I just read, with a sickening sense of deja vu, the sad saga of Gitty Grunwald, and her ongoing battle with the Satmar chasidim to regain custody of her little Esther Miriam. Like Esther Miriam's parents, my parents were devoutly orthodox Jews living in an insular, xenophobic, religious community. They were not Satmar chasidim, but rather from a branch of orthodoxy known as "yeshivish". These differences have historic origins that have lessened in importance over time. To the average outside observer, both segments of the orthodox world are equally weird and freakish. However, on average the "yeshivish" tend to be a tiny bit less insular and a tiny bit more lenient than the Satmar when it comes to access to media and higher education. That being said, for the most part, they observe all of the same rituals, strictures and prohibitions with equal rigor.
Somewhere around the time that I was six years old, my mother decided that after three kids and fourteen years of marriage, this was not the life for her. She left my father, taking me with her. (I have two older brothers but my mother decided that she could not maintain custody of three children on her own while fighting the orthodox establishment so she left them with my father.) She moved to a different neighborhood, got a job and a boyfriend and gave up religion cold turkey, like a bad habit. She enrolled me in the local public school and hoped for the best.
In response, my father mobilized an army of lawyers to fight my mother. He also deployed extra-legal "self help" tactics. He showed up one day at my second grade class, removed me from my classroom, and re-enrolled me in an all girls religious school. The court orders flew back and forth. The legal bills piled up. My mother snatched me back. My father snatched me back again. The legal case dragged on and on for over three years.
Finally, when I was ten, with the custody proceedings still unresolved, my father decided that enough was enough and he committed the ultimate "snatch". I came home from school one day on a snowy December afternoon to discover all of our bags packed. We headed to the airport and boarded an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. We lived in Israel for the next three years.
It would be another eight years before I would speak to my mother again.
Nowadays, we refer to episodes like this by their proper name: "kidnapping". Removing a child from the United States under these circumstances is a felony. But back in the late 70s, before Federal laws were passed that would have made my father subject to immediate arrest upon his return to the United States, among religious fanatics, removing the child to a religiously sympathetic jurisdiction was a clever and acceptable tactic in protracted custody disputes.
After moving to Israel, I only attended ultra-orthodox all girls schools. I dutifully wore my long sleeves and long skirts, learned how to make a chicken kosher, and studied all kinds of arcana, like the thirty-nine different categories of work that are prohibited on shabbos (it is a rather comprehensive list but fortunately fucking is not on the list or I really don't know what religious Jews would do on Saturday besides eating and praying), and fascinating disputes between Rashi and Onkelos as to the proper meanings of words like "is" and "said". I also became well versed in traditional Jewish apologetics and its saturation in retrograde misogyny. For example, if a young woman is raped the Rabbis advise us that the rapist's punishment is that he must marry his victim and he may never divorce her. Although it may seem cruel and inhumane to force a woman to marry and never divorce a man who brutally victimized her (and indeed, such a "punishment" could actually create an incentive for men to rape women with whom they are romantically infatuated), the Rabbis explain that this "punishment" is actually born out of compassion and sensitivity for the victim. As a ruined virgin, no one else would want to marry her. I see. Makes perfect sense then.
Year after year, I imagined that when my high school ordeal finally ended, I would have the pleasure of marrying some hapless twenty year old, and although neither of us would have any identifiable means of earning a living, we would live happily ever after with our 10.2 children.
Things didn't quite work out that way.
The orthodox are quite correct to regard higher education with skepticism and suspicion. It is indeed true that if you expose intelligent individuals to competing ideas, teach them how to evaluate those ideas, and remove effective coercion, intimidation and ostracism from the mix, frequently those individuals are going to subscribe to ideas that are different from the ones that you've spend two decades pounding into their skulls.
And so it was with me. Among the sector of orthodoxy where I was situated, there is a limited tolerance for allowing young people to attend local community colleges. The reasoning behind this is the practical acknowledgment that without some form of tertiary education, it becomes very difficult to find jobs that are adequate to support large families. So off to community college I went, long skirts and all.
I did indeed learn many interesting things in college. But for purposes of this tale, suffice it to say, that I learned to identify what I refer to as "consistent ridiculousness". Consistent ridiculousness dictates that if we are going to mock a competing religious group for claiming that an angel appeared to a young woman and announced that even without the benefit of sexual intercourse, she was going to give birth to a Very Important Guy, then our religion's claim, that an angel appeared to an old postmenopausal lady and announced that even without the benefit of donated eggs and Viagra for her man, she was going to give birth to a Very Important Guy, is equally ridiculous. In fact, there is a significant segment of the scientific and philosophical community who regard both of these stories as well . . . stories. Nice fairy tales, if we're being charitable, and patently absurd when they are being propounded as literal truth.
The evolution of my thought process from religious Jew to unapologetic atheist was slow and took many years. But by the time I finished college, I knew I had to get out. I was very fortunate person in that I was able to parlay my community college degree into an offer to attend an ivy league graduate school in another state. I put together a financing package of loans and grants, set my compass north, and escaped from my hometown. (Hint: It rhymes with "Crooklyn").
I wish I could say I never looked back, but getting out from under the Orthodox took many more years. In truth, my complete transition from Orthodox, frummy girl, to a fully integrated member of secular society took well over a decade. Along the way, there were many episodes of religious "recidivism" where I tried desperately to "make it work" again as an Orthodox Jew, dabbled with Modern Orthodoxy and Conservative Judaism, lots of "faking" observances for the sake of family harmony, and many painful confrontations with my father and my large extended family. It is only in the past decade that I have managed to live an open, nonreligious life with my beloved husband and three children and attain some modicum of honest reconciliation with my extended family. I love my extended family and I have made it clear to them that if they can accept me without judgment or futile attempts at proselytizing than we can enjoy holidays and celebrations together. The more enlightened members of my family have adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" policy with me and this usually works out fine.
So Gitty, there's no sugarcoating the fact the that road that lies ahead is a long and difficult one. But as you find your footing in the real world, you should be aware that the path that you are on has already been traveled by many sympathetic souls. Getting to the other side will bring you a lifetime of opportunities for happiness and experiences that you have not yet even dreamed of.
