It finally happened

As a rule, I'm a very private person. I like to keep details to myself and this aloofness generally serves me well -- after all, everyone likes a little mystery. However, there are certain areas where this personal proclivity is less than appreciated and dating/shidduching is unfortunately one of them.

Last night, I took part in one of the most perfect examples of this required transparency: The Talk. You know, the one where a serious potential spouse asks you about your "history". Your sexual history. In great and painful detail. Now, since officially converting I have been formally proposed to a fantastic five times and have considered two of these contenders to be serious Potentials so I'm no stranger to The Talk. Normally, the Talk is no big thing -- I am a person who would much rather discuss the finer points of ass-fucking than my feelings -- but this time it was different.

I felt horrible. I felt regretful and sad and very, very undeserving of a person. I finally understood this story because this Talk was hands-down the worst thing I've ever had to do. I forced myself to answer every question because I have this overwhelming need to honor the entitlements of other people, but the whole time I was just wishing I could lie. I had to think about people I haven't thought about for years and I had to remember things I have spent many minutes trying to unremember and while I know I would not be who I am right now or where I am right now had I made different decisions, I found myself wishing for the first time that I didn't know anything, that I had never even touched a boy.

For me (someone who has made money speaking frankly about escapades from my own sex life) this was officially the weirdest feeling I've ever experienced. So what now? Am I going to tell people to stay away from boning? No, because I don't know that protecting people from this situation wouldn't open them up to a whole mess of other ridiculous stupidities. Is there a lesson to be learned here? Absolutely, but you're going to have to extrapolate that yourselves: I'm still feeling way too convicted to be clever....

Tefillin dates

Make me so angry I could punch someone in the fah-king face.

It's premeditated fucking up! It's you, thinking about getting ass and not even trying to squash that feeling but rationalizing it by using your Judaism and your prayers and your God as a motherfucking band-aid which is so disgusting it might even be deplorable.

There's little chance that you, Dear Reader, have never heard of a tefillin date, but for the sake of a level playing field: a tefillin date is a date between two Jews (or at least one) where the male party brings his tefillin so he can daven in the morning after getting pussy. The less crass definition is that a tefillin date is a perfect manifestation of the classic Orthodox sin-hierarchy trumping any kind of real sanctification, any true setting apart of the Jewish self, because sooner or later everything to Jews becomes a numbers game -- 613, 365, 248, 26, 77, 194, 18, 770, 120, take your pick. This holier-than-thou, plus one mitzvah, minus one mitzvah misguided mathematics is all well and good until you take a giant conscience-sized step backwards and realize this is your mothereffing RELIGION and not religion like the Catholics or the WASPs say (where its an excuse not to play on the Tuesdays and Thursdays before your First Communion or the reason you should have buttsex to save your hymen) but religion in the JEWISH way, which is the idea of setting yourself apart through every single solitary conscious choice

(the way you wake up is to be different, the way you wash your hands is different, the way you pray, the way you eat, the way you think, the way you make decisions, the way you pray, the way you carry things, how you use electricity, how you cook, how you touch things or people, how you measure time)

until those conscious choices become the second nature that any valid internalization of a religion is, and not the empty adherence to a collection of rules that might as well be the resultant scribblings of a bad acid trip.

Look, I suck more than the next person at being shomeret negiah but you know what I don't do? I don't premeditate my sins. In fact, one of the most offensive things anyone has ever said to me had to do with this very idea, when I thought all I was doing was hanging out on motzei shabbat and trying to be a good girl but a quick tug at my skirt had this frummy boy whispering in my ear "Don't worry -- you'll be out of it soon enough." Two seconds later and I knew exactly what was expected of me and it wasn't for me to be a good Jewish girl or help him be a good Jewish boy but it was to give ass and not disappointing and when all the mystery or excitement is sucked out of a situation like that, the result is never good. I try hard not to fuck up, I try to be good, I try as hard as I can and sometimes I fail -- but I never go into a situation thinking Yes, I'm going to screw this boy, but that's exactly what someone has to be thinking in order to actualize a tefillin date.

