September Shorts Contest – “My First Aveirah”

UPDATE – Sunday, October 2, 2011: We are proud to announce the winners of the
September 2011 Shorts Contest – “My First Aveirah.”

Grand Prize Winner
Obliterating God – By Yakov Yosef

Runner Up
Mashgiach at KFC – By Shaya Getzel

Many thanks to our writers and readers, and please look out for our next contest, to be announced October 31, 2011.

Introduction

Some of our contestants found themselves in a dilemma. “Does it have to be the very first one,” several emailed to ask.

Well, we said, the first one of significance.

“Does it have to be a really big one?”

Well, if it was meaningful to you, that’s what’s important.

Still, some weren’t sure. Should they write about picking a watermelon seed one Shabbos at the age of eight? Or about davening mincha past nightfall one day at 14? Or about the time they took it up with a non-Jew at 27?

Eventually, they all found their stories. And then the dilemma was ours. How to pick the ten best ones. And we found our stories too. Fourteen of them. In true Unpious fashion, we bent the rules, and present a few extra stories that were simply too good to pass on.

We hope you enjoy reading the following submissions for “My First Aveirah.” Vote for your three favorites in the box below, and add a comment at the bottom to discuss. The winner receives a $25 gift card to Barnes and Nobles and the illustrious title of Grant Prize Winner of the Unpious September Shorts Contest.

(Voting deadline: September 30, 2011 at midnight.)

Hitchhiking and Orgasms
By Suri Grosskleiner

He was an avowed hedonist and I’d never met anyone as mesmerizing. We met in Greenwich Village. I’d just shed skirts, but was still keeping kashrus and Shabbos, making brief forays out to discover the world. No older than me, but with a treasury of life experiences, Nigel spoke about living freely. I regaled him with the excesses of Haredi-ism.  Spurred on by his rationality, I declared myself an atheist. Within days we’d bonded: body and soul.

A week later we took our first trip together. We caught a Greyhound bus to Lake George, and hitchhiked from there to a beautiful old inn in Vermont. Exiting the car that Friday night I was acutely aware I was being consciously mechallel shabbos for  the first time. My cognizant chilul shabbos continued unabated and the joy of that trip remains deeply etched in my mind. It was a glorious summer Saturday. We ate food cooked to order, swam and made love. On Sunday we left and enjoyed good luck hitchhiking again, this time with the added bonus of hospitality in Boston. Our host provided us with a marvellous en-suite with a huge clawfoot bathtub just perfect for two. Taking beers we’d bought en-route, we drew a warm bath and lay in the tub while sipping beer and soaping each other. Our fondling led to the inevitable and I experienced my first orgasm, the bliss mingling with my full awareness that this was not quite the way I’d been brought up to commemorate Tisha B’Av.

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Writing on Shabbos
By Ruth Seeker

Since I was told it was finally time for me to go to the mikvah (I’m a convert, through Chabad), I have experienced one disillusionment after another. A couple of years ago, I started to wonder what might save me from losing my fear of the rabbanim (oh, heresy!). I even explored Christianity with some hope, but when I became disgusted with that, too, I realized that since my fear of God is bound up with my fear of the rabbis, I’m not sure I fear God anymore either.

Last Leil Shabbat, I was so struck by the suspicion that the thirty-nine avot melachot have nothing to do with being a good person, I picked a melacha at random and…WROTE something. My palms starting sweating and my heart started racing as soon as I picked up the pencil and paper, so I wrote backwards, in a code that a friend taught me in junior high, after my hubby and kids were asleep, next to the Shabbat candles.

It was such a tiny act, it could seem insignificant, if it weren’t for the sense of panic I felt at the time. Natural, I guess. After all, I have been frum almost my entire adult life. Despite the fear of getting caught, though, I went to bed with a small sense of triumph. And if there is a Moshiach, I don’t think he’s going to come any sooner or later because of my personal aveirot.

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I Love Sex and Bacon…
But how is a good Jewish girl to get her jollies of the unsavory variety (or in the case of apple-wood smoked pork belly, quite savory indeed)?
By Yaakova Naomi

The time of my musing is the summer after freshman year at NYJew, working as a cashier at a kosher deli in Teaneck. Elbows on the cash wrap, chin on fist buttresses, I gaze out the window from my post. Dangling hard salamis frame the street scene before me and inspire daydreams of pork and penises. The Satmar mashgiach saunters out from the kitchen and observes that I sometimes wear pantyhose beneath knee-length skirts, but today I am barelegged. Rather than point out I stand in front of a human sized chicken rotisserie eight hours a day – not to mention the New Jersey July heat – I remind him of some unbodeked lettuce more deserving of his attention than my calves. I picture what it would be like to sleep with him and I feel sorry for his wife.

