Sotah

Amy Chua, a Yale Law School Professor, recently wrote a now infamous parenting article in the Wall Street Journal which makes my blood boils every time I read it.  Chua tells us, without batting a proverbial eyelash, that she has called her daughter garbage and worse, that her daughters are punished for getting anything less than the best grades and that her daughters are forbidden to engage in an age appropriate social life made up of play-dates and sleepover parties.

What if Chua was not a Yale law School Professor – What if she was a poor mother on public assistance? Or what if she was a religious fundamentalist following the idea of “spare the rod and spoil the child?”  Poor mothers are court ordered to parenting classes for much less than this. Then, would the New York Times parenting blogger, Lisa Belkin,  waste ink wondering if it’s ever appropriate to humiliate, isolate and degrade your children, only to come to conclusion that parents should do “what feels best for us, rather then what is ‘best.’”  What makes Chua different is that she is not poor nor is she strangely religious. Instead, she is a professionally successful academic. And of course, there is also Chua’s claim all that humiliation, isolation and degradation will turn your child into the academic and musical wunderkind. (I will not even get into her strange obsession with classical music – why is it superior to being in the school play, I wonder?).

What if it’s true, that Chua’s method leads to the promised land. As many of the 3000 commentors on the article have said in regards to their own lives – academic and professional superiority is good and all, but it’s not a yellow brick road to fulfillment.  “My Kid is a Medium-Ranking Student,” a popular parenting book in China, emphasizes this point, a book with such a title must appeal to many parents because the reality is that the majority of our children are going to be medium-ranking students. Even if we live in an alternative universe, where somehow everyone could be number one, and thus the goals Chua identifies were actually achievable in any meaningful way; these goals represent an impoverished vision of what we are, a vision that leaves out spiritual achievement to begin with. We cannot live on A+s alone.

There is no soul in that, no magic. As a teenager, my best friend and I often joked about an image that represented the opposite of what often felt like our compulsively stressful and grade mongering life.  On particularly stressful days, one would say to the other – I want to dance in a field of daises and then we would laugh at the strangeness and the perfection of that image.  I want to dance in a field of daises.

What I want for Z is much greater than Chua can imagine. Chua concludes that her style of parenting “lets [children] see what they’re capable of” and imparts “inner confidence that no-one can ever take away.” She is liar.  I hope that my daughter will be capable of much more than intellectual success– achievements in a single arena is a low ceiling.  I am also sure that the “inner-confidence” of gaining outside approval through recognized achievement and superiority is something that can be taken away, and generally will be taken away from pretty much everyone at least at some point.

That is likely a lesson that Chau is learning right now.

Late addition: Chua seems to be on the retreat.

Convinced by the excellent reviews, I dove into the hit British show Skins, conveniently available on Netflix on demand (MTV’s version, set in Baltimore airs on January 17^th).  Skins is all mayhem, drugs and sex, mixed in with moments of intense vulnerability, affection and  general madness.  The show refuses to punish the bad and reward the good; this is highly unusual for a show about teenagers. The God of Skins does not judge and when one of its characters judges, the character’s judgment is suspect and disconnected from the Skins’ universe.

In the first episode we see a Muslim teenager praying – both Muslim teenagers and praying teenagers are not often found in successful teen shows.  His name is Anwar – he prays five times a day.  He also drinks alcohol, eats pork and has sex with women. Each character gets an episode told from their perspective. In Anwar’s episode, he is rooming with his gay friend, Maxxie, on a surreal field trip to “post-industrial Russia.”  When he sees a sketch of a nude man in Maxxie’s  sketchbook and decides to let his friend know that Islam opposes homosexuality.  Maxxie in turn calls Anwar out on his own un-Islamic behavior.

Anwar says – “but I pray five times a day.”

Maxxie responds – “Oh yeah, what do you pray for, pork and women?”  In the show, ritual observance by itself has no value and may itself be sinful, a belief associated with the Christian faith, presumably the religion of the other characters.

Later in the episode after a very drunk Maxxie risks his life to save Anwar,  he tells Anwar that he does not have to believe as he does… Anwar responds,

“I am a Muslim boy.”

This answer does not actually tell the audience what Anwar believes and considering his involvement in the mayhem, drugs and sex since the beginning of the show – his homophobia reads almost like it’s another ritual act, like his five-times-a-day prayers.    Anwar is clinging to the “Muslim boy,” but the audience knows that he is now a Londoner whose best friend is gay.

Even while Anwar does not yet know it, we know that his friendship with Maxxie will survive and his ritualized homophobia will not.

What will his Islam look like on the other side?  A complex, hypocritical, evolving religious character – I am in love.

I dance at Jewish Orthodox weddings. I  put on my flats, I  kick up my heels,  I shake my hips. I dance from the first dance to the last.  I dance with joy – in the women’s section of the dance floor. I dance, celebrating patriarchal marriage, the silent veiled bride in long-sleeved white gown.

I dance because this is the first kind of dancing I ever did: on Saturday nights at NCSY (an orthodox youth group) I danced my heart out.  Ividoo at-hashem-besimcha-Ividoo-at-hashem-besimach. Worship God with joy Worship God with joy, sings the band. I dance because in the first shul I ever went to I sat in the women’s section and I was one joyful seven-year-old. On the women’s dance floor I met organized religion.

I dance because at my Bat Mitvah, at a Chabad house in New Jersey, I did not read from the torah, I did not have an aliyah for another decade, instead I danced.  At my own wedding, I was the veiled and the silent one in a three-quarter sleeve dress and I danced on the women’s side of the dance floor and I was happy, worrying about the rain and not the patriarchy.