Judaism's rules are a means to an end but most Jews (and don't lie, because you know it as well as I and it's what's wrong with Brooklyn and Monsey and dozens of other enclaves) treat the rules as the end itself. If you want to pray to your God, really think about what you're doing -- and do it in the spirit of the commandment or don't do it at all because I'm pretty sure God hates half-assed empty worship, actions without any of the sincere seeking that He demands and I'm pretty sure He made His feelings on "lukewarm" clear years ago with Jonah. Bottom Line: it makes a fool out of you, out of the girl, and out of your God when you pretend upon catching a glimpse of your tefillin on the dashboard over your girlfriend's bare bra-strapped shoulder that your plan to pray in the morning somehow makes you a better Jew.

YAY

Summer's getting closer! Aside from this meaning it's dreaded Wedding Season, it also means shabbat comes in later -- which is fantastic because you can actually get something accomplished on Friday and I can get on board with that....

No post today, but I did want to issue a quick apology for being such an inconsistent post-er, lately. I recently have had the good fortune to land a supersweet position which has a. made the majority of law school kids I've told violently jealous and, b. completely eradicated any "free" time I may have had before. Also, I wanted to thank everyone who has emailed me or left thoughtful comments in the last few weeks: I promise I will be getting to those this next week.

Shabbat shalom, everyone!

OnlySimchas is ruining my life

I know there are girls who avoid their exes like the plague and I know there are boys who immediately cut off the last girls they hooked up with, but I've never really gotten like that. For the most part, I don't see the need. So you and the guy don't work out -- so what? Does he turn into a totally worthless human being? Does he lose all the good qualities that made him interesting to you in the first place?

I don't think so. And that's why I've been to see the Monets with D and the Decemberists with B and had A over for lunch in Nashville. And yeah, I've been lucky enough to date/hook up with guys who are not total toolboxes who know that it's alright to be a grownup and keep your old girlfriend around -- after all, what are the odds that you'll find a million other people who like Renaissance oil paintings or cat shows or improv theatre? Sure, there are those boyfriends or girlfriends who turn into huuuuge assholes at the end, but even that shouldn't really preclude you from keeping up or hanging out -- if anything, that's even better because it's not your problem anymore. Most of the time, these people are only assholes in a relationship capacity -- if you both can deal with letting your old feelings go, then congratulations: someone can come jump your car or move your furniture or sew a hole in the seat of your pants or lend you a $20.

Anyway, that being said, I was hanging out with a guy I used to date; he calls me when he's in the country and we have a great time, no exceptions. This time, he let me know he was dating someone and it was serious. I was happy for him -- whether due to my altruistic nature or my freakish capacity for emotional detachment, I have not yet determined -- and so

Me, teasing: "OoooOOOooo, she sounds great! Should I start checking OnlySimchas for you guys soon?"
Him, scornfully: "Oh, I wouldn't bother with that site - we aren't part of that silly American Jew crowd."

Oh, you unbearably cute bit of douchbaggery, shall I admit to you now that I know some of those "silly American Jews"? That my arm is in some of those "silly American" engagement pictures? Or most embarrassingly, that I actually look for a specific name every time I hit refresh on the "Show All Engagements" page, invariably experiencing a deeply troubling wave of anticipatory nausea? Or that I do that with a compulsive regularity?

I know OnlySimchas is supposed to be a joyous thing, but does anyone else find it violently stressful?

The Trade for Shalit?

"If a deal is reached and approved, the exchange will begin with the release of 300 prisoners in return for the transfer of Shalit to Egypt, where his parents will be able to visit him. Then 150 more prisoners will be released and Shalit will be brought to Israel." (Olmert postpones special cabinet session on Shalit)

Nope.

Nope, nope, nope. Not after Samir Kuntar. And not after this, basically five minutes ago.

I realize this is a hot-button issue and I realize that there are people in my real-life who look at me funny when I talk about Israel or the occupied territories because they can't have any way of knowing that my life for the past two years was more about the IDF and conflict than plenty of the High Holiday Jews I see at the Hillel. For two years, I answered the phone at all hours, listening to whispers only half-meant for me -- prayers and goodbyes and Please know that I.... For two years, my name was on a piece of paper in a fancy briefcase somewhere, number three on the list of people to call in case of death or capture.