Tonight I will convince my boyfriend to sleep with me. He’s a 23-year-old virgin. He wants to marry me, but I refuse to commit to a lifetime of bad sex. Or even less-than-stellar sex. I swing by his place after my shift. I will test drive the car before buying it, kareis be damned. He consents but on the condition that he will not have to use protection. “Jews don’t wear condoms,” he explains. Of all the bullshit excuses I’ve since heard from men unwilling to suit up, this is by far the most sanctimonious. Not in the mood for a baby, I dump his misogynistic ass. On the way home, I pick up a BLT from the other deli. Skirt unzipped, belly full, heels up on my coffee table, I masturbate and smile.

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Obliterating God
By Yakov Yosef

I was thirteen years old when my father summoned me into the dining room one evening. He sat in his chair at the head of the table while I stood nearby, unsure whether to sit or remain standing. I knew this couldn’t be good, since he only spoke to me when I did something wrong, and then he would scream, shout, and even beat me. But I was used to it, this was our way of communicating.

That evening was different. I had never before seen him so sad. After an awkward silence, he began to speak in a low, sad voice, his eyes on the table in front of him. “I’ve seen you put your hands where you’re not supposed to. It was last night, while you were asleep.” He paused, then raised his head to see my reaction. “There are certain issues that go to the core of our holiness as Jews. We made a blood-covenant with the almighty, which we can never breach. You must, from now on, be extremely cautious.”

I walked out of the room feeling angry and humiliated, but most of all, something in his words made me feel violated. Perhaps it was his sadness that infuriated me, the fact that he didn’t beat me this time, or even yell at me, only pretending that my private actions – the things I did in my sleep — hurt him somehow.

Those days, I kept my sanity by reading everything I could put my hands on. Only a few days before this incident I read about one of the Israelite kings, who, to spite God, had God’s name tattooed on his penis.

Walking out of my father’s room, enraged at the helplessness I felt, the humiliation of being reproached for a private act, I took a black marker, went in to the bathroom, and locked the door. With my pants down around my ankles, I wrote God’s name on my penis in thick black ink, the unutterable four-letter “Y-H-V-H.” Then I masturbated with an anger and vengefulness I have rarely felt since, finally ejaculating and obliterating God’s name with my semen.

When I finished, I felt calm, triumphant. If my father had been hurt by my actions in my sleep, I had now hurt him in the worst way possible.

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Sacrificial Pain
By Dov Lieber

Tonight, I ate the regular food on the plane. This wasn’t the first time I forgot to order the kosher meal. I used to starve on the long trips to Tel Aviv via Europe. Once or twice it meant a whole 24 hours without food. But, I sank my teeth into soggy rye bread and mystery deli meat, guilt-free and delightedly.

I had spent the last three weeks visiting my part-Jewish Parisian girlfriend, whose overeager “culturally Jewish” father had done all he could to prepare for me, their Orthodox guest. Despite her father’s efforts, I knew non-kosher food awaited me. I felt the time was right to let my philosophical departure from religion manifest itself. Love would soften the fall. With the help of my Parisian lover, I could safely cross the kosher threshold at the end of the world.

It was a mere few hours after landing in Paris, minutes before eating my first non-kosher meal, when I realized Emilie loved me no more. There would be no time for sin, to feel guilt. My guilt knelt in awe before my sorrow, from the outrageous misfortune of heartbreak, which crushed my soul and spirit so heavily that I shook violently from the pain—the scarring, flaming, consuming, sacrificial pain that ate my will to breathe.

So I ate that deli sandwich with a large smile spread across my face, and I breathed my own air, because, for the first time, I knew I could handle God on my own.

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Neileh with Vermeer
By Leibish Jungreiz

Before certain yom tovs I know I want to, in my own way, transgress by breaking tradition while still following halachah.

One Yom Kippur I knew I wanted to ride the train to Manhattan. Since davening was a very torturous way to spend a day fasting, shul-hopping along Central Park seemed a far better way to spend the day. Before Rosh Hashanah I was hocking away at the Igres Moshe. It all boiled down to mar’is eiyin. OK, I figured, I would disguise myself. Seemed easy.

