The Goldie Locks Syndrome

      One of the hardest issues in the dating arena is getting the religious issues in sync. Everything else could be right but not that one. Its a big one. If one person is more religious the other person may not want to tweak their position to match . The less religious person might wish the more religious person would be less staunch. Of course there is a third possibility. They each could maintain their current religious values. This third possibility is a tough one depending on how wide the religious gap is. Sometimes the religious gap isn't really the internal religiosity but the externals. Is the clothing religious enough. Is the yarmulke the right color ? Are the sleeve lengths up to par?
        I really do not claim to know the answer. When people have been dating a long time they think that compromise is the only way to go. The problem is that it  would be much easier to compromise on these issues if they were younger. When one is older one has gotten used to one's own derech and its harder to imagine doing things another way even to get married. By now an older single is used to being single as well.
        I think that a person needs to think about what is actually important to them and what they think they realistically would not mind doing the way the other person would want . Some things depend on how much one really wants to do for the other person but then again not necessarily . One might think that they would not mind doing something more strictly or less strictly but three years from now when the honeymoon is over one might not think so. I think a person has to try to be realistic.
       I know that no two people are exactly alike religiously or in any of the other issues that make finding a spouse challenging, but I think that its best for two people to be more similar than less similar religiously . I have gone out with guys much more religious and guys much less religious and both are a real challenge. I think that its hard to go outside of one's comfort zone. Its hard for someone a lot less religious to suddenly want to be a lot more religious just for someone else and its equally difficult for someone much more religious to give up their current level of frumkeit. I think it would be best if each was able to maintain their own chosen religious level in a marriage but this may be difficult when raising children. This can even be difficult without the children issue. Religious level dictates what community one wants to be a part of , where one lives and  who one prefers to associate with. Judaism isn't just a bunch of  rituals . Its a way of life.
       All I can say is that its a miracle anyone gets married.
       
     
         

unorthodox

i just finished reading the book unorthodox by deborah feldman.. i agree with curious jew's opinion of the book. it is not that bad for the frum world. deborah feldman is a rebel who grew up in the satmar community. it is a little cloying to read about her snarky view of frumkeit as she is growing up but this is her story and this is how she felt about it. when you read the story you can tell that she grew up frum. she does have some things that are not correct about judaism but only someone frum would know this. i think that its irrelevant. what bothers people very much is that she grew up in the system and she rejected it and she is not a  drug addict. the worst thing she does in the book is eat treif , stopped dressing modestly and stopped keeping taharas hamishpachah. granted these render her a secular jew, but that is what she has become. a big snooze if you ask me. i am sure many who criticize feldman have never even read her book. please pardon this spoiler if you plan on reading the book, but i do feel that it is very important to share this  . at the end of the book after she has settled on her secular life she realizes that the frum world does not bother her as much as it had before when she was part of it. she also has come to appreciate that judaism is part of what makes her who she is even if she does not choose to be observant. she is not a druggie,she did not form a ponzi scheme,  she is just isnt religious. so what.
i think that feldman got a little carried away slamming frumkeit when she went on the view with barbara walters and company, but i do not think that this will hurt the world view of religious jews or hasidim . it think that we need to worry more about the frum men who are sitting in jail for  having  commited ponzi schemes for making a bad name for frum jews. deborah feldman is 25 years old. her youth  does not excuse her ,but it does not make her the devil either. simon and shuster encouraged her to use her name with her story to make this into a sideshow. had she been anonymous it would not have been as "potent". deborah feldman is the flavor of the month now with her book but in a few months no one will care who she is.
in 1995 a young woman named pearl abraham wrote a book called the romance reader which was also about a rebellious  hasidic girl with another disfunctional family.  she too garnered much attention. it was pre-interenet days so her reputation did not precede her as did deborah feldman's and i thought that her book was much more negative than deborah's.
interestingly enough, deborah feldman mentions that she had read pearl abraham's book as a teenager and that it spoke to  her. then again, deborah feldman was already going in the wrong direction when she read the romance reader, so one can't say it really swayed her. according to wikipedia , pearl abraham has taught at sarah lawrence , the school deborah feldman attended. perhaps they have met.
unorthodox is not the best book i have ever read nor is it the worst. it is entertaining and i do not take everything in it at face value. though she gets some thing wrong, she gets a lot right and this is what irks a lot of people . the only thing that bothers me is that she has photos of her ex-husband in the book , not even so much what she wrote about her marriage.i think that they both misunderstood each other.  i don't think that it was fair to him to have his image in the book without his permission.
in any event , read the book if you are curious. i am sure it will be a big letdown after all of the hype. it is not so much anti religious as much as just one young woman's quest for living life in a way that is best for her.