And lest you think it's just a stupid boy-girl thing, I'd let you know that my brother is in the military -- my brother, my favorite person in the whole world. What if he were captured or killed? Is there anything I wouldn't give or anything I wouldn't demand? But you know, it's not that easy. If I know IDF (and I do) and if I know my brother (and I do), they'd never forgive themselves for being responsible for the release of even one single solitary threat to their nation, nevermind 450. That's the sacrifice of a soldier for the greater good.

I mean no disrespect to the family. I know they want their son and brother and I know that's the absolute limit of what I can imagine. Maybe my limited scope of understanding makes me too callous or maybe it's my constantly-calcifying conviction of the depraved nature of humanity, but I don't buy it -- I don't buy that the other side honors the bargain. It's quite possible that I am more Zionist than Jewish, if such a distinction can be understood and maybe that's why I think about the State before the Family even though I understand. I understand what it is to be Jewish and the importance of the body and the significance of the act. And yet I know what IDF would say and he wouldn't do it.

My grandmother talks about the Nazi occupation in France, she says it's just as bad as the Arabs -- that there's an animal that exists within people where there is an absence of God. So who's the animal here -- the ones who hold and keep an innocent boy for collateral? Or is it me, who believes in non-negotiation even when Israelis themselves are flooding the streets, begging for a trade?

Haven't I already been on this ride?

Lately, my mother has been realizing that I am finished with college and may just be doing law school so I can put off getting married. This assumption is supported by the handful of insistent-sounding conversations I've overheard between my blonde grandmother and my seriously ethnic grandmother.

You have to realize, my grandmothers are part of a generation perhaps only FFBs can understand; the week I was born, both my father's and mother's mothers began keeping a list. A list of baby boys born at the same time, both in their respective American neighborhoods, the Middle East, and France. The two of them were (and are) thick as thieves, friends long before my mother and father ever got married and they've had countless talks in the last 20 years...mostly about planning my future. Over the years, they've gotten a lot accomplished for me, the first grandchild for either family. They've collected my sets of wedding china, amassed all my silver, candlesticks, servingware -- you'd be surprised how many scrolls and flourishes you can fit on one single pair tea set tongs --, white Jacquard table linens and the biggest hot water urn I've ever seen. Not to mention that List. That List, they've added and crossed off and smushed names in the margins (halfers with PhDs) and blotted out names in blood (brothers of newly-outed lesbians).

When I hit eighteen, the end of college within sight, they whipped out the highlighters and slash-mark-rating-system and started to pitch these men. And so it began: I've had boys show up where I do my banking, I've had old old old men "crash" dinner, I've had a straight-from-the-old country importer-exporter offer to trade my father a fleet of new Bentleys -- and those stories don't even hold a candle to my mother's match stories. Thankfully (?), I got engaged at twenty and everyone kind of forgot about me for a while. But it's been four years now and it's like the women of our clan are coming out of a deep sleep:

Shushan: "Yalah -- you remember giving Nameless a wedding gift?"
Varda: "You know, I don't ever see no invitation -- call her mother. We see what went wrong."

Invariably, they get my mother or one of my grandmothers on the phone and the news-hungry horde gets their answer: I did not get married (aside, they all agree it's because I was marrying an outsider thus, the whole thing was cursed from the beginning), and so it's on like Donkey Kong in my neck of the woods.

Next on Nameless Faceless: "I'm actually just dropping my brother off here, but I'm sure your nephew is just perfect for me, too...."

Jew-on-Jew Action!

Recently, I spent a weekend nannying for an Orthodox family in my neighborhood - a woman from my shul has a very young baby (18 weeks) and heard that I was an infant nanny in college. Yes, the great irony here is that I'm not really crazy about kids, but you know what? I'm the oldest girl in a big family and I think knowing what to do with a baby just comes with all that. Plus, the money is incredible for a fairly doable, even enjoyable amount of work. So, I agreed to watch her daughter over a particularly busy few days: the woman's sister was getting married and there were a ton of people in and out of the house. Here, I thought I was going to just blend into the background, a shadowy figure holding a baby, gliding from room to room totally unnoticed, kind of like a horror movie apparition -- just with pinker cheeks.

Yeah. Not the case.

