-year-old girl and a 17-year-old man. In the former case they did not let the girl finish school. At 14 or 15, the women are below New York's age of consent, so civil marriages are not performed. To receive benefits for single women, they say that they are living with their boyfriends and children in one apartment. Three-family homes are subdivided into five to provide kollel housing.

Among Lev Tahor, recently in the news for child abuse, the practice of forcing women to keep their socks on at all times led to their feet becoming completely infected with funguses. Additionally, my friend said that Lev Tahor actually practices malkot for punishments, i.e. lashes with a leather whip.

You can not become ultra-religious without also having increased child abuse, cheating of the government, and complete degradation of ethics and morals (especially morals). To those who would say that these are extreme examples, I would challenge with another question - Why is child abuse and exploitation of power so rampant among Jews and their rabbis? Why, when it is discovered, are complainants harassed, forced out of communities, and the offenses covered up?

I would much rather retain a connection to the so-called secular world, with ideas antithetical to Orthodox Jewry, then become more religious and rub shoulders with Jews who are basically the Erev Rav incarnate. The hypocrisy would be too much.

Is this where we are heading? I completely lost faith in Jews after hearing about what the extremists do. Not Judaism, just the people. By-and-large we are no different from the gentiles around us, so why are we special? Why do we deserve any special dispensation, from anyone?

If we become ever more religious, where is the line over which we shall not cross? What is the point of becoming ever more religious, if it only blinds us to the moral abuses within ourselves and our communities and imprisons us in halacha that servers more purpose? Where do we stop?

Edit: Changed title of Lev Hador to Lev Tahor

Shiduch dating versus the secular world

How religious Jews, and especially Modern Orthodox Jews, date is markedly interesting. This does not concern arranged marriages as the process is similar among different cultures and religions. I am not familiar with statistics on hookup culture among Modern Orthodox Jews, but presumably the numbers are very low.

Here's how it goes for secular (American) society:


Empowered women leave relationships for marriage till later, engaging in hookups instead. This does tend to lead to more rape:

"In a 2007 survey funded by the Justice Department of 6,800 undergraduates at two big public universities, nearly 14 percent of women said they had been victims of at least one completed sexual assault at college; more than half of the victims said they were incapacitated from drugs or alcohol at the time."

Communication takes place via texts. Chivalry is dying, smothered by egotistical concerns for the self, one's career, monetary issues of the fading middle-class, and a lack of manners. See this, but also see the comment, with 3400 Facebook likes, from a woman:

dude. Dude. DUDE! This is not a personal judgment, but this article comes off tonally as sexist and whiny. Do you have female friends? Did you discuss this with them? Because they could tell you that they have different desires and personalities and don't all behave in the same way because they happen to be female.

Chivalry is dead? GOOD. Stop treating women like delicate flowers who fart rainbows and aren't as interested in sex as men are, and start treating them like people. 

Head check, dude: women don't DESERVE anything except the respect that you would show an equal. Men paying for dinners was standard common procedure in a time where women were expected to be homemakers, not breadwinners. Dude, everyone wants sex. We're human, and there's nothing wrong with that. We also want intimacy and connection, but sometimes, we don't want a relationship. This is HUMAN, not male or female behavior.

Maybe your friends are dicks, but please don't extrapolate their behavior to make broad sweeping generalizations about cultural behavior as if everyone is participating in it; it's just sloppy writing.

(We'll leave my response to that for another time; suffice it to say it will be something like "So why is sex still so taboo?")

Once women achieve their professional goals and are ready to settle down for marriage, they are rudely awakened with the discovery that it's a buyer's market for men in that age: 

"''The women I know in their early 30s are just delusional,'' he says. ''I sometimes seduce them and sleep with them just because I know how to play them so well. It's just too easy. They're tired of the cock carousel and they see a guy like me as the perfect beta to settle down with before their eggs dry out … when I get tired of them I just delete their numbers from my cell phone and stop taking their calls … It doesn't really hurt them that much: at this point they're used to pump & dump!''

Men in their 40s are left out of the fun. Women also discover that for men used to hooking up, in an extremely mobile culture, it's pretty easy if the going gets tough to just pull up their roots and disappear, or divorce for that matter. It's a complicated situation, with many opinions, from "The War on Men" and fringe fathers' rights movements, to those of feminists (sorry for missing link proof).

