Have you ever opened up a journal or diary from when you were an adolescent and just cringed? You probably wrote about how the world was ending because your crush didn't smile at you one day, or how your parents were "the worst," or maybe how you were so in love with your boyfriend/girlfriend and you were certain it would never end. . .
And then you put it away and think "Thank God I've grown up!" Those written mementos, melodramatic as they may be, are valuable reminders of how things change with time, perspective, and maturity. When we write them we have no concept of how to contextualize the problems into a larger picture, into a timeline of personal development that will inevitably reshape and resize the roles of those problems in our lives. And although reading them can be painful ("OMG I can't believe I thought that!"), they are a great means of measurement for how far we've come in life. Well, apparently our capacity for melodrama doesn't always mellow with age.
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Throughout high school and college, there was this boy who had a crush on me. And he wasn't just any boy -- he was my rabbi's son. That in itself wasn't actually so alarming or awkward. I quite liked my rabbi and loved his family overall. But it just so happened that this particular son was on a path toward a more religious way of life. His family, like my own, was somewhere in the middle of the road of religious Judaism. "Conservadox," I liked to call it. For example, we kept the dietary laws in our homes but ate vegetarian food at non-Kosher restaurants, and we observed Shabbat and all the holidays but drove our cars instead of walking. But he was "becoming more frum," as we say when someone discards the leniencies of their childhood in pursuit of something more, whether it be more strict, more austere, more connected, more traditional, whatever that might be. This can be a noble pursuit, and in truth I was going through my own similar transformation, albeit in much smaller increments and with an end goal not so far from where I started. In his case, it meant ultimately wanting all the trappings of an ultra-orthodox lifestyle with its uniform of beard and black hat for himself, along with a wife who lived according to the same religious standards. This was where the trouble began, because no matter how kind he was, no matter how much I thought maybe I liked him back, no matter how sincere he seemed, I could never be that wife.
You can imagine his surprise, then, when a few years after a disastrous attempt at dating he found out where I was living. "Borough Park," I said with a smile. It was a bastion of ultra-orthodox Judaism in Brooklyn. For him it would have been a magnificent place to live! For me, it was anything but. |
AuthorNashira is a music teacher and proud Small-Town Jew who, after surthriving six years in Brooklyn for her husband's surgical residency, is finally back in Wisconsin where she belongs! At least until the end of the two-year surgical fellowship, that is. It's a wild ride, and she's ready to tell you all about it! Archives
September 2019
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