Somehow, someone decided at the beginning of the weekend that I was Sephardi. Maybe it's because I made hummus and tabouleh and shish kebab and bourek and flipped pitas on the fire or taught a little boy how to play shesh-besh. Maybe it's because I'm small and tan. Maybe its because I spent the weekend drinking diluted yogurt with mint. Or maybe it's the way I dress or my hesitancy around cholent, or my ability to communicate in modern Hebrew or my fondness for raki or my generally subservient attitude. Who knows? At any rate, I'm in the playroom (more on that later), when I get called in to the salon where a handful of 30-40 year old men are loudly discussing something or other that they'd now like to discuss with me for some reason.

Mob of men (scotch-scented): "So, ah -- you how old now?"
Me (hesitant yet acting perfectly fine): "Old enough to know better. What can I help you with?"
Mob of men (chuckling): "Yeah, yeah. So look, you need to get married, no? Say you go back to Yisrael, you meet nice Ashkenazi, nice blue eyes. You bring him home -- what your mother say?"
Me (confused yet acting perfectly confused): "Well, I'm sure my mother would be as nice to him as she is to everyone else...."
Mob of men (formerly Jewish now riot-inducing dissenters): "Lo -- No -- Impossible -- Dirty Moroccans!"
Me (gioret): "What the fuck?"

So began my first foray into Jew-on-Jew racial prejudice. I mean, alright, my entire conversion experience was pretty Israeli -- it's where I picked up:

Chareidi = Cult
Brooklyn = Den of Hypocrisy
Modern Hebrew = Awesome
Zionism = Sign Me Up

That being said, I really didn't hear any qualifying remarks on Sephardim versus Ashkenazim, just that Sephardim beat their wives and wear gold jewelery and on the whole sound a lot more like my family, while Ashkenazim are bubbes in black and shuckling streimel-wearing Eastern Europeans who smell like cabbage and wrote all the books I poured over as a curious youth. To be completely truthful, before my conversion was finalized I was taken to my then-boyfriend's house who explained away all my idiosyncrasies and knowledge gaps to his Polish-German mother by passing me off as Sephardi. This seemed to cover a multitude of sins -- then. Now, my presumed background just served to incite these people.

But I'm not Ashkenazi or Sephardi -- my minchagim are an amalgamation, my Hebrew is Sephardic, here my friends are Ashkenazim, my contacts in Israel are 99% Sephardim -- yet I still spent the next three hours being forced to sieve out bits of information from some of the harshest slurs and grandest generalizations I've ever had this displeasure to hear. It was almost like hearing my French friends slam les pieds-noirs, Algerian immigrants who enjoy French citizenship and express French language and ideas, but are ultimately maligned because they are culturally Arabic and therefore more swarthy and common and sullying). One older gentleman quoted a documentary he said he'd seen, vehemently claiming Sephardim are responsible for the destruction of Jewry as they make Arabic customs more attractive for Ashkenazim. Another man explained he thought I was Sephardi because I reminded him of Haifa Wahbe and from across the room, a woman was stressing how her Ashkenazi mother would let her bring home an Iraqi convert but never a Jew from Yemen. Then there were the Sephardim's points: Ashkenazim are cold and removed, weak from the collective consciousness of the Holocaust generation. Each side remained totally unapologetic of the other and there I was, expected to identify with the Sephardi point of view, expected to represent a younger, more secular Israeli point of view, even.

One problem: I'm not culturally or biologically Jewish...do I even have a place in any of this? What the hell do I know?

Everybody Wang Chung tonight.

Purim is supposed to be a holiday of limitless fun -- in my estimation, it turns out to be the holiday most enjoyed by yeshiva pimps and most rued by girls about to take midsemester law school examinations.

Anyway, back to Purim. Jewish history tends to elevate women I have a problem with while putting down biblical females I always thought were pretty cool; Purim is no different. I was always partial to Vashti, mostly because when I was younger I had a Torah stories coloring book and good old Vashti's picture was the most beautiful. After all, Esther a) looked like every female in my family and, b) already had black hair inked in, making her waaay less fun to color. My little girl head somehow took this to mean that V was some exotic blonde Russian and E was business as usual. I mean, my aunt's name was Esther, but I sure as shit didn't know a Vashti. At any rate, I always thought V had balls and a serious sense of self-worth, so imagine my surprise when fifteen years later, some rabbi was teaching me that V was an insolent leper. Rough break for me.

