Odd One Out

Last week Thursday night, I came home reeling from an experience that affected me so powerfully that I told my mother all about it. And I never tell my mother about anything.

I had been invited to attend an event called “Footsteps Celebrates,” an annual award-giving ceremony for members of Footsteps, an organization that provides social and logistical support to people emerging from the folds of extremely insular Jewish communities. Awards were handed out for leadership, for courageous personal choices, for college graduations and even for receiving GEDs.

I wasn’t expecting my mother to approve of the event or its organizers. She is, after all, an Orthodox woman. But the tone of her response registered guarded interest: “Sounds like something Abba could have benefitted from,” she said. “Did you know that his parents threw him out of the house, forcing him to sleep on the streets?”

My father left the Chasidic community of Karlin-Stolin in Jerusalem somewhere between the ages of 17 and 25. He doesn’t speak of it much, and the particulars are sketchy, but at some point between his leaving the Stoliner community and marrying my then-Conservative mother in graduate school, my parents decided that they would raise their children along the Rambam’s shvil hazahav, the golden mean of moderation in all things. The New Jersey home I grew up in was dubbed Modern Orthodox, and I attended “yeshiva” for girls, where hours of Gemara class were followed by discussions of “Catcher in the Rye” and other such works of required reading. The people I met at the Footsteps celebration probably considered my upbringing functionally goyish on account of my secular knowledge and my ability to sustain eye contact with men and women alike.

Unlike most of my friends and neighbors in Teaneck, N.J., I had one foot in the Charedi community all along. All eight of my father’s siblings settled in Borough Park, keeping the faith of Biblical literalism along with their Friday night gefilte fish. I have about 85 first cousins, and triple that if you include their offspring. We often visited the “Borough Park Cousins” for Shabbos and holidays, so the idea of navigating contrasting worldviews was never far from my mind. I spent so many days and nights in Borough Park feeling like a human-sized girl stuffed into a doll-sized drawer. I was told my skirt was too short, my conversations with men were too free-form and would get me into trouble, and that I shouldn’t wear a heart necklace because it was inappropriate. One Shabbos I was angry with my parents; I  snuck my cell phone under the blankets and turned it on through chattering teeth and shaking fingers. I cried from confusion, feeling trapped. Which was correct? Torah U’madda, Torah V’Avoda—which was professed at my school—or the worldview of my father’s Chasidish family, who kept warning my parents in harsh whispers that if they didn’t remove my sister and me from our “modern” schools, it would soon be “too late.”

I always despised contradictions; something as small as my parents disagreeing about something mundane would set me off. We were taught that Judaism was the true, right religion—from the mouth of Hashem to Moshe on Har Sinai, to us today. But which Judaism was right? The shtreimels or the plain kippot? Borough Park or Teaneck? I was inclined to believe that the Chasidim were more right than we were, and it was only a matter of time until we streamlined our observance to the level of black-and-white garb.

And then I went off to college, and suddenly little of it mattered. Contrary to everything I had expected of myself, I became lax with the strictures of Orthodoxy. The distance from home and community gave me the space to see my lifestyle in a lucid way—as a choice. I stopped following rules that didn’t make sense, and sought to engage in personally menaingful activities as opposed to prescribed archaic ones. But now I had a story to tell; over the past six years, since I left home at age 18, my forays into the real (read: secular) world were seldom without reference to my Orthodox upbringing. After all, for most people I encounter, having gone to a single-sex school where everything hinged on Torah is more than enough to warrant me a unique conversation, and I have found myself repeating my story too many times to count.

But last Thursday was different. I was the odd one out just when I should’ve fit right in. I speak English perfectly, but I know only a handful of Yiddish words. I graduated college at age 22, like so many goyim. Many Footsteppers celebrated GEDs and Community College—terms that I learned early on were shrouded in underachieving disdain. One man told me that his math education spanned the four operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication and division—and it ended there. He was 25. At one point he broke a lull in our chat with an oddly qualified compliment:

“You have really nice eyes.”

I looked hard through those eyes into his, testing to see if he meant it. I was not expecting what he said next.

“They remind me of my own.”

I felt like my brain haplessly folded in on itself. What was that? Some sort of self-promotion in tandem with a swift rescinding of the bone he threw me? I quickly chalked it up to the fact that he has probably spoken to as many girls as a “regular” guy speaks to by age 12.  My emotions were pendulating wildly after meeting this guy, and not for the usual reasons. Did I seem too smug? I wondered. Was I to lament their hindered education and cultural awareness? Or was I to celebrate their accomplishments, as modest as they were when compared to those of their born-secular peers? Speaking to some of these kids, I felt mildly conflicted. And yes, of those I spoke to, I saw most of them as kids, in that moment. They were young, mostly in their low 20s, but the absence of jadedness typical of so many young adults made them seem even younger.

On the other hand, I loved every minute of it; I was finally bridging the two worlds I had grown up in, although certainly not in the way my family had ever hoped. That night, I felt like my childhood fantasies of upheaval coming to “my Borough Park family,” as I delightfully referred to them, actually happened. Someone, somewhere, had finally rocked the boat. And it wasn’t just one deranged problem-child, but hundreds and hundreds of free thinkers, girding their loins for life in the real world.

On Thursday night, I realized that I had it easy.