Two decades ago, Allan Bloom had this to say about the matter in his seminal book "The Closing of the American Mind":

"The feminist response that justice requires equal sharing of all domestic responsibility by men and women is not a solution, but only a compromise, an attenuation of men's dedication to their careers and of women's to family, with arguably an enrichment in diversity of both parties but just as arguably a fragmentation of their lives. The question of who goes with whom in the case of jobs in different cities is unresolved and is, whatever may be said about it, a festering sore, a source of suspicion and resentment, and the potential for war. Moreover, this compromise does not decide anything about the care of the children. Are both parents going to care more about their careers than about the children? Previously children at least had the unqualified dedication of one person, the woman, for whom their care was the most important thing in life. Is half the attention of two the same as the whole attention of one? Is this not a formula for neglecting children? Under such arrangements the family is not a unity, and marriage is an unattractive struggle that is easy to get out of, especially for men."

Now for Modern Orthodox Jewish dating:

These Jews are surrounded by the pressure of modern society, and are yet apart from it in ways that those on opposite sides of the spectrum do not understand. Many times people abandon everything, or become much more religious, unable to straddle both worlds while remaining rationally and logically stable. They see their secular and non-Jewish friends in college hooking up but know that the pressure of family and religious friends keeps them from doing same. Sometimes they do it anyway, in secret, again building up the hypocrisy. Small wonder then that on every blog and newspaper articles are published of the death of Modern Orthodoxy in a depraved world in which it is easier than ever to keep all the strict laws of kashrut and Shabbat observance.

For these Jews, hookup culture does not exist or is minimal. Careers are what is important, with the understanding that matrimony may eventually come first, especially if a big family is in the works.

During college dating takes place through friends, chance encounters, etc. (An important disclaimer: I went to a college that is not filled with religious Jews as, for example, Yeshiva University, Touro, or some of the CUNY schools would be, so I don't know what it is like to date Jews while in college.)

After college, bereft of the bar-hopping dating scene, women and men may turn to online dating, or  Shiduch dating, where professional matchmakers set people up. This network is spread out, often relying on email chains and primitive BBS-type websites solely for the distribution of 'resumes', profile information about a potential mate's family, parents, education, and profession. Sometimes there is a personal blurb, but otherwise very little on which to base a decision to call and devote some time to the person. Relationships come first, then love (or so it is hoped).

The process begins with a woman's profile being shown to a man. If he agrees, the profile is shown to a woman, who must agree to see him for the process to continue. It is formalized and devoid of spontaneity.

Marriages are mostly in the early 20s, at which point both parents continue to work or the woman drops out to take care of her kids, a job helped by the extremely common female professions of physical or occupational therapies, and the man continues as the breadwinner. Divorce rates are low.

And yet, there is little grounding for these men and women in what it means to love and how a relationship is built. They lack any experience in how to talk to men or women with the eventual goal of marrying them or how to hold a person's interest. Maybe they just give up

So I say to you, which method is better?

The importance of being earnest

The basic limitation of Twitter is how hard it is to condense your thoughts into 140 characters. That number is too small to really say anything meaningful. For example: I showed some kids some camellia flowers, which are basically little novelty fireworks that, when lit, begin to spin very quickly from the propulsive power of the burning fuse, looking similar to this: 

They are very small and basically as harmful as a lit match, though they probably burn hotter. For some reason they are illegal. A man walked by, whom we know, and immediately said "You will go to jail for that". Contrast this to another man who said, upon seeing me give a small color pearl repeater to some kids, "just be careful; I don't want to spoil the fun, since when I was the same age something like that would be very fun". 

So it condenses to: there are three types of people - those who say "It's illegal", those who say "That could be dangerous, please don't do it because you'll get hurt", and those who say "You're going to jail for that". 

Avoid person type three.

Now, how do you condense this to 140 characters? 

Another burning question that probably no one will answer

Given that most people aren't supermen/women, if Halakha prohibited something, what was the likelihood that the Halakha was violated anyway? It is hard to believe that the shtetl dwellers of the past 500 years were all holy people. Thus, was their violation of halacha due to ignorance or the understanding that in this case halakha would need to be violated? How was abstinence / contraception used and practiced in Europe, North Africa, Persia, the Middle East, etc. among Jews of the last thousand years? There must be an answer that does not rely solely on the differing opinions of Rabbis down the ages. 

