When Judaism is uncompromising, it hurts

At the beginning of each school year, we signed a handbook. In it were the guidelines we agreed to live by if we wanted to stay enrolled and out of trouble: No unsupervised internet. No movie theaters. Modest clothing — including tights — both in and out of school. And the cardinal rule: No talking to boys.

I managed to get through most of my teenage years without ever having a normal one-on-one conversation with a boy. When my parents invited families with sons my age, I awkwardly avoided any attempts to connect. 

And then, at 17, I enrolled at Stern College for Women, and the world suddenly felt much bigger. Yeshiva University had a shuttle, the “shidduch shuttle,” that connected its male and female campuses. When I went uptown, I was startled to learn how relatable and fun the opposite gender could be. I made my first-ever male friends, navigating “just friends” and “more-than-friends” — in retrospect, pretty gracelessly.

A year later, as I began my second year of college, I cut out every single male friend I had. Shame roared, overpowering and visceral, reminding me that boys and girls weren’t supposed to be friends.

I did it poorly. I hurt my friends. I told myself it was justified; that it was the holy choice. And if the people I had befriended couldn’t understand that — well, then I was better off without them.

I was, of course, deeply wrong.

***

Parashat Naso introduces the nazirite, the man or woman who sets him or herself aside for God: “They shall abstain from wine and any other intoxicant… no razor shall touch their head… they shall not go in where there is a dead person, even if their father or mother, or their brother or sister should die, they must not become defiled for any of them…”

Most religions have ascetic traditions. Some adherents live as hermits in nature, far from temptation. Others eschew indulgent food and drink; some avoid all sexual gratification. Herman Hesse captures this mindset in Siddhartha, describing a young man who joins the ascetic Samanas:

He wore nothing more than the loincloth and the earth-coloured, unsown cloak. He ate only once a day, and never something cooked… His glance turned to ice when he encountered women; his mouth twitched with contempt, when he walked through a city of nicely dressed people… and all of this was not worthy of one look from his eye… it all stank of lies…

Rabbinic scholarship is divided on the nazirite. They note the sin offering a person brings at the end of their nazirite term. “Whoever sits in observance of a fast is called a sinner,” express the rabbis in Taanit 11a:14. “The nazirite sinned by the distress he caused himself when he abstained from wine.”

If the rabbis’ lack of enthusiasm toward nezirut is not reflected clearly enough from this conversation, a midrashic anecdote captures it perfectly. In Bamidbar Rabbah, Shimon the Righteous meets a handsome young man with matted dreadlocks. “What did you see,” the holy man asks, “that led you to destroy your beautiful hair?”

The young man explains that, while filling a jug at a spring, he caught his reflection — and his yetzer hara, his evil inclination, surged. He told himself: Don’t be proud of a beauty you didn’t create. It is dust, worms, and maggots. And so, he vowed to become a nazirite.

Before that day, the midrash says, Shimon the Righteous refused to eat from a nazirite’s sin offering. This was the first time he made an exception, because he thought this particular young man had made the vow with a mouth and heart that were in harmony.

Still, Shimon the Righteous believed most people didn’t take on nezirut with such clarity. The majority, he believed, took the vow out of anger. And so, in the end, they would regret that vow.

***

In my first year of college, I went to a small get-together at a friend’s apartment on New Year’s Eve. The campus was quiet, painted white with snow.

It was far from a rager. Someone put on music, someone else grabbed beer from the fridge, and soon a few of my new friends were dancing — bar/bat mitzvah style — to “Cotton-Eyed Joe.”

And suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. It was one of my first panic attacks. My friends followed me outside to sit with me on the frozen concrete. “I was so religious before,” I sobbed, heartbroken, “and now I’m at a party with mixed dancing and drinking.”

I laugh about this now. But I understand, also, how deeply ashamed I felt, and how little I trusted my own instincts when it came to the “evils” I had been taught to avoid.

My upbringing wasn’t ascetic. I wasn’t a nazirite. But on the spectrum between ascetic and hedonist, it skewed toward the former. It’s no coincidence that the term Chareidi literally means “trembling.” My education emphasized fear — of my impulses and intuition, of the things and people I might desire — and of my own self. With that fear came shame and anger.

In the last ten years, I’ve found more balance in my life. Still, I often wonder how much less painful it all would have been if I hadn’t signed that handbook every year. I would have hurt my friends less. And I would have hurt myself less too.

I still understand the nazirite’s impulse toward a lifestyle of extremes — toward stark holiness and self-abnegation. But when I think of the wariness of Shimon the Righteous, I am reminded of what I know is true:

When Judaism is uncompromising, it hurts.