In a little green alley alongside Fifth Avenue there sat an old lady in wide straw hat, doing a crossword puzzle. She was trying to distract herself from her fast, she said. Of course, I pointed out to her, that since she was writing she might as well have been eating.

Shortly thereafter I was engaged in prayer at Temple Emanu-El. Having listened to Helfgot and Milvani earlier that day, this service was worlds apart. Yet the young girl and her grandmother who sat next to me, dressed in their best, suggested a distinctive spiritual engagement, the likes of which I had observed at my father’s shul way back.

The services at the temple finished early. Just a few blocks north was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I talked myself past the guards and so it came to be that I ended up davening ne’ileh, the most revered tefilah of Yom Kippur, in front of the painting, The Milkmaid. For those of you who don’t know, at any given time, there are always at least four Vermeers on display in that room. With no machzer, I had to daven in my own words. I couldn’t prepare for that moment. I knew the sun was setting outside, the room held an antique bookshelf smell and I was talking to God, my inner voices having a split personality. Leibish, you are a nuv’el ber’shis ha’torah.

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Premarital Sex
By Gutman Braun

I’ve heard it said that a first aveirah is like a first love; you never forget it. It could be that’s true for some, but not really for me – I was doing aveiros, on-and-off, since forever. There were times that I skipped tefilin (hey, what was I to do? I woke up too late and I had to get to shiur), I had eaten non-kosher food (others were offering and I partook) and there were things like chilul Shabbos (not often, but is turning a switch really such a big melachah?). Zerah levatla? Yeah, sure – gimme a break. However, there were SOME aveiros that I still considered a big deal, such as pre-marital sex. That was a big no-no. We’re talking krisus here.

That’s when I knew that it was over for me. I was an average well-meaning yeshiva teenager; so, while I had my aveiros, and my s’feikos, I considered them indiscretions – no harm meant. But sex? I couldn’t just brush that one off. Moreover, what if I got someone pregnant? Oh, shit…

I woke up feeling sick. She was asleep next to me. All I could think was, “What have I done? OK, OK, don’t panic.” I looked at her laying there. Her hair was all a big mess, some of her 17-year-old cuteness seemed to have disappeared, and, oh yeah, I was scared.

My mind was racing. This wasn’t my fault! I hadn’t planned this – she had forced me into it! I had just wanted to make out a little, you know, live life the way humans were supposed to. Was it so terrible to feel the rush of excitement that occurs when there is contact with feminine flesh? There was so much new terrain to explore and it was so new, so exciting and I’d felt euphoric. I honestly didn’t seek anything beyond that, honest! But she wanted us to sleep together… without clothing. OK, I said, it was fine. I hadn’t expected her to want me inside her – but, she did. It was strange, everything felt numb – it still didn’t register. Then it hit me: I was no longer a virgin. I was no longer able to claim innocence. She was smiling, glowing. We kept at it, more slowly and minus the numbness. It was sweet and it was wonderful, and we fell asleep afterward.

When it was morning, we woke up and talked. She was calm as could be, and I tried not to let on that I was terrified shitless. Now I had a possibly pregnant girlfriend to go with my bieber hit and beketche. We got cleaned up and went to our separate homes. I needed to get home before my parents put out an APB.

It seems like a lifetime ago. My life didn’t end, she didn’t get pregnant, and we remained (secretly) close for a while – until I went away and she got married to a nice Chassidishe boy. It worked out OK for everyone involved, but I never was the same: I could no longer convince myself that deep-down I was a good frum boy.

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Cheese, Salami and Yom Kippur
By Pinny Gold

Dear God:

I know you exist. I’m going to eat this forbidden sandwich. I know I will go to Hell as a result. Is that good enough for you? Now, let go of me.

You wrote: This day … I have set before you life and death … Now choose life!

If you gave me free will to choose then you can’t force me, right? I already know what choosing “life” looks like; now I want to see what choosing “death” will look like.

Five minutes earlier:

In a rural area, far from the sound of busy, urban streets, in the middle of nowhere, I, a righteous yeshiva bochur, walked along the empty hallway of my yeshiva dormitory. All my life I was encouraged to think, and thought I did.

“Am I the way I am because I chose to be so?”

“Yes, of course!”

“Really?”

“What if I choose something else? Will I die? Go to hell? Just feel guilty?”