fear of g-d vs love of g-d

if the reason you follow the torah is due to fear of g-d , well that grows old fast, especially when one's alleged fear of g-d is often really fear of peer pressure. i think that after awhile a person has to observe the mitzvos because of their love of g-d which a lot of the time is really their love of doing the mitzvos. 

of course in the end it really has to be a mixture of the two philosophies. if you only do mitzvos because you love g-d , then you may figure you don't have to do so much because heck he will forgive you , he loves you and he will understand. you need a little fear of h-shem so you actually stay observant.

we have no prophets in 5770

there are no prophets in 5770. this seems obvious, but not to everyone, especially those who seem to have a pat reason for every disaster that has befallen human kind lately.

when i heard that people were saying that hurricane katrina happened because of the gaza pull out i was sure someone was making that one up. why would poor blacks in new orleans who probably never have met a jew in their life be the receptors of the punishment for the israeli pull out from gaza? its too pat. one can connect every dot to form any conclusion one wants. i don't buy it.

after the disaster in haiti someone told me that they thought this happened because the people of haiti practise avodah zarah. well isnt that a simple solution.

others like to say that the holocaust began in germany because reform judaism began there. well, what about the fact that at the same time sara schnierer started the bais yaakov movement to counter the spiritual decline and many of her students were brutally murdered al kiddush hashem.

the problem i have with all these "reasons" for these tragedies is because they make life too simplistic. furthermore, we do not have any prophets in modern times, so there is NO WAY of knowing that any of these conjectures of these rabbis are real or not. there is however a reason we do not have prophets these days. this i do know. probably because if we knew the true reasons for these tragedies we wouldn't be able to handle it or perhaps no one would listen to them anyway, so its better they are not around for us not to listen to. or we would be too petty if we knew the real reasons these tragedies have befallen mankind. oops! we are being petty which is exactly why we dont have prophets or know the true reasons for any travesty .

all this finger pointing is rather useless. bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people and though we have to believe there is a reason it is not necessary for us to know what the reason is . sometimes its best to just put one's faith in hashem and assume he has his reasons but we as people aren't wise enough to understand them. THIS is what i was always taught.

a serious man?