There is joy for women followers of patriarchal religions, so much joy that it wears down theirs dancing shoes and so I dance at their weddings a little ashamed and a little uncertain, finding a bit of comfort in the homoeroticism of it all.

As I near Christmas, I am reminded of attending of Jewish elementary School where Christmas was not a day off. There were no school buses, so our parents drove us to school instead.  At NCSY, an orthodox Jewish youth group, we read Permission to Receive, which outlined why Judaism is the only credible religion and everyone else’s narrative is utterly unbelievable. Even after shedding layers of my education, this layer is left behind.

I recently read Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner, a book I was immediately attracted to. Here was a woman who so totally managed to get away from the Jewish religious narrative superiority that she actually converted to Christianity.  Winner was born to a non-Jewish mother, raised in the Reform movement, converts to Orthodox Judaism in college, and soon after converts to Anglican Christianity. She travels through life about a decade before me – she inhabits the New York Orthodox Jewish world with which I am intimately familiar. She prayed in places I prayed.  The author and I both left these spiritual places – I for egalitarian Judaism and she for Anglican Christianity. However, the most profound disagreement between us has nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with whether religious truth is literal truth. For me, the thought that God can author a book is outside the realm of possibility, for her it is the first belief.

She writes, explaining her conversion to Orthodox Judaism:

“Either these laws were true or they were not true. Either God revealed all this stuff to Moses on Mount Sinai or He didn’t. If He did, then we’re bound by all of it, every last word, every last syllable, every letter.”

She writes, explaining her conversion to the Anglican Church.

“First He shrunk himself when He revealed the Torah at Mount Sinai. He shrunk himself into tiny Hebrew letters, man’s finite language, so that we might get to Him that way. Then He shrunk Himself again, down to the size of a baby, down into manger finiteness.”

Winner believes that the Torah was The Word in scroll form and then Jesus was The Word in person form. I have often wondered about the enormous leap of faith Christianity seems to require. Winner’s spiritual journey from Orthodox Judaism to Christianity has closed that enormous leap for me. Surely, the belief in God parenting a child, is no greater leap then the belief in God authoring a book.

GathertheJews.org true to their word, embraced a bit of blogging diversity.

I will be blogging the weekly portion for Gather the  Jews  starting this week.

You can read my take on the Shabbat children’s blessing here.

I am no fan of modesty. In the name of full disclosure, I used to be seriously “modest.”  For several years in high school and college I covered by elbows, knees and cleavage.  I swam in the Dead Sea in a black t-shirt and skirt. I wore tank tops backwards, to take advantage of the high neckline, which was actually intended as the back of the shirt. I wore old navy long sleeve t-shirts year round, with another short sleeved t-shirt over it for the fashion. As an Orthodox Jew, I dressed more modestly than the Duggers.

And then I got fat and immodest, I think pretty much in that order.

I was taught that modesty is about opposing objectification. Underneath it all there an assumption of male sexual aggression (even if it’s only in the thoughts of the male aggressor) and heterosexuality (amongst other women the clothing can come off).  I was taught that I am literarily the embodiment of temptation; that I must control men’s temptation by covering my body in meticulous ways.

And then I got fat. Fat women are supposed to coverup, not because they are  sexual sirens’, but because they are sexually unappealing – men are not supposed to desire there bodies.  Just take a look any “dress for your figure” article – it is about the hiding of fat bodies.

Cover your body because you are a temptation and cover your body because you are the anti-temptation? Modesty is profoundly about the desires of men, and thus, ironically the objectification of women, the very problem it claims to address.

A friend once said “both magazines for men and women are publishing articles on how to please men!”

There is the Hebrew School Chanukah, where the Macabees are guerrilla fighters leading an uprising in the name of liberty (kind of like George Washington) and then there is the other Chanukah, the civil war Chanukah, where Jews killed other Jews for religious reasons, but also for political ones.  There is also the Rabbi’s Chanukah, where the oil  lasted for eight days.

Against the background of Chanukah-as-civil-war, there are stories of two women – Judith and Hannah – both women are extreme models of virtuous womanhood under the patriarchy. Judith manages to get an important general to trust her, she gets him drunk, and cuts of his head, puts it on a stake at the city gates. She is a harlot who uses her sexuality to save her people. Hannah is far sadder. She is the mother of seven children. She encourages her children, even the little ones to die rather than violate Jewish law. I continue to be terrified by her story – Hannah is the silent, suffering Martyr, she allows her sons to die for the ideas of powerful men.  She is the ancient narrative equivalent of a mother who encourages her sons to become a suicide bomber.

Talmudic Rabbis transformed Chanukah from a story of civil war into a miraculous re-dedication of the temple, where the oil for one day lasted for eight.  The very first Chanukah occurred on Sukkot that is why the holiday is eight days, not the “oil miracle.”

Tradition has allowed for the movement of this story from one of in-fighting to a temple miracle for people who wanted to experience a miraculous God, and now to the Hebrew school version of Chanukah as a story about the fight for religious freedom, a foundational belief we wish to teach our children.

Chanukah  can also be read as a holiday about the religious capacity for transformation – an ongoing re-dedication, where like the Rabbi’s oil stretched the boundaries of physical law, our stories can stretch the boundaries of religious law and tradition.

When they tell the Chanukah story at some point in the future, there will likely be other women in it, women besides Judith and Hannah, women who are neither martyrs nor harlots.

Note:  Check out this Chanukah Dvar torah at Slate, which inspired my own.