“Nah, I won’t be able to do it.”

Then, I noticed the refrigerator. Inside were a bag of stale sliced bread that could’ve been several weeks old, a couple tomatoes and a cucumber, a half roll of salami, and some sliced yellow cheese hardened along the edges in a half-opened plastic wrapper.

I took what I needed for a sandwich: two slices of bread, a slice of salami and some cheese. If I was going to eat on Yom Kippur, I thought, I might as well pile on the sins.

“Will I have the courage?” I wondered as I held the forbidden sandwich in my hands.

I took one bite then another, the rush of freedom pounding in my intestines as I wiped away the crumbs. And there I was, facing the unknown for the first time. The journey of my life had begun.

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Disappointed in the Devil
By A.M. Yehuda

I fantasized about this sin over and over again. I imagined it exploding in my mouth, sending my taste buds dancing, corrupting them permanently. I visualized it flowing through my body, poisoning my cells, toxifying my soul and leaving me forever altered, with a junkie’s craving for more – more – more.

Finally, today is the day. I am ready to partake in this piece of quintessential treif: the curdled milk of a cow layered over the baked flesh of the same animal, an ubiquitous goyish invention that perfectly symbolizes non-kosher.

The cashier slaps the cheeseburger down on my tray. The bun is flat. The fluorescent yellow cheese is draped like a piece of plastic over the thin, grayish patty. I open my mouth, swallowing down the instinctual blessing that forms on my lips, and take a bite.

The meat is dull and slick with grease. The cheese only registers as a gummy, bland texture on my tongue. I chew the dry sandwich. The masticated sin slides down my throat.

My mother’s glatt hamburgers, pitted skins crisp, tender insides streaming with juicy flavor, are a hell of a lot better than this treif crap.

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My First Aveirah…of Today and It’s Only 8 am
By Esther Tehillah

A long time ago, after too many “first” aveirahs to count (kiss boyfriend, sleep with boyfriend, eat non-kosher vegetarian, break shabbos, something like in that order) I decided to take it one day at a time. Every day, I want to say Modeh Ani but so many mornings lately I find myself sputtering out “another shit night” to my husband on the phone or as a text. He has been gone for three weeks on business and it’s hard to be a “single mom” with four young kids, especially when I think about doing this for another five weeks.

Maybe I should text G-d instead?

As I rush to get myself and all the kids ready and fed, in forty minutes, lunches made, coffee going, I can already tell it’s going to be a rough morning. I am sweating as I’m layering up to head into Elul’s unseemly mugginess. My two-year-old is having a meltdown and I can feel my patience dwindling.

“Just run ahead!” I hiss at the older two while trying to strap him into the heavy double stroller.  “Only one block to go!”

My baby spits up on my sleeve and is getting fussy.  Right then, something in me snaps and I can’t bear the heat anymore. I rip off my damn jacket and let my naked, unshowered arms breathe. It’s not so hot out, actually. I am annoyed with how big of a deal this is for me. Vans are passing us, mothers are returning from drop off and I see familiar faces looking at me, aghast. Now my children can really forget about having play dates with their children. But instead of feeling sad, it makes me angry and I rip my scarf of as well. Actually I feel like even taking my shoes off just to make a point but by then I have cooled down. The babies are peacefully sucking their juice and the carriage wheels itself as I’m going downhill fast.

When I unlock the front door, I wonder if some people’s first aveirah today was judging a tired mother who just couldn’t take the heat anymore.

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It’s Called a Slammer
By Reuven Lerner

Alex filled a shot glass with equal parts vodka and Diet Coke. She covered it with her hand, slammed it down and drank the whole frothy mixture in one gulp.

She went to public school. I went to Mishmor. She wore glittery tube tops, and I wore special Shabbas deodorant. She poured and I drank, first vodka with Coke, then rum with Sprite, then gin with tonic and then we lost track.

I never learned the old adage not to mix drinks. And behind the sticky mascara lashes her eyes were wide and young and lying. Neither did she.

The door locked, and we were in bed, kissing, the liquor metallic and cloying on our open lips.

I woke up at some point in the middle of the night, too sick to move, too tired to pee. All I could do was glance at the blue screen of my phone. The tiny alarm icon was glaring at me, waiting for Shachris.