Anyway, back to Purim. I dated a boy - handsome and tall in a way only the culmination of thousands of years of latent attractive genes manifest within that single Ashkenazi male in every generation can be - who teased me mercilessly about being a recent convert. In an odd turn of events, I found myself on the UWS (where I have not been before or since) when he pulled up beside me in his car. Arm draped over the steering wheel, he stared me down in my barely tzuniut lavender dress and asked me what the hell I was doing there. I dryly answered, "Planning a fucking Purim play" -- he laughed so hard at the absurdity of it all that he slammed into the car in front of him. Rough break for that guy.

Anyway, back to Purim. Tomorrow is my mother's birthday, so in addition to being in the midst of preparing for exams, I am going home for a shining for ma mere. Should be cute, especially when one considers that my father has just come around to the idea that one should get one's wife a card or cake or cadeau for special occasions. Seriously makes family dinners a lot less tense when your mom doesn't want to force your father's wiener down the garbage disposal. At any rate, my mother's birthday means I should be careful tonight so I can drive at a decent time tomorrow. To top it all off, the boy's birthday is also tomorrow. This is perhaps the saddest thing of all, because it's never good to miss an occasion like that. Especially when he thought he was getting some...what can I say? Rough break for you, baby.

Happy Purim!

Open letter to my brother and sister

Dearest siblings:

Congratulations. You have finally found my blog.

I'd like to take this time to warn you -- you are not going to like this. I'm just trying to spare you the crawling feeling you will invariably experience because I am now going to post the dirtiest shit possible. Waaaay worse than what I've ever put up and not because I want to, but because that is your punishment for poking around for this.

Love you lots,

Me

PS: Any of you long-time readers who would like to say "Hi" to the family, go ahead and leave it in the comments section....

Growth and Development

In my tenth year of schooling, I took AP Biology. I was 14, the rest of the class 18 and so I paid particular attention to the concepts of growth and development - do you know they are two different things? Many times, we say we want to "grow" (in the Torah, as an observant Jew, emotionally, relationship-wise, etc.), but that is not really what we mean; what we are craving is marked development.

You see, growth is a physical measurement -- what's that you say? You'd like me to use it in a sentance? Alright...awkward Jewish boys grow to be awkward Jewish men. Yes, that will do nicely. In face, a perfect example of this would be a man I'm going to call Moshe who struck up a conversation with me at my local Walgreens not too long ago. I had swung my overnight bag-sized Balenciaga over my shoulder a little too forcefully and the handsome, normal looking, fourtyish Moshe was struck with my pocket Hebrew dictionary and a copy of Maimonides writings on sexual health.

Me: Oh, I'm so sorry! Please forgive me!
Moshe: No, it's perfectly alright. Hey, are you Jewish by any chance?
Me: Yes, I actually am -- thanks for helping me pick up my books. See you --
Moshe: Are you on Frumster?

First off, what? It was like a whole new perversion of Jewish geography; not where can I find a little more information about your family, but where can I find YOU. The oddity of this can only be appreciated by keeping at the forefront of your mind that I'm litterally standing IN FRONT of this man. Isn't the point of sites like Frumster or JDate or SawYouAtSinai to find people not in front of you in hopes of getting them in front of you? So, all things being considered, I can only imagine that my new bestie Moshe has been simply growing for the last 25 years - meaning his body could be analyzed by scientists who would determine (by sawing him in half and counting the rings, of course) that he has the bones of a fourty-year-old, the teeth of a fourty-year-old, the wear and tear on muscles and vertebrae and the skin discolorations and hair patterns of a fourty-year-old.

But thankfully for my personal amusement, that kind of growth does not ensure any kind of development, which is what women are really attracted to when they say they get all tingly when they think of an older man. We want someone who has developed enough to know that they don't know it all, a man who has developed a sense of integrity and humily, a man who has developed his ability to provide and support, a man that's spent time developing the ideas of who he wants to be and what he can make his wife.

To say that you want growth just isn't enough, so maybe take some time and develop that feeling.