Burning questions that no one knows how to answer

1. How are you supposed to have sex for reproductive purposes only, according to Halakha, and yet also bring the most pleasure to your wife, using toys as well as your own skills? How do we properly compromise between creating children in the right and holy manner and satisfying our/our spouses urges? If you believe in not having a gigantic family, under what circumstances is it permitted to use your own choice with regard to contraception (not talking about customs or asking the Rabbi)?

Most answers I've ever seen are very strict one way or the other, nor can you find a good book that lays out the strict halachic positions, then goes on to discuss what you will violate with modifications of the standard rules (violate, guilt trip, then move on). Maurice Lamm never answers the question directly. The answer isn't in the Eight Questions either. Contraception, used by many if not most, is not discussed openly, because it's forbidden. Presumably no one wants to mention that Leviticus 18 and 20 technically do not exclude women, i.e. lesbian relationships (let's leave out what the New Testament and Catholics say). People also do not know about the permission granted by the Talmudic sages to newly-wed couples to engage in anal sex (found in Nedarim). Also this link has more information.

2. Are donations by Jews to sperm banks permitted given that the seed is not wasted? If only one out of millions of sperm cells makes it into the ovum anyway, on the rare case when a woman is perfectly fertile, then what are you wasting with masturbation in the first place?

3. Is bread baked by a non-Jew acceptable?

This one is thorny and every compendium of ideas and opinions about it is different. There are enough opinions to say that non-Jewish bread is fine, except that no book ever says it out-and-out. Recently I found that in Yoreh Deah 112, where bread is discussed, that if the higher quality bread is the one that is not baked by Jews, it is preferable to lower-quality, kosher bread. This means that given the ingredient list put on the plastic wrappers of fresh-baked bread, such as at Whole Foods, such bread must be perfectly fine to eat (provided it has not been glazed with egg). In fact it would be better than the usual stuff made at most kosher bakeries, with no salt, lots of egg, and always white wheat.

4. Why do so many Jews prefer to say blanket NO to questions, rather than discover loopholes and permissions?

When I ask a question such as "If you wanted to go to a bar with friends on Friday night, how would you go about it?" the answer must not only be "no, you simply can't"; rather, it should also include reasons to allow it. Frequently rabbis of today's generation can not think outside a paradigm, or are afraid of something. (And they wonder why youthful Jews abandon religion so fast.)

Let's try to break the above down, as I have in fact done so on at least two occasions. The typical reason for saying no is that it is not in the spirit of Shabbat, which is completely valid. But you still want to go, so what to do?

Preparing for Friday night - Accept Shabbat early. Pray before. Have a Shabbat meal as dinner substitute (invite your friend and bring mevushal wine) or after the bar hopping.

Getting there - No way around it, you have to walk. In the past I have walked a round trip of over six miles on a Friday night to attend a concert. Make sure you are wearing comfortable shoes, and drink up before going, as there will likely be no eruv and so you can't carry water.

IDs - putting them in a plastic bag attached to your belt, is not actually permitted. Another, permitted method is to loop a string around your waist, and attach the id directly. I think that technically wearing a lanyard with an attached ID around your waist would be fine.

Drinks - Give someone familiar money beforehand, or arrange it later. Best to discuss this before you go for your long walk. To ask for a drink at the bar, say "it would be nice if such-and-such could be had", to be completely halachically acceptable. I think it is irrelevant that a waiter or your friend is nearby. Upon receiving the drink, if in a building no worries, otherwise stand while drinking it, or walk no more than four amot at a time, as this is a suitable emergency. (One especially kind person asked for more drinks on my behalf, as he had been exposed to Jewish quirks before. He got a bottle of 15-year scotch as a thank you, a few days later.)

Do you see any religious teacher giving you that kind of advice? I don't think so.

5. If you go to the house of a friend (who was brought up Modern Orthodox) for dinner and drinks before a singles event, and discover that the Caesar dressing being used on the salad is not kosher, as is the cheese being sprinkled on the lasagna, do you simply not eat anything and assume everything is not kosher, or do you eat anyway? If you decide to go down the rabbit hole of checking other people's kashrut, where does it stop? If you don't decide to go that way, where do you draw a line?