the only thing serious about this movie is its title. it is a coen brothers film about a jewish physics professor named larry gopnick who is black mailed , has marital strife and and various eccentric family members. the jewish week likens larry gopnick to a modern day job. i say they are giving this film too much credit. this is a film that is one note more serious than an adam sandler movie.
the film begins with larry's 12 yr old son in hebrew school. he is close to bar mitzvah. the funniest scenes are those with the hebrew school teachers and children.
the film seems to be depicting reform jews in 1967 who seem to know a heck of alot more about judaism than most reform jews know. granted this is 1967, not 2007, but the characters are constantly referring to g-d as hashem, and ive never met a reform jew who would ever do this let alone actually know that hashem meant g-d. several of the rabbis in the film do not wear kippot in the tradition of reform jews of that era. the rabbis were portrayed in seinfeldian tradition. because they were sooo cartoonish you couldnt be too insulted by how absurd they behaved. i wish i knew more about reform judaism because i think i was missing out on some of the jokes.
as usual when i watch a movie with more authentic jewish references i find myself the only person in the audience laughing. often the hebrew/yiddish terms were not translated. the barmitzvah boy had a friend named he kept calling faigel. turns out the kids last name really was faigel. it took me awhile to figure this out . i kept thinking he was making fun of his friend. this of course was an inside joke for those in the know because it was never explained. i of course was the only one laughing about this one. there were other instances too, but i dont want to give them away if you decide to see the movie.
there is strife between larry and his wife who is carrying on with a homely widower 20 years her senior. one would be offended by the wife's overdone stereotypical jewish wife behavior, but she was so over the top one could not help but just laugh.
this is one of those few movies where actual jewish actors were used to portray jews.
after all of the comical strife that befalls larry gopnick the film has the most perfect ending. i will not tell you what it is, but i loved it.
this movie is most definitely not the the story of a modern day job. its much too over the top .
entertainment weekly said and and i concur that the idea of this movie is to show how jews of the 1960's thought they were so assimilated, but really they weren't. the way they showed this was by the inappropriately frum jargon the characters used by reform jewish characters. i find this especially interesting because more yiddish would have been used if this film were more authentic to the time period. more hebrew was used due to the lack of fluency in yiddish of the current young movie going audience.
a serious man was not the dark film i thought i was going to be. i didnt want to actually like it, it just worked out that way.

where's the middle road?

it is so easy for a new baal tshuvah to go the extreme route. the frummer the better. why try to coast and find a heter when one can just blindly follow the strictest view.(yes, i know that all new bts are not like this, but im just trying to make a point) .

in my parents era the accepted view was that women would get married and be stay at home moms while the men would go to work and make a living. these days if one chas v'shalom wants to be a stay at home mom it is quite frowned upon. there just is no middle of the road. whatever happened to doing what is best for ones self instead of abiding to a bunch rules made by who knows who. why does it always have to be the extreme view? why must everyone abide by only one view?

the worst is when certain hair types are in style. the blowout is always in style with curly haired jewish women, but in the outside world sometimes curly perms are in - shirley temple, the 1980's, and sometimes straight is in as in usually. the thing is one was born with a hair type and weather be damned, there isnt always anything one can do about it.

i think that religion is very extreme these days. the frum are moving further to the right and the non-frum are moving more to the left (if this is even possible). we should all be who we are, ultra- orthodox or ultra-reform, but i do think that there are plenty of us who are somewhere in the middle and the middle is okay too. people dont fit into pat categories. the idea is what direction one is headed, not how far the journey. are we all striving to do mitzvot at our own levels?

i never get how people are so all or nothing about judaism. if they dont do everything then why bother? NO ONE is perfect at anything . i guess it takes a certain extreme personality to take the all or nothing approach. then again, all or nothing is the easy way out. doing the best one can is much harder. it requires much more stamina. when one is a do the best one can type, one may have setbacks, but one owns what one does do. its all about where one is going. part of my day job is teaching. ive taught adults, ive taught children. the one thing ive learned is that there are many ways one can reach the same endpoint. everyone doesnt think the same way , one just has to find what works and go with that. one will eventually "get it" . we all have individual hashkafahs that we have to "go with" and this will help us get closer to hashem.

salute to israel parade

when i first came to new york i was so amazed that there was a salute to israel parade. of course new york is the home of parades. there is the thanksgiving day parade, puerto rican day parade, the halloween parade ... well you get the point. it still amazes me that there is a salute to israel parade. ive gone almost every year. some years its scorching hot outside, other years its chilly. no matter, the energy is always the same. there is always a healthy mixture of secular and observant jews. it is one of the few times one sees this. new york is so ethnically segregated. unfortunately we jews often take this so many steps further by separating to our own religious groups never speaking to one another.

as religiously diverse as the salute to israel parade is, the concert in central park afterward is mostly orthodox jews.

i plan on going to the parade tomorrow. hopefully many of you who live in the new york area will be there as well.