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Strip Clubs and Driving on Shabbos
By Steve Pescaro

“You’re invited to the wedding but not to Shabbos Sheva Brachos,” my wife said to me two days before the wedding.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, my mother thinks you’re a bad influence on her kids and doesn’t want you to be around the family.”

“What am I supposed to do? Where am I going to be for Shabbos?” I imagined all of Monroe gossiping about my being banned from the family simcha.

“Well, you said you wanted a break. This is your chance. Go, explore, do something.”

The day of the wedding, I booked a room at the Residence Inn for ten days. I guess I’m on a break now, I thought. Right after the wedding I got into my car and drove off, leaving the rest of the family wondering why my wife and kids were not going home with me, and hit the gas pedal while grinding my teeth with shame.

Friday night I sat in my room bored out of my mind. I headed down to the concierge service and asked the guy, “Is there anything interesting in the neighborhood?”

“Not really,” he said, then bent over the counter to speak softly, “There’s a strip club across the street.””

Well, what else was there to do? I’d never been to a strip club, and I was kind of curious and anxious at the same time.

I went in and sat down at the far end of the stage, and couldn’t bring myself to look at the girls directly. “This is so wrong!” I thought. “It’s disgusting! What’s a chasidishe yungerman doing in such a place?” I started thinking about everything that happened that year, and I realized how screwed up my life had become, one big giant complication. Tears started flowing from my eyes; a girl came over and asked, “Is everything OK?”

I found myself telling a total stranger everything that had been going on in my life, how I’d gotten married at 18, had a whole bunch of kids, and now no longer believed in any of it. She seemed touched, almost mesmerized by the chasidish lifestyle I was describing. When she asked if I wanted to dance, I said, “No, this is not me.” And I got up and left.

I decided to drive into the city, maybe find something to do there. As I drove through the Lincoln Tunnel, I began to shiver. What if the tunnel collapses just when I’m driving through it? Everyone will know I drove on shabbos! I didn’t mind the getting killed part as much as the headlines in the Jewish newspapers, “Chasidic Man Killed in Freak Accident While Driving on Shabbos.”

But the tunnel didn’t collapse. And I didn’t get food poisoning after eating bacon. And my hand didn’t fall off after shaking a woman’s hand. So I guess life is not so complicated after all.

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Mashgiach at KFC
By Shaya Getzel

My first aveirah was slacking off by not putting tefillin on every day, but not putting on tefillin is passive, and boring. My first active aveirah, and definitely my most ironic, was sneaking off to the KFC drive- through while working for a Glatt Kosher catering company, representing the OK as a mashgiach no less! I wonder to this day what the girl at the window must have thought of me, a Chasid in a full beard, white shirt and black pants. Even though I hid my payes behind my ears, and traded my yarmulke for a ball cap, this was Monsey, and even the most oblivious goy knew what we looked like.

This was around the time that the infamous Moshe Finkel was caught selling repackaged traif chicken as kosher, and was forced into the witness protection program… I was outraged! If you don’t want to play by the rules that’s fine, but how dare you deceive others! I  – on the other hand – was still a strict mashgiach, and took my responsibilities seriously. I was extra machmir and wore rubber gloves when I ate my chicken strips, and washed my hands carefully before going back to work.

I’ve had all sorts of treifus in the years since, but nothing compares to that early KFC.

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Shabbos Lights
By Rosella Rome

I sat frozen, ramrod-straight on my bed, hugging the book to my chest and waiting for a bolt of lightening to rip through the roof and strike me between the eyes. I had purposefully turned on the light on Shabbos, simply because I had wanted to, and had seen no legitimate reason not to.

As a teenager, every Friday before licht benching, I set a timer on my bedside lamp. As months passed, I extended and extended the time, pushing Friday night lights-out later and later, and thereby reading for longer and longer. My parents were not in favor of their 14-year-old staying up all Shabbos night reading. They had declared 12:00 am as lights-out. Initially, each Shabbos when the hateful timer left me in darkness, I would grab a pillow and move to the bathroom floor to continue my read. But that particular Friday night, when the lamp went out at the witching hour, I did not want to move to my bathroom perch. I was enjoying my nice warm, cozy bed with flannel sheets, down blanket, many pillows and stacks of friendly books. I had endured enough of the hard, cold, uninspired bathroom floor.

I gingerly reached out in the darkness, hesitated briefly, and clicked the timer’s switch. I glanced at the now illuminated words running across the page of my world, and then stared up at the ceiling waiting for some repercussion from god. None came.

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